Aj stood.
The ground shook with the charge
of twenty-thousand warriors.
In an eternal sunset's glow
Aj killed them all
with compassion in its heart.
Inro slipped into the Vale, his only companions a single battered, unarmed Feral and his Valeer who immediately fell dead.
The Feral snapped and clapped, gesturing frantically towards the settling Sunset Thorn as if Inro could somehow forget the massacre they'd just escaped on the other side. Inro drew the stone-hilted sword from his waist. Unlike most things in the Vale, the hungry shadows forming the blade grew more substantial in the half-light and swirled like mist along its length.
Sluggish with the gravity of what he was about to do, Inro raised the sword, stepped, and cut through the Thorn's base. The blade passed through without resistance. His Feral backed away, shaking.
He expected it to topple like a severed tree, but instead the Thorn unraveled, untwining into a thousand threads of shadow-stuff. Each shriveled and wilted, dissolving into flecks of darkness as it fell. The dozens of wyres bound to the Thorn twanged discordantly and curled away; severed cords on some impossibly complex stringed instrument. Only the Thorn's stump remained, a travesty with few equals in the Dynasty's long history.
He'd ordered his best units to do the same at every other Thorn into the now-doomed verse.
This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.
"They're gone, Feral, all of them." Inro stared at his awful handiwork with a heavy heart. "Where were the reinforcements I called for? We wounded it near the end, I saw it! Just a few more men and it could have been done!"
The Feral didn't answer, of course, but the man's flaring nostrils revealed his fear. Inro felt no fear, just sorrow and weight. Sorrow at the loss of all his valiant soldiers; the entirety of the Sunset Legions just... annihilated. The weight that of failure; all his long preparations come to naught.
With the deliberate precision of a surgon extracting an organ without killing it, Irno detached himself from his raging emotions, regarding them dispassionately. They were a sickness, a weakness. It shamed his men's sacrifice to indulge so. One by one, Inro killed each feeling, buried it deep down until his internal battlefield lay still and lifeless as Sunset's fields.
The weight shifted from his shoulders, tilting like a heavy maul towards those who'd ignored his urgent calls and pleas. Cold rage welled up and this he allowed, tapping into it for strength where he felt weak a moment before. This emotion could serve him.
"Carry him." Inro sheathed the forbidden sword everyone knew he carried. "Perhaps his lifeblood will serve to gain us access to whatever verse we find next."
The Feral glanced from the Valeer's body to Inro.
"Play the Wretch and carry the corpse or stay and wait for the Mourne. You decide." Inro strode away with gathering purpose. A moment later, the Feral grunted along beside him, the Valeer's body slung over a shoulder.
As they walked, Inro found some satisfaction despite his loss and the stark new reality the Book faced with Aj reawakened. He'd severed one Thorn and if anyone might destroy the other Thorns piercing into Sunset from the Vale, the teams he'd dispatched would. Perhaps he'd even find them at their fallback on Terminus. Though his legions' destruction dragged behind him with the weight of twenty-thousand tombstones, all was not yet lost.
That entity clothed in human form would remain trapped until the next Thorn sprouted in Sunset and who knew how many centuries that might take? If Aj even needed Thorns to travel anyway.
Inro pushed such doubts and worries away. Why spend energy on something he was powerless to know much less affect? Forward: the only direction Inro believed in. His mind shifted alignment in its relentless, slow churn. A new plan and purpose congealed.
By the time they found another Thorn and the Feral set to work enticing it to come alive with the Valeer's lifeblood, Inro's failure ceased to be. It was not he, but his sister Rega and her puppets in the Black Court who failed the Dynasty. The Dynasty and every verse it ruled. Inro had discharged his self-appointed, centuries-long duty to the fullest and would have succeeded if not for them.
They'd failed him, failed everyone. If the Dynasty was to survive, they couldn't fail again. He must now take control and lead the Dynasty if it were to survive this foe.
As the unknown Thorn curled about them, he spoke a vow.
"By my ancestors and Kin, by every Ascendent watching over every verse, by every woman and man who died in my service this day, I will reforge the Dynasty into metal strong enough to prevail against the Aj or break myself and all around me to pieces in the attempt. So I swear."
Only too late as the Vale faded away did he notice: not a single wyre connected this Thorn.