The fight in Ink rapidly turned into a brutal four-way clash.

At the malfunctioning gates, the riflemen's opening volley did some damage, but not enough to stop the Legion's charge. Bullets punched straight through the Vale Legion's shields while the each shot from the Keen's heavy weapons blasted through with enough force to tear three men in half. Standing in tightly-packed ranks on the tower platforms, Ink's gray-clad soldiers suffered greatly under withering fire from the Legion's archers. With only metal railings for any sort of protection, they dropped their rifles and fled before they'd even finished reloading.

They even bled gray.

After their initial shots, the Keens dropped their heavy rifle-cannons, drew their gruesome cleaver-axes, and charged forward. Each hard footfall crunched on the worn and cracked concrete of the streets. Arrowheads and shafts shattered on impact with or pinged off their heavy armor. To their credit, the Legions formed a tightly-interlocked shield wall to stand against the thunderous charge of tank-knights. Aida couldn't imagine how anyone could convince her to stand her ground with one of those things hurtling at her. Well, sans-strings anyway.

Just as the Keens neared the Legion line formed in between the gate's towers, those Legion mancers Ryk had pointed out to her slipped from the ranks in their distinctive, uniquely-ornamented armor. One charged an onrushing Keen with her two-meter-long copper hair thrashing about her head like a nest of enraged snakes, ducking a swinging cleaver that could have split a heifer in half then driving sharp bundles of hair-wire through tiny armor gaps at knee, elbow, and visor. Another Keen parried a swinging blade with a flaring blade of blue light that arced from between his fingers. A second swing cut through the tank knight like the unfortunate Keen wasn't even there.

Most shocking, however, was Sava. The tall Dynast in her gleaming steel plate stepped through her soldiers' ranks and, the Keens rushed her in an attempt to cut the head off the snake. The shout Sava unleashed hurt Aida's ears even from several blocks away, shattering the road at the tank knights' feet and their legs besides.

Strings. Sava was using strings. The realization shocked her, shaking a sense of specialness she hadn't realized she held. Aida wasn't the only Dynast who could weaponize them, apparently, though likely the first to ever need a set to make the discovery. The Ancients had learned her trick with terrifying rapidity and though Sava demonstrated a notable lack in precision, she more than made up it for in volume.

All of this was seen only in snatches, busy as Aida was blasting away at her own set of Keens as she and her companions fought their way towards a frantically-gesturing Eth as the Imminent pushed her way through crowds of downtrodden Ink people... Inkers... Inkies? The Inkies, as Aida decided to call them, either fled in terror or rushed the Keens with ferociousness that must have been born from hatred, desperation, or both for the Keens took down ten citizens for every one of them finally overwhelmed and brought down in hails of concrete or engulfed by Molotov cocktail analogs.

They finally caught up to Eth as the Imminent took off down a shoulder-width alley between two towering, bleak apartment buildings. After squeezing through, they paused for breath in the narrow, practically-empty street on the far side populated only by scatterings of Inkies fleeing the chaos.

"Where the hell are we going?" Aida croaked between pants, her words barely audible even to herself.

"Another Thorn," Eth said tiredly, throwing Aida that "no duh" look she'd mastered. As though another Thorn was the most obvious thing in the world.

"How many Thorns can a verse have?" Aida said, catching Ghillie's shoulder as she nearly fell into a knee-deep pothole. "Thanks Ghillie."

Strings, Ghillie signed, tapping her own throat.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

"I know, they have to be..." Aida trailed off as she reached for the choker and found the metal ring to which the wires had been bound bereft of even a single intact wire. She unclasped it and stared the broken thing in stupefied horror. "Well... shit."

"How many idiots can you fit in a royal strider's carriage?" Wake non-answered the question it took Aida an embarrassingly long time to remember, the other Dynast's voice surprising Aida as she'd almost forgotten the other Dynast was there.

"Won't they be guarding this other Thorn?" Aida whispered hoarsely. "I mean, the Directory may shuffle us through it as fast as they can to be rid of us, but I'd give it at least even odds they just shoot us instead."

"They don't know it's there," Eth said, stopping before the rubble of a half-collapsed building covered with official-looking posters in some block-scripted language Aida had never seen before. CONDEMNED, DO NOT ENTER, or some such most likely.

"How could they not... wait, wait, wait!" Aida said, waving the choker in front of Eth like it was her fault or something. "This thing is broken, how do you understand me?"

"Logos," Eth said with a shrug, before yanking a door off its rusted hinges and disappearing into the gloom of a crumbling doorway.

"What the hell does that mean?" Aida said, pausing to look at the creaking remnants of the building critically.

"You're speaking fluent Ebonese," Wake said as she ducked into the doorway. "Apparently wearing the strings long enough lodged it in your mind somehow."

"How can she just walk into that thing so casually?" Aida muttered, flicking a scarily-large hunk of concrete out of the door jam.

Eth. Future, Ghillie signed, motioning for Aida to proceed.

"Maybe I don't need this thing anymore either," Aida said, taking the chain circlet off her forehead and plucking the waxy glob of the string circlet from her ear. While she'd removed it occasionally to clean her ear out, she'd worn it pretty-much constantly since she'd first gotten it back in Heaven's Tread.

"Say something so I can see if I need this," Aida joked to Ghillie.

Funny, Ghillie signed back.

"Wait, where's Ryk and the..." Aida whirled about in time to see Ryk dragging the incoherently-babbling, filthy Valeer behind him. Aida's heart warmed to see him and she reached out to touch him instinctively as he neared, but he gave her a look far worse than hurtful. As he brushed past her, he stared at her with the look Aida might have given a stranger who tried touch her cheek on a New York subway.

She stared in shock as he disappeared with the Valeer into the doorway, leaving Aida feeling gut-punched and trembling. Ghillie prodded her gently forward and Aida responded numbly, staggering through the near-pitch dark gloom of the long hallway beyond in a state of emotional shock, physical exhaustion, and mental fatigue combined.

She emerged into what might have once been a large interior courtyard at the heart of the squarish apartment building but had turned into a sloped rubble heap leading up to what remained of the superstructure. By the time she got there, the others already stood around a Thorn sprouting incongruously from a smaller heap of debris near the concrete scree pile's base.

Belated, she realized she'd dropped the string ear bit sometime in the hallway. When she turned to go back and find it, she bumped into two of those color-shifting people instead.

A short man and tall woman, both mumbling something in a language she didn't understand, even if the flat, nearly-monotone 'accent' gave it away. It took a few seconds for her to understand why she couldn't understand what the people were saying. After she just stared at them with a look of non-comprehension as they talked to her for a bit, they glanced at each other and slipped past her towards the already-expanding Thorn.

Eth waved her over towards it impatiently, Wake regarded the two rainbow people with disdain, and Ryk stared off at the pile of rubble with a grim look.

"God, let's hope I can understand the language as well as I can speak it, or everything's about to get stupidly more frustrating," Aida grumped.

"I can speak the language now, it seems, but I'm not sure I'll ever understand you," Aida said to Eth as she ducked into the Thorn's already-shimmery spiral.

"I don't think I'll ever understand you either," Eth said, flatly. "Oh wait, I know the future so, definitively, I never understand you."

"Oh good," Aida said dryly, "I'm fluent in Ebonese now."