The air shimmered as Inro, Arca, and Cairin stepped through the stone archway, leaving the flat gray of Terminus behind and emerging to the dark, starless chill of Ziggurat. Glancing back at the limb-coated warriors emerging from the whatever between place the arches created, something about how they manifested into reality gave Inro the impression of folding. Not the Thorn mirrage-shimmer he'd become accustomed to, but something that just felt different. He couldn't explain it even to himself, but he didn't dwell on it for they were here to fight, not study.

A sprawl of once-white, now yellowed cloth tents stretched in all directions from the archway. Groans, coughing, and snores came from within. The stench of vomit, bile, and blood hit Inro's nose hard, but not nearly so intense as the rotting meat reek of the vast rotter pens stretching beyond the tent city. For a moment, Inro stood shocked still and silent at the scope of them. Had the Legions tried to fight the Aj and faced casualty rates as high as Inro had in Sunset? How else could so many rotters be gathered here at the Book's military stronghold of all places?

Cairin's stump nudged him as the cadre of hand-picked warriors they had selected for the initial assault pooled around them, looking between the tents, pens, and Inro. "What is? From Inro's look, another basket of snakes falls, but Cairin sees only one bright star and some smooth cliffs of man-make."

"There's been a war or plague or worse," Inro whispered. "Those are the rotters I told you of."

Cairin nodded, taking in the standing, rotting dead with jaded indifference. "Good for One Tribe. Enemy already weakened."

"I don't want them weak, I want to execute their flawed leadership, then use the whatever of the Legions they haven't wasted to destroy the Aj." As he spoke, Inro motioned for the others to follow him, dropping low and sneaking from tent to tent. They all wore the darkest Limn paint they'd been able to scrape up, but even the darkest gray and black hues sparkled with the flakes of currence within. Moving with the stuff on felt strange, beyond even the texture and feel on his skin. It was as though his body weighed far more yet moved more easily.

As his people fanned out to secure the area around the archway, Inro controlled his breathing. They'd been lucky and came during the sleep hours of Ziggurat's perpetual bright night. Arriving a few hours earlier or later likely would have led to a far more violent and rushed entry.

"Better a lucky general than a good one," he muttered, counting his heartbeats as they waited for the second wave. A brief scuffle broke out near one of the tents as a wounded Legionnaire stepped out, glanced up, and spotted one of their warriors. Fortunately, the man proved too surprised to utter a sound before a broad-chested Stone Tribe warrior rush up behind him to club him in the back of the head with an obsidian-studded club. The warrior grinned at Inro, then motioned to the nearest One Tribe warriors. They drew obsidian knives and ducked inside the tent the man had ducked out of.

When they came back out, they wiped blood from said knives on the bandages wrapping the now-dead Legionnaire's chest and dragged his corpse inside before returning to the shadows to wait.

Inro regretted the losses. If the others didn't arrive soon and they couldn't move on, many more would die needlessly.

Then the air under the arch twisted and the elite teams he'd dispatched to sever the Thorns out of Sunset and who'd loyally holed up in Terminus all these many months until Inro returned folded into Ziggurat. Though only a few handfuls of them remained, half of them carried the shadowblades Inro had spent centuries accruing and training his best soldiers with - terrifying individuals to face across the battlefield indeed.

Though they'd refused Limn even after seeing a quick demonstration of its potency and been shocked at Inro's barbaric, tribal appearance, Inro had hammered loyalty and discipline into all of them from the time they were children. They all wore black face paint with dark cloaks to cover their well-oiled arms and armor. Their leader, Centurion Hadrien, caught Inro's eye and joined Inro in a tent's shadow.

"To the First Tier?" he whispered.

Inro nodded. "Whether Baka's there or not, we can easily hold it with this many warriors for the day until the others arrive if needs be."

"Let's hope needs not be," Hadrien muttered, glancing at the otherworldly painted and glinting One Tribe warriors then to among the tents and rotter corrals. "Looks like too many Legionnaires are already dead or dying. The Ancients finally come to blows with the Fraction or the Isolates?"

"Wish we could have taken the time to find out before coming here," Inro said, motioning the warriors and soldiers towards the gates leading to the Third Tier. "Food and water are scarce in Origin so we had little to carry and only so many clay urns to carry it with; we'd be losing strength due to hunger and thirst before anyone could make it to a populous verse and report back what we're getting into."

"And risked them being captured and us found out besides," Hadrien said. They'd hashed all this out in a quick meeting upon their reunion in Terminus, but leading less than a hundred warriors seemed like a much better plan while sitting in the midst of the One Tribe's thousands than it did now looking at the imposing fortifications rising from the cliff-like face of Ziggurat's Third Tier. The repetition helped assuage the nerves and forestall the second-guessing that always found military leaders standing on the precipice of battle.

Fortunately, the rotter pens provided cover most of the way to the gates. Though the sheer numbers of them standing there inert continued to shock Inro, he was grateful for them in the moment. As he and his troops moved along, he opened a few gates and nudged enough rotters towards them that the whole mass began a slow-motion shuffle out of the corrals. If they had to fight here, a few hundred rotters roaming around would add to the confusion of the battle.

Stolen novel; please report.

At the wide, low-inclined ramp leading up through the wide gatehouse to the Third Tier, Inro and the One Tribe warriors hunkered down in the nearest rotter pen. They collected the cloaks from Hadrien and his men. The Legionnaires stood tall, formed up a double column, and marched towards the gates with the timed tread of a Legion at march.

At the gate, the watch officer walked out of a smaller gatehouse with a few bored-looking Legionnaires following a few steps behind. Inro couldn't make out the words of the officer's challenge, but he heard similar boredom in the man's tone. By their disheveled, unpolished appearance, Inro labeled them garrison dregs - the sorts of soldiers you left behind to guard your impregnable fortress to keep them out of the way of the real soldiers doing the fighting and dying.

In spite of that recognition, he mourned their sudden deaths. Hadrien and his men caught them completely by surprise, suddenly shifting from attitudes of complacent negligence as they drove two or three spears into each guard and an extra into the officer. One of the men got off a short cry before a shadow blade lashed out and cleanly cut the top of his head off. Inro and his warriors met Hadrien's men halfway between the gates and the rotter pens. They tossed the bodies into the tight press of dead flesh then hustled through the looming gatehouse with sharp glances up at the murder holes gaping above them.

Nothing. Either so many Legionnaires had been lost the ones Hadrien's men killed were all that could be spared or Baka had grown extremely lax and overconfident. Judging by the heavy layers of extra fortification tacked onto the walls about the Thorn he could see in the distance, the latter made sense. By the sheer numbers of rotters, the former. Perhaps both were true.

While a squad of Hadrien's men took up the cloaks and positions of the guard's they'd dispatched and a couple more climbed up into the heavy structure of the gate house, the rest of Hadrien's men reformed their columns and began the march along the well-worn stone roads marking the center of the Third Tier.

Fortunately, Ziggurat's Tier layouts and contents had changed little in the decade-or-so since Inro had been there last. It seemed the rough route he sketched in the dirt of Terminus plotted cleanly through the warehouses, smithies, armories, and granaries packing the Third Tier. In their cover, Inro and his warriors shadowed Hadrien's march all the way around to the far side of the Tier where the gates to the Second Tier rose.

What little other traffic passed along the road - mostly messengers, wagoneers hauling bronze, cloth, or grain, and, at one point, a clunking ConMach convoy - ignored Hadrien's little company completely.

From the shadows stretching from the lip of a giant stone cistern, Inro and his One Tribe warriors watched as Hadrien approached the Second Tier gate house. Where the Third Tier's spread stretched wide enough to host a small city, the Second Tier's footprint spanned only the acreage of a large castle. The First Tier formed a high tower at its heart. Unlike the lax watch at the Third Tier, an actual Dynast in full armor stood in the middle of the gateway. Between his long braided hair and a luminescent line traced around his hand, Inro marked him instantly.

"Ruja," Inro growled. "Never trusted him. Must have defected and sold out Berujat to the Ancients if the civil war the Imminent have been fomenting for a hundred years finally broke while I was gone."

"Other Dynasts hard to kill as Inro?" Arca said, taking in the lean Dynast with his good eye.

"Not nearly," Inro said. "But still dangerous. If they all close on him quickly enough they can probably take him down without-"

Ruja proved far more suspicious than the Third Tier guards had been. When Hadrien ignored Ruja's calls to halt to be sure they were close enough to bring him down, Ruja stepped back and unleashed a rapidly-intensifying roar that started out deafening before it turned kinetic. Those of Hadrien's men who didn't fall down clutching their ears as the sound amplified, were hurled like dolls with the booming force of Ruja's shout when he unleashed it.

"What dark magics are these?" Arca cried.

"Never seen its like before," Inro said, already sprinting towards the Second Tier gate. He wondered what other tricks the Dynasts had been hoarding, keeping away from each other to only be utilized now as the Book broke. "Whatever luck we had just ran out."

Ruja tilted his plumed helmet back and grinned ferally as he admired his handiwork. A horn blasted sharply from the top of the gatehouse, echoed soon after by others across the Third Tier and likely rippling outwards towards other Tiers.

The Dynast shook his head, his voice booming. "Rogue Legion's extinct, hadn't you heard? You're supposed to be off fucking Wretches and begging along side starving menials now."

The sight of Inro and a few score Limn-clad, otherwise naked, shaven-headed warriors rushing towards him took the cocky Dynast back for a moment, but he soon braced himself and the hum amplified again.

"Ruja! Bastard son of Rega. Is this any way to greet your uncle?" Inro called as he ran forward.

A tiny fragment of confusion faltered Ruja's expression and the building resonance of his hum. It bought them one second. That one second ended up being all that they needed for Cairin and her slingers to come into range. Limn-coated stones whistled from slings. Recognizing them and, draped as he was in heavy layers of armor, Ruja ignored them, opening his mouth wide to blast them with sound.

Instead, the whole mouth of the gatehouse vanished in a stuttering series of booms and cracks as the slings struck. Stony debris, dust, smoke, and blood-misted chunks of what had been Ruja caromed in all directions. Before the dust had settled, Irno and the others were inside the gatehouse. The stone about them creaked, popped, and groaned.

"Quickly, come through in before it comes down," Inro shouted, motioning for the rest of the hustling One Tribe warriors and what was left of Hadrien's soldiers to stagger through. Sounds of fighting erupted in the courtyard soon after they ran past Inro. As the last came through the gate, Inro directed Hadrien's men up the inner gatehouse stairs to close it. Or rather, those who had been Hadrien's men as the Centurion hadn't made it through.

"Hadrien. Another face to haunt my dreams," Inro muttered.

A few half-armed and -armored Legionnaires streamed into the Courtyard or launched arrows, bolts, stones, and javelins from atop the walls, but Inro's forces held surprise, the initiative, and quickly a vast morale gulf as the Legionnaire's weapons deflected harmlessly off of or shattered against the One Tribe's Limn paints.

Inro ignored it all even as Arca peeled off to lead a charge against a group of Legionnaires trying to form a phalanx on the far side of the courtyard and Cairin slowed to concussively pick off archers atop the wall. His focus locked on the First Tier tower.

When Baka emerged from the heavy bronze doors atop the narrow ramp leading to the First Tier, Inro faced him alone. Baka was not only the largest Dynast Inro had ever seen, but one of the largest men, period. Coated in plated steel armor, wearing a high-plumed helm, and hefting an immense steel war axe complete with a long spike off the back, the man looked born and bred for battle.