“Hold your fire!” Tarn shouted as he ran down the steps leading from the Spire’s North Balcony to the docs below. He could feel the tension of the assembled soldier below them. Swords in their hands, bows pulled back. Each one of them had been waiting weeks for this moment, both dreading and perhaps savoring the chance to face their annual enemy in battle.

That’s no enemy, Tarn thought as he raced forward, feet barely touching the stone. The head of their true enemy lay dead upon the deck of that ship, as unthinkable as it was. His mind was struggling to put the pieces together as he moved, the sound of his teammate’s boots right behind him.

They exited the stairs and began running down the grass-covered hillside. Passing a battalion of archers, bows at their side, the tension in their eyes was clear. He could hear Urthin’s light footfalls just a few steps back, while Ramad had increased his stride to run alongside him.

Bog’s heavy footfalls were missing. Meeting her own people face-to-face had been a concern for her for months. She may have been ready to face them in battle, but to see them like this, broken and defeated?

As he reached the main dock and began running down the pier, Tarn pushed his worries for her aside. He slowed his pace, taking time to scan the state of the ship. The vessel had thrown lines down at the pier, but they stood limp, dragging in the water as the craft drifted slowly with the current.

A pair of dock workers waited at the edge of the pier, clearly unsure of what to do with the lines.

“Moor it up!” Tarn called ahead. It was really Ramad’s decision, but he couldn’t help but take the initiative in the moment. This was no council room. “Grab the lines and tie them off before she drifts out into the harbor!”

“This could be deception,” Urthin said from over his shoulder. “An attempt to lure us into lowering our defenses or grouping our leadership together for an attack.”

Tarn bristled at the thought that he might be considered part of the Realm’s leadership. Urthin’s suspicion was a valid one, a decoy wasn’t just a good tactic but one he might have tried himself.

Coming to a stop, he looked up at the orc captain standing on the deck. Exhaustion and worry were written all over him, readable like a map. From the dark rings under his eyes to the slight tensing of his muscles, he had the look of a man who had all but pulled this ship across the great sea by himself.

It wasn’t a trick. Tarn could feel it, could see it in the orc’s stare. Even so, it didn’t hurt to be cautious. He nodded to Ramad. Ramad’s look of worry was almost as strong, but there was a trust that had been built over the past three months, despite their differences.

Being ready for a war and wanting one were two different things. Tarn was willing to bet no one here wanted one.

“Bows up!” Ramad called to the dozen archers waiting on the hillside next to the pier. “But hold your fire! No one does anything until I say so.”

Tarn nodded at Ramad with satisfaction. Despite his young age, the man knew how to put some bass in his voice when he needed to.

He turned to the orcish vessel and looked up at the captain. He was surprised by the silence, even unnerved, as the orc looked back at him. One hand was on his sword hilt, the other reaching up to stroke his dark, braided beard.

Opening moves were tricky, as Rykin had taught him. Let ‘em come to you when you can, the old man had advised. Given the apparent leverage was all on his side, Tarn decided to wait the orc out. He smiled his most wholesome grin, and simply raised his eyebrows in amusement.

The orc released the hand on his weapon, brow furrowing.

“I am Narsol.” His voice was deep, and conveyed and even deeper weariness. “We… I am here not as an invader, but as a refugee. Below decks are women, children. The aged and the sick. We are here because… we have no other place to go. Though it sickens me, I am here to ask for sanctuary.”

Tarn heard Ramad’s gasp of surprise behind him, but his own reaction was one of disappointment. Somehow the Progenitors had found a way to Ak-Thanon? In a land free of any gem-touched, they’d have run wild against even a foe such as the orcs.

You and your loved ones are already dead, Isca had once said of the massive insectile for that threatened both their worlds. Tarn had expected they’d be persistent, but this tactic had not occurred to him.

“This is not what we expected,” Ramad called up. His voice was filled with skepticism. “You can understand us being careful.”

“This did not come easy to me, human.” Narsol spoke each word as if it had to fight its way out of his mouth. “To come here on my belly. But I will make the hard choices to save my people, or what is left of them.”

Tarn’s mind was still working on the larger problem. How could the Progenitors get to Ak-Thanon? The Sword is still here in the Realm. There’s no way unless…

“There’s a second dungeon.” Tarn said the realization out loud, then stared up at Narsol. “A second dungeon! Your attackers, did they come out … a giant weapon?”

Narsol narrowed his eyes, as if he were dissecting Tarn with his vision.

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“Yes.” His jaw clenched. “A massive Axe, hundreds of feet high. It arrived in Ak-Thanon three months ago, just as our Blood Fleet was about to depart. The Chieftain delayed our journey, sending the full force of our army against the monstrous creatures that came forth.”

“It would have been a slaughter.” Tarn shook his head. “Nothing you have could have stopped the Progenitors.”

“Indeed, small human. Nothing we did stopped them, and now ‘nothing’ is what we have been reduced to. For all I know this vessel contains the last of all the free orcs. Yet you know the name of our enemy, you deduced the way they arrived?”

“Yeah,” Tarn said. He looked over his shoulder, past Lurim’s Spire and all of the capital. Hundreds of miles away, the Sword Dungeon lay buried in the snow of the Cairn Plains. “I have some experience fighting these things.”

“Then somehow it would seem you succeeded, where we failed.” Narsol followed Tarn’s gaze, but his eyes stopped at the Spire. Any other year, the city would have been covered with an azure dome of impenetrable energy. “But the city is unshielded, that victory came at a cost.”

Tarn heard the orc, yet his mind remained distant. The still-bomb attacks must be coming from Ak-Thanon. They had started a few months back, lining up with the timeline Narsol was describing. That was one mystery solved, though the answer didn’t seem to be that helpful. And a second dungeon landed over there? But why?

During his time in the Sword, Tarn had never fully deduced what led to the Progenitor’s desire for the Realm in the first place. The still-bomb attacks could be a softening up tactic, preparing them from invasion from across the sea. But if they had a second dungeon, why not just send it here?

Too many questions, and none of the answers were here.

“My request remains unanswered.” Narsol’s tone was insistent. “Will you grant our sanctuary?”

Ramad turned to Tarn, questioning. There were murmurs from the gathered soldiers on the pier, grumbles surely about past enemies and remembrances of comraded killed in Blood Summers past. Tarn’s own parents died at the hands of this race, as did every child he knew at the orphanage.

Yet the deck of the vessel was filled with victims, not victors. Aside from Narsol, there was no warrior here. Nothing but the wounded and the lost.

“This is your call, Ramad.” Tarn had watched the young man lead the fractured Realm through the crisis of Lurim’s death, but he had not faced a decision like this. “Remember you’ve got all of our military just a few feet away, bows trained. Things have been the same for a thousand years.”

“It sounds like you think we should accept them.” Ramad rubbed his thin beard. “Many would say that ship is filled with our enemy.”

Tarn looked at the single dead Progenitor head on the deck of the ship. There were possibly hundreds, even thousands more back in Ak-Thanon, and he was sure they wouldn’t stay there.

“Right now, we have a bigger enemy, Ramad. That Progenitor head on the deck proves it, and so does Narsol’s story. They are coming, just like I said. I don’t think we can afford not to know what the orcs have seen.”

Ramad nodded his agreement and cast a look at the lead soldier standing nearby. The man grabbed a comrade, and the pair moved a makeshift gangplank along to the deck of the ship. Narsol put one boot upon it, as if testing, then began to walk forward.

Tarn’s stomach pitched in knots. No orc had set foot in the Ream in generations without drawing blood. Yet he had seen many moments no one had thought possible in the past few months, and both his mind and gaze were already shifting back to the Progenitor and the real threat it represented.

They were back already. Just an ocean away, slaughtering another race.

The orc captain stood upon the wooden deck, his face a mixture of fear and frustration that Tarn easily understood. To come to an enemy for aid, to show yourself utterly defeated. It took guts to stand there as the injured, the sick, the children walked off the ship behind him.

Narsol sacrificed his pride to protect his people. What would Ramad say to that?

The Realm’s Steward had left the dock, headed back toward the Spire to prepare quarters and supplies for the incoming refugees. Now a new problem came walking down the wooden deck, her heavy boot falls sending vibrations thought the decks.

Bog’s eyes were straight forward as she walked, her expression as implacable as any Urthin had ever shown. But Tarn could see the tension in the subtle clenching of her jaw, the hands that desperately wanted to ball into fists.

It was one thing to deny your past when it was hundreds of miles across the ocean. Now it was right before her. She walked down the long pier with Lash scuttering by her side, while Isca hovered along close behind. Tarn felt a bit of strength return to him just seeing the rest of his team arrive.

The refugees who walked past Bog looked up at her in awe, and something that might have been recognition. Did they know her? It was hard for Tarn to be sure, they may just have been reacting to her great size. He had never fought in any of the blood summers, never seen an orc until he met Bog. Now he could see that even for her own kind she was large and seemed to exude strength.

A strength it took to come down here. He looked at her and gave her a smile and a wink. Good on you, Bog.

At the sight of her approach, the orc captain’s jaw dropped, his eyes widening.

“Fang’s Father.” Narsol gasped, recognition clear on his face as he looked up at her. “I thought you were dead. I had no idea that you were-“

“Stop!” Bog pushed past Tarn, glaring angrily down into Narsol’s face. The orc captain took a step back. “Whatever you know, whoever you think I am – I do not wish to learn it.”

She pulled her emerald hair back, revealing the mage scar upon her forehead. Narsol looked up at the scar, his brow furrowing in frustration.

“Mages,” he hissed. “Human mages. Your mind has been taken.”

“Yes, mages.” Bog released her hair, letting it fall back into place. “Her memory is gone, whoever she was. But I am my own person now, and you will not speak of her past. That person you are remembering is dead. I am Bog, and that is all I need to be.”

Narsol opened his mouth to speak, then froze as Urthin suddenly surged forward between the pair – his arms outstretched.

In mid-leap his hands closed around an object that at first seemed invisible, then revealed itself to be an ebon-colored javelin. In one swift move, Urthin snapped the weapon in half as he whirled to face whoever had launched it.

Tarn turned with him, his instincts expecting to see an orcish assassin perhaps, or another still-bomb. Indeed, he felt a tingling from the gem in the center of his chest as his magical stone detected the presence of another using the still.

Yet what he saw before him was the last thing he expected.

The figure who stood there was tall and dark-skinned as he stepped out of the shroud. His head was shaved, while one white line had been drawn in paint above his brow. A glint of mischief came from his eyes, as he looked at Tarn through gold-rimmed glasses. He wore simple armor of dark leather, designed for the quick movement a Monk of the Shattered Stone would need.

Urthin’s people? What the hell?

A dark-black dungeon gem gave off an other-worldly glow from the center of his chest, highlighting the man’s wry smile.

“Tarn Arisfal.” His voice was calm, amused even. “I’m here to kill you.”