Prince Nagoya was not a Yokun to allow surprise to overcome his battle-fervor.

He struck out at the deceptive Tigran with force, his katana cutting into the thick carapace of Yokun armor she dared to desecrate with her flea-bitten flesh. She buckled beneath him as soon as the blade made impact, and the Prince brought his sword up in a mercy stroke that would end her miserable life.

One life for a life…this wretched fiend for Canjung.

It was a bad trade, to be sure. One that would only displease Holy Akira and his brethren. But it would appease the Prince’s soul to know that this murderer who had sealed his fate was gone. He cared not for his own life at this point. He would turn the blade on himself rather than be slain by slaves.

A spark of power knocked against his blade in the moment before he brought it down, and he watched with seething fury as his katana left his hand, the grim energies that had knocked it free now spiraling around his fingers, burning his emerald scales with green, evil fire.

His eyes widened as he beheld the flame. The pain was nothing compared to the revelation that these Pipers were even more debased than he had thought.

The Tigran’s fiendish eyes smiled up at him while his attacker spoke with a voice coated in dust:

“I wouldn’t be too upset. You aren’t the first ‘man of honor’ I’ve dealt with.”

Nagoya’s eyes jumped to the form that had just slipped through the haze of dust, while the screams of his dying, burning men still echoed all around him.

A man.

A human male. Wearing a tattered trench coat and a pair of cracked lenses.

A human male with a hand covered in unholy green fire. The magicks of the Underkingdom.

“By Akira…” he spat. “You – you are the one who caused so much trouble below. The self-professed savior of the Ratmen of the Underkingdom.”

The eyes of the General met those of the Prince across the broken battlefield that had once been the latter’s camp.

“Shai-Alud.”

The Prince said it with enough venom to fell a thousand mortal men. Only now did he truly understand the depths of his failings on this day.

His chief failure had been one of imagination. Had he known that the conqueror of the vermin was here…

“Surprised?” another voice then broke out from the clouds to his right: the smug face of the Pale Matriarch, being carried on the shoulders of her Tauron brute.

“You see?” she said. “Things may not be so easy for you, after all.”

At this, her people cheered—their rusted, ill-gotten blades cluttered with the broken scales and viscera of the Prince’s men. He felt their seething hatred, and their uncaring eyes appraise him like he was nothing but a bondsman himself—a clawless, defanged hatchling, good for nothing but soaking up swamp water.

His eyes closed momentarily. He breathed in his last gulp of air.

He knew what was coming next.

“If you think I shall surrender,” he said, “you are gravely mistaken.”

Without warning, he hacked at the nearest Zhurkin pretender with his bare claws, intercepting the next spear-wielder with a roundhouse kick that sent the imposter to the ground, buckled and trying to breathe through the pain. He grabbed the short dagger at the Tigran’s side as she tried to restrain him and managed to bring the thing an inch away from his throat before the green light of the Shai-Alud slammed into him again, sending the dagger spinning away and knocking him to the ground with a face full of killing fire.

As he groveled in the dirt, clawing at his burning scales, he felt the shadow of five creatures loom over him.

“Give me the word,” the Tigran said. “And I’ll finish him right here and now.”

“No—let Hilajia finish her duel! Hilajia want to see dancing snake scream as he dies!”

“He’s too dangerous to be kept alive. And listen to the crowd—this is justice, Maria. Let’s just get it over with, lass. We gotta keep moving.”

The Prince snarled in fury and sorrow—sorrow for his men, and the still-bleeding face of Canjung who lay at his side. Fury at the fact these base creatures were now about to decide his fate.

It would add insult to an already disgraceful death.

His burning eyes flew to the sigil of his clan that was currently being slashed to pieces by the vengeful Pipers on the palisade walls that still held firm above them.

“Forgive me, Lord Akira. Forgive me, Hitogi. For I have failed you.”

“Oh, please…”

The voice that uttered these disdainful words was different from the others. There was a strange tone to it—equal parts filled with conviction and overcome by weariness. In essence: the voice of a General who had seen too much bloodshed in his time.

It could only be the mythical Shai-Alud. The greatest enemy to all Yokun of the surface.

“If I have to hear one more fanatic cry out to his Gods and Kings that he’s been forsaken, I’m going to be the one offing myself.”

He chanced a look up at the man—the man who held the fire of the Unclean in his human hand.

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“He’s more useful to us alive—we talked about this,” he said. “As a prisoner, he gives us protection as well as leverage. And if I’ve heard correctly, Mari tells me we’re bound for the territory of this Emperor Marxon. Well, we oughta bring him a gift, shouldn’t we?”

The sly cackling of the beasts above him did not threaten Nagoya of Hitogi. But what did give him pause was the grim expression on the human’s face as he gave his last command:

“Put him to sleep,” he said. “We’re done here.”

…

Post-battle excess had become something of a drudgery for Marcus Graham.

He watched the various species of Pipers toil about the decimated Yokun camp—a few of them defacing the banners of their once-masters, while others worked to plunder as many goods as they could before they embarked on their journey to the human-controlled border of the southern Arasaka jungles. Many pilfered weapons, armor, and a few muskets that had been stored away in the tents of the Yokun ‘Zhurkin’—which Marcus had come to understand denoted the rank-and-file infantry of the creatures’ armies.

The polished onyx overcoats of the elite squad that had taken more than a dozen Pipers to bring down (and even then they’d needed to hammer them with arrows from afar) were more interesting to the historian in Marcus. They had fought to the last, not one of them accepting surrender to beings they considered little more than property. Marcus had learned already that trying to reason with such men was as useful as maintaining a plastic fireguard. These ‘Kherja’ were strong in body as well as spirit, and once again Marcus was put in mind of Japanese Bushido culture as he inspected the leather-bound platemail pieces that composed their armored hides.

They were a tough people. Far tougher than the ratmen below—although clearly less numerous. Probably the leather interwoven between their scales and their armor acted as a kind of shock absorber. Yokun scales were already tough to break—a few of the archers had shown Marcus just how much punishment they could take from a blade, even though he hadn’t asked them to demonstrate. They explained that Yokun slaves were often ‘scraped’ in such a way by their captors as punishment. Their scales would be used to make furniture and hung as grisly trophies while they toiled in their Masters’ fields, stripped bare of that which made them lizards.

“It is a great dishonor to lose one’s scales among our Clans,” one of the Yokun Pipers said when Marcus broached the subject as they cleared away the bodies of the dead. “This, and one’s tail, is what makes us who we are. This is why you see many of us are tailless. The Masters know just how to disgrace us. But they do not know what the Pale Matriarch knows: that when we have nothing, we are free to gain everything.”

A general cheer went up from the Yokun archers as this line was mentioned, and Marcus had to admit just how much Mari had drilled some powerful notions into the minds of these people. She’d managed to create a movement, alright. And it wasn’t stopping anytime soon.

“You don’t feel dishonor in killing your own people?” Marcus asked—a forward question, but one which he felt he’d rather air now rather than later. He was done with being stabbed in the back by those whose loyalties he couldn’t place.

Luckily, the Yokun archer looked him dead in the eyes and told him, unblinkingly, exactly how he felt about the situation:

“My species is nothing but this,” he said, pointing to his scaled skin and slitted, reptilian eyes. “Those of my own species have degraded me and my brothers and sisters since we were children, even though we are all born Yokun under the gaze of Mingra and raised in the fires of Akira. If your own kind dragged you through the dirt and spat upon your children, and your children’s children, would you still bear them any love simply because they are the same species?”

“Point taken,” Marcus said, offering the soldier his hand. “From a human to a Yokun, then, let me thank you.”

The archer blinked up at him. By now, a few of his men were watching.

“It is easy to kill those that hate you,” Marcus explained. “But you still see something of yourself in the eyes of your own species. It takes guts to draw the blade, pull the trigger, or loose the arrow that will close those eyes shut forever.”

The Yokun accepted Marcus’s handshake with some trepidation, his scales thick and cold against the warmth of the human’s peach skin.

“The Lady is right,” the warrior said as he went to join his band in their plundering. “You are wise in the ways of war as she is in words. Perhaps now we shall finally have lives that we can call our own.”

The lizardman then gave Marcus an odd, yet intricate salute—one hand behind his back and one on his chest, palm up, with a slight bow of respect. Marcus was left feeling somewhat touched by the whole exchange, so much so that he almost didn’t hear Mari coming up to rest her head on his shoulder in the next moment.

“Takeshi is right, you know,” she told him, laying her head gently on his shoulder for a moment, her thin fingers interlocking with his own at her side. “Without you, we’d still just be running. Today, for the first time, we’ve struck a blow against the House of Blades that they won’t soon forget.”

“Mari,” he whispered. “Did—did he hurt y—”

Her kiss stopped his concerns before he could even voice them.

“Now, I’m not saying that battle gets me all hot and bothered,” she chuckled. “But I gotta admit, seeing you in action was…something.”

“Me?! What about you? You and your ‘Princess’ had that pompous Prince’s entire army fooled. But it was still a stupid plan. Too many variables. Too much luck involved. Had he deigned it fit to actually look past the animal eyes of Karliah, he might have seen through the whole façade the second she began her report.”

Both their eyes wandered across the now-cleared battlefield, watching Karliah bark orders to her Tigran sisters, while Marvin regaled his fellow Pipers with stories of Marcus’s bravery as they charged the camp in the dead of night. In the rear of the camp stood Hialjia, utterly triumphant, her axe held high as she tore apart the rest of the walls—so that there would be no evidence left that the Prince and his Clan had ever set up here.

Above the broken palisades of Prince Nagoya’s war camp, the sun was beginning to show its face through the clouds.

“Everything’s going to change now,” Mari told her General. “This isn’t just the dawn of a new day: it’s the dawn of a new era. The history books’ll talk about Maria the Pale One and her handsome General who put the armies of a great Yokun Prince to the sword. We’ve been in the dark for so long, Marc. Now it’s time for us to come into the light.”

Marcus watched the Pipers scurry around them, each one practically falling off their feet to bow in respect. Part of him felt a pang of nausea to have former slaves treat him with such deference.

“You’ve led all these people here yourself, Mari,” he said.

“I’ve done no more than you did below the surface.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. Everything I made was torn to pieces because of one single failure. It won’t happen again.”

Mari sighed beside him, squeezing his hand tightly.

“‘It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.’”

She eyed him slyly.

“Know who said that, Mr. Historian?”

“I don’t,” Marcus admitted.

“That’s because it’s from Star Trek,” Mari replied with a mischievous wink. “But it’s a lesson I wish you’d learn. Because you’re not the only one who’s failed up here. All of us—the Pipers—we all see ourselves as failures. We’ve all been seen as failures in the eyes of the Yokun. But that was just our lives. Our old lives. And now, we’re about to gain something totally new.”

She stepped on to address her people, calling for them to begin their last-minute preparations before they departed for the border. Watching her talk to them like a humble but stern mother, Marcus couldn’t help but feel there was a double meaning to her words—that the ‘old life’ she spoke of referred to something far different than her time spent as the Matriarch of the House of Whispers.

Maybe Yeeva had been right. Maybe you really don’t want to go back home now…

He snapped back to reality when she offered him her hand.

“Well?” she said. “Ready to make history?”

He never had been. Maybe he never would be. But with her by his side, he could at least give it a try.

Even if it was nothing but a fantasy.