Dust on the far horizon; that was the first anyone saw of their coming. A subtle sign at first, remarked on only by those of anxious disposition. But it thickened, blotting the horizon, until person by person, the fear spread like a contagion. They could see it in the eyes of their gathered neighbors in the street, who made furtive glances at the sky; in the frantic pace of hunched labourers heading home early, refusing to look over their shoulders.

But it was the sound that ultimately shattered that fitful peace. It would go unnoticed until an opportune moment of silence or a first step outside suddenly exposing a person to the open air. The distant rumble of something like thunder—but not. That was when most realized: something was coming.

Scholars delved into their archives, rummaging through piecemeal archives in a desperate effort to understand what it could be, what the signs could mean. A dozen answers were found, as is often the way of things, but to all who heard it, one description rang out above all others with a terrifying resonance. No one knew who spoke it first, but once it was uttered the word spread rapidly. The city fell into turmoil.

Most ran, gathering their most precious goods and taking flight from the city in droves. In other times and places there might have been cruelty borne of desperation, anger exploding out of abiding terror. But the people of Calamut took pride in their solidarity, in the principles of community that had seen their prosperity rise in the last decades. But still, wherever goodwill failed and tempers threatened tragedy, black suited figures in white masks travelled through the crowds, offering guidance, soothing tempers and carrying messages. The night-runners came in force and that strange group of rebels and misfits organized the city's flight with diligence and care that shocked those that encountered them.

When the next sign of disaster came, it received little attention at first. A faint glow in the sky, a stirring of air, these things were trivial in the face of impending ruination. But they grew, minute by minute until even those in flight could not help but stop and stare. High in the heavens, a star had appeared to the north. Its light was not gentle. It shivered, pulsing with tongues of strange lightning and flares of plasma visible even in the late afternoon sky. Hot hurricane winds pressed down from it, striking the earth and flowing outward in a wave of unearthly heat and stinking ozone.

Amblers brayed in fear; even their engineered docile minds were shaken. Wild animals streamed along the ground, eyes wide and mouths frothing in a desperate panic. Those fleeing simply halted. The coming of the elementals was a destruction that could at least be outrun, but this, it seemed, could only foretell something inescapable. The exodus of Calamut crouched low to the ground, held those they loved, and waited for the end.

A pillar of light split the sky.

As suddenly as it appeared, it was gone, only the lingering flash burned in retinas that would take minutes to fade.

Radiant flame appeared on the horizon, a rising column of dust stretched far into the air.

For a brief time, there was silence. The winds abated. Those flinching from the world began to stir, uncertain. A sudden boom swept over them, and then a low static rumble, but it was not the inconceivable destruction they had expected, in comparison to the earlier effects it was almost... gentle. The power that had driven them to their knees had spared them, and some began to wonder what its purpose had been.

When hours later the oncoming horde of elementals failed to appear, and the city stood largely undamaged, the realization finally came to the people of Calamut: they had been saved.

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Calre and Grant took a path parallel to the elementals, one that kept their nimbles far from the choking dust that stirred in their wake. Calre was ready to see his role in the affair ended. He had followed the orders of those on high and became their eyes on the ground, a perfect witness thanks to the power of Catalogue.

He had his own thoughts on the heavy-handed efforts to maintain secrecy in the Meäl region. The release of pet monsters to kill or ward off travelers had already been distasteful to him, but the use of such sophisticated hivers was shockingly foolish.

He would almost suspect an assassination attempt by a rival if the creatures hadn't been primed to his scent—the sole reason he and the others had escaped summary execution at their capture. But even that had been fumbled—they had ignored his authority—too deviant by far. Hivers should never have had the autonomy to conceptualize holding them hostage, let alone do so. He had been at a genuine loss for how to proceed when an unlikely saviour, one he’d seen as no more than an idle diversion—an equal, an ally, even a—Calre disciplined his thoughts away from that line.

His focus needed to remain in the present. Grant’s loyalties had been sorely tested but Calre knew that with appropriate handling his conviction could be made stronger than ever. Calre stifled the feeling of regret that his bondsman—closer than a father—had become another figure necessary to control.

The speed of their nimbles, driven hard, would take them to the ruins of Calamut in a matter of days. There he would act to reduce unnecessary casualties. The danger of the city would be broken, and so as much of its people as possible could be saved. There were those who thought otherwise, who had fully left behind their humanity and didn’t see the abomination in pointless death.

They had already ridden through the night, resting only briefly, or taking turns to sleep in their saddles. The nimbles would need weeks of maintenance and recuperation after this outing, but the ancient creatures were resilient, and it was worth it—to keep a promise to a dead boy. Calre urged his nimble on, racing away from the thoughts that he could not seem to crush. He looked for anything, anything at all that could distract him from—the bile in your throat as you ordered... the confusion on his face as he lay there. He didn’t see it coming did he? He didn’t suspect you for a moment. It wasn’t a ploy with him, he truly cared for yo—Calre reached for anything that—what—what is that light?

Gratefully, Calre flickered through his recent memories from Catalogue. The light he’d only just consciously perceived on the horizon had been there for some time, growing steadily stronger for the last quarter-hour. He kept his attention on it, watching it grow brighter until—flash!

Something had just happened hundreds of kilometers away. The elementals couldn’t have reached Calamut yet. They were two hours out at least.

Calre felt Grant’s silent presence come alongside him.

“Something’s awry. We need to be on site as soon as possible.”

He spurred forward, hungry for the distraction, for the excuse to drive himself into thoughtless exhaustion.

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They journeyed through shockwave flattened fields then patchworks of burned out grasses that still smouldered on the south side of gentle rises. The remnant heat increased further in—like the earth suffered a feverish wound that grew nearer with every stride.

Blackened stones, half melted and still hot to the touch were scattered over the ground like the aftermath of a hellish hail; growing larger as they advanced, slowly revealing the broken portions of flowstone elementals, torn asunder by incomprehensible forces and flung across the landscape like pebbles.

The air grew so hot that they sweated through their clothes, and the ground began to crunch with every step, barely cooled glass cracking into dagger-like shards. They halted then, to gird the nimble’s feet in thick leather padding kept for this rare purpose.

All these signs accumulated, like a miasma of destruction that thickened as they approached the nexus of all they had seen: the crater.

The light Calre had seen—this is where it had landed. He could almost imagine it. The titanic rumble of the elementals, overshadowed as the very air screamed, and the world burned. A being of power had taken umbrage, and their plans had been as nothing before its ire.

Part of him grappled with the frustration of futility. All their efforts—sacrifices—had been meaningless.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

He remembered a pond on his family estate, drained one year according to the custodial whims of the gardeners. The frogs had remained, scrabbling against one another for the rapidly drying patches of mud, victims of forces far beyond their comprehension.

‘Ribbit,’ he thought grimly.

His duty now was clear: to learn as much as he could, and report the findings in turn. An event of this scale would have repercussions. One great power could not stir without disrupting the slumber of others. The original plans for Calamut were irrelevant in the face of the new threat, if anything, the advancement of their spring-tech would be essential to surviving the coming storm.

They were coming up on the crest of the crater. Sheltered from the unlivable heat by the power of Grant's barrier, their nimbles had been left far behind. It was an unwise advance, but Calre needed to see.

A lake of flame: molten rock still cooling. All lesser material had been blown away until bedrock alone served as fuel to unimaginable fire. Calre stared out in silence, shaken by a feeling that rarely troubled one of his birth. A furrow had been carved into the earth, extending hundreds of meters from the south and terminating here in a cauldron that still simmered in the fury of its creation. In its path had been the reviled bane of a dozen civilizations, an unconquerable power now broken.

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Jack fell.

He could not remember how long he had been falling.

Had the elementals come? Had he missed them? But, no—he could remember now, he had been in the sky. Traveling faster and faster until even the thin air burned red from his journey, then orange, then white. It was red now, he must have slowed down.

No—that wasn't right. He had stopped. He had cancelled Return and struck the ground with his dash. He had seen the fury of his fall drawn away, the energy pulled into a momentum charge that felt... inconceivably bright in his mind.

He hadn't had but a moment; he had seen the hurricane winds his passage had created, the world rippling away from him. But even those winds did not matter before the onslaught he had arrived before, the oncoming fury of the mountain that walked. They clambered over each other, titans melding into one another and separating like water. His timing had been close. They were nearly upon him.

He had seen, and then felt, a shadow fly onto his shoulder. The nightbird had landed there; had come all that way. He remembered wondering why. His hand had gone up to touch it, came away stained black, an oily darkness that crept up his fingers. He remembered not caring. What did it matter? Whatever gambit it still tried for meant little enough to him, here at the end. He thought it was funny, how light it seemed, as he leaned forward. To an observer, he wondered if it would appear he was bowing before the majesty of the cataclysm that thundered, nearly upon him.

But he was merely picking his angle. He'd wondered if he would feel it, but no, he would strike the ground magnitudes faster than a nerve could signal, his body would dissolve into a cloud of heat and flame and motion. There wouldn't be a Jack capable of feeling.

He released the energy bundled up within himself, and the world disappeared.

Until now, when all he saw was a sea of red. He wondered if this was oblivion.

He couldn’t move, and yet he moved. He could feel it, the slightest creep of momentum. He fell... somewhere.

Time passed and, with a suddenness that could only be likened to waking, the sky appeared above him. Jack realized his error. He had not been falling, but rising.

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Grant saw it first. Emerging in the middle of the now nearly solidified lake, where a small well of liquid stone still remained, a shadow had appeared.

A figure of a man, identifiable only when he made to stand atop the hellish flow he had only just risen from. A man of darkness surrounded by radiant light that allowed no shadow of his own. Reflections of flame hurried over his body, like the glints of light across the feathers of a bird.

Calre watched with bated breath, never imagining that the power that had done this would have remained. He didn’t think to feel fear any longer—even when the figure spotted them and began a plodding, slow pace forward—their fate had already been decided. Either it would take offence to their presence... or it wouldn’t.

He couldn’t help but feel a sense of eerie familiarity, something about the way it moved made him feel pain.

Tendrils of shadow flowed off as it neared them, twisting in the air as they dissolved to nothing. When it was near enough Calre realized the acuity of his earlier observation: they were black iridescent feathers, becoming smoke as they slowly revealed a human form.

Grant fell to his knees, a breathless keening unlike anything Calre had ever heard emanating from him. But he understood; the emotion that poured from his bondsman was something he knew very well. Disbelieving joy, as the dark feathers fell and finally revealed a familiar face.

“Jack,” Calre said, a greeting as much as a statement, “you’re looking well.”

The last of the shadow dissolved. He looked much the same, if bare of clothing. A faint pale mark upon his chest was the only evidence of the wound Grant had given him.

Jack’s mouth quirked, and Calre knew he was still human, even when his expression returned to the serious.

“You tried to kill me.”

“I won’t pretend otherwise. I regret it now as much as I did then. Well, perhaps more now.” Calre knew he probably should be grinning as widely as he was, but he couldn’t help it.

Jack nodded slowly.

“We spoke once... about the neighbours that lay beyond the borders. Safe neighbours and dangerous ones. I am a safe neighbour, but if Calamut should fall, I care not how... I will be a very dangerous neighbour indeed.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Calre replied, “I expect we’ll be seeing more of each other in the future. New neighbours receive welcomes after all.”

Everything had changed. All the plots of the nobility, the half-millennia of relative calm their conspiracy had produced, it was over. Calre did not cling to ideas past their point of usefulness, it was a point of pride for him. From the moment he had learned that the self-aggrandizing stories of the nobility were nonsense he had abandoned any fledgling notions of his own blood’s superiority.

So when Calre had first seen the light in the sky, and he knew that the world must change, he had been surprised by the feeling of pain that accompanied it. Only with Jack’s reappearance did he realize that he had been mourning another loss altogether.

“Grant...” Jack spoke softly then, to the bondsman who openly wept before him, “I forgive you.”

Then in a rush of motion he was gone. Only the careful examination in Calre’s memory of the moment revealed a faint dot, seen at the very edge of perception just before disappearing into the distance.

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Neavie strained to keep herself awake but she was dead on her feet. Resting during a brief reprieve in the flow of people. She was keeping watch on the darkening hills around Calamut, waiting to direct any who came this way to the community aid stations that had sprung up in the wake of the disaster.

The last of the folk who had fled from the city were still returning. Many of them had left without anything but the clothes on their backs; a day of desperate travel had strained them. The night-runners had been run ragged delivering supplies and ensuring those that had fled furthest heard the news: the doom that had come to Calamut had been broken.

Her eyes went again to the north horizon where someone precious had gone, and only disaster had returned. Weeks of terrible stories had come from the north, plagues of dangers that harried or drove back all who ventured there. There had been talk of mounting a culling expedition, a course pursued far too late for the person she fretted for.

There had been things she meant to say, but couldn’t, when there had been time. She’d learned much about the pain of regret in the last weeks, of the damnably false inevitability of ‘I couldn’t’ or ‘I can’t’.

‘I couldn’t possibly tell him how I feel,’ she’d thought the day he left, when he’d finally seemed to understand that there might be something more than just friendship between them.

‘I can’t tell him not to go.’ She’d thought that too. She’d thought that it wasn’t fair to demand such a thing. She was afraid of what it would mean if he said no or, worse yet, said yes and regretted it.

So she’d listened to that voice inside of her—the one of whispered doubts—and let him go.

She saw a lone figure walking towards her and dismissed her sorrowful thoughts for the moment. She would return to them, time and again, she couldn’t—that word again—help but do so.

“Food and healing is in the market square,” she called out a regular refrain, “if you need assistan—”

“Neavie?”

Her whole body froze. There was only one person in the world who would call her that while she was in her nightblacks. She started to run.

“The others said you’d be here, I—”

But she wasn’t listening. A part of her was screaming that she couldn’t simply jump into his arms, couldn’t pull his face down to hers and silence his sputtering with a desperate kiss.

‘But I can,’ she thought, and she did.