"Sorry. Just...sorry.

"I mean, it's day twenty, uh, four. Yeah. We'll say that. Everything is horrible. Sorry? Is the mic picking this up?

"I had to reconstruct it after breaking it. I had a bad day. Hell, every day is a bad day. Jacob's still under. He's alive, but he's changing, and I don't feel so good myself. I'm barely eating, and all we've got is this native Tellurian bamboo shoots--

"--What the hell? What's growing out of my hands?"

--Recording recovered from Site Resh, reconstructed 1887 CE (restricted access)

---

15 Rising Withering, 1886 CE

The Nameless City

Oralie moaned and shifted in Dorsin's arms as he raced through the the empty audience chamber. The double-sun lamp hanging in the center of the room flickered unsteadily, making the speckles on the black floor glint, but the aerosol had dispersed.

Oralie was burning up. Was the wetness of her forehead and her clothes residue from the pool, or was it her own sweat?

The Symbiont's pool, Dorsin reminded himself. He'd killed the Symbiont.

He'd killed it to save his wife.

He'd probably

Also killed the hopes of humanity. Without the Symbiont, human technology would fail utterly. Man would enter a new dark age, a repeat of the post-Pandemic years when Chimeras had conquered the planet.

The last time they'd done that, mankind had been powerless to fight them back until the Sodality had emerged from this very hole bearing the gift of the Symbiont, which they'd painstakingly cared for during the years of destruction. This time, there would be no such gift.

As Dorsin padded to a stop in front of the lift doors and used his elbow to press the call pustule, a shudder ran through Oralie. She quivered like a feverish child and groaned piteously, her soaked hair clinging to his arm like a capsized fisherman clinging to his raft.

Dorsin didn't regret his choice. Perhaps in an hour, perhaps tomorrow, he'd realize the enormity of his decision, but he'd made it for the sake of his wife.

Where was the elevator? He pressed the pustule again and again, but the doors didn't slide open.

In killing the ancient Tool that produced the Symbiont, Dorsin might also have killed the Archon Tool for the Palace, or maybe even for the whole of the Nameless City. If the lift's muscles were inactive, it wouldn't be coming for him at all.

Dorsin gently propped Oralie against the wall, then pried the lift doors open. A dark, humid, and musty shaft awaited beyond.

Dorsin lifted Oralie onto his back. Spider-silk webbing. He quickly spun a net to hold her, freeing his hands. Then he gripped the access vertebrae sticking out of the wall and began to climb.

The Symbiont made Dorsin more than a man, but since he was an adoptee of obligation, not a true scion of Gens Nethress, his bloodline had no particular affinity for the Symbiont. His bond was much weaker than the typical Magus's, and so where his daughter Senrii or Erus Tvorh might have brachiated straight up the wall without trouble, his arms began to burn partway through the long climb.

He spun a web to hold Oralie and him to the wall and rested for a few minutes. Oralie's hands, tied against his waist, tightened once, then loosened. Involuntarily? Or was she awakening?

She didn't move again.

Dorsin dissolved the webbing, popped a calorie pack into his mouth, and started up the wall again.

A tiny vertical glint about as tall as a man broke the wall up above. He was almost to the bottom floor. Surely the High had sent word of Dorsin's actions to the main floor. He didn't relish trying to fight his way through hundreds of Magi, nor releasing any holds they'd placed on his skywhale--

Were those gunshots?

Dorsin redoubled his pace.

Gunshots. And screams. Dorsin pried open the lift doors into a scene from some Adonist hell.

Blood-smeared Chimeras charged the doors of the lobbies. At least a dozen guardsmen took cover behind overturned furniture, receiving Chimerical spines from the invading monsters and returning bullets in exchange. Targeted clouds of venomous air, crawling vines, and naphthgel bursts splashed back and forth between the monsters and the Magi.

A volley of poison-tipped quills whipped past Dorsin, embedding themselves into the soft flesh of the lift walls. Dorsin flung himself to the ground, but Oralie was a person, not a backpack. She whimpered in unconscious pain.

Dorsin counted six Chimera bodies scattered in the lobby. They had apparently made it in, then been pushed back. There were other bodies as well.

Not all were wearing uniforms. The young novices Dorsin had seen earlier lay on the floor, throats torn, torsos bloodied, unseeing eyes staring at the ceiling.

Dorsin crawled toward the nearest chaise, keeping it between him and the door. A quartet of guards crouched behind it. One of them popped around the side, squeezed off a few shots, then popped back. His eyes widened as he saw Dorsin. "Magus?" he asked. "You can fight?"

Dorsin climbed to his knees, let Oralie down, and then placed his back against the chaise, which rocked as another volley of quills embedded itself in the other side. "Yes. What's happening? How did they get here?"

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

"Thank the Most High," the guard breathed. "The city's defenses went down. The Defenders of the Pass are overwhelmed. We need all the help we can get to clear a path for the civilians."

Dorsin drew his pistol from his skinsuit, then checked the chamber. "Can't they descend from the balconies?"

Having taken a few shots of his own, a guard on Dorsin's other side knelt back down. "The Chimeras are everywhere. One second, the defenses were reporting everything nominal. The next, they just went off-nerve." The man rubbed his fingers nervously against the grip of the pistol. "It's like the Chimeras knew exactly when to attack."

All of this in the twenty minutes since he'd slain the ancient Tool and freed his wife.

"We're holding for the city, but it's like there's an army out there. It's a target-rich environment for our snipers, but..."

"But that's not a good thing." Dorsin felt the outside of his skinsuit. He still had three Symbiont-slayer grenades. "Spread the word. On my mark, in five seconds, every soldier in this room suppresses them for ten seconds. No melee. That's my job. When I hit their line, reload and regroup, then wait to follow me out. You'll need to stay away from the mist."

"What are you--"

"I'm Magus Princeps Dorsin Generosus Ortus Nethress. I've been doing this longer than you've been alive. When I go, nobody with a Symbiont is to follow me until the mist clears. I'm going to make a path. Do you understand? No Magi are to enter the mist unless they can completely vacuum-seal themselves. Once the mist is gone, one of you needs to carry my wife out after me."

The guards on either side slowly nodded.

"Spread the word and have them wait for my mark."

The soldiers scrambled away to the other barricades. Dorsin saw one of them shout into the ear of the blond guard who'd been at the door. The man's attention snapped to Dorsin. He scowled.

Dorsin stared back. There would be plenty of time later for them all to rue Dorsin's choices.

When the messengers returned to Dorsin's barricade, they had a trio of Stigmatized warriors with them. Spiked armor plates bristled beneath their skin, and all three of them had secondary arms rising from their shoulderblades. The additional limbs ended in nasty-looking forgebone blades.

"Stigmatized all right in your, uh, mists?" one of the soldiers asked.

Dorsin nodded. Stigmatized didn't have any SOPHIOS of their own, so the Symbiont-killer wouldn't hurt them. It would be good to have backup.

Wishing he had Tvorh's natural vocal chords, Dorsin enhanced his voice. "Mark now! Five, four, three..."

On zero, the snaps of bullets became a horrifying din, like a thousand drums all beating at once.

Dorsin tossed a grenade past the doorway, counted ten, vacuum sealed himself, and peering through bleary double-lensed eyes, leapt over the chaise, pulling his short sword free of his skinsuit.

The Chimeras in the doorway were bloodied and confused-looking. A dim mist drifted through the nighttime air beyond them.

When Dorsin and the three Stigmatized hit the line, the Chimeras folded like wet paper, stumbling back into the night over the corpses of their fellows.

Dorsin charged through the fog, sword in one hand, gun in the other. Chimeras waited warily at the edge of the mist.

He slew them with blade and bullet. The slashing talons of the Stigmatized whipped about him. Dorsin fought cleanly, efficiently, driving the Chimeras back toward the landing pad, where four skywhales loomed in the gloom.

The monsters reformed lines at the edge of the Symbiont-killer as the fog dissipated. So, as his heart and lungs pounded from lack of oxygen, Dorsin holstered his pistol and threw another grenade.

The slaughter recommenced.

Bullets from behind proved that the Defenders of the Pass were supporting Dorsin's push. In the open air, more lethal STIGMOS and conventional weaponry could be used. The ground cracked as manual artillery from deeper within the city launched mines that tore through the earth and devoured the monsters, and the night sparked with electricity as STIGMOS that created voltage differentials latched onto Chimeras and shocked them.

A cloud of fungi ate the eyes of the line in front of Dorsin as one of the skywhales on the landing pads beyond the army deflated. Hundreds of winged Chimeras crawled over the biomobile's gas-bag, devouring it alive but falling as snipers' bullets picked them off one by one.

Some of the snipers on the balconies shouted as Chimeras descended on them from above. The monsters disappeared into the tower.

Dorsin threw his last grenade. Covered with blood and worse, he opened a wound in the enemy line, pushed a path free to the remaining skywhales. As artillery fell and vile mists drifted through the air, refugees streamed from the towers.

The Stigmatized warriors turned the enemy flank and pushed toward reinforcements coming from the city, and Dorsin took his wife from the guard carrying her.

Dorsin inhaled a single deep breath of untainted air and sprinted for their skywhale. Its thin loading limb lowered to allow him on board, and he took the stairs two at a time.

"Take off as quickly as possible," he said, handing over Oralie to one of the servants as he rushed into the hold. "Get the uxor principis into our cabin. And try to get her fever down!"

The servant turned, but Oralie's hand grabbed Dorsin's wrist with surprising force. Through eyes that were a bare slit, Dorsin's unconscious wife seemed to see him. "Rosabella," she moaned, like a woman trying to speak in a dream that forbade it.

Gasping with terror as Muoro fruitlessly held the door closed. Nerves weaving into her hair, spreading across her skull. Pressing back into a chair that was a deformed man, praying that Muoro's strength wouldn't give out.

The Synapsis chamber--eighteenth floor?

Dorsin staggered back. How...? Whatever had happened to Oralie, he'd stopped it when he'd extracted her from the pool.

Hadn't he?

But she'd shown him. She'd shown him Rosabella.

Through Synapsis.

Despite the heat and the chaos of battle, a chill came over Dorsin as he realized that his wife's suffering had only begun.

"Rosabella," Oralie said again. Her hand slipped from Dorsin's wrist.

Dorsin spun, staring out the door at the battle-ravaged plaza. Chimeras moved in undulating waves in the dark beyond the towers. Whole armies of them.

And Rosabella was trapped.

But Oralie was here. His wife was here.

The skywhale groaned as it came fully on-nerve. It drifted up from the ground: a foot, two, three.

Dorsin's obligation was to Oralie. Not Rosabella.

Not Rosabella, the first woman he had ever loved, but Oralie, the second; not Rosabella, the second great love of his heart, but Oralie, the first.

The skywhale rose above the height of the towers. From here, Dorsin could see the horror waiting for the people of the Nameless City. Men and women streamed into the two remaining skywhales; others flowed toward the city proper. Whole divisions were moving through the streets. They would be able to hold for a time.

But only for a time. Because past the towers, in Vallus, waited not an army, not ten armies, but a horde of Chimeras. A day, two, five, ten; a month, at most, and that horde would break free.

They were already in the tower.

The tower where Rosabella was. Rosabella, ruby-lipped, ruby-haired, full-breasted, whose fingertips were silk and whose eyes were emeralds. Rosabella, coy and sensual, courageous and clever, who had never lost faith in Dorsin, even when he had lost faith in himself.

Rosabella, who had given him up to Oralie for the sake of his conscience and never asked anything in return, save that he remember without regrets.

She had given him up to goodness.

He would not give her up to the slaughter.

As the skywhale turned north toward Acerbia, Dorsin cast one final look into the interior, toward the cabin where his beloved Oralie lay.

Wings, gossamer.

Then Dorsin stepped out of the hold into the sky.