Rust-red beetles swarmed over Falor’s feet. He and the entire squad drew several steps back, aware that the forest yawned nearby. More of the creatures emerged from the mud, their immediate interest in them looking anything but peaceful.

The priest wasn’t singing, but was screaming atop his lungs, his words swirling together in a language Falor had never heard before. But the man was clearly a priest of Ort, or bore every distinction of one. The bald pate, the gold and crimson paint covering his head and neck, the black text tattooed across his skin. He was larger than most priests of Ort, but wore the same tattered robes and the tools of his office: the sickle hanging at his waist.

“What’s going on?” Falor demanded, voice raised to cover the priest’s chant.

Bodies rose from the ground, forming a mass of the shambling dead that trailed the screeching man like a procession. Falor wasn’t feeling a single heartbeat from either them or the priest, and it made his hair stand on end. It was hard not to lash out, fear gnawing at his patience.

“Commander?” Barlo rumbled to his side. He crunched down hard on one of the beetles and it shattered with a porcelain tinkle.

“I am Commander Falor Merchal of the Eternal Empire’s Storm Guard, Primary Division. Well met, traveller,” he tried again. He wasn’t going to strike one of lord Ort’s men, but that may change if the bastard didn’t wake up from whatever this was and answered him.

Questions crowded in his mind and he was certain this man held, if not a key to the mystery of this gods-abandoned village, at least some insight into what had happened. However, the rising dead were an accusation hard to ignore.

Barlo tensed at his side. So did Vial. Against protocol, they had drawn weapons. It was forbidden to threaten any of the clergy. But that growing procession? Their numbers swelling by the heartbeat, it was a threat as clear as any Falor had ever felt.

A low droning noise filled the air. The beetles were now a flood, covering the ground in the colour of wither time decay. Quistis’s invisible barrier went up and the critters massed against it, climbing one over the other, flowing like a river trying to find the edge to form a waterfall.

They were all intent on them, the black-eyed heads aimed their way.

“That priest ain’t right,” Barlo said. “What’s he saying?”

“I haven’t the foggiest,” Vial answered. “No language I’ve ever heard.”

“Me neither,” Falor concurred.

With a shuddering sigh of delight, the screaming cut off. The man’s eyes turned from the sky to the group and a grin that stretched ear to ear split his features.

“The child? Here? How fortuitous!” His voice was odd, not quite matching up to his features. It rasped and gurgled slightly. Lips and words didn’t synchronise flawlessly. There was a lilting quality to the words, as if the man’s attention was somewhere far off.

“Greetings,” Falor tried a third time. “What’s happening here?” Even asking the question made him feel silly, the dead and the beetles encroaching against their invisible bubble of safety.

“The reaping is begun,” the man said, eyes growing wide. His entire bulbous body shuddered as if in ecstasy. “Witness the first to have been embraced.”

Quistis spat to the side, though that wasn’t unexpected of a healer.

The man’s words made no sense. Falor knew of the Reaping as some event Ort’s priests sang about, but it was, as his mother often put it, just “religious hogwash”. Every god promised something or another. It was basically demanded of them.

Lord Ort did not need followers even if he enjoyed their attention.

He and Falor had often spoken of this during Falor’s education in Aztroa. The Reaping was no more an event to begin than was Isadora’s Rapture, or Anatol’s Great Battle, or whatever nonsense the Lady of Healing convinced her flock of. All were demanded and expected of them, but all unneeded.

What was this blathering idiot on about?

“I don’t understand,” Falor said.

The beetles climbed higher against the wall. Several found the edges and slipped by. Barlo and Vial trampled them to dust.

Quistis’s barrier became an encircling wall. The beetles continued to boil around its perimeter, pressing against the wall, showing their bellies as they tried climbing on thin air. Their mandibles shivered wetly.

They parted for the priest to approach.

The dead lurched after him.

Through the smoke of the censer, they were a shambling, rotting lot. Men and women, the children and the old, they all stared in grotesque rapture at the priest, desiccated hands reaching out to touch the man’s robes.

“There’s something wrong with the heads,” Mertle said from Falor’s back. Her voice quivered. “Oh mercy, do you see it too?”

Falor saw it on one of the closest walking corpses. It had turned its back towards them so it could reach out and touch the priest. The back of its skull was shattered, yawning like the shell of a nut. Something wiggled inside the gap. In the light of the sprite, rust-coloured chitin shone wetly.

He made a decision.

Whatever this madman was, he couldn’t be of Ort’s clergy. Falor knew the god. He knew Ort’s gentle nature and his care for humanity. He’d helped foster the current age of peace and stability, been at his mother’s side for centuries, worked to built and not tear down. He hadn’t ever even seen the god angry or upset.

This atrocity wasn’t the work of the god he knew!

If this man had anything to do with what happened to the village, then he was to be put down. Falor made decided sentence there and then.

His fists tightened on the shaft of his hammer and lightning coiled tight around his fists. Another of the dead turned and the sight was the same: back of the head cracked out, the inside hollowed out, a beetle squirming about.

“There are times to understand. And there are times to judge. There are, most often, times when you must decide without understanding. Whatever you choose, do it with full confidence. Whatever happens, you must never be anything but a rock for all to cling to.” Cinder’s words rose from the folds of memory. His mother had attended the lesson. She had approved of the message.

He did as he’d been taught.

“Tummy and Mertle, please stand behind us. If you feel threatened, run. I will find you later.” He spoke through gritted teeth, his anger boiling over into fury, voice distorting with the buzz of his power. “Quis, on Barlo and Vial.”

Barlo didn’t need telling what was expected of him. He stepped forward and raised his heavy mace in both large hands, the smaller touching his daggers. Vial hung back, close to Quistis, always her guardian in the field.

“Lads, we kill everything,” Falor said, though his words came out a garbled buzz. He whistled and the invisible dam broke.

He and Barlo exploded forward, both weapons swinging. His hammer hit the ground among the swelling mass of insects, and a pulse of power detonated forward. A miniature sun shone in the middle of the destroyed village. The dead screamed in chorus as lighting speared them.

A great swathe of the beetles evaporated to dust.

The dead… did not.

Barlo’s swing of the mace cracked into the first body that separated him from the priest. The spiked head crushed the rib cage to mulch, but didn’t pass through. The vanadal’s eyes widened in shock as his muscles bunched to to effect. The corpse man didn’t drop. Instead, it turned in place with lightning speed and grabbed hold of the spikes, yanking.

Against proof of his own eyes, Barlo staggered forward. More than the villagers—staring in confusion at the smoking holes blown through them—this sight lit the first fires of alarm in Falor’s gut.

A second bolt of lightning cut through the mass, snaking its way through the crowd. They screamed in pain, human voices laced with agony, but none fell. Instead, they turned their attention from the priest to them, as if only now becoming aware of their presence.

“Catharina’s heir,” the priest sang out, voice rising again. “Why do you strike against your god’s will? Why do you strike at its most humblest of servants?”

Falor closed his ears to the man’s bleating. Instead, he focused and increased his output. The dead turned as one and advanced in horrifying concert. They moved as one, quicker than they had any right to be.

Barlo kicked out at his foe, drew back his bloodied mace, and brought it down two handed over the thing’s head, pulping bone and cartilage and whatever passed for the man’s brain. That dropped it in an instant. And it animated the whole crowd into a frenzy.

Violence exploded as they rained blows upon him, hands like claws grabbing hold of his arms and clothes and cloak, trying to drag him down. Teeth clanked as they tried to bite through his armour.

Falor swung at the closest dead to knock three of their feet and gain the vanadal a breath.

Barlo brought his mace around and swung again in a double-handed grip. He took off two heads in a single strike. The corpses still advanced several paces, pushed forward by the mass behind them, then were crushed beneath stamping feet. The next swing of the weapon was caught by an arm, the strength of the swing barely moving the dead man.

Falor felt pincers punching through the armour plate of his heel. He stamped down and shattered the beetle. More streamed out from the crowd, as if his initial blast hadn’t hurt their numbers at all.

He whistled. Barlo dragged his weapon back and lifted the man holding on to it. A swing sent him flying over the crowd to crash atop the forest of hands that stretched in their direction. He kicked out and managed to tear himself away from the mob’s grasp.

Falor loosed his bolts into the crowd, lightning arching atop the mass of bodies, lightning up eyes and mouths as he controlled the power to hit heads.. Some popped.

Smoke curled out of mouths, eyes and ears, but the dead kept moving. The priest’s laughter echoed over into the night, the distance to the man an ocean now.

Someone grabbed hold of his hammer and yanked. Others gripped his arm and shoulders, their strength monstrous. They would’ve drawn him into the crowd if not for another hammer coming down on the closest head, smashing it to shard of bone.

Tummy waded into the fray, wielding his weapon the same way Barlo did his, striking into the mass with a butcher’s cold, calculated abandon. Falor followed suit once the pressure off him lessened, and moved with the flow of killing. There were barely a hundred bodies surrounding them, but those were already too many.

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Something smashed him in the face. His nose burst. Fingers raked across his eyes and it was pure luck they didn’t pluck out an eye. Another hand gripped his hair and, were it not for the smith’s aid, would’ve scalped him.

A beetle bit into his lower calf and the pain juddered through him as if someone had cut off the leg. He staggered and sent a pulse of power around his feet.

The priest, in the distance, was waving his censer. Smoke rose into the air, the stench acrid. He sang again, the words alien, their sound foul in the ear. Falor wished he could stuff a boot down the man’s throat.

“Clear the vermin,” Barlo called out. “They hurt.” He was wrestling for control of his weapon again, arms pinning it constantly as the dead kept trying to drag him down.

One man bit into the vanadal’s arm and Falor heard the crunch of teeth smashing bone. Barlo grunted in pain, grabbed the man’s head in his other hand and squeezed it. It shattered like an egg. The bloodied beetle tried to wiggle free, but Barlo shattered it with a grunt.

“I require this one be mended.” Quistis ran forward and pressed her hand to the vanadal’s back. Healing light engulfed the warrior.

She scrambled back as Barlo waded back into the fight, punching and stabbing and swinging the mace. Tummy fought his way to Falor’s front, his movements precise, each strike a kill. The dead around him grew. He kneed one of the corpses in the chest as it feel, set it between himself and the ones coming from the back, and used it as a shield while his smith’s hammer bashed in heads.

This isn’t getting us anywhere. No matter how many the two giants killed, more pushed in from behind. And he became more and more convinced some of the dead were rising back, headless and mangled, still dragging at them.

Falor burned the beetles. Pulse after pulse of power raced across the ground and destroyed the little beasts before more got closer. He didn’t want to imagine how they got into the victim’s heads, or the excruciating pain of the process. One by one they puffed to smoke, or cracked underfoot. The source of this was clear enough: the priest at the centre of the congregation, watching with beatific interest the proceedings.

A bolt of lightning snaked through the throng of the dead. It shattered against the priest, the power never even reaching the man’s skin. If Falor didn’t know any better, he could’ve swore his bolt shattered against a healer’s barrier. But that was impossible.

A second bolt proved the impossible possible as the power again spilled against an invisible shell guarding the man. Bolts cast at him from beneath or above got the same result.

He’d had enough. This wasn’t a fight they could last out, and failing here would be disastrous for any other village in the area.

“Going in,” Falor said.

Barlo took a single step aside and swung around the woman wrestling with him for the mace.

Falor jumped, focused, and shot forward to deliver an overhead strike with his maul. He passed into pure energy, raced across the horde, and reappeared in reach of the man. His hammer came down with enough force to shatter a gold-tongue’s skull into paste.

Power exploded as the jagged head smashed over the man’s head, driving down so hard that it bisected the body. Whatever protection the priest had shattered like glass against the hammer’s star ore. Bright red gore errupted from the ruined body, turning the corpse-to-be into a geyser of blood. Falor poured power behind the weapon’s passing and incinerated whatever remained. He would not take a single risk with the creature.

As one, the mob screamed.

The fallen, whichever was still on the ground, revived.

“Run!” Falor ordered across the sea of bodies “Get clear of the village.”

The priest’s corpse did not fall. Rather, it seethed with life, turning charred organ meat and flesh into new, grotesque growths. Its arms spread open as if for an embrace, and from the ruined chest a low, droning song errupted. It bubbled out like blood, then grew louder, and louder.

Beetles grew upon priest’s wet flesh, falling to the ground with sickening squelches. Falor drew back as they flowed free of the body, snapping pincers, multi-segmented legs churning the mud.

Change came over the dead. Their flesh became waxen, melting like tallow. Limbs sprouted, each tipped with razor sharp bone blades. They howled in the night. A miasma of rot and death permeated the air.

Quistis and Mertle had been the first to turn tail and head away from the village, a sprite lighting the way. Barlo and Tummy followed. Vial was nowhere to be seen, but that only meant he was alive.

Falor was behind the enemy’s line, alone with the reforming priest, still reeling from the shock of the thing surviving. The mob would be on the others in heartbeats. He grit his teeth and launched himself forward to blast back near the others.

He wasn’t going to run.

They come back no matter how we hit them. He searched his memory, his mother’s teachings, and Cinder’s anecdotes for something that would be even distantly similar to these monsters. Nothing came to mind. He’d only seen the daemons of the Twins once, but even that eclectic menagerie of monsters died after taking enough damage.

Here, he couldn’t find a soft spot to hit. Lightning did not slow them. Physical blows sent them down for a time, but it wasn’t permanent. Destroying the head was simply not enough. And always the beetles, whatever significance those carried.

Whatever he did next, he had to halt them here or risk another village being taken the same way.

He swung the hammer with as much force as he dared, infusing it with illum. Each blow became an explosion that sent bodies back. In heartbeats, he cleared himself a space, but the claws were encroaching.

A sharp whistle. A heartbeat’s time for Quistis to stop and turn. Then the walls came up right in front of him. He stared at the gathered mass of monster flesh and the shining hairline crack forming. Bless her, she was already doubling and redoubling the walls.

Illum flooded his veins. It tasted odd and reeked of death, but it served. Falor drew in a full charge then let out a low, tuneless whistle. Barlo and Quistis would understand and keep Tummy and Mertle safe.

He slammed the hammer down into the mud and dropped it, needing both hands for what came next.

The creatures howled. Barriers shattered.

Most metal minds, such as his mother and Leea, could weave a Titan’s Punishment in a heartbeat. It wasn’t that complicated of an effect, and their control was superb.

Falor needed slightly longer to unleash it. Not because he lacked the capacity or knowledge for it. Not because he lacked the control.

Lightning arched away from his body and incinerated the surrounding forest. Trees burst into flames and offered grim illumination at the beast that reached for him. Crazed and transformed, the dead villagers were nothing more than lumps in the firelight, their forms too grotesque and misshapen to set apart from one another. They bore down on him as more lightning arched from his body. They hit the barriers on one side, his lightning on the other.

Falor needed exactly ten heartbeats to cast his Punishment. He counted patiently while his charge sharpened, restrictions lifted off his strength one by one. His hearts thundered in his chest, both accelerating as more of his stores poured into the prepared strike.

He’d held back against Cinder in Valen, the first time in a decade when he’d had a chance and need to cast the Punishment. He’d held back because he hadn’t wanted to blast a hole through half of Valen’s Upper City.

Here, he had no such dilemma. The village was dead. The villagers became more monstrous before his very eyes.

For the second time that evening, the night burned away. Falor unleashed a true Titan’s Punishment. Pure energy uncoiled off him, was guided through his arms, and burst forth.

He set the power to a wide cone of destruction that would sear away anything in its path for at least half a league from the point of ignition. In any circumstance aside from a large scale war, this would have been an absurd and deranged excess of violence.

Here, he considered it warranted.

There was just the slightest resistance to the thrust of his power. Something opposed the energy, then shattered. He shut his eyes tight against the flash, though he wished he could see if he’d gotten the bloody false priest.

The discharged had happened in less than a heartbeat. Anymore and he’d burn to his own attack.

Nothing remained once he dismissed the power and dared open his eyes. A short, low-strength pulse sent over the forest floor confirmed five strong heartbeats about fifty metres behind him, and a much weaker one much farther out. There were no small animals left in the forest surrounding him, all having fled. Or died of shock.

There was no forest left surrounding him. In the guttering light of the burning vegetation on the edges of his effect, he could only make out scorched, cracked earth. There was no sign of the walking dead, nor of their returned kindred.

“When all else fails,” Cinder had once told him, “make sure to render your enemy down to nothing but ash. Once you’ve established a threat is too great to ignore and too immediate to let out of your sight, don’t fear using all of your resources to take it down.”

Falor let out a slow breath of exertion and hefted his hammer back up. He whistled. Then was answered by the correct pattern. A confirmation called his people back while he scanned the surroundings and kept pulsing his power out, watching for any surprises he could feel. Nothing. Though he’d felt nothing before as well.

He took several steps in the village’s direction, aware they hadn’t cleared the edges of the settlement before he’d unleashed his Punishment. The air stank of ash and burned dust. Heat scorched his cheek.

Nothing was left for them to investigate further. He doubted they would have found anything worth investigating in any case, but still.

The beetles had been important. Born of blood. Now that was something he’d never seen before.

This wasn’t the work of some errant Vitalis. It looked similar enough, what with the flesh moulding and the unpleasant oddity of what the villagers had turned into.

What else could it be then? Another thought wormed it way into the cooling maelstrom of his mind. We never would have known if we hadn’t headed for Drak’s Perch. Does Cinder know of this? Is she part of it? Or does she oppose it.

“Damn you, Cinder,” he groaned. Ever his teacher, it seemed, even when his mission was to end her.

The earth cracked underfoot as he stalked towards his goal, still listening for the sounds of the night to change. Ash rose into the air and coated his trousers and boots. Smoke drifted in.

The threat had been dealt with. Part of him added a “for now” to the end of that thought.

“You used a citadel buster for some walking corpses. Are you that unimaginative, boy?” Cinder would have been aghast at his interpretation of her teachings. That, at least, got him to smile.

“Commander,” Barlo’s voice called out. “Threat status?”

“Unknown,” he replied earnestly.

After seeing the priest survive a hammer to the head and then do… whatever it had been that it did, he wasn’t about to trust the appearance of anything.

The dark could still hold unpleasant and terrible surprises.

His answer set his men on edge as they fell into step with him. Fires on the edges guttered out, the dark crashing down as if to spite Quistis’s sprite.

Falor looked over his shoulder at the others. Quistis and Mertle were both muddy-faced and had twigs in their hair. Tummy also looked to have rolled through the soft earth.

They’d all hit the ground when he’d cast the Punishment. Sensible thing to do, really.

Nothing moved. Nothing breathed. Only the final fires crackled and some parts of trees fell to the ground with complex notes of death.

The village had been erased. Whatever houses had initially survived now lay toppled, the force of the blast having knocked down walls and support beams. This place’s death lay complete.

Finally, he found what he was looking for. Then cursed under his breath.

A spot lay burning in the middle of the village square. And from there footprints walked away through the ash.

“That thing’s survived,” he said, as if wasn’t already clear for everyone gathered.

“What was it?”

It was Mertle who asked the question, her voice surprisingly calm and steady. She hadn’t fought, but did keep a hand tightly gripping the pommel of a knife on her belt. Something about the weapon set his teeth on edge.

“Haven’t the foggiest. Terrible business.”

Vial followed the tracks deeper into the dark, then returned at a jog. “Tracks disappear, commander,” he said. “They get weird before they do, but they disappear.”

“Define weird for me.”

Falor followed where Vial led, to see for himself. Indeed, what started as naked human prints in the ash became smaller and less defined until they united into a slithering groove.

“This kind of weird,” he finally said, watching as the groove disappeared altogether.

What had the priest turned into? And where had he gone?

It was impossible to know. And in the dark, he didn’t want anyone heading out into the forest. Even if nothing rustled and nothing moved, he felt uneasy. He had the unmistakable sensation of being watched.

“We make camp here,” he declared, in the middle of the ash site. “Three men on guard. No fires. No constricting sleeping arrangements.”

“Catharina’s heir,” a soft whisper drifted down to him. “Catharina’s weapon. You were not supposed to be here.” The priest’s voice, carrying the same kind of musical tone. “You are not where you should be. You are not who you should be. Pity. More’s the pity.”

With that, the voice disappeared. Falor could just make up a shape flying out into the night, briefly outlined against the sparse moonlight punching through the clouds. Bat-like wings carried it away from the mountains, and deeper into the countryside.

Cold dread washed down Falor’s back.

That way lay Drak’s Perch. Would it be entirely too much coincidence to think the creature was headed there?