Agraneia lay on the wooden floorboards at the top of the fort, staring up at the rain. Letting the stinging drops fall into her eyes.The sting made everything else fall away.

It kept the thoughts from pulling her down.

Here she was, waiting again. Waiting for the next call. It could be days. It could be weeks.

So, Agraneia was also waiting for the stars. They only came out at night - and on Thrass, the night always meant rain. Thus, very few people ever saw the stars. But Agraneia had discovered if she stayed up long enough, there was a moment after the rains lifted and before the day broke where she could see them on the horizon, below the clouds. A narrow band of twinkling light, all around her.

That was why she was laying on the floorboards, with her head turned towards the horizon. And that was why she felt the clump-clump of bootsteps coming from inside the fort, coming her way.

The bootsteps stopped at the top of the steps. A soldier. He stood near her, and cleared his throat to get her attention.

“Lieutenant,” he saluted at the empty air above her. He had a jagged, white scar running up his cheek that turned suddenly towards his eyes. Some old wound that just missed making him blind.

“You’re blocking the rain,” Agraneia said.

“Lieutenant, my name is Sergeant Baccus. Captain told me to come get you.”

Baccus was a dullscale, just like the rest of Witch Patrol. By his stripes, he was also a sergeant, which made him unusual among the dullscales. Most of them didn’t last long enough to get promoted.

He held out his hand, offering to help her up. Agraneia stared at it.

Baccus lowered his hand awkwardly.

Agraneia squeezed her stomach and pulled herself up to standing in a single, rocking motion. This Sergeant Baccus wasn’t short, but she still stood half a head taller than him.

“Come on,” Baccus said. “This is a bad one.”

“They’re all bad,” Agraneia said. Though Agraneia didn’t mean it as a joke, it still made him laugh.

She followed him down into the fort. There was a banging sound, followed by Captain Dinnae’s voice echoing through the stone hallways. “Gods damn it! They always do this! It’s always us!”

They found her alone in a cramped room with a canvas map tacked to the wall in front of her. From the way she held her fist to her chest and gritted her teeth in pain, it looked like she had just punched something.

“Captain,” Sergeant Baccus stopped in the doorway, and saluted.

“Look at this shit.” She gestured at the map. X’s and circles and arrows drawn all over it. Dotted lines outlining possible enemy positions and movements. “It’s all guesswork. None of this is right. They might as well give me a blank map. Some armchair officer just scribbled this, and now I have to pretend he knew what the hells he was talking about. Gods damn it!”

“Captain?” Baccus asked.

She looked up at him. Her eyes were red, not from crying. Simple exhaustion and stress. Agraneia assumed they all looked like that. A few days’ break in a blown-out village wasn’t nearly as restful as command thought it would be, either.

But the Captain looked like she was taking it especially hard. Her whiskers were twitching, and the scales of her face were carved with rage.

“We’ve had three days. I lost more than half my patrol. And they want us to go back out? What in the Emperor’s divine shit is this?”

“Sir,” Baccus said to the Captain, “This is Witch Patrol.”

The way he said it, it sounded like it was a common refrain among Captain Dinnae’s patrol. A motto, maybe.

And it worked. The Captain gave a defeated sigh. Massaged at her temples. Then, she straightened up, and set her jaw. Her eyes were still red, but the fatigue was gone, replaced by a renewed fire.

“You’re gods damn right this is Witch Patrol,” she said. “And we get shit done. Doesn’t matter what they give us. Right?”

“Hells, yes.”

But despite the fire of determination in the Captain’s voice, Agraneia could hear the hollowness too. Like this was something they had to tell themselves - had told themselves, a hundred times. And both of them were tired of saying it.

Agraneia could remember when she had hit that point. Years ago…

A group of cyrans. Six muddy faces, leaning on each other and laughing. One of them had cut off the head of a local, and was holding it up.

Which squad had that been, again?

She pushed the thought away, and focused on the map in front of her.

“Someone’s gunning for a promotion,” The Captain said, “Or something must’ve happened Cyre-side. Either way, they’re sending a big force up to take Ovan Thay. This is a huge push, and they want us to scout the way ahead first.”

“That’s good, right?” Baccus furrowed his brow, not understanding, “I mean, better than a frontal assault. Take our ten freshest. Quiet and easy.”

“Nothing is easy in the Temple Lands,” Agraneia said.

They both looked at her, Bacchus unsure of himself. Dinnae, mildly impressed.

“The Temple Lands?” Baccus asked.

The captain jabbed at a section of the map - at this scale, it was nothing but a thin strip of land, bisecting the map east to west. A stretch of blank ground, with no tree cover.

“Scouting will be easy, until we get north of this strip,” she said. “But its the strip that worries me. The Temple lands. Maybe I could do it with more seasoned soldiers, but all I’ve got are greenfins.”

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Captain Dinnae shook her head. And muttered something to herself that sounded a lot like It’s suicide. She was staring at the map, tapping her fingers on her lips. And then, she seemed to decide something.

“We’ll have to merge the squads. I’ll take center point, with amber, beryl, and stone squad. Baccus, you’ve got carnite and whatever’s left of gold. Agra, take jewel and take diamond. Do not argue with me. We are down, and I need you to take the right flank. Got it?”

They both nodded.

“Good. No point in waiting. The sooner we move, the sooner we’ll get this shit over with. And remember, when we get into the Temple Lands, don’t touch anything.”

“How will we know when we’re-”

“You’ll know.”

***

It was a day-and-a-half march on the way up, if they went slow. But Captain Dinnae wouldn’t let them go slow. The air was wet and hot and stuck to everything and made the going that much harder.

Two of the moons were high in the sky, and the red sun seemed to follow them northward. Nobody talked. Talking made everything feel hotter.

Along the northern trail, someone spotted three empty huts. They sat on short stilts, on the high side of the hill, looking down into the small valley filled with red and purple foliage.

Only, the houses weren’t empty.

A lassertane woman came out when she heard the soldiers, her straw hat trembling on her old head as she hobbled towards them. She was hissing and clicking in that local language, but none of the soldiers cared to understand what she was saying. Three of them split off the patrol and went up to inspect the houses, and when the woman saw them coming, she ran back inside the middle house, pulling her tail inside before she slammed the door shut.

“Get her out of there,” one of the soldiers shouted. All three of them had their rifles at the ready.

“Get out of the house, you stupid blackmouth!”

No reply. No movement, either.

Agraneia pulled her squads up to the Captain’s. Baccus was there too. He was trying to hide his nerves, but Agraneia could see the way his fingers tensed around his own rifle.

“Captain,” Baccus said, “Is this necessary?”

“We’re still on protocol, Sergeant.” She said.

Unless otherwise commanded, every patrol, every squad, every soldier had to sweep. If you found something, you had to sweep it. If you heard something, you had to sweep it. In theory, it was supposed to guarantee the safety of an area for the next soldiers to come along.

But in practice…

One of the soldiers was still shouting at the house. Agraneia couldn’t see the lassertane woman anymore. The roof was caved in and blocked the window.

The soldier made to move inside the house. He was about to reach the front door, his gun held out, ready to fire. Then, the ground disappeared underneath him. Dirt had been sprinkled over a loose trap of branches, and when he stepped on it, the whole thing gave way.

He fell down into a pit, all the way to his shoulders. And then, he started screaming.

Agraneia didn’t have to guess what he landed on. Bamboo spears, sharpened into rough points and wedged into the dirt, spikes up. If he was lucky, they were clean.

The soldier’s screams were so loud, a flock of dark-feathered birds departed from a nearby tree. She didn’t see who, but someone shot. And then, the whole patrol was shooting. Bullets crashing through the thin walls of the huts, tearing them to pieces until all three structures collapsed. Underneath it all, the soldier was still screaming.

“Cease fire!” the Captain shouted. And she had to say it again, to be heard over the gunshots. “Get him out of there!”

It took two squads and half an hour to work him out. Sharpened bamboo stakes impaled all the way up his thighs. They gave him a piece of bark to bite down on, to quiet his screaming, while the squads worked.

The Captain sent four soldiers to carry him back. Two to hold the stretcher, two to keep watch. Agraneia thought it was an excuse, and a good one at that. Four soldiers less who would have to enter the Temple Lands. By getting impaled, that one soldier had probably just saved the other fours’ lives.

The rest of the hike, Agraneia could hear them grumbling. Private Taeso from her own squad was the loudest among them.

“Blackmouth cowards,” Private Taeso was saying that night. “If they spent half as much time fighting as they did digging traps, maybe they’d actually stand a chance. She could have killed three of us. Maybe more. No wonder they’re losing.”

“She wasn’t doing anything.” It was the scribe, from the middle of the line. He said it so weakly, Agra almost didn’t hear him. But Taeso definitely did, and he was looking for a fight.

“Like hells. She knew exactly what she was doing.”

“She was just defending her home.”

Taeso said something so foul, it made a couple of diamond squad start laughing. That only seemed to encourage him. He started going off about how the locals deserved this. They deserved to get conquered. And worse. A few of the others joined him.

“Quiet,” Agraneia said, and they lowered their voices at least.

Corporal Medus, she noted, hadn’t said a word since they left the fort. He simply walked along the line, not talking. Maybe he’s not nervous anymore. Maybe that’s all.

When they took a short break, the scribe’s cheeks were still flushed with anger. He was scribbling away furiously until someone threw a clump of mud at him, splattering his notes. He gasped, and stood up, and tried to wipe it off quickly, which only made them laugh harder and start throwing more mud.

Agraneia thought about intervening again, but the scribe was already walking away toward the back of the line, away from their cluster.

Later, they made camp, and slept under the leaves of the jungle. Hidden from the moons. It only rained a little, a drizzle that lasted the whole night. In the branches, in the leaves, she could see them.

Too many faces. Most of them, cyran. All of them, soldiers, whether they wanted to be or not.

She could see Private Yulus, who had been sitting there talking when a bullet crashed through the branches and took off his jaw. And that other private, who had a spear sprouting out of her stomach, as if it had grown there. Touching at its tip, covered in her own blood. And him, who was crying and kneeling and begging them while they stormed down the valley and fell upon him and stabbed him to death.

And her…

And him…

And…

They were in the shadows. In the bark of the trees. She closed her eyes, and they were there too. They were in the puddles made by the rain. Even when she closed her eyes...

Agraneia pushed herself up. She would get no sleep tonight. Might as well take watch.

She passed by her squad, all of them sound asleep. One of them was snoring. And someone was making a sniffing sound, way in the back.

Crying.

That last sound came from the scribe’s half-finished foxhole. He had dug it so far away from the others. Curled into a ball and crying, with his shovel discarded at his side.

Agraneia said nothing. Stepped back.

Not my problem. She circled around, away from the scribe’s hole, and went to go take her watch.

The next morning, the Captain declared that she wanted to get through the Temple Lands before nightfall.

“We’ll cross as far east as we can. There’s a village here, on the edge. The further from the center, the better.”

None of the greenfins seemed to understand the significance. They seemed nervous, but not nearly nervous enough. They just nodded, and kept their questions to themselves.

Medus was still quiet, though he was keeping together. Getting his gear tucked, keeping his head low. Good. That would get him far, out here. Taeso, surprisingly, seemed more refreshed than any of them. He was cracking jokes, and bonding with the cyrans from diamond squad, probably because most of them were from the same province.

They passed two more huts that morning, but this time the Captain kept them moving.

“Not worth it. Not worth the risk.”

Agraneia knew it wasn’t the huts she was worried about. It was the Temple Lands. If they mistimed their approach, they would have to hold back for another day. Even though they would make their passage where it was only a few miles across, there was no straight shot through the Temple Lands.

The jungle was still dripping with last nights rainwater when they came to the edge. One moment, the forest was all around them, filling the air with thick humidity that weighed down lungs and matted everything with sweat.

And then, it all peeled away, in an enormous, unnaturally straight line.

Far to the left and far to the right, an empty canyon stretched before them. Unnaturally straight, as if the ground had been split apart along a single line. Mosses of every color clung to the cliff edges, and made the bare rocks there slippery.

Agraneia dared a step toward the cliff edge. The canyon below was pockmarked with thousands of stony structures. Some of them short, some of them sunken into the ground. Some of them, as tall as the watchtowers back at camp.

The temples.

And just ahead, a village on the edge of the canyon, where the cliff had eroded into a kind of craggy ramp. They would take that road down through the village.

And then, they would walk. And pray. And that was all they could do.

Gods, watch over us.