Alesander Belthaire knew by the colour of the sky that something was wrong before the day even started. His father had been a sailor for most of his life, always pointing out that a red sheet across the horizon was signs of a storm, and now it wasn’t a blanket but the whole sky painted with a clouded brush that turned the dawn a bloody scarlet. The problem was that it was on the wrong side of the world. A fire perhaps. The war came closer to the city every day. 

Rubbing his eyes, he accepted a coffee that was passed to him and pulled in the last deep breath of fresh air he was probably going to get for the rest of the day. It didn’t matter how far the war was; there needed to be a response, and he was on first shift. Shoving the omen to the back of his mind, he pushed away from the balcony, away from the thick scent of the oak trees that lined the back garden of the hospital. From this spot outside the break room, he could see the morning crawling across the cobblestone streets, the narrow brick buildings coming to life as bakeries opened their doors and vendors began setting up awnings out the front of brightly coloured stalls. Beyond the outline of the city buildings, the craggy mountains of the Wild Hills only a blue shadow in the distance. 

Ales pushed back into the break room, empty save for a small table in the corner, and washed the bitter, tasteless coffee down before resting it on the wooden surface and letting himself into the hospital proper. The room on the other side was just as cramped, the smell of cleaning fluid and blood tainting the air. Nurses in white dresses with flat hats in netted hair scurried about, weaving around metal tables full of instruments, while iron chairs sat sporadically against the white walls. Only one was occupied, the older woman sitting with her arm outstretched as one of the nurses pushed a needle into her arm. A radio buzzed near her head, the presenter on the other side naming the winners of the latest football game with that radio-presenter- voice they all seemed to have. 

The woman smiled when she saw him and waved him over. Elsbeth McCullins had the graceful age of someone who had only known youthful beauty and kindness. Long white hair fell in ringlets over her bony shoulders, and her limbs beneath her smart grey dress held the lines of muscle that had grown soft in age. Sharp, pale eyes studied him as he approached, and Ales found his gaze wandering to its usual spot - the dent in her hooked nose that suggested a break. He had a similar one in his otherwise straight nose, and could never picture how someone so small and sweet could have broken it. He glanced down at the clipboard on the table beside her chair. 

‘Finishing or starting?’ Elsbeth asked. 

‘Starting.’ Ales stifled the word with a yawn, the familiar queazy dizziness hitting him as the tube in her arm turned a deep red, the blood running into the bag waiting at the table. He knew he had to be used to the sight of it by now, but he turned away anyway. ‘This is your third time this month. Aren’t you supposed to take a break?’

‘I feel fine,’ Elsbeth said. ‘I bought in butterscotch, would you like one?’

‘Not at the moment,’ Ales said. 

‘Does anything on that clipboard make sense yet?’ she asked. 

Ales chuckled. ‘Haven’t had time for that.’

‘What’s the point of me coming all the way down here to tell you off about studying if you’re not going to do what I tell you?’ she teased. 

Ales grinned at her. ‘You can tell me what to do if I ever end up in one of your classes.’

‘Oh sweetie, I teach a different kind of residency.’

Ales shrugged. ‘I guess you’ll just have to wait until the war is over then.’

‘Soon,’ she said. ‘I have hope.’

A shadow on his peripherals made him turn, and he saw Thea standing in the doorway. She motioned behind her, and he gave a small nod. Turning, he squeezed Elsbeth’s arthritic shoulder. ‘Keep some blood for yourself, okay?’

‘You take care out there,’ Elsbeth said. As he turned and rushed after Thea, she called after him. ‘If you end up in one of these beds again, I’ll smack you!’

Thea was pulling on her coat as Ales made his way into the front of the hospital, stifling another yawn. She fixed him with a hard look and opened her mouth to say something, then paused as two more response members came from down the hall. He and Thea were opposites in appearance; where she was tall and well-built with bars of muscle along her arms, he was scrawny and wiry, all his clothes just a little too big for his lanky frame. Her face was oval and her features pinched, her explosion of red hair cropped short around her jaw. Ales on the other hand could never keep his dark hair under control. Even when he tied it into a little tuff at the back, strands fell loose around his eyes. Thea nudged closer to him, and Ales flinched, bracing for the question he knew was coming. 

‘Are you alright to come out with us today?’ her voice was a whisper. 

Ales’ stomach twisted, but he tried to keep his face passive. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘Because you’re not up to it,’ Thea said. Her eyes traced down to his shoulder. ‘The heavy lifting.’

‘So I won’t do any heavy lifting,’ Ales said. Thea rolled her eyes, but Ales pulled his own coat on and walked away before she could respond. His shoulder twinged at the movement, the reminder of the damage bringing the injury back to the surface. The brace wrapped around his shoulder rubbed against his suspenders, but he chose to ignore it. Not until conscription started five years ago had anyone had a problem with his shoulder. It hadn’t mattered that it was crooked and badly scarred, that he couldn’t lift it beyond ninety-degrees without it screaming in pain at him. It had never bothered him none, and the fact that other people saw it as an issue now only put him in a bad mood. 

The responders didn’t have to travel all the way out into the valley to tackle the war-zone, which was the one thing Ales was thankful for. Instead, borrowing an ambulance from the hospital - with most of them hanging off the outside as it whirled down the city streets - they travelled to just beyond the outer suburbs, where the more practiced grunts of the armed forces would meet them with supply lists and any wounded that could afford to travel into the city but needed care before they could go home. Ales always hung off the ambulance with his right hand, which caused the others to give him strange looks, but that part he could ignore. 

The dawn crawled further across the sky as the ambulance drove down the empty streets, the iron lampposts still buzzing with their fading light. Elsbeth’s words echoed in his head, the repeated empty promises that he would go back to his expensive university and make something of himself. Part of him regretted bringing it up at all, but he had broken his brace during their last trip and ripped his shoulder too far back, and spending the night in a cot didn’t leave much to do except chat to the woman in the bed next to him. She had scoffed at the idea of his conscription being rejected because of his shoulder, and had told stories of her time during the last Crown Wars, when she had been a nurse on the front lines, telling men with missing limbs and holes in their faces to sit down and rest. She had told him to consider himself lucky he didn’t end up as a grunt, and he admitted that he enjoyed being a responder, but he wished people wouldn’t treat him differently. He had the strange sense that she knew what he had meant, knew about things like distance and strange looks, though he could never imagine it in her. Yet, it invited a kinship that he appreciated. 

The divide between the city and the farmlands that bordered the mountains weren’t subtle. They turned a corner around huge plaza’s with spanning fir trees and umbrella-covered cafe tables, and saw only rolling hills of green beyond, the road moving from it’s smooth stone to rougher dirt. Lines of crooked wooden fencing broke the fields into squares, and the ambulance came to a stop next to a plain tin building behind an equally plain warehouse. Ales leapt from the side of the ambulance as it came to a halt, following the motions of pulling the back doors open and flicking the ramp down. The half-dozen others flurried around him, some leaping up the ramp as he pulled it down, others rushing straight for the shed and whatever waited inside. 

‘You’re staying out here.’ Thea’s voice sounded from the passenger seat of the ambulance, and she jumped out with her usual scowl. Ales scowled back at her. 

‘You didn’t bring me here for my good looks,’ he snapped. 

‘No, I told you I didn’t want you here at all,’ Thea said. ‘You’re still healing.’

‘No, I’m really not,’ Ales said. He twisted his torso around, raising his arm as much as it would allow to show. ‘See? Don’t baby me, it’s insulting.’

‘Last time I left you to your own devices, we took you back in the cot,’ Thea said. ‘You hurt yourself and it’s my ass. Just humour me until the big dogs stop watching our every move.’

Stolen story; please report.

Ales pinched the bridge of his nose, but it was too early to drag out this same old argument. ‘What do you want me to do?’

Thea shoved a clipboard at him. ‘Take stock.’

She took a seat on the back of the ambulance, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a case of cigarettes. She offered him one, and when he shook his head, she lit one up and took a long drag. Ales scanned the list strapped to the clipboard. A call for supplies; the usual rations and medicines, nothing that pulled attention towards them, no weapons or artillery or maps of any kind. Ravensong — the city to the north — had learned not to do that the hard way. 

There were two soldiers inside, one with a broken arm and another who had taken shrapnel to the eye. Just the words on the page made him squirm. Nothing to suggest why the sun rising over the mountains was four times the size it should have been, a deep red disc hovering in the sky. 

‘Fires,’ Thea commented when she saw him looking. ‘The islands off the coast started burning a few hours ago.’

‘That’s close,’ Ales mumbled. On clear days when he was down by the docks, he could see the gentle outline of the islands shadowing the distant horizon. The idea that the Crown’s enemies had crawled so close, even though Shihoa had never done anything — aside from be owned by that Kingdom across the world —gave him shivers. He had already seen the damage keeping them at bay had done. 

‘You scared?’ Thea asked. Her face softened as she watched him. 

‘If I said yes, would you think less of me?’ he asked. 

‘I’d be a hypocrite if I did,’ Thea said. She stamped out her cigarette and got to her feet. ‘Look alive, they’re coming back.’

Ales glanced up to see two officers marching towards them, both holding a box each and chatting casually. Ales took the closest one as he approached, and shoved it into the ambulance. ‘Are the two men in there?’ he asked. 

‘Yeah,’ the other man said. ‘One of them is all bandaged up, and he’s sleeping pretty heavy.’

‘Need the cot?’ Thea asked. 

‘Probably, just to be safe,’ the man said. ‘Anything on that list about a huge rock?’

Ales stared at him, but the man was serious, and he scanned the list. Nothing about any minerals of any kind. He shook his head. 

‘The other guy - with the hole in his face - he won’t leave it. He’s pretty adamant.’

Thea groaned. ‘Can you lift the cot?’ she asked Ales. 

‘Of course,’ Ales said. 

‘Good. You.’ She clicked her fingers at the other man. ‘Help him and follow me.’

Ales managed on his own to lift the cot from the back of the ambulance and drag it across the dusty ground towards the shed. Inside had long been abandoned for it’s original use, but by the built in shelves along the wall and the domed roof with its rusted metal supports, he guessed a train-yard. The trains had developed with the rest of Crowfell and left this, with the other original sites of colonisation, left to vanish into the backend of history. In the far corner were the two men who lay across a makeshift bench, sitting with another box and the rock in question. 

Ales paused when he realised it wasn’t a rock. It was a sword. No longer than his forearm, the outline of the hilt embedded with stones and the silver outline of the blade, old and so encased in age and rust and rock that he couldn’t be surprised if no-one saw the blade first. Lumps of sediment and mushroom-like fungus had collected around the thing in a great misshapen lump, as though the weapon had been merged with a mountain and someone had ripped a chunk away to get at it. Since nobody had carried a sword outside of ceremony for over a century, it wouldn’t have surprised Ales if it had been there for a long time. 

‘That’s not a rock,’ Thea said. ‘Or am I the only one seeing it?’

‘I can see it,’ Ales said. He pulled the clipboard out from under his armpit. ‘Nothing on here about a sword either.’

‘We don’t carry weapons,’ Thea said. ‘We don’t give them, we don’t take them. It’s not coming with us.’

‘Tell him that,’ one of the other officers mumbled. 

The wounded soldier wore the uniform of the Shihoan military, the green-grey jacket dusty and unkempt. The wide brimmed hat was curved up on one side, and the strings that held it to his chin were snapped and dangling loose. A wooden tourniquet had pinned his bandaged leg straight, but Ales could still see the bruising between the bandages. His eyes were bleary, probably under the influence of whatever drug the other soldiers gave him to ease the pain. 

Pulling a set of gloves from one of the kits the other officer brought in, he pulled them on and crouched down in front of the strange sword. Up close it was easier to see the outline of the blade, but it was more rock than metal, and rust had claimed the edges a long time ago. The only part still in tact were the gems lining the hilt, the biggest at the base and each slowly getting smaller as they worked towards the guard, all of them the same dusty brown as the rock around them. He reached out to brush the dust away, but a hand caught his wrist and stopped him. 

‘Don’t touch it.’ The other officer had bandages completely wrapped around his head, only his mouth and a single eye peering out from underneath, his uniform just as dishevelled as his companion’s. The single, watery eye glared at him. ‘Don’t touch it.’

‘Alright,’ Ales said. He yanked his hand away from the man’s grip and glanced up at Thea. She had her hands on her hips, a sure sign that she was about to start yelling, and Ales wasn’t going to be spared from her rage. ‘We’re not taking it, so nobody touch it. Just leave it.’

‘No!’ The bandaged soldier lunged forward and wrapped his hands around the rock, pulling it close to him. The scrape of stone against stone told Ales it was heavier than he first imagined. ‘It’s mine! You can’t take it!’

‘Not yours,’ the other soldier said. ‘It’s not yours, and it’s not mine. Belongs to the King.’

‘I’ll kill the King,’ the bandaged one said. ‘Don’t touch the sword.’

‘Can’t kill the king. King dies, king comes back,’ the first said. 

The other officer took a step back, and Ales rolled his eyes. ‘They’re drugged.’

‘I can see that,’ Thea said. She turned to the bandaged man. ‘Can you walk?’

‘My sword!’ The bandaged man screamed. 

‘I will leave you here,’ Thea said. ‘We’re not taking that fucking rock.’

‘If he wants to take it—’

‘No.’ Thea cut Ales off with an angry glare. ‘We don’t carry, Alesander. It’s against code, and if something goes wrong when we knew there was a weapon in the supplies, we get left out on our ass. You should know that.’

‘We can’t leave him here,’ Ales said. ‘I’m willing to say I thought it was a rock.’

‘Same here,’ the other officer said. ‘I’m not getting involved in this madness.’

Thea pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘Get the other one on the cot. Give me a minute. Go. Both of you. Piss off.’

Ales did as he was told, the other officer helped him lift the soldier with the bad leg onto the cot, both of them straining against his shifting weight as they pushed back out towards the ambulance. The other officers were almost done sorting the supplies they were leaving behind, stacking them in a neat pile while two of them began to march the stock towards the shed. By the time the wounded soldier was securely strapped into the back of the ambulance, Ales saw the two other officers hurriedly returning, their boxes left by the door of the building. He took it as a sign and sat down on the edge of the vehicle. 

‘What do you make of it?’ the other officer asked - a short and stacked fellow who was as wide as he was tall, who Ales only knew as Jeremy. 

‘The sword?’ Ales asked. ‘No idea.’

‘You’re the one hanging around the witch,’ Jeremy said. 

Ales stared at him. ‘What?’

The second officer sat down on the other side of the ambulance and pulled a cigarette from his pocket. He was older, a thick moustache curling across his leathery face. Ales had been introduced to him, but could never recall his name. ‘He means your lady friend. Ms McCullins,’ he said. 

‘Beth isn’t a witch,’ Ales said. ‘Where would you get an idea like that?’

‘People talk,’ Jeremy said. ‘She’s way into the occult. Story is she purges herself when she donates blood, fills herself up with innocent virgin stuff so she doesn’t face the consequences when she makes her sacrifice at an alter.’

‘That’s barbaric,’ Ales growled. ‘And so unbelievably untrue.’

‘She survived the first war with impossible skill,’ Moustache said. ‘Tent she was working out of got blown to high skies. She walked away with a few second degree burns and some bruises.’

‘If she was a witch, why was she injured at all?’ Ales didn’t bother to keep the disdain from his voice. 

‘You defending her because you don’t believe us?’ Jeremy asked. ‘Or because she’s got you all caught in her spell.’

‘Beth is my friend,’ Ales pressed. ‘Besides, the occult is bullshit. I’ve seen those peddlers with their future-cards and their incense that can cure missing limbs. It’s all nonsense. Why would you believe something like that was possible in the first place?’

‘They’re stories,’ Jeremy pointed out. 

‘They’re cruel.’

He shrugged. ‘Dozens of people telling the same stories, you gotta wonder about where they came from.’

‘So wonder,’ Ales snapped. ‘Don’t spread it around. It makes you sound like a common bully.’

Jeremy huffed. ‘Don’t get so up in arms about it. Just making conversation.’

Ales glared at him. If he wanted to, he could talk about those parasite snake-oil types, the ones that chased his mother around when he was little, swearing up and down they found a magical cure from the other side of the world that could “fix him” and “make him proper,” all with the same aggressive wording that suggested he was no good as he was. His ma had no patience for any of it, and when he became old enough to understand, he realised he didn’t either. Yet, explaining that wasn’t worth the time. Instead, he turned to Moustache. ‘Can I have one of those?’

Moustache pulled out his cigarette case and tapped one against his palm before passing it over with a match. Ales let the arid taste fill his lungs, savouring the bitterness of it as Jeremy sulked off to help carry the boxes into the building. Ales remembered the stock list and rummaged for a pen. 

‘I didn’t mean any harm in it,’ Moustache said. ‘Ms McCullins has been doing a lot for the hospital. She’s a good woman.’

‘It’s alright,’ Ales mumbled, checking off the items on the list as they were carried away. ‘I just don’t go for any of that.’

‘Don’t believe in magic?’

He scoffed. ‘No. Why? You ever seen it?’

Moustache chuckled. ‘Can’t say I have.’

Thea appeared in the doorway of the building, and both men got to their feet as she dragged the other soldier with her. He had the massive lump of rock in his hands, hugging it tight like a child with a toy.

‘It’s not real.’ The soldier behind him spoke up, making Ales jump. ‘Magic. It’s not real. I don’t want it to be real. It’s not real.’

‘Alright, calm down,’ Ales said. The cigarette singed at his lips and he stamped it into the ground. He exchanged a look with moustache, who shrugged and stalked back around to the drivers seat. Ales stood to the side as Thea wrangled the bandaged soldier into the back of the ambulance. He took a seat next to his companion without a word, rocking back and forth and hugging the stone tight. Ales shook himself. Whatever was going through that man’s head, he wanted no part in it.