- [Anneli] - Central Operational Logistics Command

The dull light of the solitary overhead bulb casts a tired glow over the stacked folders and strewn papers all around Anneli as she hovers over the desk. Her wings hardly flap anymore in idle excitement like they used, her feverish fairy-energy having been dampened by the greatest enemy of them all.

— Bureaucracy.

As always since the counter-assault began, tension permeates the military logistics office's air; the constant clatter of typewriters interspersed with the odd bark of an officer delivering directives blends into a mess, vibrating off the dirty, olive-green walls like paint that refuses to stick. Given their value on all fronts of the war machine because of their size and natural gifts, the fairy is an unusual presence in this sea of human troops and officials that make up logistics command back home. Funnily enough, they’ve rubbed off on her — the humans and such — her once-bright iridescent hair and eyes are tarnished and drab from many nights spent slaving beneath the fluorescent light, attempting to bring order to the anarchy of war. In a way, she looks just like any of them now, apart from her size. They’re brothers in mousy-gray painted chaotic monotony.

Every morning is a whirl of the same crises and computations; today is no different. On top of a desk, she wanders between tall stacks of requisition forms, her red-rimmed eyes examining each one of the human-sized papers and her little hands working with great speed to scribble down notes and corrections into her much more convenient fairy-sized notebook. Pinned at the corners with cracked mugs and half-eaten rations, a map covers her desk; crisscrossed with pencil lines and dotted with pins, it is a labyrinthine record of supply routes and strategic deployments between the old and the spirit world.

A hurried runner, not even saying a word, barely notes Anneli as he slaps a telegraph on her desk before sprinting off to his next assignment. “Hey! Watch it!” she yells after him, her sharp voice not even carrying to him before his black boots are already thundering out of the door. She sighs, her attention already centered on the next emergency that has been given to her — an unfortunately paradropped mountain division with the goal to destroy a dragons' nest is cut off, and their condition is becoming increasingly grave by the hour. One plane of two crashed; the other made it through. Her eyes scan the paper. They’re good soldiers; she calculates that they're able to secure a foothold where they are, but only with more men and guns, and she has to do the paperwork to get it to them.

Seconds matter; lives are at stake.

— Hence why everything must be filled out in triplicate, archived twice, and an additional copy brought to the military offices of command.

“Gods, just send me to the front…” she mutters to herself, her wings twitching in agitation as she looks at the map, trying to figure out where she can push what to make this happen. “Hey!” she snaps, a group of soldiers at the next desk looking her way as she points down at the map. “Unload half a truck from the seventeenth,” she instructs, slapping the back of her hand into her palm. “Get me a flight of harpies to bring a Forty-Eight and five fresh soldiers to the cliffs here!”

One of the men raises a hand, looking at the map. “Ma’am, that truck is heading for Delta-Hazel. They need those supplies,” he counters.

She narrows her eyes. “And they’re getting half of them and an I.O.U.” barks the fairy. “Go!” Anneli moves over the mess, her wings creating tiny dust devils in her wake as she commands the hurried logistics soldiers to hustle to forward her instructions down the line. Though little, her voice has the weight of authority around here — plainly put, because she outranks them and they have to do what she says. Some of them have an issue with it, but she can’t help but wonder if some of them aren’t relieved that this war isn’t their mess to clean up every day. She rubs her face, staring down at the map as she pulls on her cheeks, stretching out her tired eyes. Every choice is always some damn razor's edge balancing act: allocating limited resources, organizing travel, forecasting enemy movements — she has a gift for this kind of work — although for a fairy, it’s a curse. Her frantic, squirrely mind works at an amazing speed, processing knowledge faster than any human could hope to, but the nature of the process leaves her head feeling like a well-boiled cabbage. She even has the lines to match said cabbage, etched into her delicate, once-crow's-foot-free-face.

The fairy studies the map, taking in a deep breath. Today looks manageable. The trucks are moving, thanks to the undead. The factories are at full capacity. The mines, the foresters — everything is well greased and in motion.

As long as nothing goes wrong, all she has to do is adjust a few inches of the metaphorical topsoil. But the roots of the grand operational theater are strong.

“Private! Coffee!” orders the fairy, snapping her fingers but not looking away from the map as if she were waiting for it to change by itself into something terrible. She doesn’t like today’s map. It looks too peaceful. Something else is going to go wrong.

— A heavy thunk shakes the desk she’s standing on.

Anneli turns her head, staring with very tired eyes at the very human-sized cup of coffee next to her that has been freshly set down. It’s half her size, rising up to her gut. If she tucked her legs in, she could take a bath in it. Quietly, she turns her head, looking at the nervous boy in a standard uniform he hasn’t quite grown into yet, standing there behind her desk and saluting.

It isn’t worth the energy to tell him off.

She leans over, grabbing the edge of the already stained mug, and sips from it like she was drinking from a fountain. It’s mediocre, lukewarm office coffee. This one was made last night but has somehow survived until now, which she doesn’t understand the logistics of herself — ironically enough. This place runs on coffee. Her baggy, purple eyes turn to the wall between a pair of massive metal shelves. Three separate coffee machines are running there next to each other around the clock.

The chaotic room doesn’t skip a beat when an officer kicks the door in and barges over with a crumpled dispatch that calls for immediate action. The only thing that shakes is her mug and the private, who jumps and lets out a yelp. The man runs in and accelerates towards a different corner of the office, his messenger bag nearly swiping Anneli off of her desk, wobbling the mug, and spilling tepid coffee on her. “Hey! Watch it, you goon!” she barks at him. She leaps into a furious swirl, toppling a tower of records all over her desk. She grinds her teeth, feeling a surge of fury as she watches her perfectly arranged environment descend further into chaos. Papers fly around her like snowflakes caught in a breeze.

“Ma’am, should I get you a new coffee?” asks the private, catching a few sheets and lifting a dripping document out of her mug by its corner. Fussing to herself, she looks at the paper he’s holding by its corner like it was an old rag.

“It’s just an old report on potion deliveries,” she mutters, waving her wet sleeves out, deciding that this isn’t enough to ruin the exceptionally mediocre mudwater she has been destined to wash herself with inside and out. Anneli takes off her stained uniform jacket and throws it over the human-sized chair she obviously can’t use before she gathers herself, dives around, and grabs each still drifting paper in mid-air like they were falling snowflakes. She wrestles them back into some kind of order on their ordained stacks, that follow a system only she can understand.

Her eye catches the analog clock on the opposite wall; its hands move too swiftly for comfort; another convoy needs to be dispatched, and they are already behind schedule. She can feel it in her bones. If those men on the cliffs she just sent supplies to are fortifying that critical position, but Delta-Hazel is running on fumes, that’ll put a gap in their lines in quadrant seven-seven. Anneli dashes around her desk, her little hands wriggling as she works to gather the required data.

“Ma’am, do you need -”

“Shut it, Private!” orders the exhausted, sweaty, coffee-covered fairy with twitchy eyes, pressing her back to the wall the desk is leaned against as she pushes open a large tome of records with both of her legs. “In five minutes, we’re going to get an emergency call for shells, and I need to figure out which witch’s warty ass I’m going to yank them out from!”

“Ma’am,” starts the private, looking at her as she practically pants like a rabid dog, tearing through page after page of the delivery records as she traces them. “All shells are accounted for. They’re sent directly from the factories to the front,” he explains.

“WRONG!” screams the fairy, almost abruptly, as she points an accusing finger his way. Nobody in the office even takes notice; everyone is absorbed in their own little hell.

Anneli hovers just out of arm's reach in a frustrated attempt to reach an upper shelf where important maps are kept, berating under her breath at the stupid height restrictions placed by human furniture. She grudgingly grabs the edge of one map with her foot, unfolding it and almost getting caught in it as it slinks down toward her desk. The private moves her coffee out of the way. The fallen map settles, and she spreads it out right away, shuffling over it with her boots to straighten its wrinkles as she scans it like a stalker looking through the window of their obsession’s home. “THERE!” she yells, pointing at a spot on the map, before running back to the ledger of delivery records. “Five hundred anti-armor shells are still in the defensive stores at the north-east bunker from the last invasion!” she explains, double-checking her numbers. “PRIVATE! GET THEM OUT THERE TO SEVEN-SEVEN! GO!” she orders, dunking her head into the coffee and drinking while submerged. By the time she lifts her face out of the muck, her hands gripping the edge of the uncomfortably damp mug, the private is gone and on his way. Smart boy. She’s going to enjoy having him around. He knows his place.

A new loud crash fills the room — a chair pushed over by an enraged junior officer releasing his anger as something goes wrong on his line.

This is followed by a second crash, as the door to the office, already barely hanging onto its hinges anymore, slams open and crashes a little further than it should. The handle on the inside has already made a significant dent in the wall. A logistics operator runs in, holding a few sheets in his hand and waving them as he pants through his words. “We need shells!” he gasps. “At seven-seven. Shells!” asks the man, stumbling through the office, almost knocking a man over as he drops the papers onto her desk.

“They’re on their way already,” says Anneli.

The man doesn’t seem surprised or interested as to why she’s in the state she’s in, simply grabbing his cap that had fallen off of his head on the way in and sprinting back out of the door. There's no time for anything else.

Left alone now for just a second at her station, she holds her arms out to her sides, simply holding them aloft as she basks in the glory shining down on her, which may either be the light of heaven or the flickering shine of the jail-bar rows of standard fluorescent tube lighting suspended above the room. She called it. That’s why she’s here, not driving a stupid tank or something. She has a gift for this work — a sense. She can see how the pieces in the world — resources, people — are going to line up in so many different ways. She knows the math. She knows what they need, what they do, and what the enemy does. Before it all happens, she can just sort of feel it out and get things in motion.

She isn’t the spirit world, so she can’t quite say anything about religious matters. But for the soldiers on the front, she may as well be their masterful and fearsome master and god. She decides who gets what and who gets nothing; she decides before any general or commander does.

She. Is. Destiny.

— Opening her manic eyes, the fairy drinks more of the coffee, shaking herself out as she feels a race running through her heart. Caffeine goes a long way for fairies. The military is very careful about dosing fairies with stimulants because they tend to get… excited. She heard the stories from some friends of hers down the line about how they used to run secret tests out in the forests, back before any of the labs or hospitals were built. Wild days. According to what her friend said, even the war hero Pilot was involved in the testing directly.

— That’s so like him, risking himself for them all.

Anneli sighs for a long time, looking at the mass-painted ‘moral’ poster on the wall by her desk, depicting the war hero named Pilot, standing there with a flight helmet firmly held underneath a crushing bicep, his standard issue shirt is wrapped around his waist.

— These posters aren’t regulation. But the rules are to just hide it if the world tree caretaker ever shows up. But she only ever came by once, had some sort of over-stimulation attack after sitting here for a few minutes as she watched them work, and never came back again. Anneli flies up and runs a hand down the filmy paper. “I’m doing this for you,” she whispers, her lower left eyelid spasming.

Her twitchy attention is immediately diverted to a furious dispute breaking out between two battered logistics officials close to the eastern wall. Standing toe-to-toe with Lieutenant Baker, whose uniform is unkempt, Captain Hartal, his face a mask of tiredness with black bags under his eyes, speaks raw from hours of nonstop dispute.

"You don't understand, Hartal," Baker says as he smashes a fist on the table, rattling coffee cups. "The eastern front is bucking back. There won't be much left to protect if we fail to get those missiles out into the air!”

Then what about the southern front? Hartal responds, his voice equally strained and nearly feral. "They’re barebones out there and are trying to hold some damn dragons off! Our resources must follow where they will have the biggest effect. Achieving aerial superiority is our key priority!”

Dragons?

Anneli flies above them, hardly registering as more than a glimpse of light in their peripheral vision. Their frenzied fight gets more intense until neither sees her. She pauses momentarily on the brink of a neighboring stack of ledgers, listening carefully as her mind races to understand the whole extent of the problem.

Hartal snags a request form and waves it under Baker's nose. “Look at these figures, Baker!” he barks. “If we want to push deeper in on the southern front, I need those missiles to break the obelisks!”

As Baker puts the paper away, his face flashes with annoyance. “If we get rid of the dragon nests, we can just send our planes to take out the obelisks, idiot! The sky will be ours!"

Anneli, having a short break now before the next disaster falls her way, watches the two of them. The fewer problems they have, the fewer problems can become shit-piles big enough for her to have. Though equally naive to the larger picture of the beautiful war that whirls in her head, they are both correct in their state of desperation because they are trying to solve a problem without her genius. Her eyes dart over their faces as she flutters between them, then she dives into Hartal's file stack, extracting one specific map that would be a compromise. She hangs mid-air over their dispute like a quiet arbiter. “Hartal. Baker!” says the fairy, showing them the paper.

The soldiers stop briefly, shocked by the fairy's abrupt presence. They silently see Anneli tapping on key redistribution points delineated in rapid ink strokes.

Her small hand points out a series of paths and fresh schedules. "If we change the convoy plans this way, we’ll restock long-range indirect artillery here." Her finger runs along the map, tapping it on the cliffside her paradropped boys have hopefully secured by now. “Send anti-air teams for the dragons. The cliff’s almost ours,” she explains. “We’ll have a corridor right into the mess,” finishes Anneli, her digit running a straight channel up from the freshly contested cliffside and toward the heartlands of the spirit world. Her wings throb as she hovers there, much the same as her head.

Hartal scans the chart, his eyes darting over the suggested modifications as Baker lets out a weak, shaky nod. “Yes, ma’am!” concede both of them, running out the legwork on the operation.

She flies back to her desk, leaning over her mug. It’s too empty for her to drink out of like this. Kicking her legs, she clambers over the side and hangs down into it. Her boots stick up into the air as she takes another sip before slapping her face to wake herself up a little more.

She’s forty-eight hours in, and if her heart doesn’t explode, she has another forty-eight to go.

----------------------------------------

Five Minutes Earlier - [Private Piddlewitz] -

Piddlewitz's heart hammers in his chest as the night sky streaks past him as he falls from the plane, filled with racing clouds and flashes of lightning. The howling wind around him merges with the flapping of parachutes as his squad falls from the heavens, hurtling toward the distant, jagged outline of the elevated cliffside below. His goggles fog with sweat as his hands grip the parachute cords with white-knuckled intensity, the weather’s elements conspiring to disorient them.

The man looks to the side, watching as dragons' silhouettes streak past them in the dense storm, rushing through a cloud so thick that it should be solid. A group of them is flying after a flaming comet — a crashing transport plane that they’re hounding down to the ground.

This storm was their only opportunity to make the jump. In clear weather, the dragons would see them come down and tear them apart in the air. In the storm, this has only happened to half of them. It looks like the other half of them made it through.

Sergeant Grael's voice crackles through the radio receiver strapped to Piddlewitz's helmet, wired to his rucksack, barely audible over the wind’s fury. “Stay tight; stay sharp. On landing, regroup at Point Bravo. Secure the area — no mistakes,” instructs the man, being as brief as ever. Piddlewitz swallows hard, glancing at the four members of his team drifting around him in free fall.

The ground rushes up to meet them with alarming speed, and Piddlewitz prepares himself, bending his knees and tucking into a staggered, tempoed jog as he lands, the rocky ground tearing at his uniform as he stumbles around in the dark. His breath leaves him in a painful gasp as he comes to a halt just short of a sheer drop, wobbling on the heels of his black boots as he regains his balance, staring down into the abyss he almost ran straight off of. “Anyone flattened?” Grael's voice cracks through the darkness.

“D-Down!” Piddlewitz verifies with a shaky voice, clawing himself back from the cliff as he grabs hold of an old tree with jelly-like limbs.

“In one piece. My knee hurts like shit though,” groans the dwarven soldier a few feet away — Thorek — preferring his uninjured leg as he shakes out the other one. A shoulder slung trench gun rattles at his side.

“Alive,” replies a sharp, direct woman’s voice. The squad’s designated marksman, an elf — Vinter — answers calmly, assessing her surroundings with her acute elven eyes. The tips of her long ears are tucked into the sides of her helmet.

The squad wizard and medic — another human named Nina — gives a terse nod as she undoes her harness. “Present and accounted for,” she says quietly into the radio headset, grabbing her fabric rucksack and checking that her pistol hasn’t fallen out of its holster. Rain from the heavy storm falls around them, and lightning flashes, illuminating ghostly silhouettes moving amidst the clouds — Tango dragons circling their roost, protecting the cliffside. “Captain. Plane two didn’t make it. It’s just us.”

“Copy,” replies the captain. “We’re all we need. Keep an eye out for anyone else who dropped with us.”

Piddlewitz tears off his parachute harness and unshoulders his strapped-on paratrooper’s carbine rifle, his eyes locked on Captain Grael, who is quickly assessing the status of their small team.

Piddlewitz's feet slip on the rain-soaked rocks as he strains to go forward across the rocky cliffside to the others, mumbling curses under his breath and straining to stay standing as the rain pours down around them. His hands, still shaking from the first drop and from the potential second one he only just barely missed, wrestle with the rifle's slippery grip. Nearby, there are weird sounds coming from the many caves and hollows around the cliffside. They sound like moans, but they feel like dull, bony fingers clawing his way, making every shadow appear to be a lurking monster and every gust of wind a possible threat. This place gives him the creeps. He already regrets signing up for this shit. He doesn’t even know why he stepped up when they asked for volunteers, but here he is. Captain Grael's voice crackles through the radio again, cutting through the storm's thunder just enough to yell out commands, demanding they line up with rifles ready, backs against the rock wall. The ground is rough and uneven. Piddlewitz stares from the cliff out into the endless night, his vision wandering past the floating debris that fills the sky from several moons that had crashed into each other and exploded — quite the sight.

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

They’re at the ass-end of the spirit world, with orders to secure this cliffface. The reasons? He isn’t sure. They just gave him a rifle and threw him out of a plane.

Piddlewitz catches up with the others, standing there as the captain does a headcount one more time, and then nods quietly, gesturing for them to follow. A hand slaps Piddlewitz’s back, and Nina nods to him. Piddlewitz nods back with a tense smile, holding his carbine against his chest as they begin to move in a line along the rocky cliffside, which really is more suited for mountain troops than paratroopers. But here he is. Vinter is down on the ground, assembling her rifle together from the kit it dropped in. Unlike the rest of their snubbed and compact weapons, it’s a full length bolt-action rifle.

Given their need to stay undetected, the poor conditions, and their even worse footing, their progress is sluggish, like a line of black figures marching through deeper darkness and driving rain like a troop of lost ants scuttling across a big rock that they shouldn’t be anywhere near.

— His boot snags.

Piddlewitz almost stumbles again, his boot stuck in a small outcrop. He flails his arms, but grabs a tree root for support at the last second. A strong pair of hands holding his legs. “Watch it, rookie!” hisses the dwarven man behind him, as Piddlewitz presses his back against the wall again, pausing to wipe the rain from his eyes and look around to check if anything heard them.

His eyes wander toward the sky, staring at the massive, circling silhouettes that dive from one cloud to the next. The dragon’s long tails sweep behind them through the fog like knives, too dull to cut the thick soup that has layered itself over the spirit world.

— It looks like they’re still in the clear.

The dwarf, Thorek, stumbles next to him; his teeth clinched. “This ain’t no place to spend the night,” he mumbles, looking down at the drop that they’re siddling past.

“We don't have time for complaints,” the elf, Vinter, says with a fatigued but forceful tone, holding her re-assembled bolt-action rifle ready with both hands, as if she wasn’t afraid of falling down at all, unlike the rest of them, who are gripping the wall like infants to their mother’s bossom.

“Eyes forward!” hisses the captain from the front of the line, making it over to the other side of the thin cliff wall, toward a larger, flatter section of the mountain. “Stay close,” he orders with a raspy voice.

Piddlewitz nods weakly, teeth chattering as cold seeps into his bones. The regulation uniform is fine and all, but it’s not suited to being wet at the top of a damn mountain. He forces himself to exhale, looking around at the others. There’s tension in the air. “Why are we even here?” asks Piddlewitz quietly, leaning over to the wizard.

Nina, adjusting her military standard issue wide-brimmed wizard’s hat, which is secured to her head with a strap, looks at him. “Didn’t you read the briefing, private?” she asks quietly, walking next to him as everyone steps over to the other side of the pass, and they begin to move some dried-out, brambly mountain underbrush.

Piddlewitz shakes his head. “I didn’t really get one,” he replies.

She raises an eyebrow, looking him over for a second from her position, one head’s height shorter than him. “Dragon’s nest needs to go,” says the wizard after a moment. “They’re a thorn in command’s side.”

“S-shouldn’t they send tanks or something to get rid of an entire dragon’s nest?!” hisses Piddlewitz loudly.

Her finger quickly slaps over his mouth, followed by her dirt-smudged palm. “Shh!” she hisses, looking around for a moment, the squad stopping.

— Nothing seems to have heard him.

Nina sighs, looking back at him and slapping the sides of her waist with both hands. Her equipment on her back jangles. “Sure. I’ll just get my rope, tie it around my waist, and you four can use me as a counterweight so that you can hoist a thirty-ton tank up a mountainside!” she whispers sarcastically. “...Idiot.”

“How much farther to the nest?” asks Thorek.

“Few minutes if Tango doesn’t know we’re here,” replies the captain, holding his sub-machine gun ready. “Add five if they do…” he mutters, narrowing his eyes at the darkness ahead of them out on the other side of the underbrush. The landscape of the mountain’s sharp drops gives way to a small, rocky plateau full of loose stones and dead, many-branched trees with no leaves on their crowns. They look more like make-shift gravemarkers stuck into the soil, than some sort of natural high-altitude growth.

The spirit world gives him the creeps. Everything here is always fucky.

Sure enough, shapes darted between the woods, ghostly forms just out of the reach of direct eyesight. At first, everything seems calmly quiet as they watch the movement from the distance. They’re just drifting between the trees.

“Did they see us?” asks Piddlewitz, the four of them hunkering down and watching the ghosts. “What are they doing?”

Thorek exhales, shaking his head as he crawls forward another foot over the loose stones. “...Looks like they’re just… doing their thing, I guess,” he mutters as the ghosts continue to drift apart. Some move to the left of the forest, and some move to the right.

“No,” remarks Vinter in her professional, sharp voice, her rifle already braced on a large stone as she looks down the iron sights. “They’re repositioning,” she says dryly, passing on her observation. “Captain. We’re hot.”

The rain continues to hammer down around them, dripping off their waxed uniforms. For a moment, everything seems almost eerily quiet.

And then the dead forest erupts with movement. Like a surge, a wave of water crashes out of a blocked pipe all at once — blue, wispy shapes blast out of the distant treelines from two separate angles, coming at them like a closing pincer. A sea of empty, hollow faces merge together as the many shapes of the undead flow their way, howling in mindless jealousy and anger at the living they’ve become aware of.

“Open fire!” orders the man immediately, barking their way.

Thorek is the first to respond, lifting his trench gun and firing a burst at one of the apparitions, but the buckshot passes through the incorporeal body like air. “Damn ghosts!” shouts the man, pumping the gun. Panic fills Piddlewitz's chest, as evidenced by his wild heartbeat.

“Stop wasting ammo! They're spirits!” she exclaims, her tone urgent but steady, as she fires a shot that causes one of the wraiths to vanish into mist. A stormlight-glinting, off-white bullet rushes toward the forest. “Silver or enchanted rounds only!” she snaps, yanking Nina’s hand to the side and forcing it onto the barrel of the shotgun.

The wizard focuses her eyes, casting a spell.

[Weapon Augmentation: Arcane] • All fired rounds are now enchanted with impactive arcane magic

Thorek fires again, a fresh shell ejecting from his shotgun as he pumps it. The sprayed, enchanted buckshot tears through the screaming cloud that is rushing their way, punching a hole straight through it. He laughs, pumping again and firing again as Nina rolls over, grabbing Piddlewitz’s and the captain’s guns with both hands.

“Save your magic!” orders the captain, pulling his submachine gun away as he gets up and pulling out a silvered knife from his belt.

“Captain!” protests the marksman.

The man rolls his shoulders, readying himself as he steps forward. “I used to do this for a living. Just watch where you’re shooting,” he says, looking back at them. Nina nods, finishing enchanting Piddlewitz’s carbine with the same arcane enchantment.

“Thanks!” says Piddlewitz, aiming down the sight and pulling the trigger. His gun rattles in his hands, the crack of gunfire aligning perfectly with fresh thunder above. A bright, off-blue shine streaks after the bullet like the firefly glow of a tracer round as the enchanted bullet rips through a ghost’s chest. It looks down at itself, grabbing the hole with both of its strange, distorted, long hands, and tries to quite literally pull itself back together. But a second bullet rips through its neck, and it puffs away into something akin to smoke.

The spirits' wails grow louder, howling within the storm like a tsunami breaking into their thoughts. The icy mountain air becomes even colder by the second. The captain runs forward, slashing through a stream of them with his knife, using an old warrior’s ability like they all used to do back in the days of dungeons and adventurer’s guilds — back before guns. Piddlewitz's hands shake more than usual as he attempts to maintain his aim, trying to fire in between the gaps the captain is leaving as he cuts through the first encroachers. Vinter's silver rounds flash through the darkness, each one causing a ghost to vanish, but she can't keep up with them all by herself. She doesn’t seem to suffer from the same unease he does, each shot being a precision note of the percussion song they’re sending out into the world around them.

Piddlewitz fires, his carbine letting out a loud chime like a bell as his magazine empties. He instinctively pulls one from his belt, his eyes rising to the sky, watching as the dragon shaped silhouettes there begin to swirl in agitation — like disturbed sharks smelling blood.

"Thorek, cover your side!"" Vinter shouts out, not even looking his way as she stares down her rifle, pulling the trigger again, and sending the next ghost to wherever the dead go when they leave the spirit world.

“What? I-” The dwarf looks to the side, turning onto his back and aiming the trench gun up at an angle. A single wayward ghost scatters into the same spread of directions as the buckshot’s pellets fly into. Piddlewitz flinches as the trench gun cracks over his head, the discarded shell rolling off of his back, pulling the trigger of the carbine, and, by sheer happenstance, striking a ghost that was creeping up behind the captain.

The roar of distant dragons blends with the ghosts' shrieks and frenzied gasps. “I think they’re onto us!” shouts Thorek, reloading his gun.

“You think?!” yells Nina, clutching her pistol as she watches the area. “I think the storm is disorienting them, but we can’t stay here!” she yells, looking up to the sky at the dragons who are swirling over the mountain, their vision stuck in the clouds. Piddlewitz can feel his intangible terror merging with the very tangible wetness in his pants, which is just rain-based at the moment, but it sure doesn’t feel like it in his subconscious.

“We need cover!” barks Vinter calmly, her voice scarcely audible above the rain and phantom howling, followed by another crack of her marksman’s rifle. “Captain!”

The captain’s knife swipes through a ghost, slicing it with a clean diagonal cut. Without even having heard the conversation, the captain points toward the forest. “There! Captain Grael points to a collection of boulders and fallen trees that provide some shelter. “Move!” he orders. The group scrambles to their feet, running after him towards it as he cuts through the last ghost remaining and reholsters his knife.

A sharp yelp comes, the wizard slipping on mud and falling over to the ground. Piddlewitz runs back, grabs her arm, and pulls her up again after him. “Come on!” he calls over the rain, the two of them running after the rest of the group as they dive into the forest. The two of them dive into the dead foliage, scrambling to the ground as they crawl after the others, who have their backs pressed to the rocks.

“Thanks,” she whispers to him, feeling around herself as something feels odd. Her wet hands slap over her short, brown hair. “My hat!” she says, realizing it had fallen off during her fall. She looks around the boulders, then back to the clearing. “There it is!” she says, crawling out an inch from cover.

— Piddlewitz grabs Nina, yanking her back again just in time.

A second later, the mountain shakes like an erupting volcano. Everything around them rattles; debris and dead wood fall around them as a massive, hulking dragon crashes down into a landing that is anything but gentle, directly in the clearing they just left.

“Hell, that’s a big one…” mutters Thorek beneath his breath as they watch it through the gaps in the rocks.

It lumbers on two thick, densely muscled legs, with two wings wide enough to park four tanks beneath it lengthwise, back-to-back. The dragon’s long, scaled neck turns as its sharp, armored head scans the area. Glowing, yellow eyes that are alight with fire look over the area with suspicion.

“Shit… shit…” mutters Nina quietly, pulling in her legs and pressing her back against Piddlewitz, who shushes her this time, holding a hand around her side and over her mouth as the ground beneath them shakes. The black-scaled dragon steps closer; each single movement it takes feels like it rattles the entire mountain. Piddlewitz tries to control his own frantic breathing, once again unable to tell if the indistinct wetness covering him is rain or sweat.

For a brief second, he thinks that he hears an engine coming their way, and he has hopes that a third plane is coming to help them. But that hope is dashed as the rumbling becomes louder in conjunction with the footsteps — each of which almost causes them to bounce off of the hard, shaking stone ground they’re sitting on as the dragon comes closer. It’s making the rumbling noise, like some kind of purring. But if Piddlewitz had to guess, it isn’t a good sign.

— He’s pretty sure that’s the sound they make when they’re getting ready to breathe fire.

It’s coming closer.

“Soldier! Stay put!” orders the captain’s hushed voice.

“Fuck this!” gasps Thorek, running up and over into the woods. “It’ll see us here!” argues the dwarven soldier, running toward the forest with his trench gun and his rucksack. His face pales, and he turns to run.

The captain starts to argue, closing his mouth immediately as the ground just behind their cover quakes.

It’s here.

Piddlewitz opens Nina’s bag, quickly rustling through it. She looks back at him, shaking her head for him to be quiet. Piddlewitz pulls out a dark-gray, waxed fabric tarp and unfolds it, quickly throwing one end to Vinter, who, without asking what he’s doing, takes it and opens it up together with him. The two of them lift the large piece of fabric over their heads just in time, covering them all from above as a long, slender, disgustingly serpentine neck winds over the rocks like an arm with too many joints.

Water rattles down onto the tarp, dripping off of the sides as, just above them, the air hisses and shakes as the dragon’s superheated breath steams and vaporizes the droplets from the storm before they strike the ground. He can feel the wizard’s heartbeat pressing into his body. It doesn’t strike in two steps, simply pulsing through like a fist banging on a drum as fast as it can without regard to rhythm.

They all flinch, pulling together against the rocks as the world screams. Fire casts out into the forest, the dragon roaring a few feet above their heads, spewing a stream of fire into the woods. The damp, soaked, dead trees blackened and crumble from the heat. The water from the storm does not even come close to being a hindrance against the dragon’s breath. The head moves, vaporizing the forest from one side to the other, before then watching the world as the rain rattles around them. There isn’t time for a scream to come out back to them from within the trees. The fire burns too hot to even feel before it eats through to your marrow. The wax on the tarp is starting to drip down the edges, down around their black boots.

Suddenly, the forest explodes, a wayward fireball violently casting toward the sky as a rucksack full of mission-critical explosives detonates. Debris rains down around the area, together with the rest of the storm.

Everyone sits quietly together, listening to the long, deep exhalations that come from just over their heads as the dragons waits and watches.

But then, after a long, long minute, the monster pulls its long neck back over the stones to the other side. A rumbling makes it clear that it begins to trod away, followed closely by a loud flapping gale as it gracelessly rises back to the sky.

Everyone exhales in relief, four bodies falling slack.

“Good thinking, private,” commends the captain as they fold the tarp back together, taking a moment to look at the scorched holes that had begun to eat their way through the material.

“He’s dead…” mutters Nina, looking at the freshly smoldering ashland ahead of them. “Captain!”

The captain lifts a hand, shaking his head.

Piddlewitz, letting go of the unit wizard, gets up and looks back over the stones they used as cover. “...How the hell does something that big even fly?” asks the man, watching the fairly standard sized dragon vanish back into the storm.

A firm, matter of fact voice comes from the side — Vinter’s. “They’re like birds,” she explains. “Hollow bones go a long way,” says the elf. Piddlewitz looks at her as she finishes folding the tarp back together, handing it over to Nina, who stows it away again. “The gas in their guts floats too, so it helps them stay up,” she notes. “That’s why they can’t fly if you puncture their guts.”

“Easier said than done,” replies the captain. “There’s a reason we never took anyone but A-tier adventurers or higher after dragons back in the day.”

Vinter grabs her rifle, shouldering it again. “‘Back in the day’,” makes it sound like it was a long time ago,” she says in a dull tone. “It’s just been a year’ish.”

“That’s a long time in this new world,” replies the captain, gesturing for the four of them to follow after him.

As they walk through what was left of the forest, Piddlewitz looks at a melted trenchgun that has fused with the stones it is lying on.

He tries not to look at the mess all around it.

----------------------------------------

They finally reach the cliff edge, and what should have been a ten-minute walk now feels like a real accomplishment. Across from them is the dragon’s nest, visible within some kind of crater on the mountainside. Below them, separating the two sides, is a steep ravine. The ground crumbles here abruptly, revealing the vast expanse of the valley below. Dragons circle down in the ravine like crows over a grave, some of the smaller ones opting to stay out of the storm that is raging in the sky. The rain still comes down ceaselessly. “Dig in,” Captain Grael orders, pulling out a pair of

“Sir, I think we all saw that Thorek had the charges,” explains Vinter. “I suggest we abandon the mission,” says the sharpshooter, looking over the massive nest on the other side of the ravine.

Piddlewitz looks at them, then stares down at the unit wizard, Nina, who is still pale like a ghost and breathing like one. Her hand is on her chest as she tries to calm herself down.

“Negative,” remarks the captain, pointing over to an outcrop over the ravine. “We still have our charges, soldier.”

“But..:” Vinter looks, following his pointing finger.

A dead man is dangling from a root on the cliffside from his parachute. A rucksack is attached to his front, and his burned, deployed parachute is on his back.

“Plane two…” she whispers, realising that the troopers from the crashed plane that had descended down together with them had been carrying explosives with them too. “I’ll get them,” she says.

“No,” says the captain, shaking his head. “You’re the best shot. Cover me if this goes wrong too,” he says, belting his binoculars again as he makes a break through the underbrush. The elf grabs her rifle, steadying it.

“You holding up?” asks Piddlewitz quietly, pulling out a dried fruit bar from his stripped ration that he had pulled apart pre-flight to save space in his bag. He holds it out to Nina, the wizard, who is sitting back against a small incline.

“Yeah, like a highwayman,” she replies, forcing another breath out of her chest as she looks his way and then down at the standard issue hundred-gram ration fruit bar.

“Sugars help the shakes,” remarks Piddlewitz, shrugging.

“Thanks,” says the wizard, taking the bar and opening it, not sparing a second before biting into it. “Why the hell are you so calm now, Private?” she asks. “You were a shaking mess before, back when we landed.”

Piddlewitz lifts his hands to her, showing her his fingers. They’re ghostly white and dancing around like spirits lost in a waltz as he shakes. “Still am,” he replies.

“Ah. Great,” she remarks, sighing and rubbing over her face with her free hand. She exhales, sitting upright with better posture, and then breathes in deeply for a moment as she chews. “You’re still holding up better than I am.”

Piddlewitz shakes his head, looking around them at the area for a moment. It’s hardly shelter, but a few collapsed trees over them keep away at least a little of the rain. “I used to have a little sister,” explains Piddlewitz. “Back before,” he adds, folding his hands together. He smiles weakly, his fingers pulling in and out of each other. “She was a real bedwetter. Terrified of everything. Daytime, nighttime — it didn’t really matter,” says the soldier, shaking his head as he shrugs, not losing his nostalgic expression. Nina chews and watches him. “I guess I always felt like it was my job to make sure she always felt safe,” explains the soldier, his hand running back through his hair as he takes off his helmet for a second.

She points at him with smug expression and a listless finger. “So you’re the strong, brave big brother type, huh?” asks Nina dryly, raising an eyebrow as she scans over his wiry frame.

Piddlewitz shakes his head again, almost laughing for some reason, but he stops himself. “No. Honestly, the truth is that I was probably always more terrified of everything than she was,” answers the private, pulling his locked hands apart and watching them continue to shake violently. “...But I didn’t want her to be right,” he says, almost desperately. “So I did everything to prove her wrong, even if I was always frightened too.”

She tilts her head an inch. “Huh? Right about what?” asks Nina curiously with a full mouth, chewing on one cheek.

Piddlewitz looks her way, grabbing his rifle so that he can ground himself on something. “That everything is actually really fucking scary out here, man,” says the private, looking back at her.

The wizard chews slowly for a while and then holds out the remaining half of a fruit bar back to him. “...Helps against the shakes,” she quips.

“Thanks, Doc,” replies Piddlewitz, taking the last half of the bar and biting into it.

“Piddlewitz! Bodina!” hisses a voice from the side. The two of them look over at Vinter, who waves them over.

“Wait. Your family name is ‘Bodina’?” asks Piddlewitz, amused as he gets up. “Nina Bodina?”

Nina sighs. “Wait until you hear my middle name. My parents had a real sense of humor.”

“Does it also rhyme?” he asks.

“Yeah… it does, actually,” she replies, sounding very displeased about that fact, her dull expression fitting exactly to her tone.

Vinter sits on a rock, wiping the rain and sweat from her face as she aims down the rifle, trailing after the captain, who is on his way back with a tattered bag in hand. “Got it,” says the man, opening the rucksack and showing them several explosive charges. “We’re still good to go.”

“Captain,” remarks Vinter in an unimpressed tone, looking back up at him. “These are Team Two’s mountaineering charges, not the timed bricks we had.” She points down at the bag with a sharp, long finger. “We need to plant these, then wire and detonate them ourselves,” she explains.

“Missions are dynamic and change, soldier,” replies the captain, pulling the drawstring back shut and slinging the bag over his back.

“— Inside the nest,” she adds plainly, pointing across the ravine toward the crater. “The nest is on the other side of this bottomless pit.”

The captain shakes his head. “Just like me, it has a bottom, soldier,” he replies. “But you won’t be seeing it.” He turns the bag, hoisting it up a little toward them for them to see.

The three of them look quietly.

“You can’t be serious…” asks Piddlewitz, looking up at the man and then back down to the rope and grappling hook fastened to the side of the dead mountaineer’s bag, and then at the captain’s grin.

An elbow hits him in the side. “What’s the matter, Private?” asks Nina as he sharply exhales, rubbing his ribs. “Scared?” she asks, teasingly with a face to match.

Piddlewitz, wincing and rubbing the pain away, nods once. “Yeah, actually,” he gasps, watching as the captain takes the hook, swings it a few times, and then casts it across the ravine toward a cluster of stones on the other side. Captain Grael pulls on it, tugging a few times to test its security after it snags in, and then ties the other end of the rope around an old tree.

“Used to do this back in the dungeon,” remarks the captain. “Takes me back.” Checking it one last time, the captain wraps his legs around the rope and begins to crawl — suspended upside down — over the ravine.

Vinter goes after him, shouldering her rifle. But instead of crawling like he had, she walks it like a tightrope and does so fairly easily as well, by the looks of it.

Nina looks at him, raising a hand to whisper his way. “I’m scared too,” she admits, shrugging once.

“Ladies first,” remarks Piddlewitz nervously, gesturing to the rope.

The wizard slaps his back, pushing him forward. “I outrank you, Private,” she says, her face pale. “Go.”

Piddlewitz lets out an uneasy sigh, looking over the ledge as he grabs hold of the rope and then swings a leg around it.

A dragon shoots by at the bottom of the ravine, slicing through the pouring water that falls down into the gulch.

But on the plus side, since he’s swinging upside down and staring up at the sky, he can’t see that or the drop — only the swarm of them flying overhead, hidden only just barely by the storm.

It isn’t much better.