The battle, like all of them, was a blur. Bloody, beautiful, and far too short.

Only after it was over, and the beating of her heart slowed to that painful, aching emptiness, did she realize she had left the scribe behind.

She found him sitting in the broken remains of one of the villager’s houses. Not hiding. Just sitting on an old bamboo mat, like he was a guest waiting quietly for his host. The house was sagging on one side, and the thatched roof had collapsed almost completely so that the floor was flooded with rainwater, rushing to the hole where the wall had once been.

There was a body in front of him. A local, rain pattering on her farmer’s rags. She was laying on her side, and it almost looked like she was asleep with the way her mouth was hanging open, revealing that black palate. Her tail, almost as long as her body, limply reached across the stilt house.

“I was trying to talk to her,” the scribe said. “I was trying to tell her to surrender. She ran at me with a knife. Someone shot her.” He shook his head, swallowing some emotion that threatened to spill out of him.

The rain rattled heavily on the wooden floor.

“I thought I could help her,” the scribe said. “I thought she was a farmer. Like the ones I saw in Sseran Thay City.”

“She was.”

The local’s arms were curled over her chest. Even in death, she clutched something in her claws.

Agra bent down to pry it loose. A humanoid figurine, short and round, with closed eyes, carved out of a single transparent stone. Amber or red quartz, or something like it. All its features were worn smooth from years of touch, which only made the luster inside the stone shine all the brighter.

She gave the figurine to the scribe. He was mesmerized, not by the stone’s simple beauty, but by the fact that someone - an alien, a person - had made this. And now, that someone was dead.

For the glory of the Empire.

“Why do they fight us?” the scribe asked. “Don’t they know we’re trying to help them? Don’t they know how many others we’ve helped...”

“Oh?” Agra asked, more dull than bitter. “And how many is that?”

But the scribe, transfixed by the local’s figurine, didn’t seem to hear her.

The squelching of boots made its way around the house. A soldier from Witch Patrol shielded his eyes, squinting up at the broken house through the rain. When he saw Agraneia, he shouted at her.

“Are you Jewel squad? The medics want to see you.”

***

The medics had claimed the driest corner of the fort, on the first floor. Upon entering, Agra immediately wished they hadn’t. Dry it might be, but the waterproof roofing sealed the scent of death in here. Not the fresh gore of battle, but that slow, awful, putrid death that made a body shiver and burn at the same time.

One of the medics was working at a makeshift surgeon’s table. The patient was one of the whiskerfolk from Jewel squad. The one whose name she couldn’t quite remember.

Most of her arm was missing, leaving jagged chunks of flesh and scales chewed up by broken, flying metal. A soldier was holding linens to the wound, and they were already soaked with blood while the medic prepared his tools, getting ready to amputate the remains of the whiskerfolk’s arm.

The medic was an older dullscale, at least older compared to the crop of young fry they sent to Thrass anyway. His glasses were spattered with rain and blood. His face was painted with that clinical neutrality of all field healers, who see only the wounds, and not the soldiers who carry them.

“Once I get started,” the medic said, “She’ll probably pass out from the pain. Honest, I’m surprised she’s still with us.”

The private lifted her head, her whiskers trembling from the effort. When she saw the Lieutenant, her eyes went wide. She struggled to say something.

“Your fault,” it sounded like. “Your fault.”

And then, the whiskerfolk collapsed back on the makeshift surgeon’s table, and closed her eyes against the pain.

The medic shrugged, apologetically. “She’s not herself.”

I wouldn’t know, Agraneia thought. I never knew her, to begin with.

Agra couldn’t stop staring at her face. She knew she should look away but… She’s so young. Every call, they seem to get a little younger.

The medic started cutting, telling his assistant to hold her down. Another assistant had a bottle of clear liquid, and was gently pouring it over the wound. The blood didn’t want to stop.

“Opiam,” Agraneia said. “Let her go.”

“No,” the medic said, “We’re taking her back to Sseran Thay City with all the rest. She’ll be fine.”

“She won’t make it,” Agraneia said.

But when the medic was finished, they wrapped up the whiskerfolk’s arm and took her with the other wounded just the same. Later, Agraneia would find out that she had died on the way back. Whimpering, and sobbing for someone to take her home.

Of Jewel squad, only three had survived the assault. Corporal Medus, Private Taeso, and Agra. The scribe, too, though he hardly counted. More than half of Witch Patrol was wounded or dead, most of those coming from the central line, so Command decided to give Witch Patrol a break.

“No more calls for a week. Hold the fort while we move to inhabit,” came the order. “Get some well-earned rest.”

Command thought they were doing them a service, but to Agraneia, the waiting was the worst part.

Nothing to do but think about what you’d done.

Taeso hadn’t said a word since the battle. Even Corporal Medus was light on words. However, he had copped extra rations from the fort, and had even found a cellar down there, with a keg of some local brew made from fermented fruits. He had filled two canteens with it, and was passing it around their campfire when Agraneia returned from the medics.

Agraneia intercepted the canteen. Unscrewed the top, and sniffed it. She could almost taste it, that sweet, cherry-colored liquid burning her throat. Warming all the right parts of her. Her lips wanted to… but instead, she dumped the canteen, letting it glug out onto the muddy ground.

“Lieutenant, come on!” Medus shouted. “After all that - come on.”

“Might be poisoned,” Agraneia said. “Not worth the risk.”

Medus narrowed his eyes. Not wanting to believe her. He stowed the other canteen, refusing to get rid of it, but not wanting to test her either. Agraneia didn’t care. She assumed he’d already taken a few swigs. Sure enough, an hour later he was vomiting so violently that she had to send him to the medics.

The whole Patrol spent the next few days, trying to stay dry. Wishing they were drunk. Eating the extra rations they found on the bodies of their dead.

Agraneia spent the next few days venturing alone, out into the treeline, half-hoping to find a local lying in ambush. She found nothing but empty tunnels, discarded leaves, and a musket with an exploded barrel.

One night, when Jewel squad pulled watch duty, and Agraneia had them positioned around the edge of the Fort’s eastern roof. From here, she could look almost straight down into the pit in the center of the hill. The temple itself.

Dozens of steps and stairways had been carved all around the flat faces of the pit, crossing back and forth, creating a lattice of angles that cascaded down into the pit. Even from up here, they could see the complicated designs carved into the pit’s walls, thousands and thousands of lassertane hieroglyphics and jagged geometric shapes. Streams of water fell over the sides of the pit, washing down the steps and disappearing down into that black, bottomless hole at the center of the sunken temple.

Save for the unique pattern of the carvings, this temple looked exactly the same as every other temple the Empire had claimed on Thrass et Yunum.

None of the soldiers knew what it was. The locals had their own beliefs. They feared the holes, and worshiped them. They buried the dead in those holes, among other things.

Once, she had seen what that bottomless void could do, at another temple outside of Sseran Thay. They had been camped there for only a single day, when the steam began to rise up from those black depths.

An awful, screaming hiss rose from the hole at the bottom of the temple, as a jet of pure, white vapor shot out of the hole, pluming higher and higher. Dousing them all with a hot mist. Rising even over the ridge of the hill. Then, there was a light, that seemed to thread its way through all that steam. Infusing the clouds of steam with veins of golden orange, becoming red, becoming a deep purple.

But tonight, that hole was pitch black. Brown, muddy streams waterfalled over the steps, whirlpooling at the bottom, stone floor of the temple as they drained into the void. Agraneia found it hard to look anywhere else. Taeso was there too, silently staring. All that nervous energy taken from him.

The scribe was sitting on the floor of the fort, interrogating the only person who would talk to him.

“They can’t all be like this,” he was saying. “Right, Corporal?”

“No,” Medus said. “Some of them are easier. Last call I was on, we started shooting before they knew we were there.”

“What about the goodwill missions? What about the Emperor’s aid? We’re supposed to be helping them. But they’re all… there’s no one left to help.”

“Got what they deserve.” Taeso said. It was the first thing he’d said in days. He was eyeing the scribe, and his mouth was a thin, grim line. “Savages. Write that down, scribe. They’ll get what they deserve. We’re going to make sure of it.”

When nobody argued with him, he threw his canteen onto the ground hard enough to make the cap pop off, and splash the wood and stone. He stalked off, and Agraneia didn’t try to stop him.

“Tough about his friend,” Medus said, shaking his head. “It was their first call, you know. But you know what they say. Nobody cares about a dullscale but a dullscale. Tough.”

The next morning, three new cohorts marched into the village. The scribe looked relieved when he heard the horns and drums. There was a kind of hopeful pride on his face as a commander, a central cyran who left the crisp collar of his uniform open wide to reveal the emerald green scales on his throat, gave a speech about the good work they’d done here, dishing out credit as if it was his to give.

“One step closer to bringing hope and prosperity to this world,” the commander said, “One more village blessed with the light of our glorious Empire.”

They gave Captain Dinnae a medal, they pinned it right to her uniform in front of the whole Patrol. The captain played her part, but she looked nothing close to proud. All the while, Witch Patrol was made to watch. They stood in ragged lines, wearing their ragged uniforms. Only half as many as there had once been.

Agraneia took a kind of pleasure in watching the scribe’s face, as he watched the whole charade. Saw the pride give way to sickness, as the parade leaders blew their spiral horns and conches, signalling this bloodbath as a grand victory for the Empire.

She could see it happening inside him. The scribe was wrestling with the reality before his eyes. Trying to reconcile the senseless death and destruction with the loyalty and patriotism they had hammered into him, back on Cyre.

How much longer, she wondered, would it take for the war to break him?

Would he live long enough to give up?