Lander strode confidently up to the shrill, excited to prove himself by destroying a horror whose existence was an affront against life itself. Slaying a beneffrygt and a shrill in the same night would surely impress the Archangels.

Even hunched it was twice his size, rippling in the grey world like fluid. At least the grey was easy on his eyes. It reached for its maw with its fifth hand and tore its own jaw open. The abhorrent screech that emerged rattled his core. The rippling edges that defined the world snapped solid, as if the noise pulled them taught like strings. Was it the creature? Or a property of this ‘World of Grey’? Whatever it was, distance and objects became clear in the noise.

Lander ignored the shrill’s tantrum and marched toward it with confidence. It brought down its monstrous hand to sweep him off his feet, but he caught it in the palm with his sword. He crashed into a wall, and pain shot through his back, welling within his chest and burning his core.

He was not given time to think on it, as the shrill’s claws lifted him into the air before he saw it reach him and carried him towards its slathering jaws. His sword was stuck into its hand, but it was so thick with the dead that the blade had not gone deep enough to harm it. He reached for it, and swung his arm to chart a path towards its face. The blade obeyed him, flying through the air and striking the shrill in the eye. The eye popped like a bubble, spilling acrid fluid across the shrill’s body.

It howled in agony, clutching its socket, the fluid dissolving the layer of flesh it wore over its chest. All its noise tightened the edges of every shape, making them more distinct. His ability to see truly was based on sound in the World of Grey.

He pulled the sword back through the air as the monster released him, and plunged it into the side of its hand to catch himself. It panted heavily, two pale eyes snapping to him as he held its fingers like a ladder.

It clenched its hand into a fist and sent crushing pain reverberating through his body. Another hand grabbed him by the legs, and they tore the legs of his armour away and tossed them to the street. With another balled fist it struck him in the chest until his armour was smashed to bits. It tossed him into the air, and the shrills two remaining eyes suffocated him with their heavy gaze. It turned its eyes to the far side of the plaza and he was thrown through the air.

Just as he thought he would be smashed against the steel walls, his direction changed, and he fell upwards towards the sky. His leg hit the wall with a dreadful scraping until he shot up above the rooftops. His ascent slowed, he hovered as if about to fall, and he saw the grey outline of a tall man with his arms crossed blending in with the ground. This was why Ove had wanted Toldremand around with his Gravity spells.

Instead of falling down, he fell towards the shrill, his cloak snapping in the air as he sped forward. He readied his blade; if he was going to be a bolt, then he would be a bolt. Just as he finished the thought, a crack of lightning struck him, and he carried the charge into the exposed chest of the shrill. His blade pierced its hard shell and it roared as electricity pulsed through its body. He crashed into the street, but there was no pain as he lay numbly staring into the grey sky. The edges of the World went taught again as the shrill crashed to the street.

It clawed listlessly at everything around it as it lay face down. Lander dragged himself to his feet, and tried to pull back the bits of his expansions, but they hid, blended with the ground in the ocean of grey. He stomped around to draw out the edges of their forms, and knock the numbness from his legs. The ground was littered with weapons and bits of armour, but he was just able to make out the scraps of his metal, and gathered the bits together into a hot mass before his eyes. He could see the shrill reaching to take the edge of a building and pull itself up behind his metal as he forged it into two long, hiltless double-edged blades.

His eyes grew hot as his thoughts commanded the blades to spin to a blur, and he launched them forward. Each one took the shrill in an arm and sawed their way through, scattering indistinct forms of flesh and chitin until its weight broke the arms and it toppled back to the ground.

He limped towards it with a sneer for his dented leg, stepping carefully to avoid making noise. He walked as carefully as only a man who did not want socks put on him could. Holding itself on an elbow, the shrill brought its arm down. Lander leaped forward well in advance of its strike, and as predicted it struck the ground behind him before he saw it connect. To rely on his eyes in the World of Grey was to serve himself up to betrayal.

He leaped over the writhing leg of the beast and called his blades to him as he vaulted over its arms. His eyes focused on its head. The blades met two of its remaining arms as he passed, and laboured to cut through the thick layers of armour.

The shrill twisted to pull itself up, and its limbs cracked and broke away from its body where the blades were cutting through them. A deep groaning drawl came from its broken maw. ”… This is not what was promised to us…”

Lander whipped his blades through the air, slamming them into its eyes. The ground shook from the weight of its head smashing the ground, a ripple of clear borders cascading past him. The acidic fluid from its eyes dissolved tracks through the dead flesh covering its face, and chunks of torso and severed hands split from it to fall to a pile on the ground. “... beware the glass in the dust…” the shrill drawled.

Lander raised his blades, and slammed them again into its sockets. Then again, and again until his mana was spent and the blades fell motionless like the mangled skull they protruded from. His head and chest burned, so he expanded his chest to draw the cool night air through his body. “Glass in the dust, eh?” Steam poured out of him, whistling as it dissipated.

He turned to Toldremand, the large man an amorphous figure as he walked, every heavy footfall sending a shimmering up to his shins that defined them against the vague grey. Behind him, the darkness was seeping back to swallow the plaza. Flecks of blackness washing over the World of Grey like locusts devouring a wheat field. Lander climbed the shrill’s silent head to pull free his blades before the darkness could obscure them.

“Well done,” Toldremand said, just as the dark fully engulfed them.

“I appreciate the assistance.” Lander hopped down from the head. It was a relief to be out of the World of Grey, and seeing things clearly. If a bit dark.

“Battle is an exercise in teamwork,” Toldremand said, letting a bit of the general in him shine through. “Let’s not dally. Gottfred should be waiting for us to the south.”

Lander tried to ignore his dented leg as they ran southward out of the square. It was just a bit of metal cramping when he moved it. Embarrassing, but no one else would notice if he did not draw attention to it. He sighed, praying the Archangels did not weigh this minor blemish heavily on his otherwise flawless performance, when they judged him for Ascension. Not that he knew the criteria by which he was judged, but he did not imagine real angels were baulked by a mere dent.

“What holds you?” Toldremand growled impatiently, scratching the hair on his chest at the fringe of Gottfred’s lamp light. Gottfred was standing further down the road, looking over his shoulder anxiously.

Lander dismissed the question with a wave of his arm that caused his blade to scrape on the metal road. “Nothing.” He pulled his cloak tightly around himself to cover his body.

As they continued southward, the streets remained mostly silent. The southern side of the Residential Quarter had seen less combat, so for the most part things were undisturbed. Occasionally they came across a dead guard or two sprawled in the street, and left them as they were. They would have to remain there for a little while longer. Carnage was not for the city cleaners; it would be the Wards’ final task before they could rest. Fourstaile was likely already taking a mental manifest of the dead.

“Before I forget,” Lander said to Toldremand. The Highward did not turn, so Lander continued, “Did you hear the shrill speak? I was not aware that those things could speak.”

Toldremand scoffed. “They can, but rarely do except to cause trouble. Did it say something to you? Their noises all sound the same to me. Well, except that big noise.”

“Aye,” Lander said, “two things. I thought it was odd, the lament of a shrill, and a warning for their unmakers.”

“Lament?” He spun his head to face Lander, eyes wide in the closest thing to surprise he had ever seen on the man. “What in Soulhollow does a shrill…?”

“It said, ‘this is not what we were promised’, or something to that effect,” Lander shrugged.

“That…” he scratched his chin. “Well that actually makes a bit of sense. You had me worried for a moment. Whoever brought them here promised them… whatever it is a shrill wants. Bodies to consume I suppose. They nearly had it, but found brutal deaths instead. What else did it say? You mentioned a warning?”

Lander nodded. “Beware the glass in the dust.”

Toldremand stopped so suddenly that Lander nearly stepped on his foot. “Shit, oh shit.” Consternation poured from his pores and dripped from his nose. He bent over, the strain of the night seemed to catch him all at once. “Gottfred, you have mana? How much mana do you have?”

“I’m not drained yet. Should I whisper to Highward Fourstaile?”

“Do it quickly.” He was on his way before he had even finished speaking, and the Captain was close behind, whispering into a spell to send his voice away.