Chapter 2

The Farreach militia moved into motion. The line stepped into the weight of the Devourers, shields rising, spears lancing into the press of warped flesh and bone.

The next impact was like a siege ram hitting stone. Creatures slammed into the front rank, claws raking across wood, limbs thudding against iron bands as shields jolted and the lane became a grinding, shuddering crush of bodies.

Pyre drove his spear into the nearest opening he saw. The tip punched through a slick membrane with what felt like a wet squelch. Dark fluid splashed his armor and hissed where it touched the muddy ground.

The Devourer shrieked, but it did not fall. It simply twisted, its torso turning past where a spine should have been, three new limbs bracing against the wall as it continued to push.

“Again!” Master Jorren shouted. “Forward, now!”

The front rank heaved as Old Danar took the brunt of the surge, shield locked against his shoulder, boots sliding in the wet earth. Pyre followed his lead, stabbing past the older man’s arm with his shield as another monstrosity tried to clamber over the shield wall.

This one had a bone-helmed skull, smooth and featureless save for a single vertical slit that opened to reveal rows of teeth grinding against one another. Pyre sank his spear into the gap where its shoulder should be.

The beast roared and kept coming, dragging itself along the shaft.

Pyre wrenched the spear free and shifted his aim. There was no throat, no clear joint. Only overlapping plates of bone and cords of black sinew.

He stabbed anyway with all his strength, Pyre fighting back beside Old Danar.

To his left, Rena cried out as a hooked limb raked across her shield, carving a furrow in the wood. She shoved back, teeth bared, and drove her spear up under a jutting ridge of bone and into the soft mass beneath.

The creature sagged; a second Devourer surged behind it, climbing over its body as if it were nothing more than fallen rubble.

Pyre turned just as a heavy weight crashed against old Danar’s shield. The man’s legs buckled, and Pyre stepped in, slamming his own shield against Danar’s side to keep him upright. The force of it knocked the breath from his lungs.

“Still here,” the man wheezed. “Still standing. Good on me, lad!” he cried with glee.

“Not for long if you keep taking hits like that!” Rena said through clenched teeth.

Something massive moved in the swarm ahead. The Devourers parted for it, their bodies forced aside by sheer bulk.

The monster that stepped into view made the others look almost reasonable.

It was almost taller than the gate had been, its hunched frame scraping the upper stones of the lane. Its skull was a smooth dome of bone, helmed and ridged at the back, with no discernable eyes. A cage of ribs had grown over its sinewy black chest, each bar fused and layered like plates of armor. Its arms were long, ending in hooked claws thicker than Pyre’s wrist.

“Hold!” Master Jorren shouted. “Do not break!”

The bone-helmed Devourer hit their line, its claws crashing into their shields and driving them back. Wood splintered under the impact, and the men on either side of Master Jorren staggered as the creature leaned in, pressing its weight against Jorren’s shield.

For a moment, man and monster locked there, an impossible test of strength.

One of the Devourer’s claws snapped forward, faster than Pyre thought something that size could move. It hooked over the top of his shield, dragged down, and tore it aside.

The Devourer caught Master Jorren by the front of his armor and hauled him off his feet. It slammed him into the stones hard enough to crack them, then brought a massive foot down, crushing him.

“Father!” Rena screamed as lesser Devourers surged in, a knot of limbs and teeth and sinew closing around her father.

Pyre lunged to join her, but the swarm folded inward with terrible precision, bodies locking together to bar his path. Claws raked for his legs. Another creature slammed into his shoulder, driving him back a few steps.

Rena did not think. She screamed for her father again and threw herself after him, shoving her way into the gap the creature had made.

“Rena!” Pyre reached for her, fingers brushing the ends of her cloak. A smaller Devourer slammed into his side, knocking him away. When he regained his footing, she was gone, vanished under a forest of hooked limbs and clawed hands.

“No, dammit!” Old Danar shouted. “Hold the—”

The line broke as shields twisted out of formation.

Men and women lost their footing in the muddy lane and the torrential downpour. One defender went down under the press and did not rise. Another dropped their spear and tried to run, only to be pulled backward by something that moved faster than their terror.

“Back to the courtyard!” a voice shouted, Pyre not recognizing it until he heard the voice again. “Back, I said! Back, lad!” Old Danar latched onto his shoulder and dragged him with him as they retreated.

“But Rena—”

“Move, Pyre. Listen to me, damn you!” Danar wheezed. “We cannot hold here! We cannot save those who are already dead!”

Pyre stumbled backward, reeling, still stabbing where he could, trying to mark where Master Jorren and Rena had fallen. The swarm made it impossible. The Devourers were not a line. They were a tide, heavy and thick and relentless, frothing through the broken gate.

Pyre and the defenders fell away in clumps, the narrow street widening into the open courtyard before the inner defenses. The rain opened up even harder, hammering the stones, making everything slick and sodden. Smoke from distant fires mixed with the wet, leaving the air thick and bitter.

“Form here!” Old Danar shouted to those who remained. “Make a circle! Shields up!”

A handful of militia, perhaps a dozen at most, stumbled into a rough half-ring in the courtyard, backs to the inner buildings. Old Danar took his place at the front, shield braced, chest heaving.

Pyre came up beside him, his arms shaking, lungs burning, spear slick with black fluid that refused to wash away in the rain.

The Devourers flooded into the courtyard after them.

Some frothed along the walls, their limbs digging into stone. Others spilled across the ground, fast and low, moving in horrible lurching strides, bodies too heavy for their own legs. Bone helms, open maws, flayed limbs, and black sinew beneath it all, holding impossible shapes together.

“They do not tire,” Danar said, exasperated. “They never tire.”

Fear tried to rise in Pyre’s throat, but he swallowed it down. There was nowhere to run. No higher wall to retreat to. There was another inner gate behind them, sealed so the civilians still had time to flee below.

This was the last stretch of soil between the living and the dark, and it fell to him to hold it.

“We can do this.” Pyre did not know whether he was talking to Danar or himself. “For Master Jorren. For Rena. For Farreach!”

Old Danar gave him a bloody grin. “That’s the spirit! For Farreach!”

The Devourers shrieked forward.

The first slammed into Old Danar’s shield and bounced off, more from the angle than any lack of strength. The second hit harder and stuck, claws sinking into the wood. Danar twisted, shoving it aside so Pyre could drive his spear into the joint of its neck. The creature spasmed and dropped as two more took its place.

To Pyre’s right, a woman screamed as something latched onto her leg and pulled her down. She hacked at it with a short sword, severing one limb, then three more took hold and dragged her into the swarm.

The ring shrank as spears snapped and shields split. Every wound they inflicted seemed to slow the Devourers for only a breath before they pushed on again.

Pyre’s arm went numb from the constant shock of impact, blood running down his side from a shallow cut he had not seen happen, his breath coming in ragged pulls.

He forced any doubts aside. The colony must hold. Karastella will save us all.

The Devourers closed in.

They filled the courtyard, crawling over fallen bodies, pulling apart what little resistance remained until there were just a few of the militia left, a battered battalion clinging to its last breaths.

“Karastella?” someone behind Pyre asked.

They all looked up as the sky answered.

A sound like the world cracking open rolled across the courtyard. It was not thunder; thunder was broad, rolling, imprecise. This was sharp and focused, a single note that cleaved the air from the clouds down to the stone under Pyre’s feet.

Light speared down from the sky and hit the courtyard with the force of a falling star.

For a heartbeat, everything went white. The noise of the battle vanished, replaced by a high ringing in Pyre’s ears. Heat flashed across his face, intense enough to sear his eyes closed.

When he was finally able to open them again, there was a circle burned into the courtyard before him.

Devourers lay around its edge, half-formed and half-gone, their bodies cut away by the cosmic force. Those that had been in the center were simply erased, their remains nothing but drifting motes of light and ash.

At the heart of the scorched circle stood a figure.

He was taller than any man Pyre had ever seen, his frame encased in jagged white armor, the banner of the Heavenly Host on his epaulettes. Cracks ran through it along the pauldrons and breastplate, glowing with a deep gold light that leaked like blood from a wound.

Wings rose from the man’s back, not feathers but radiant constructions of light and structure, each feather a shard of bright, shifting geometry. The right wing hung lower, fractures spiderwebbing through its glow.

The mysterious man’s helm was simple, a smooth mask of light with the suggestion of features beneath, and his eyes burned through it in twin points of molten white.

Pyre stared up at him, chest heaving, grit clinging to his skin, the rain still coming down.

“Karastella?” he asked, the name tearing out of him without thought.

Leaning against his shield, breath rattling, Old Danar squinted through the slowly clearing smoke. “No, lad…” he said. “That’s Daedalus, the angel.”

Pyre blinked hard, wiping rain and ash from his face. Daedalus. The Heavenly Host must have sent him. Karastella heard our call!

Excitement lifted in Pyre’s chest as he took in Daedalus again, now with clarity.

He had seen depictions of him on cathedral glass, stylized and distant. But this was different. Even in all his blazing glory, Daedalus looked tired. Not in the power, not in the light, but the way the angel held himself, as if every fragment of armor weighed a ton.

The angel raised a hand and golden radiance pooled in his palms, drawn from cracks in his own armor. Threads of light whipped outward, reaching for the ruined buildings, the broken gate, the lingering shapes of Devourers at the edge of the courtyard.

The threads sputtered.

They stretched only a few paces before snarling in the air and collapsing into sparks. Daedalus’s brow furrowed behind the light of his helm.

The angel tried again. Harder. The glow around his hands intensified, the cracks in his armor deepening.

The threads lashed out in a dozen directions, some of them latching onto Devourers, burning furrows into their flesh. Others reached toward the sealed inner gate and the stone beneath their feet.

Again, they snapped.

The power faltered, folding back on itself, flickers of spent light drifting downward.

Old Danar forced himself upright. “Daedalus, Shield of the Southern Host, if the old tales still mean anything. We have to help him! For Master Jorren. For Rena. For Farreach!” He raised his cracked shield and charged.

A handful of survivors went with him. Six, perhaps seven. It was difficult to tell where the militia ended and monsters began now, the courtyard a blur of movement and blood and rain.

They threw themselves at the monsters converging on Daedalus, spears and swords flashing in the angel’s reflected light.

“Danar!” Pyre shouted as he tried to catch up.

The Devourers rushed Daedalus, who summoned a flaming sword, not drawn from a scabbard but called out of the light itself. It took shape with a ringing note, a long blade of pure radiance edged in searing white.

The angel swung it once, and the arc of the strike carved a clean path through the nearest Devourers. Their bodies split and burned in the same instant, falling in pieces that turned to ash before they hit the ground. Afterimages of the blade hung in the air, bright lines that made Pyre’s eyes water.

Daedalus pivoted and swung the sword again and again, each strike perfectly weighted, perfectly placed.

Devourers fell in heaps, and for a moment, the swarm hesitated.

For a moment, Pyre believed.

Salvation. Deliverance. Fate.

Karastella has sent Daedalus to save us.

Every whispered prayer and childish hope, all crashed down into this single impossible scene as Pyre pushed forward, forcing his way through the chaos.

His spear caught on something and wrenched from his hands, snapping near the midpoint. He almost fell, caught himself on a fallen body, grabbed the broken half of the spear, and kept moving.

He had to reach Daedalus.

Pyre couldn’t stay back and watch others die in his place.

The Devourers rallied. They surged again, this time throwing their bodies at Daedalus without care for the ones he had already cut down. Some climbed over the fallen, using their corpses as a bridge to reach him. Yet the closest Devourers disintegrated the instant they touched the circle of scorched ground around the angel.

Every swing of Daedalus’s fiery sword sent fractures deeper through his armor. Light leaked from him in steady streams now, pouring from the cracks, from his eyes, from between the plates of his gauntlets.

He’s burning himself out, Pyre realized as the air changed.

Pressure settled over the courtyard like a great hand pressing down. It shoved the breath from his lungs and drove him to one knee. The monsters nearest to Daedalus staggered, some of them collapsing outright as their limbs buckled under the weight.

Daedalus threw his head back. “Karastella!” he cried.

The name tore out of him, full and raw, nothing like the measured tones of the cathedrals. It was a plea, loud enough that it could be heard for miles, and for a brief moment, nothing happened.

Then the clouds split.

A ring of white fire widened in the sky above, its edges too bright to look at. Inside the ring there was no cloud, no blue, only a depthless brilliance as the pressure intensified.

Pyre’s bones felt like they were being pressed inward. Devourers closest to the angel began to come apart, their bodies fraying into dust.

The surviving militia, those few still standing, raised trembling arms toward the light.

“This is it,” someone sobbed. “This is salvation.”

“Can it be?” Danar asked, the older man somewhere off to Pyre’s left. Pyre saw him then, staggering forward through the ash and wreckage, shield hanging from his broken arm, face covered in open wounds crusted in mud and stained with blood as he looked up. “Karastella… we are saved!”

Above, a figure stepped through the ring.

She descended slowly, wings unfurling from her back, not merely wide but immense, a double span of blinding white feathers layered over a second set formed from hard, shimmering light. Each beat of them stirred the ash around her in gentle swirls.

Her armor was immaculate, polished plates of pale metal traced with lines of silver and gold and opal, every piece laid with perfect precision. Her face was unhelmed, features fine and cold, eyes pale as the inner light of the portal.

Karastella touched down near Daedalus and surveyed the battlefield with a single, unhurried glance. Devourers recoiled from her presence, those nearest to her dissolving without her lifting a clawed hand.

Pyre’s heart pounded as he stared up at the Host, the one who the faithful said would come when the world’s last light faltered.

She turned her head, and her gaze fell on Daedalus, still kneeling in the scorched circle, sword of light held point-down, its tip resting against the stone.

“It has already been decided,” she told him, her voice clear and flat. No comfort. No warmth. “They will not help this realm.”

She did not look at the Devourers. She did not look at Pyre or the crumbling buildings. Her eyes remained fixed on the angel.

“Shame on you, Daedalus,” she finally said. “Shame on you for delivering false hope. We do not interfere with the Hunger.”

Daedalus flinched as if struck. Golden tears welled at the edges of his eyes, spilled down his cheeks, and fell to the blackened stone with soft, glowing impacts.

“We can still save some of them,” he finally said, his words thin in the heavy air. “There are souls here worth—”

Karastella lifted her hand. She did not aim it at him. She simply turned it toward the sky, and the ring of white fire began to close.

Above, the portal she had opened folded in on itself with a twisting motion that made Pyre’s vision blur. The edges of it curled inward, bright lines crossing and consuming themselves until there was nothing left but low cloud and darkness.

Karastella vanished with it, and the pressure lifted.

The Devourers that remained in the courtyard turned to Daedalus with a strange, wary stillness, as if unsure what to do without the pressure of the Host pressing down on them.

Daedalus knelt in the middle of it all, sword of fire still in hand, shoulders bowed, chest heaving. The cracks in his armor started to spread with soft, crystalline sounds, light leaking out faster now, spilling from him in shimmering streams, pooling at his knees.

“We have failed,” he whispered.

Pyre was close enough to hear it. Close enough to see the way Daedalus’s hand tightened on the hilt of his sword.

“Wait—” Pyre shouted, reaching for the fallen angel.

The word tore its way out of him. He was not sure what he meant to follow it with. Wait for what? For Karastella to return? For the Heavenly Host to change its mind? For someone else to rise from the ruins and do what the angels would not?

Daedalus’s fingers tightened on the hilt before Pyre could intervene.

He inverted the sword, the light along its length trembling as he steadied the point against his own chest.

“No—” Pyre yelled, lunging toward him.

Daedalus thrust the blade into his chest.