The grasslands rushed past with an indistinct green smear. Every desperate pounding step was another stone's weight of exhaustion upon his back. His bones ached, his muscles burned. His lungs felt like he'd been inhaling glass dust.

  Yet despite the sting of sweat in his eyes, and the throbbing of his blood like his arteries were about to burst, it all paled in comparison to the heartbreak.

  Dross let out a heaving sob, disguised as an exhausted pant, as he drove himself onwards.

  The hammer-blow of fatigue was a good thing. It slowed his thoughts, hammered out that iron grasp of loss.

  Gods, those utter bastards. Why? Why now? They were so close. It was a new leaf. They'd just gotten a bit of that fire back. That rush. They couldn't be gone. Why him? Why should he be the one to live?

  Every thought, every line, another dagger carving its way deeper into him.

  Vicious thoughts that had hooked themselves deep circled through his mind over and over again as his feet droned a monotonous tempo — a sound that only made him more mad.

  He'd barely made it out of Strangspine alive. Even with all of his skills and all of his abilities, there had been too many damned beasts!

  He shouldn't have made it. Not with the way he'd been beset on all sides, carved up by leaping hunters and swooping watchers, as a teeming carpet of living flesh had roiled on the ground below him. Three quarters of his Health gone. Mana halfway. Stamina utterly empty.

  Every step was harder than the last.

  Blast the gods, and their fickle and rat-faced favour. They'd abandoned him. Abandoned them all. Sneering down at him with contempt while he killed himself with a death-sprint.

  He could feel it — the crawling itch all over his body, his racking cramps spread through his legs as fibres snapped and rewove over and over again. His heart beat too fast. His vision was a bare tunnel, wrapped in a tinny whine.

  Without the supportive properties of Stamina to fend off exhaustion, his body was eating itself. Only the maddened pike of grief at his back and the soul-deep duty to the city that had been his home for so many decades keeping him moving. The strain was bad enough, but he could feel his Health ebbing away inexorably.

  What would give out first — the final leagues between him and Deadacre, or his resources? He didn't know.

  He had to do it anyway. They were coming. Oh gods, they were coming. A single mass, slaves to a hungering will.

  His worst fears were realised. His friends were dead. They had failed. Oh gods, they were dead.

  Dross remembered that crushing weight as he tore his way out of the jungle and into the surrounding bush. He'd only had a bare half an hour left of his final charge of Airstep. Somehow, he'd broken away from the beasts.

  No. Not somehow. He knew exactly how he'd escaped. He'd been allowed to. Not unmolested, unpursued, or uninjured, but allowed all the same.

  It was that damned weight. It had been so suffocating, smiting him out of the sky with the gods' own fury.

  Her eyes, watching him from the edge of Strangspine, burning and terrible and far too many.

  Her words burned.

  She was coming. For him. For Deadacre and everyone who lived in it. For the challenges she so desperately craved.

  He ran. Not as a survivor, but as a man reduced to being a Tyrant's herald.

  Drowning in an ocean of fatigue, in all too much pain, Dross kept running.

  Just a few more leagues.

  He would make it. He had to. It was the only bloody thing they'd asked of him.

  …

  Dross fell to the dirt like a dead man, his heart fluttering in his chest.

  He failed. The leagues were too many, and his body too worn.

  Earth and dust coated his mouth, and the weight of loss crashed over him.

  They had chosen wrong. Bronn could have done it. Yan could have done it. Even fucking Julis could have done it. Why him? Why pick him? He’d failed. For nothing.

  Over and over, he saw their parting looks — before they had walked face-first to their deaths.

  Too strung out to cling to any semblance of conscious wakefulness, Dross mumbled in the dirt. His world was reduced to a small section of yellowed grass pressed close to his face as his breath came in shallow gasps.

  He heard it pounding. It could have been feet or his heart.

  “By our blighted lands, is that fucking Dross?”

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Something rolled him onto his back. The light was blinding.

  “By the gods it is. What the fuck happened to him?! Where are the others?”

  He heard the meaty sound of a hand striking flesh.

  “Fucking look at him, man, and don't ask questions you don't want to know the answer to. Come. Call in the others. Whatever did this is too much for Iron to handle, and we need to get him back to the city.”

  Something hoisted him up; he couldn't tell what. They still held his weight easy.

  “Fuck. He's delirious. Do you think that Yas will be able to keep him stable with her skill?”

  “How the fuck should I know, man? He's bloody Silver!”

  “Goat’s piss, we best hurry.”

  …

  Ro gnawed at her lip, a curdled weight in her gut. She couldn't focus on this bloody paperwork. Someone was playing haywire with her instincts, had been ever since that morning. There was no rhyme or reason to it, but she'd learned to trust that feeling many years ago. Something, somewhere, had gone wrong, and the gods had seen fit to make it her problem.

  It was, perhaps, the most infuriating sensation of all. Her two best teams were out on jobs — dangerous jobs.

  Letting out an explosive breath, she slammed the ream of paper in front of her to the side. No way in all the hells she'd be able to process reports on tax intake and job payouts now.

  It was almost a relief when the hammering fist landed on her office door. There it was. Her gut was never wrong.

  “Ro! Ro!” Someone unfamiliar to her said with a panicked scream, “Ro!”

  Ramming upright, Ro inadvertently slammed her chair back, sending the flimsy pine thing into the wall so hard one leg shattered. Uncaring of the damage, she belted on her sword and had the door open in less than a second.

  Tall and panicked, an experienced Bronze delver looked at her with a shocked expression. Rak, she remembered — the man had no reason to be here. Whatever had happened, it was serious. She shoved the man back, keeping her hand on his shoulder so he didn't lose his footing.

  “Tell me on the way. Who's going for Rieker?”

  “I…”

  “Shattered Axle's man. Quickly!” she snapped.

  Rak blinked and nodded, before he turned and hurried away. Gods, the man was pale. What the fuck had happened?

  “It's Dross. An Iron team dragged him into the common room only a few moments ago. It's chaos in there. Just about every healer on hand is crowded around him. Man looks half dead. I heard one of the healers say something about Stamina burn and exhaustion.”

  Fuck. Had the man run here all the way from Strangspine? He was lucky to be alive. This was bad.

  “And the others? Bronwyn, Yanira, and Julis?”

  She only saw Rak silently shake his head.

  Piss on the gods!

  Ro hardened her heart, blocking away the pain of familiar loss. She moved. They were in the common room. There was no point waiting.

  Inscribed boards flexed underfoot as she threw everything she had into a sudden forwards leap. Rak stumbled and fell to the side as she shot down the hall. Moments before she hit the far wall, she kicked off again, her boot squealing for traction.

  Three more turns and she was there. She couldn't see him. Four dozen delvers crowded around the table. Waves of Life, Water, Nature, Solar and Holy magic streamed from their centre — triage.

  A little pointless, a potion appeared in her hand. Hard to acquire, but worth it for Dross. She didn't slow down, only went high, stretching out into a dive as she sailed over the crowd's heads.

  Dross was in her arms and she was out again before the first gasps had even left the crowd's lips.

  One look was enough. Dross looked skeletal, his cheeks sunken in like he'd been hollowed out from the inside. The bastard must have stripped his body of every gram of fat to stay alive. The fool. He was lucky his heart hadn’t shut down.

  Ripping through the Guild hall, she tore up the stairs. Rieker was halfway up, an axe in hand as he tore his way down. She met his eyes, slipping to the side. She grabbed Rieker's hand and used her momentum to yank him after her. A turn on the third floor took them to the medical bay. It was empty. The enchantments laid in the place would help keep Dross stable.

  Nestling Dross into the closest cot, she upended the tonic in her hand down his throat. It was exactly what he needed. With her focus on speed, she always kept a supply of revitalisation tonics for this very purpose. Forcing your body to the limit when it was out of Stamina and low on Health could be disastrous. It needed that natural magic to fuel and endure what the body could not otherwise. Stats helped, but dross would be more like her — more weighted towards Dexterity and Strength than Constitution and Vitality. Too much power, not enough endurance. Not without Stamina.

  “What the fuck happened to him?”

  “Don't know.”

  “Where are the others?”

  “Don't know.”

  “Fuck,” Rieker growled.

  Ro only heard a breath as Dross let out a desperate gasp, his eyes snapping open like he'd been kicked by a mule. She knew from experience that that tonic certainly felt like it.

  “I… what?” Dross mumbled, looking at her with glassy eyes. “Ro? Rieker?” he questioned, still dazed.

  She crouched down, laying her hand on his shoulder. “Dross. You’re in the Guild hall — an Iron team found you a few hours from the city. I know that you're injured and that you are hurting. But I must be callous — what happened?”

  Even if he'd lost his team, Dross was too seasoned to push himself like that all the way from Strangspine unless he absolutely had to.

  The weathered lines of desperation that appeared on Dross's face told her she was right.

  “I… they're gone, Ro,” Dross choked out, tears welling in his eyes. “They're gone, and it's coming, and there was nothing I could do.”

  Ro forced herself to breathe. The man was wrecked in more ways than one. Getting frustrated wouldn't help anyone.

  “What's coming, Dross?” Rieker said in a heavy basso, drawing the ranger’s wild eyes.

  “A bloody tyrant. And it's bringing all of them. A gods-damned army of beasts.”

  Ro met Rieker's eyes.

  Fuck. Did her gut always have to be right?

  “I'll get Hanrick. We need a war council and he's the only one who can seal the city.”

  Ro nodded. “I'll stay with Dross, get him comfortable and learn what I can.”

  Rieker was gone a moment later, reaching for the medallion on his belt that granted him authority as Guildmaster. He'd be recalling everyone — from the newly rising to the old and seasoned. She hoped it was fast enough to save those roaming out west. They were lucky — the alert might be able to save some of the outlying villages. Somehow she doubted it. War had come, and death with it. The only question was how many would be lost.

  She hated war. So much senseless destruction.

  Wetting a cloth from a nearby basin, Ro gently placed it over Dross's forehead as he openly wept. Gods' blood, she'd always known she'd lose more, but did it really have to be Bron and the others?

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