CALEN

  The upstairs section of the barracks was absolutely trashed.

  Rain pattered down through a narrow rift in the sloped ceiling, and splattered down the less-protected remnants of the tower steps. Calen could see that because the inner wall of the tower was currently scattered all over the floor, having crushed furniture and floorboards alike when it toppled.

  The damage the monsters had done to the building was not what worried Calen.

  Judging by the splintered wood around some of the trunks that had been locked, someone had also very obviously meticulously searched every square inch of storage space. Pieces of clothing, blankets, tools, wooden carvings that were very obviously knickknacks of personal importance, and spare weapons were all strewn about the space carelessly.

  And there were only so many suspects who would have performed that kind of systematic search of people's private—

  There was a person glaring at Calen and Emma. Dressed in a different uniform than Mirri, leveling a battered spear at them from across the destroyed space.

  Mirri pushed past Calen roughly where he had frozen at the top of the steps.

  "Sutai! What did you do?" She demanded.

  Emma let out the breath they had both been holding while Calen steered them out of the way, towards an open window in a space mostly bereft of debris. He wanted the view outside, and the potential escape route.

  Being stuck in a tiny stone room with someone like Mirri pulling a weapon had given him a newfound appreciation for the value of personal space.

  Sitting on the windowsill also let him rest the leg, which had started to complain strenuously around halfway up the steps.

  "What? You told me to clear the upstairs, I cleared upstairs like a good priestess. Those knights had already gotten to some of it," The tan-scaled dragonborn turned away to address Mirri flippantly. "And it's a monster nest. Did you want me to leave space un-checked for hatchlings? You clearly found some of your own down there."

  Calen found himself on the receiving end of a dismissive glance. Barely looking at Emma, Sutai's eyes practically slid over him, only pausing on his hands before locking back onto Mirri.

  "I didn't realize the tribes fielded their nobility unarmored. Or fed them that poorly."

  Mirri seemed almost as irked as Calen was at the comment.

  He decided to let them work it out, examining his surroundings instead of picking a fight with an armed stranger. Some of the noises outside were interesting, but he didn't want to turn his back on anyone in the room quite yet.

  On further inspection, Calen realized that every bunk that hadn't been crushed by massive stone bricks had been stripped of its blankets, and the straw-stuffed mattresses turned out of the frames as well.

  Emma had taken way too long upstairs, barely returning before the human knights had smashed open the door, but not long enough to do all of that. She was probably only responsible for some of the mess.

  "They're Arrivals, not prisoners. And you didn't need to turn out the beds," Mirri corrected Sutai. "Quiet about the nobility part, we're keeping them separate from the Bessos men for a reason."

  Calen kicked Emma lightly in the calf when she opened her mouth to take responsibility, and got the first half of a scowl for his trouble. He mouthed the word 'priorities' at her.

  They were already expensive human prisoners chewing through healing potions. Or, not-prisoners, if he could believe what Mirri was saying. If the stakes were life and death right now, the more of the mess they could blame on the monsters, the better.

  "Nobility?" Calen blurted out as his mind caught up to the idea of not being prisoners. "We're not—"

  "Save it, little rabbit," Sutai chirped across the room. "Even if I couldn't see your channels from here, I can see your teeth when you speak, lined up straight like centurions on watch and shining like lightstones."

  Calen had no idea what 'channels' were, but Mirri was nodding along.

  "You talked about knowing how to speak another language with Sister Emma," She at least added a little more context to the mistake. "And your palms are soft. Even if the minder downstairs wasn't privileged enough to match your investments, you two had access to mana, specialized tools, and education on your home planet."

  Calen's mouth closed with a click, unsure of how to get around the cultural gap on display. They were only even wrong about the mana part, but convincing these people that they weren't important seemed like a good way to get left behind anyway.

  Mirri might even regret forking over the potion he could feel prickling its way through his system.

  "What's a channel? Home planet? So this isn't Earth?" Emma took up the slack with a barrage of mostly-coherent questions. "How do you know we're not from— never mind, can we get back? Will you send us home?"

  "Because you're too light." Mirri started to answer... none of the questions, as far as Calen could tell, but she fell silent when a third dragonborn joined their discussion from the stairs.

  "I suspect you don't want to go back to Earth, even if that were possible. Five billion souls are seldom snuffed on a whim, or without turmoil in the aftermath."

  The implications of that number hit Calen in the chest like a sledgehammer. The big maroon behemoth with all the shiny metal strapped to them was back, bobbing into view up the steps. Even without a ceiling crowding close, they still looked too big for the room.

  Time seemed to slow as the Venatrix drew closer with exaggerated delay in their stride, silvery boots, somehow bereft of mud, clacking over the wooden floorboards.

  The space next to Calen felt emptier as Emma shrank back. Calen stood off the windowsill and caught her by the too-tight sleeve as surreptitiously as he could. Which wasn't very.

  "Calm, Sister Emma. These are the strange ones?" The Venatrix asked Mirri, who nodded.

  Emma stayed frozen as the wall next to Calen was used as an impromptu spear rack for a shaft of metal he likely couldn't have lifted with both hands, much less swung around. He had had enough trouble with the wooden one that had disappeared from where he had thrown it to the floor earlier.

  Not that he was going to begrudge Sutai her new weapon. The battered-looking spear thrown in a corner looked like something Calen would have replaced at first opportunity too.

  Hopefully that meant nobody was going to be mad about the missing 'medical supplies' Emma had 'borrowed.'

  "I trust neither of the Sisters here have mistreated either of you?" Mahira's voice cut through Calen's distraction with deliberate slowness.

  "She's my literal sister, not like, a nun or a priestess or whatever you all are," Calen corrected a misunderstanding he could see coming, before his mouth ran away from him. "We're twins. And Mirri fixed it, after we fought. We didn't know she was people, for a few seconds. The uh... whoever was dead downstairs got here first and tried to eat us, so we were a little jumpy at the sight of scales. Are, a little jumpy. But you're not eating us, right?"

  The Venatrix seemed almost amused by the time he finished asking. Almost. Calen didn't quite trust his read on her body language.

  "I had personal potions with me, Venatrix Mahira," Mirri cut in before Calen could babble too much, straightening her stance and lifting her chin where she stood. "They wouldn't have been able to run otherwise."

  Mirri was speaking at an absolutely glacial pace, and the Venatrix was certainly taking her time nodding her approval, before turning back to Calen.

  Maybe they were making sure Calen and Emma had time to hear them on purpose, and avoiding sudden movements. The one that had broken down the door certainly hadn't spoken or moved this slowly.

  "No, we're not letting anyone eat you," Mahira said firmly. "And you don't need to surge the mana through your entire head to hear me, just your ears."

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  Calen checked, and found himself doing just that. The rest of Mahira's words seemed to tumble out at speed, once he corrected the imbalance.

  "We'll have to do the rest of the welcoming words later. Sariel will be retreating soon, and we need to be gone from here before the horde regroups, if you want me to keep that first promise."

  "Not being eaten sounds great," Calen said carefully. "Which one is Sariel, and how are we getting out of here?"

  Mahira stretched a claw out to point at the horizon through the window.

  "That one is Sariel, and it depends on what Dovin can convince the local tribesmen to go along with," She said. "We have this time to watch the show or ask questions until the Seraph invokes the Twilight Accords, and then things will begin moving very quickly."

  Calen almost asked what a Seraph was, and then he saw it.

  He almost thought it was a drone, all shiny silver and skimming fast between the treetops, but nothing that size had the power reserves to be throwing superheated balls of plasma into the foliage.

  Seeing the wings flap as Sariel banked and threw out a few more bolts of shining light made the shape make sense, and gave Calen a dozen more questions about how the Seraph could even flit around like that in the first place, so covered in metal.

  He ignored them all, mouth agape, to watch the silvery humanoid figure not-quite-singlehandedly turn the treeline into a charnel pit without ever touching the ground.

  The giant, three-headed viper wasn't so much helping as thrashing around and contributing by accident, every lunge for the darting silver menace snapping on air. There seemed to be a third participant in the fight, carving pieces off the snake and drawing shrieks every time the monster committed to a motion and missed.

  Sariel seemed to be actively avoiding harming the monster to focus their fire at the people scampering for cover, and at the third fighter when they had the chance. The overlarge figure seemed to be a harder target than the rest of the scampering silhouettes. Even as Calen watched, one of the crackling balls of plasma burst backwards and sent the Seraph diving away from the consequences of their actions.

  His breath hitched when the viper used the opportunity to snap its jaws around the silvery figure, and he heard Mirri do the same next to him.

  When the entire head of the snake burst in a shower of gore and light, revealing the Seraph, whole and seemingly unaffected, the entire cluster of people who had crept up to the window behind him seemed to let out a breath.

  "I swear it's always a few slivers of a second slower on purpose," Mahira muttered. "Gets me every time."

  "What about the acid?" Emma whispered beside Calen. "The little ones had acid blood."

  She then winced as Mahira cursed.

  "You're right," Mahira said. "I suspect we just lost some of our time."

  A barrage of slung stones struck the Seraph, and this time Calen saw them flinch, even wobbling in the air.

  The air rippled oddly, causing the hairs on Calen's arms to stand up, and then the beam of light sprouted from the Seraph's outstretched arm, lancing through the trees with a crackle. The Hydra lost a second head, cauterized same as the first, while the third dove for shelter, and the beam began to reflect, swinging wide out of the trees at a sharp angle to sweep across the horizon. Steam billowed as the laser went hissing through the rain, angling steadily towards the tower until the refracted light disappeared just as suddenly as it had begun.

  Sariel had landed after cutting off the laser, and was taking steady, wing-assisted bounds up the ridge. They were slinging the occasional bolt of plasma, but otherwise leaving the scaly fighters in the woods to regroup around the thrashing monster.

  Calen could see large circles of the soaked grass beneath the Seraph's feet wither and brown, excess heat baking the ground dry every time the Seraph landed to throw another projectile.

  "So that's... someone on our side?" Calen asked. "And the people out in the woods right now, they eat people?"

  The Venatrix hummed agreeably. Calen hoped that was agreeable. Tone seemed to translate better when he kept the flow of mana between his ears and brain denser, the way Mirri and Sutai were doing it.

  "Mahira," A gravelly voice rasped from the stairwell. "We no longer have time for this little game of yours. The tribesmen are in poor condition for a real fight. How are my people getting out?"

  Riveting as the scene outside was, hearing Emma's sharp intake of breath and feeling her heels snap together, bringing her ramrod-straight beside him, pulled Calen's attention away from the spectacle and towards the newcomer.

  They were at least wearing the same uniform colors as Mirri, but that was where the similarities ended.

  "With Sariel, if they bother chasing you. They're after me, so they'll split forces when we cross the pass," The Venatrix sounded certain. "It'll buy us time for Isha's arrival."

  Examining the golden-scaled interloper for wings, Calen instead noted a shorter skirt hanging below their armor and a thicker tail, along with wider feet and flatter, shorter claws. No one else panicked or went for a weapon, so he stepped on Emma's foot when she flinched back.

  Apparently the gray-scaled corpse downstairs was also a dragonborn, but they were just a male, not some other species of lizard-person.

  Outward-curving horns swiveled towards him, and he decided to save questions about sexual dimorphism for a time when they weren't about to die. And for someone carrying fewer than four knives strapped to their chest. Zero was his ideal number, actually.

  "This is a shit plan. What can those two do?" The dragonborn who was probably Dovin asked. "The boy, I suppose, if the girl's a null even with all that power in her."

  "A what?" Emma bristled, forgetting her fear the moment her ability to fight was called into question.

  Calen winced.

  "You don't have—"

  Probably-Dovin's eyes narrowed, looking at Emma. Calen squinted his own, but didn't see any of the tell-tale signs of mana buzzing around the golden-scaled dragonborn's eyes. He wasn't looking at her mana, he was suspicious of something.

  "Take your hands back out of your pockets," He drawled out exaggeratedly, then glanced at Calen. "And stop doing that, you're not in a fight. It's dangerous."

  "Stop doing wha— oh."

  Dovin's hand was creeping up to tap at the side of his own skull, almost in slow motion. Calen cut the flow of mana to his head down to just his ears again, and heard Dovin rap a flat, pointed nail on his own head rapidly.

  "And train yourself out of squinting. I'm a gold, you can't see where I'm surging anyway," Dovin continued at a normal pace. "At least we know you're actually Arrivals, if you don't know about the bloodlines. Don't tell me someone dumped all that power into you two and you're reflexive casters. What did Earth know about mana?"

  'Toggling' the flow of mana through his brain stem caused Dovin's voice to warble and stretch in Calen's ears, dragging the words longer the more mana he shoved through his own head. The question at the end snapped him back to attention, mind scrambling to organize what he had discovered and maybe maintain the illusion that—

  "Nothing," Emma said, before Calen could come up with a convincing enough half-truth. "Magic wasn't real on Earth. We knew nothing. Yesterday the world ended, and we fell in a river here instead of dying, and we just wanted to not freeze to death or die painfully, so now Calen can turn on the heat and I can break these things."

  She was holding up one of the stolen leather patches with her hands, presenting the ragged-looking arts and crafts project that had saved Calen's life to the now-quiet room.

  "That's impossible," Mirri spoke first. "He has channels. Minor ones, single-element, well-threaded, not some overwhelming mess. That doesn't happen without understanding and intent. He knows what combustion is, how it works, and he kept his primary channels near-perfectly clean."

  She sounded almost accusatory, by the end, holding up the back of her own scaly hand. Calen could see similar orange lines in his manasight, but hers were much thicker, fed through her wrists as well, and seemed almost intentionally patterned through her fingers up to the claws.

  She also scowled at him when he leaned forwards for a closer look, pulling the hand away and crossing her arms to keep it hidden.

  Apparently only Calen and Emma were up for examination.

  The Venatrix seemed unconvinced, stepping forwards and waving Dovin away when Emma cringed away from him. Calen made to step between them, but stopped himself when Mahira simply knelt, and held one of her own palms out. Even diminished, the Venatrix was only eye level with Calen's sister, but made no demands.

  She was waiting patiently for Emma to finish panicking and make the first move.

  Calen nodded slightly when Emma's darting eyes finally found him. It was better to know what these people thought, while they still had the chance to ask. She reached out a few endless breaths later, and the thick-scaled ridges above Mahira's eyes furrowed for a moment before climbing rapidly.

  "She has channels too, they're just hidden under a significant durability curve. Fading from my sight as we speak, she's more injured than we thought if that potion is having this much of an effect on her balance," Mahira muttered to Emma's hands. "The channels are less restrained than his, she committed much of herself, but... lower those, out of the window."

  The Venatrix returned Emma's hands and let her hide them again.

  "Keep them hidden from other people for now. You're fine, you just look like a well-apprenticed artisan with room to grow." She added towards Calen, when he stuck his own hands in his pockets.

  Which told him absolutely nothing about why Emma's hands were so interesting. He fought the scowl poorly, until his hand found the brass disk in his pocket again.

  Dovin tilted his head oddly, and stretched an arm out to open the shutter at the top of the stairs where he had retreated. Calen saw another tower framed in the gap, almost identical to the one they were on, across the pass, atop its own sloping cliffside.

  "Did you say river?" Dovin seemed almost exasperated, when he turned back to look at Emma. "Right when you landed? Were the banks swelling?"

  She nodded mutely beside Calen.

  Dovin sighed and closed his eyes.

  "We'll talk more at Eastwatch, if you make it there." He said, turning away. "Mahira, this is your show until then, and you can work out the consequences with Isha. I'm getting the Wards and the Bessos men out of here before we run out of time."

  Calen and Emma shared a nervous glance, realizing they hadn't told anyone their last names. Dovin seemed uninterested when they failed to follow him, and no one else was looking at them or trying to usher them out of the room.

  The golden-scaled dragonborn paused at the top of the stairs with one last request.

  "Mirri, if you can convince your cousin to stop tempting the gods, I would appreciate it."

  "He doesn't do it on purpose, he's just a bit den— I'll try." Mirri switched tacks midsentence when Dovin actually turned away from the stairs to face her.

  "Can someone please tell us what any of that means?" Calen reached the end of his patience. "How are we getting out of here without getting eaten if we're not going with them?"

  "Cover your ears and stop listening, we'll explain in a moment," Mahira said bluntly. "You'll hear the Seraph anyway, but it will hurt in a dangerous way if you're surging your head when Sariel invokes the Accords."

  Calen had his mouth half-open to retort when Sariel crashed, straight-legged, into the soggy charcoal remnants of the bonfire outside. He saw at least half of the milling figures in the courtyard following Mahira's advice, and changed his mind about arguing for more information.

  The Seraph strode out of the wreckage with flecks of ash and droplets of rain sloughing off their shining silver carapace like magic, and spoke.

  The incomprehensibly ringing declaration still assaulted Calen's skull brutally enough that he flinched, and when the blaring ringing stretched, forcefully cut the flow of mana to his head.

  The almost-rhythmic noise ended quickly after that, but his fingertips still came away from his ears brushed lightly with red.

  predates written language, and is thus hard to trace to a precise year. Around the third Millenium B.C.E., ruling families emerged, exercising power via their control of previously communal temples that served as bureaucratic and social centers of trade.