Fires, echoes of guns and powder, had erupted in the bastion.

  Screams—thin, cracked, old, young—rose against it, a twisted harmony none of us had been born to hear. The same men who moments ago danced toward hope now scattered like cattle before a storm, pushing, shoving, clawing for space as if the earth itself had turned hostile beneath their boots.

  The Natives’ rhythm did not falter. Their shouts, their ululations—whatever rites they followed—only grew louder. A sound without translation, yet carried with conviction enough to shake the spine. Holy to them, and alien to us.

  I clamped my hands to my ears. The screams of my own countrymen, the tortured howls of the Touched turning again, the harsh reports of rifles firing at shadows—all of it crashed together. A single, crushing din. And through it, the giants’ thundered cries rose like pillars.

  Too many fronts.

  Too many things broken at once.

  More of those lank, olive beings lunged forward. They heeded nothing—neither our cries nor our lamnentations—only that unseen point beyond the walls. Their eyes were fixed, unblinking, drawn to a purpose I had not yet grasped.

  One vaulted the parapet in a single bound. Another followed. Then another. Their passage over the stone mimicked their ambassador—no hesitation, no fear—only an urgency so absolute that nothing in this world could bar their path.

  Whatever lay inside the bastion eclipsed all concern for what stood outside.

  I still held my ears against the cacophony—the breaking voices of men, the war-chant of giants, the gunfire slapping against stone—when another sound cut through it.

  A rasp.

  Thin at first. Then rising.

  Sharpening.

  Splitting every other noise as if they were straw.

  A laugh.

  If laughter can be forged of sin, then this was its steel. Each syllable scraped like a blade dragged across bone. A voice twisted beyond its own anatomy, speaking in a cadence too close to our tongue to dismiss, and too ruined to endure.

  It babbled—wet, broken, filled with hate—something born of us, yet stretched far past the likeness of man.

  I ran. I had to. Something in me—call it spirit, call it terror—dragged me forward. Better to die seeing than to live blind while the last scrap of hope was drowned behind stone and screams.

  Women still crowned in flowers stumbled in my path, their garlands wilted, their joy trampled with them. Old men and the infirm lay scattered across the ground, dressed in their meagre finery, toppled by panic or felled by the crush of bodies fleeing either way. Soldiers knelt in their rigid reload—ramrod, powder, flint—performing the old ceremony with hands that shook, their eyes locked wide on the abyss swallowing the Platz. Smoke billowed from corners without warning, without pattern.

  The babbling rose again.

  More of it.

  More blasphemy.

  Words that scraped the air raw, like a child’s laughter bent into something obscene and hungry, a parody of speech that hated even the breath it used to form itself.

  As I pushed past all those wiser—or simply luckier—than I, I saw it.

  I saw them.

  The horrors our poor wretches had been twisted into.

  I saw the spawn of the One Bellow, Lord of the Damned.

  They rose above the crowd in broken silhouettes—clad in scraps of fur, barbs of bone, grins too wide, full of teeth that had no place in a human jaw. Their eyes accused, glared, burned. Fire and bile streamed from their mouths, and from the punctured holes torn through their bodies by guns and crossbow bolts.

  Dead and dying bodies littered the court.

  Fires burned—not true flame, but colours that etched: blue, green, red, black. They didn’t consume what they touched—they carved through it, searing shapes into wood and flesh alike.

  Swollen corpses sprawled beside parts of men that no longer looked like parts of anything. Screams cut through it all—terror, agony, madness. The sound alone turned my stomach, made the air tilt, made the ground feel unsteady beneath my feet.

  I wanted to close my eyes, cover my face, blot it all out with my hands until darkness swallowed the sight.

  But I knew—sights like this would pierce any eyelid, any hand, any mind that tried to shut them out.

  Like a nightmare that refuses to fade when waking comes—this would never leave.

  Another scream tore through it all.

  Higher. Frailer.

  Yet filled with such agony it seemed to break straight through my ribs.

  I felt it—sharp as glass in the lungs, clean in a way suffering should never be. It split me open as if the voice itself refused to bear its torment alone.

  As that cry rose above every other horror, the Natives answered in kind—a roar, matching pitch and pain, carrying anger and defiance tangled together. A roar of equal pain, equal measure, tinted with anger and defiance both.

  I pushed into the Platz as far as courage allowed—stumbling, catching myself against shattered stone, slipping past bodies that choked the entrance. The crowds pressed and heaved; some suffocated against the crush, others fled blindly. I skirted the dissolving fires, the colours that etched rather than burned, the dark smoke rolling low over the ground.

  The defenders had turned inward now—rifles aimed not at the ridge beyond but at the twisting shapes among us, powder flashing, shot vanishing into chaos. The air reeked of sulphur and fear, and every step felt borrowed from death.

  “Fire!” a voice cracked—raw, terrified, commanding by instinct alone.

  Dozens of rifles answered at once.

  The volley struck one of the monstrosities full in its warped chest. The thing staggered, convulsed, then collapsed in a heap of limbs and bile.

  More of the devils howled. Their voices twisted into curses no ear should bear, a language scraped from the underside of creation itself. Then they belched their fire—those impossible colours—onto anything that moved.

  Mothers clutching their children.

  Old veterans of the Holy War, proud in their best gear.

  Smiths with their aprons still on.

  Carpenters, merchants, every trade and calling.

  None were spared that fire.

  None were spared the spinning, mind-crushing torment that followed it—pain that ignored flesh, heat that ignored reason, flame that obeyed no law of God or man.

  Yet through the screams—through the gunshots and the blasphemous babble of the Devils—another sound broke.

  The thunder of Native strides.

  Their immense legs hammered the earth in long, rolling beats. Their treelike spears struck stone, parapet, wall—each hit a drumbeat of inevitability. The ground shook beneath them.

  They were closing in now.

  On what mission, toward what prey—or in whose defense—I did not know.

  A devil rose to meet one of them—high on the watchtower where the Touched had been held, it stood against the vast shadow that now climbed toward it. Its flames hissed, its jaws split wide, its limbs contorted in challenge.

  The being of the land heeded none of it.

  In a single stride it reached the tower’s height. One long leg planted on stone, the next step carried it level with the misshapen beast. No hesitation. No pause.

  It reached out with one hand—long, thin, sinewed like stretched rope—and wrapped its fingers around the devil’s torso.

  And crushed.

  Bone, fire, bile—whatever made up that warped thing—gave way with a noise like wet timber under a saw. The Native’s grip squeezed the creature into pulp, its burning form collapsing inward, snuffed like a coal under a boot.

  The Native’s size had never suggested such force. They were tall, yes. Thick-limbed, yes. But not built for that kind of ruin. Yet there it was, as plain and undeniable as every horror I had already been forced to witness.

  Had they turned that strength on us, we would be butchered to the last man.

  There would be no defense.

  No strategy.

  No salvation.

  But they hadn’t.

  They treated us as friends—shielded us, sought us—while the intruders, our own twisted and cursed, were treated as vermin to be stamped out.

  Or as mere obstacles to their true path.

  For as the olive giant marched on—crushing its foe without pause—its gaze was fixed elsewhere.

  It never looked at the thing it killed.

  Its eyes were set toward the source of that shrill, breaking cry—the sound of a child being undone.

  I had heard it too. Even after all I had witnessed, it had nearly finished me.

  Another devil lurched up to meet them. Its body already leaking from a dozen wounds, bile and fire dripping from rents in its flesh. Yet it rose again, snarling, spitting its twisted curse at the oncoming Native.

  It stood no chance.

  The Native’s tree-spear moved with a precision no creature of that bulk should possess. A single thrust—clean, brutal—drove straight through the devil’s chest and hammered it down into the earth.

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  For a moment the thing hung there, pinned upright like an offering.

  Then the spear struck deeper.

  The devil sank halfway into the softened earth of the Platz, its body collapsing around the shaft, boiling bile pouring into the dirt as it died.

  Roars came rolling from the hills beyond—eager, angry, triumphant, all at once.

  Too many tones.

  Too many meanings.

  Voices stretched far beyond what human ears were made to grasp.

  It clashed with everything in me—what I saw, what I smelled, the screams, the dying, the fires etching the ground. And yet those voices on the ridge… they rose like celebration. As if our outward-bound guardians rejoiced at the killing before them.

  It did not fit.

  Nothing fit.

  As the fires before me sank into embers—

  as the corpses of men and women under my care smouldered—

  I saw fit to leap.

  To follow the giants’ path.

  To see what called them.

  What made them leap, stride, kill with such ease, and with so little care for anything but that one destination.

  In my stride, I found Grave.

  Still clad only in his finery—no sword, no pistol—he stood amid the ruin and directed fire toward the last twisted forms clinging to the holding tower. His clothes were soaked in soot, his face marked black with bile-smoke and roasted flesh, carved into a mask of defiant fury.

  He pointed. The men answered.

  Rifles rose. Barrels spat smoke and fire.

  A devil erupted under the volley—drilled men tearing apart a thing no drill had prepared them for.

  But still—

  above powder, above flame, above the roaring giants—

  the shrill cries of a single soul in agony rose over all.

  That cry. That singular anguish.

  It pulled me in, held me fast. For a breath, I no longer saw the carnage around me—only that voice. Nothing else existed. Nothing else mattered.

  I didn’t even feel the arm that seized me until it wrenched me backward—hard enough to break the spell outright.

  Grave.

  He had left his post, crossed the chaos, and taken me himself. His face was a grotesque mask of soot and fury, fire burning behind the blackened lines.

  His calloused hand clamped on my neckcloth and dragged me close, choking the trance out of me.

  “YOU!” he rasped—hot breath, twisted brows, beard streaked with ash. A man stripped to the wire.

  “Have you come to witness your making? Do you see the people bleed? Do you hear the cries?!”

  The cry answered him—still rising, still shaking the air, perched on some edge none of us could see.

  Another foul thunder—

  a volley fired without order—

  tore loose behind us. The shots cracked like splintering bone. Grave held me too tight to see the creature fall, but I caught the flash as its ruined form spilled fire in its death-throes.

  “I came as I hold responsibility for this massacre!” I forced out—the first words I’d managed since the world tore open—my voice thin, breaking under the strain.

  “I came for the cry!”

  And then—as if summoned by our very breath—the shriek tore upward into a new pitch of agony.

  Clear now. Undeniable.

  A child.

  Young—too young for any guess beyond that.

  A young voice being pulled apart.

  The Natives answered at once. Their roar rose higher, shaking their heads in a grim, shared rhythm with the scream. The whole hill responded—one living mass, united in pain and in purpose.

  Grave released me as that unison cry rolled through the field. He turned, searching for the next shift in the battle—where the weight of the world was tilting.

  A shimmer.

  A light.

  There—on the tower.

  Among the devils, the fallen, the broken remains of those who once guarded it when they were only poor outcasts—something was gathering. A force, small yet fierce, swelling amid blood, fire, and ruin.

  And the Natives were converging on it.

  Only two devils remained now. Olive giants and the powder of men had culled the rest. Our earlier ambassador—the one who had greeted us with that broad, unsettling smile at the gate—was hauling himself up the tower’s side, gripping rope and stone with enormous hands.

  At the top, a devil waited. Even pierced through with holes, leaking foul smoke and spittle, it stood ready. It spat fire—searing the ropes, burning the wood from under our ally’s grip, showering him with flecks of etching flame.

  The giant reacted by instinct.

  A hand shot out. It grabbed the devil by the legs and reached.

  In one pull, the beast was wrenched free—nothing more than a ragged doll in the hands of a furious child. It was slammed into stone, into shattered beams, into sharpened debris without pause or care.

  It took mere seconds for its body to collapse into something like a torn pelt—its structure gone, purpose gone—and I presumed it dead.

  And then, as the devil’s form was finally released to its undignified end on the ground;

  A bell tolled.

  That tone. I had learned to abhor it. The rhythm of the world turning again, turning wrong, turning without my leave.

  Sul’s bell.

  I had not seen him since the first screams. Had not glimpsed what path he took through this abominable reckoning. But he had found his bell, and it sang yet again.

  A single strike, and a hymn followed—a sound from his chest older than scripture, older than any tongue we kept alive. The Giants answered at once. Their heads snapped toward the tower, toward the cry, toward him.

  I still did not see Sul.

  But I saw Issak.

  He pushed through the survivors, the soot-covered, the terrified. A wall of a man forcing his way step by step through rain and spatter—through the filth and bile dripping from the tower above. Fire-blood hissed on the earth around him, and he did not pause.

  Issak made straight for the scaffolding.

  Straight for the tower.

  Straight for the cry that tore the air apart.

  The last devil steadied itself—ragged, leaking, ruined, but still poised to kill.

  And now it faced two fronts:

  An unstoppable force rising to meet it, olive-limbed and silent as judgment.

  And another—Issak—thundering up the stairs, every step a promise of war.

  The creature had no bile left. Its throat gurgled dry. So it relied on mass and malice instead—lifting its claws, hissing out a curse in that foul tongue no sane ear should ever suffer again.

  Issak closed the last of the distance.

  He reached—one arm sweeping forward, fingers clamping down like a smith’s vise. A shoulder and half an arm vanished in his grip. The devil buckled beneath the pressure, twisted by the sheer inevitability of it.

  His other hand rose.

  A single blow, nothing fancy, barely measured—the full weight of a Blemmye brought to bear.

  It crashed into the devil’s face.

  Bone and cartilage buckled inward. But it was the sudden, violent jerk of its neck—the way spine met force and lost—that killed it.

  Dead before pain could register.

  Issak let the body fall.

  Already, he looked beyond it.

  The bell tolled again, loud as sin, from somewhere near.

  I saw him then, Sul. Gripping again that improvisory instrument of faith, a chain and bell, and rang. Rhythmic, otherworldly, as the first time it had been rung.

  His eyes were fixed on that peculiar light at the tower, wide as plates, mouth agape in a motion that revealed that even he was uncertain. The glow jittered across his features, catching the wet at the corners of his mouth, the strain in his throat, the slight tremble in the hand that held the chain. Maybe, he did not even know why he rang.

  I moved to him, gripped him by that marble-shoulder, and called out, “What are we converging on? What force is this, Sul?”

  “A change, Allemand. One, that has not yet turned fetid.” His gaze faltered further, the bell’s weight dragging the chain low, its metal clinking against his knuckles. “Or, that is my inclination.”

  The olive-giant on the tower’s top had stopped its hunt. Its goal had been reached. It cried out—long, sharp, a call torn from some deep chamber of the earth—seeking its kin. And it was answered. Issak stood beside it, both of them framed in the ruin’s glow.

  This was the time.

  I ran.

  Putrid bile and festering flame. Blood of human make and blood of whatever else had crawled into this place. Charred wood, shattered stone, all of it marked the innocence trampled underfoot. The parade of peace crushed to pulp.

  I forced myself through it—past men-at-arms beating fire from the backs of their brethren; fathers clutching children torn open by the stampede; musketeers reloading in stiff, frantic motions, not knowing if they loaded to greet another devil or to track where the Natives would strike next.

  I panted. Sweat stung my eyes. My lungs scraped dry against the fumes. Smoke curled in colours that warned of poison long before they burned.

  At the top—carnage.

  The poor, changed wretches lay broken, reduced to pulp and splinter. blood, bone, and ruin—felled with a precision no sane world should ever have allowed.

  And on the ground, between Issak and the olive-ambassador:

  A child.

  Shrieking, consumed by holy agony.

  She was shaking—violent, urgent. Not like she moved on her own, but as if she were a ragdoll gripped by an enraged child and rattled without pause.

  A faint glow, a white light, enveloped her.

  Her face carried a pain no world had language for.

  The Native roared again, head thrown high, the sound pitched strange—raw, yes, but laced with something else. A brightness. A flare that did not fit the ruin around us. It sounded like joy.

  What joy the creature found in the tragedy before us, I could not fathom.

  When its form bent again toward the poor child at our feet, it confirmed every suspicion—

  that frightful grin, wide as my arm was long, stretched across its horned head.

  “A Chosen! A Chosen! Her strength guides her to God, and God will meet her!” it bellowed, its wheezing voice scraping against each syllable.

  The moment hung. Issak studied the girl with tear-filled eyes, his face folded with a sorrow and confusion that seemed to wrestle for the same place in him.

  He reached for the child.

  But the Native reached first.

  With a motion as careful as it was swift, the child vanished into its massive arms, its sight locked upon its prize.

  “Her struggle will be guided. Her transformation will be pure. So is the will of God,” it murmured, fighting through a language awkward to its tongue. A finger of immense proportions brushed the unseen child—slow, deliberate—while her pain still tore through the air. “God wants this. We will guide.”

  And with that, it retreated down the tower with impossible care, placing each step between the dead, the dying, the barely-standing. A short climb, a measured drop, and it was already over the wall—vanishing toward its kin once more.

  What, in God’s name, had befallen our world?

  In search for answers, I turned to Issak.

  He studied the Native with the same shock I must have worn, though something heavier worked behind his eyes. His tormented features revealed as much.

  “What was this? Issak, what happened to that child?”

  Issak did not face me as he spoke.

  “I do not know, Allemand. I do not know.”

  His gaze fell to his hands—one slick with blood, smeared in viscera.

  “But I was called. Something told me to help her.”

  A pause, thin as breath.

  “I was told she needed help.”

  The roar of giants punctuated his reckoning.

  They had their prize.