Winged as an eru, I flew above an ocean of smoke. All around clamored my brothers and sisters, each fashioned in their own shape, and all of us killers. Flashes of light like silvery minnows caught in the waves as the dying gave up life. My siblings dove into the waters to gulp up each soul.
The spirits of the dead walked through us, the hunter’s children, from the mortal world into the spirit world.
I saw everything: A man rides away from his comrades on a desperate errand although they urge him to turn back. My eru’s sight could not encompass the features by which a mortal person recognizes another: the flash of sweetness when he really smiled, the way his eyebrows rose when he was teasing me, the promise of his lips. I saw instead the fathomless well of a cold mage whose person is the conduit through which weave the energies that bind the worlds.
Vai.
Thunder jostled my sight, and I lost track of him. The current of battle swept me south. Camjiata had deployed his artillery parallel to the road. It pounded into the Roman columns caught marching at double time, trying to reach their Coalition allies. Every time the Romans tried to break out they were met with a fierce attack from the general’s Iberian Lion Guard or his Amazon Corps. The Kena’ani skirmishers with their white sashes had moved miles down the column to hit the hapless rear guard, which was cut off from the front by the lumbering baggage train.
So small rats were, seen from the height. Their lives of no moment, not truly. So much death churns through the world that we look the other way lest we be overwhelmed by its weight. But I was my sire’s daughter. I had no heart whose conscience burdened my wings.
Separated from its Coalition allies by the tide of the battle, the Invictus Legion retreated step-by-bloody-step south, hoping to meet and join up with its brother legions. However much I had disliked the legate, he held the ranks together under merciless fire. The remnant hunkered down at last within the walls of a lord’s estate.
Farther south an eagle standard went down amid screams of angry victory shouted by jubilant Iberians. Pressed by an unrelenting stream of cannonade, the Romans broke and ran, all but the Ironclad Legion. Under the command of an unflappable young tribune, it worked its way along the river and, in a meeting of grim embraces, joined up with the Invictus.
Twilight reached its fingers out of the east as a front of cold air. The current of the past hauled me into the tower room where I had stalked hours ago.
The first two men have no warning. I am no cold mage, to kill with merely a cut, so I slice their throats open to bleed them out. Cold steel has a sharpness that tastes like finest wine. The others realize they are trapped in the room with a monster. They try to fight, even the old mansa of Two Gourds House tries to draw cold magic to stop me, so I incapacitate him next. The officer puts up the worst struggle, for he is a canny and experienced man who does not want to die. The pulse of his ebbing heart’s blood booms in my ears.