*Weekly updates* "There are no leashes now, no bindings," she says, her voice a dark lullaby in the flickering candlelight, "and it is their sacrifice that gave us this. Nothing can ever repay it. No one can ever take it from us. So now, in this hal...
The horizon bleeds with two red suns when the Paragon walks out of her tent. She is clad in purple-red armor; the very same armor she had worn on her first foray into Quersido, when she came to meet the late Dynast, just a year ago. There is a preternatural glow to her face, and her eyes, the glittering dark voids of ruined stars, sweep the front lines, the scuttling men moving to and from.
"We are ready, Your Excellence," General Jin tells her, her twin her shadow behind her.
Allayria Akalia, the 95th Paragon, turns, half-woman, half-ghost, and it crosses both twins' minds at the same exact moment that this very familiar face is rather alien to them, and the kernel of fear buried deep in their hearts grows further still.
"Go then," this phantom tells them, no feeling in its pale face. "Lay siege to the city. Pull down its walls. Lay waste to what lies within."
And it walks down the main line, every head turning to watch as it passes.
General Hin turns to her sister, exchanging a knowing glance just once, before turning back to her marshalls.
"In line!" she shouts. "Sound the horn!"
And it goes, this braying blowing thing, piercing the quiet morning air, ringing out over the city as another from another side, and another from another side still, take up too. Hin spies the silhouettes of people peering over the city walls and sees how the dawn light glints on their steel.
It's time now, she thinks wildly, and her gaze turns to their left, to the north where Tara Leaft and her Roftenian army stand tall.
Here we go.
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The seventh wave is the worst.
The first few rounds of siege are just men—mostly Nature-callers, spread across all camps, who hew their hands into rock and stone so they might try to scale the walls. They are slow, they are sane, they are easily shot down.
The birds come too, large raptors circling high. The ones not engaged by the Cabal's own flock are shot down with arrows, a fury of feathers and screams in the air.
The fifth wave almost seems to promise to be the worst—they bring out the heavy movers, the Nature-callers who traded deftness for strength, and the city walls tremble and groan as the Skillers on top try to keep together what the Skillers below seek to tear apart.
But the seventh wave... the seventh wave is worse.
It is led by the masked ones, so few in number now that only a handful of the soldiers stationed at the walls see them; though many who do fall back shrieking or fall forward, over, off the wall, screaming harder still. But in between those few masked is a slew of new bodies, new recruits in black and blue, faces painted white with ash, and they climb like there is fire in their shoes, like a devil whispers in their ears, and if they fall, they fall silently, and if they make it over—
The seventh wave breaks the front line. It breaks in two places in the north, two in the south, and five in the east. Once a climbing route is established more of those pale faces follow, until they scuttle up the walls like black beetles, ropes and other things tossed back over for the Roftenians, Solveigians, and Keesark soldiers to follow suit, to witness the aftermath of the carnage. What was ordered outside of the walls quickly descends into chaos within as bands of soldiers run and roam at will, and the screaming grows as the suns rise further still.
Somewhere, in the ruins of the White Tower, Ben sits, pale-faced too, holding a sheathed knife in his hands. Jokul and the others keep running back, telling him what is happening, and the more they speak the paler and quieter he grows.
He's cracking up, Jokul thinks to himself, not entirely unsympathetically. A fine line of blood is tracking down the Smith caller's temple from where one of those loony freaks blasted him on the head with a pipe. He wonders, not for the first time, what exactly is the leader of the Cabal's grand plan, because as of now, it looks like jack shit.
Ben is not cracking up; though he might like to be. Cracking up might be preferable to hearing his people being slaughtered and knowing he must wait still.
He looks up, at the bleeding sky beyond the surrounding buildings and sees a figure in the distance, a figure with long, curling brown-black hair. He knows this Allayria is not real; it is the ghost one, come to watch him die.
Let her come to me on my ground, he thinks, turning away from her and turning over the plan once more. Let the others draw near too, so if I fail...
Not too far from him, Hiran Baulieu blasts through the city walls.
"No civilians!" he shouts at his generals as the retinue charges inside. "Protect the innocent!"
The city is a blast of gray dust and darkness. Swirling inside it, he can hear the hysterical crying of a child, somewhere in the dark. He knows what Allayria's army is doing.
"Get the medics in here!" he shouts back to the Solveig generals now, and he beckons to Reg and Lord Ishmal.
"Bring the sharpshooters," he tells them. "We go to the Tower."
North of him, Tara Leaft tells Hyim something similar as they pass into the city, though she asks for the wildcats and the brawlers instead. Their section of the wall collapsed after a panicky Cabal member blew a hole through it in an attempt to get away from the seventh wave and inadvertently buried himself, alongside those deadly ghosts, underneath.
"I need Felix and Emil with me," she tells the older man. "You must hold the back line."
East of her, though more city center than either Hiran or Tara, Fae Urilong and her spymaster drop into Quersido from the sky. Grisman flies low enough for the pair and their retinue of thirteen to slide down an uncoiling rope while batches of soldiers do the same all around them.
"With me," Urilong tells her men, her green eyes bright, her hair pulled back, and her shoulder shifting her black bow higher on her back. "Das, establish a perimeter; Keno, route us to the Tower."
All three rulers turn to converge on the last place their band of friends had been together. They turn to find the man who had once been imprisoned in it.
And each of them wonder silently in turn:
Where is Allayria?
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