Infinity: Reborn

The beam of white plasma tore through the sky. Lucien saw it from the canyon floor—radiance that turned the overcast afternoon into noon, bright enough that he raised his hand to shield his eyes.

Adrian, you damned fool.

He’d moved before Lucien could stop him. Twelve inquisitors at his back, cutting through the demon line toward the cliff base with the single-minded focus of a man who’d found his target. Lucien had watched him go, jaw clenched, because following would leave the centre exposed. The vanguard was barely holding as it was.

The light faded. Smoke curled up from the cliff rim.

No trace of the demon leader. Just scorched stone and empty air.

Relief moved through his chest, brief and cold. One casting. One ninth-circle working, and the coordination holding these forces together would shatter. The demon army would fragment back into the fractious, leaderless bands he’d been fighting for two centuries.

Then she appeared.

Thirty yards from the cliff base. No warning. No spell-light. Just there as if she’d been present all along.

The relief vanished.

Lucien turned to the nearest captain. “Hold the line. No matter what you see, hold the line.”

The man’s eyes had gone wide. “Sir, the Supreme Inquisitor—”

“The line, Captain.”

The order carried across the ranks. Shields came up. The soldiers who’d started to falter pressed together. Lucien moved through them, heading toward where Adrian had fallen, keeping his movements steady, controlled. If he ran, they’d break. If he showed the fear curling around his ribs, they’d see it and know.

A different light bloomed ahead. Not white this time. Gold.

It came from Adrian’s position, rising like dawn through the press of demon bodies. The creatures nearest it scattered, their weapons forgotten, their discipline gone. The light spread.

Lucien stopped walking.

Adrian rose into the air. Not flight. Levitation, his body pulled upward by something that bent the space around him. The gold poured from his eyes, his mouth, the cracks spreading across his face in luminous networks. His armour burned away in sections, the blessed metal unable to contain what moved beneath it.

The sword of light formed in his hand. Not the working he used in battle. Larger. Brighter. The blade itself seemed uncertain whether it was metal or pure radiance.

The Empress watched him rise. No surprise registered on her face.

They met in the air.

The first exchange was too fast to follow. Blade against blade, the impacts sending shockwaves that rolled across the canyon floor. Soldiers on both sides stumbled. Someone near Lucien dropped to one knee.

Lucien forced his voice steady. “Eyes forward. Maintain formation.”

* * *

The shockwaves came in pairs now, each aerial exchange hammering down through the stone and rolling up through the soles of Lucien’s boots. Above, Adrian’s light stuttered between impacts, flaring and dimming like a torch in wind. The demon ranks around Lucien thinned with each pulse, creatures flinching from the radiance, shields raised against a light that wasn’t aimed at them.

Their line buckled.

Not much. A half-step backward here, a gap opening there. But Lucien had spent two and a half centuries reading battlefields, and a gap was a gap.

“Nolan.” He didn’t shout it. Nolan was close enough.

“I see it.”

“Wedge. Full compression. Everyone behind the front rank locks shields and pushes.”

Nolan was already moving, pulling the nearest century inward, barking numbers at the standard-bearers. The formation shifted. Soldiers who’d been spread thin pulled to the centre, shoulder to shoulder, weight pressing forward.

Another shockwave. A demon pikeman to Lucien’s left lost his footing entirely, and the soldier behind him drove an elbow into the gap before the creature could recover.

The eastern column was four hours out. Maybe less if they’d pushed pace. But maybe wasn’t a number he could ration lives against. Forty thousand men in a canyon with no sky exit and no reinforcements meant one thing: someone had to reach the rim road and ride hard enough to warn them before they walked into the same throat.

If everyone here died with their mouths shut, the east walked in blind.

He pulled his blessed sword, stepped to the point of the forming wedge, and raised his voice.

“Push through. Now. Move.”

The wedge lurched forward.

They hit the demon line like a fist into wet clay. The front rank buckled, creatures stumbling against each other in the compressed chaos, and Lucien drove his shoulder into the first body that didn’t move fast enough, sword coming up to deflect a spear before it found his neck. Three steps. Five. The gap widened and the soldiers behind him poured into it, shields grinding, boots churning the torn earth.

Above them, the light pulsed again. Something in the aerial exchange shrieked, high and resonant, and every demon in the canyon flinched in the same half-second.

Ten steps became twenty.

Lucien cut left, redirected a blade with his forearm, kept moving. The canyon wall drew closer. The north exit was visible now, the narrow throat that opened onto the rim road, fifty yards away and narrowing.

Thirty yards.

A body dropped in front of him and he vaulted it without breaking stride.

Twenty.

The soldier to his right went down hard. He didn’t look back.

Ten.

The figure stepped out of the shadow at the canyon’s throat as if it had been standing there since morning, waiting for precisely this moment. Six and a half feet of grey skin and blackened armour, the great sword already drawn, the crimson blade catching no light because no light touched it the same way twice.

Lucien’s stride didn’t break. The wedge compressed behind him, momentum too committed to absorb.

“Hold your pace.” His voice came out even. “Do not slow.”

Drakul watched them come. His expression held nothing at all, the patience of something that had waited a thousand years and found thirty seconds unremarkable by comparison.

Lucien levelled his sword, light building at the blade’s edge, the ground closing between them at a dead sprint.

He slammed into the vampire like a wave into stone.

* * *

The collision achieved nothing.

Lucien’s momentum, two hundred and eighty years of mass and divine force driving forward at a dead sprint, simply stopped. His boots carved twin furrows in the dirt. Drakul hadn’t braced. Hadn’t stepped back. The great sword came across in a measured arc and Lucien caught it on his blade, the impact travelling up through both wrists and into his shoulders, and for a moment neither of them moved.

Then Drakul disengaged, smooth as water finding a lower level, and reset his stance.

“No offence intended.” The baritone carried the cadence of a dead accent, vowels shaped by a kingdom that hadn’t existed in three millennia. “My Lady asked me to stop you. I don’t make a habit of refusing her.”

Lucien rolled his sword wrist once, settling the ache. “Don’t mistake longevity for invincibility.”

“I rarely mistake anything.”

Lucien stepped left and Drakul mirrored him without looking like he’d moved at all.

“Mages.” Lucien kept his eyes forward. “Drop the barriers. Every thread goes into the push. Break through.”

A ripple ran back through the wedge, commands relayed in fragments, and behind him the defensive light that had been bleeding energy into warding spells guttered and died. The formation lurched forward again, soldiers driving into the demon line with nothing protecting them but steel and speed.

“You won’t stop everyone.” Lucien kept his voice level, aimed at Drakul, not at the men. “There are too many.”

“Wasn’t the plan.” Drakul came forward.

The exchange lasted four seconds. Drakul’s first cut came high and Lucien ducked under it, drove an elbow into the vampire’s ribs, felt like striking a buttress. The return stroke caught his pauldron and spun him a half-step sideways. He channelled light into the blade’s edge and slashed across Drakul’s forearm on the pivot, and this time the vampire moved back, the blessed metal opening a line in grey skin that smoked faintly at the edges.

Undead. The holy current wanted to follow that wound inward and Lucien let it, pushing more into the blade, the light intensifying to something that threw sharp shadows at noon.

They separated. Drakul regarded the forearm without apparent distress.

“Then what is the plan?” Lucien pressed his advantage, moving in before the vampire could settle.

“You don’t need to know.”

The great sword came around in a horizontal sweep and Lucien got his sword across it, turned the blow, stepped inside the arc and drove his palm into Drakul’s jaw. The vampire’s head moved an inch. His free hand closed around Lucien’s wrist.

He wrenched.

Lucien went with the pull instead of fighting it, letting his weight carry him into a roll across the vampire’s hip, coming up three feet away with the sword still in hand. His wrist throbbed where the fingers had been.

He pushed radiance into his feet, into the ground beneath them, a low sanctifying pulse that made the dirt hiss and forced Drakul to shift his weight off his back foot. Lesser undead would have screamed. Drakul simply adjusted, but the adjustment cost him a half-second and Lucien put a cut across his shoulder before the great sword came back around.

Behind him, the sounds of the breakthrough sharpened. Steel on stone, boots scrambling up incline. Someone was moving fast through the canyon throat.

He needed thirty more seconds.

Drakul pressed forward and Lucien gave ground deliberately, each step backward drawing the vampire away from the exit, letting the soldiers behind him widen the gap. The crimson blade came down in an overhead strike and Lucien caught it on a crossed guard, the weight enormous, and he braced and held and channelled everything left in the blade upward into the point of contact.

Drakul’s hands smoked.

The vampire pulled back.

Above, the quality of light changed.

It wasn’t a sound, exactly. More an absence of one, the aerial exchange going quiet in a way that pressed against the ears. Lucien’s eyes moved upward without his permission.

Adrian hung in the air, slumped forward against a blade that had entered his chest. The divine radiance that had lit the canyon went out like a snuffed candle.

One second. Less.

The flat of Drakul’s blade caught him across the temple.

The world pitched sideways. Stone came up at an angle. His knee found it first, then his hand, and through the ringing he heard the distant sound of hooves on the rim road above, moving north, moving fast, and he thought, good, good, that’s enough.

The pommel descended.

Darkness.

* * *

The canyon was quiet. Smoke from the last burning supply wagons drifted south on a wind that smelled of scorched stone and copper. Drakul stood at the canyon throat and watched the dust settle on the north road, the last of the Solarian escapees already beyond the ridge.

He counted the tracks. A few hundred, at most. He looked back at what remained on the canyon floor.

The demon line stood in rough order, some of the soldiers already moving among the fallen, the disciplined ones waiting on command. The Solarian dead were everywhere — in the bottleneck, along the cliffs, in the wide floor where the wedge had shattered against Eligos’s infantry. Those still breathing sat in loose groups with their hands bound, most of them staring at nothing. Three officers had tried to stand when the tide turned; two had been killed for it. The third was kneeling between two of Bael’s soldiers, his mouth moving without sound.

Lucien lay where he’d fallen, face down in the dirt, chest rising.

Drakul crouched and turned him over. The temple was bruised, the eye already swelling shut, but his breathing was even. Still alive. For now, a more complicated problem than a corpse would have been.

He straightened, and the soft chime of a message spell sounded at the edge of his perception, a current of violet threading through the air beside his ear.

Status report.

Her voice arrived clear, the way it always did, slightly cooler than ambient temperature.

“The canyon is ours.” He kept his own voice low, a habit, though there was no one close enough to matter. “Lucien is unconscious. Alive. The rest—most of them are dead or sitting in the dirt waiting to be told what to do. Perhaps three hundred broke through the throat before I could seal it. Voso will reach them by nightfall.”

A pause. Long enough that he glanced north again, as though she might be visible on the ridge.

Let them go.

He waited.

There’s been a change. Don’t pursue. Focus on the canyon—gather the wounded first, ours and theirs both. Then get the prisoners organized. I want them fed and watered before dark, and I want every one of them with their hands still attached. If anyone puts a blade to a prisoner’s throat for sport, you have my permission to remove that individual from the army permanently.

“Understood.” He looked at the kneeling officer, who had stopped moving his lips and was now staring at the ground. “The eastern column is still a consideration.”

I’ll handle the east.

The certainty in it was not a boast; it arrived the way weather forecasts do, as a statement about something already decided. He had spent a thousand years learning the difference.

As for Lucien. Another pause, briefer. Keep him comfortable. Secure, but comfortable. A public execution of the Empire’s greatest champion will do more for our cause than another ten battles. I want him alive and well enough to stand when the time comes.

Drakul looked down at the man in the dirt. The golden hair was matted with dust. The armour, stripped of its radiance now, was just dented metal. He looked, for the first time, like something that could be broken.

“As you command.”

The violet thread dissolved.

Drakul turned toward the nearest unit commander, a hulking bat-winged demon who was already watching him.

“Wounded first,” he said. “All of them. Then the prisoners. Anyone who touches one without cause answers to me.”

The commander’s fist struck his chest and he moved.

Drakul looked north again, at the empty road, then down at Lucien.