Infinity: Reborn

The whetstone made a short, dry sound against the spearhead with each pass. Arthur sat on his bedroll with one knee up, the shaft braced against his boot, working the edge in the grey light that filtered through the tent canvas. Outside, the rain tapped without rhythm on the stretched hide. Inside, it smelled of wet wool and iron and the tallow candle guttering near the tent pole.

He turned the head and checked the angle with his thumb. Not quite. Another pass.

He’d been at it long enough that the sound had become part of the rain, both of them steady and unremarkable, when the first horn sounded.

He was already reaching for his boots.

By the time the second horn layered over the first, he had them laced. He wrapped the spear shaft in his fist, ducked through the tent flap, and stepped into the mud.

The camp was already moving. Soldiers spilled from tents in various states of readiness, some still buckling straps, a few jogging with their helmets under their arms. The horns had stopped, but voices carried across the field, sergeants finding their units, torches bobbing through the drizzle toward the command pavilion. Arthur moved with the current.

Commander Drest stood outside the pavilion on a raised platform of lashed timber, a hand raised to stop the noise. He was a stocky man with a grey beard cropped short, and he waited until the milling settled before he spoke.

“Scouts put a demon column about few hundred strong moving toward our position from the southwest.” He let that sit for a second. “Infantry, cavalry, some archers mixed in. Nothing we haven’t seen before. At their pace, they reach us in three, maybe four hours.”

A murmur ran through the assembled ranks. Not panic. Something looser than that.

Drest’s hand came down. “We’ve been slogging through this mud for days and eating whatever those bastards decided not to torch. Today we stop moving and they come to us.” He turned his head, taking in the length of the crowd. “Get your formations tight, get your archers high ground, and eat something while you still can. This is what you’re paid for.”

He stepped off the platform without ceremony.

What followed was not silence. A cheer went up from somewhere in the middle of the crowd, one voice first, then a dozen, then the whole mass of it rising in the wet air over the camp. Men clapped each other on the shoulders. Someone laughed. A young soldier near Arthur pumped his fist and turned to the man beside him, and whatever he said was swallowed by the noise.

Arthur pulled his spear upright and stood with the sound washing around him.

He understood it. Six days of mud sucking at your boots, six days of watching wagons burn on the horizon and seeing nothing to put a weapon to—the body accumulates a particular kind of tension under those conditions. A known enemy marching toward you at a known pace was almost a relief by comparison.

He rolled his shoulder, feeling the familiar pull of old scar tissue, and checked the spearhead once more in the grey light. The edge caught nothing, flat and even all the way around.

He moved toward his unit’s muster point, stepping around a cluster of soldiers who were already arguing over the best ground for a shield wall. The rain had not let up. His boots went into the mud and came back out.

Three hours, maybe four. He settled the shaft against his palm and waited for the sergeants to start shouting.

* * *

Three hours of standing had put a particular ache in Arthur’s left knee. He shifted his weight, gravel grinding under his boot, and kept his eyes on the flat grey distance.

The canyon was out there somewhere to the west, two day’s march at least, where Lucien’s column was supposed to be waiting. Between here and there: dead earth, scattered rock formations, and the wind dragging low cloud across the scrub.

And the demons.

They’d appeared on the western horizon maybe twenty minutes ago, a dark smear resolving into a column as they closed the distance. Arthur counted standards by habit. Five hundred, give or take, Drest had said. Against forty thousand.

The numbers made it obvious. What made it strange was how they were moving.

No wedge. No screen of cavalry pushed forward to test the line. They came in a loose cluster, almost a crowd, their mounts picking through the broken ground at a walking pace. No shields raised. No visible coordination between units. A few of them seemed to be talking to each other.

The soldier to Arthur’s left, a young infantryman whose name he hadn’t caught, tilted his spear toward the column. “What are they doing?”

Arthur said nothing.

Drest’s voice carried down the line from somewhere behind. “They’re buying time. Stand your ground, shields up, don’t let them read a gap in the line.”

The front rank tightened. Arthur brought his spear level with the others, the shaft cool through his gloves, and watched the column continue its unhurried approach.

They stopped about three hundred yards out.

The distance was close enough to make out individual shapes. Mounts. Riders. One of them, near the front, raised an arm—not a weapon, just a raised arm—and the whole column went still.

Then a single rider broke from the group and came forward alone, moving at a canter, no banner, no weapon drawn.

“Don’t.” Drest’s voice, flat. “Archers.”

The volley was in the air before Arthur could process the order. The rider went down with the horse, both of them tumbling in a cloud of disturbed ash and dust, and the sound of the impact reached the line a half-second later.

Across the three hundred yards, the column erupted.

Not a charge. Not a retreat. They broke in on themselves, riders wheeling, voices cutting across each other in what might have been argument or alarm—Arthur couldn’t separate the words from the distance. Some of them reached toward the fallen rider. Others pulled away from the group in the wrong direction, then stopped, then pulled back again.

Arthur watched one figure dismount and stand with both hands pressed to the sides of their head.

Drest’s voice rose above the commotion. “There it is. They came here expecting us to fall for their tricks and we didn’t. Now they’re pulling back.” A pause that let the idea settle. “Don’t let them reach that canyon. Move.”

The line lurched forward. Thousands of boots in wet ground produced a sound that Arthur felt in his teeth more than heard. The column ahead had already begun to turn, most of them moving west, back toward where they’d come from, still without formation, still without urgency—no sprint, no organized withdrawal, just a loose group pointing themselves away.

Arthur ran with the line. His knee complained and he ignored it.

But the image stayed with him. The raised arm. The way the whole column had gone still at the gesture, like they’d been waiting on something. The figure standing in the dirt with its hands at its head, not fleeing, not fighting.

His grip shifted on the shaft as the gap closed.

* * *

The eastern column’s fires were visible an hour before they reached it—a smear of orange against the grey horizon that Gordon had fixed his eyes on for the last stretch of road when his legs had stopped feeling like legs and started feeling like furniture he was dragging behind him.

Four hundred men. Maybe a few more. Two days ago there had been thousands.

He didn’t think about that.

The horses were done. Half the riders had dismounted miles back to spare the animals, leading them by the reins through cracked Wasteland earth that had at least stayed dry. The men who’d dropped—fifty, maybe more—Gordon hadn’t looked back when the last one fell. Norak had ordered two soldiers to stay with each casualty. Gordon didn’t know if anyone had obeyed.

Norak himself rode at the front, a broad-shouldered sergeant who’d inherited command somewhere between the canyon floor and the first night’s march when everyone above him had either died or stopped moving. He hadn’t asked for the position. He’d simply been the one still giving orders when morning came.

“Formations,” someone ahead of Gordon muttered.

Gordon raised his eyes.

The eastern camp was awake. Not the lazy waking of soldiers brewing morning rations—shields up, lines dressed, the posture of men expecting contact. Banners he recognised. Solarian gold on dark cloth, same as his own tabard, now so caked in grime the colour barely read.

Norak raised a fist, slowing the column.

“Why are they—” The man beside Gordon didn’t finish the thought.

Rain had hit the eastern camp. Gordon could see it in the churned mud around their perimeter, the slick dark gleam on the shields. Their own boots were dusty. Two forces that had covered the same ground in different weather, approaching each other across a strip of dead rock.

Norak turned his horse. “Jeremy.”

The young scout was already nudging his animal forward, reading the order before it was given. Barely twenty, Jeremy, with the kind of face that still looked surprised by things. He adjusted his grip on the white-wrapped hilt at his saddle, the standard signal, cloth visible at distance, no weapons drawn.

Gordon watched him go.

Fifty yards. A hundred. The eastern line didn’t move.

Then the arrows came.

Three shafts, close enough together that they sounded like one strike. Jeremy’s horse screamed and crumpled. The boy went over the animal’s neck and hit the ground hard, rolled, didn’t get up.

For a breath, nobody in Gordon’s column made a sound.

Then Norak’s voice, raw: “Hold! Hold your—”

But the eastern line was already moving. Not a skirmish advance. The whole formation, shields locking, the grinding rhythm of ten thousand boots finding the same beat. A battle march.

“They think we’re—” someone started.

“Demons.” Another voice. Flat. “They think we’re bloody demons.”

Gordon’s hand found his horse’s mane. The animal shifted under him, feeling his weight change.

He looked at the column around him. Men with two days of march in their bones and the canyon still behind their eyes. He looked at the eastern line, close enough now that he could see individual faces beneath the helms—set, certain, no hesitation in the step.

He looked at the ground to the south. Open. Dry. Nobody on it.

Norak wheeled his horse. “Form up! Form up, they’ll hear us if we… Gordon, get back in—”

Gordon was already moving.

He turned his horse south and put his heels in, and the animal, exhausted as it was, lurched into a canter because horses understood urgency better than arguments. Behind him he heard Norak shouting his name, then a general collapse of shouting as the column fractured, some men standing, some following him, some standing with their hands out toward the eastern line as though they could stop it with a gesture.

The first clash reached him as sound. Steel, screaming, the particular hollow crack of a shield wall meeting bodies that weren’t ready.

Gordon didn’t look back.

His children were seven, nine, and eleven. The oldest had written him a letter in the spring, crooked letters on cheap paper, asking when he was coming home. He’d kept it in his breast pocket until the canyon, when everything in his pockets had become a liability and he’d left it with his spare rations in the supply wagon that no longer existed.

The eastern line’s noise fell behind him.

The Wasteland opened out, empty and cracked and quiet, and Gordon rode south into it with his jaw set and his eyes forward and his horse’s breath loud in the silence.

* * *

The line compressed into the demon column before Arthur had taken thirty paces.

He kept his spear low and moved with the press of bodies around him, watching the shapes ahead resolve through the rain. Small, most of them. One carried what looked like a supply pack. Another had its hands raised before Drest’s vanguard even reached it.

“Ticks.” Drest’s voice cut through the noise from somewhere to Arthur’s left. “Kill them and keep moving.”

The men around him didn’t hesitate.

The first demon in Arthur’s path was young, by the look of it, crouched with its back to a rock and its palms flat against the wet stone. It opened its mouth. Arthur drove the spear through its eye socket before the sound came out.

He pulled free and moved on.

They weren’t fighting. That registered somewhere behind his focus, filed away without comment. A battlefield was not a place for questions. Drest had called it, the men were moving, and soldiers would not stop because a few dozen demons forgot to draw their weapons.

The killing was quick and methodical for the first stretch. Arthur worked through them at a walk, spear finding gaps in whatever scraps of armour they wore. Some scrambled. A handful at the edges of the column peeled away and ran before contact, which confirmed Drest’s read as far as Arthur was concerned. Rats leaving before the boot fell.

Then one of the demons screamed something at the soldiers closing in from the north flank. Arthur didn’t catch the words over the rain and the noise of steel, but the pitch of it carried, and the men around him laughed.

After that, a few turned to fight. Too few, too late. A bull-headed demon with a broken sword got three steps toward Arthur before he planted his foot and put the spear through its throat. Two more tried to run the same direction and collided with each other. The soldiers behind Arthur handled them.

The column’s shape was gone. What remained was scattered shapes in the mud, some still moving, most not, the last runners disappearing into the grey distance where the plain met the darker grey of the horizon.

Drest’s horn sounded the halt.

* * *

The blood on the spearhead was the wrong colour.

Arthur had killed enough demons to know what their blood looked like, that dark, almost-black red, thick and slow to drip. What ran down his spear shaft now was bright. Thin. It beaded at the socket and fell in clean drops into the mud.

He turned the shaft in his grip and looked at the nearest body.

The horns were still there. The grey-green skin. He hadn’t imagined any of it. His eyes moved to the next corpse, then the next, cataloguing without knowing why. The same thing. That same too-bright blood soaking into the Wasteland dirt.

He was still staring when the clapping started.

Slow. Measured. Coming from above.

Every head in the column tilted at once. Arthur’s followed.

She hung forty feet up, suspended in open air without anything beneath her, arms folded and a hand moving against a palm in that same unhurried rhythm. The wings were folded against her back. The rain broke around her without touching her clothes.

“Better than I expected, honestly.” Her voice reached the ground without effort, clear as a bell through the drumming of the water. “You moved faster than I gave you credit for.”

Three mages broke from the vanguard simultaneously. Two bolts of force and a gout of flame climbed toward her. A shimmer expanded outward from her body and swallowed all three, the magic dissolving against it without a sound.

She looked down at the point where the spells had vanished, then back at the column.

“You’ll need to do considerably better than that to inconvenience me.” A pause. “Now. Where was I.”

Her fingers snapped.

The sound was nothing. A small, dry click.

What followed was not.

The nearest corpse shifted. Arthur watched the grey-green drain out of the skin like colour bleeding from wet cloth, watched the horns recede and the proportions of the face settle into something else entirely. Something familiar. The leathers the body wore were Solarian cut. The boots were standard Imperial issue. The face, slack now and tilted toward the rain, was a man’s face. Young. Beardless.

Arthur’s gaze moved across the field.

Row after row after row.

“The men you just killed,” the woman said from above, “were your own.”

“Parlour tricks.” Drest’s voice came from Arthur’s left, loud and certain. “Dressing up five hundred demons, sacrificing them to break our nerve. I’ve seen worse from your kind.”

She laughed. It wasn’t the laugh of someone performing amusement.

“I didn’t dress anyone. Though I’ll grant you, given the human track record, the confusion is understandable. You’re rather more like demons than most demons I’ve met.” The amusement dropped out of her voice like a stone. “But your men already know I’m not lying. The evidence is on their spears.”

Drest said nothing.

Arthur looked at his hands. Bright red. Thin. Already drying in the lines of his knuckles.

“Why would humans be here?” Drest’s voice had lost some of its edge.

“They were broken at the canyon.” She said it the way a tutor corrects an arithmetic error. Patient. Faintly tired. “Survivors trying to reach your column. Trying to warn you.”

The field was very quiet except for the rain.

“Congratulations.” She let the word sit for a moment. “You’ve killed everyone who tried to save you.”

Something tore loose in Arthur’s chest. He had taken them at the crouch. The ones with their hands out. He had put his spear through them and moved to the next and not once had he—

“You made us do this.” The shout came from somewhere in the rear ranks, hoarse with something that hadn’t decided yet if it was grief or rage. “You’re a monster.”

The woman tilted her head. The rain moved around her face.

“Did I?” She looked toward the source of the voice without any particular urgency. “Did I hold your hands? Did I aim your weapons?” She let the silence answer. “You didn’t listen. You didn’t wait. You slaughtered them before the first one finished raising his arms.” Her eyes moved across the column. “So I’ll ask you this. Who’s the real monster here?”

A crack of cold split the air. A mage on the column’s eastern edge had his arm extended, a lance of ice already shrinking as it struck her barrier and fractured into nothing.

She turned toward him. Raised one finger.

The fireball was small. That was the thing that stayed with Arthur afterward, how small it was when it left her hand, just a thread of smoke and then a point of light, and then forty men were charred outlines in the mud and the heat reached his face from thirty yards away.

She lowered her hand.

“I’m warning you.” The warmth in her voice was almost worse than the fire. “The next person tries that and I stop being generous.” She looked across the field again, the same patient sweep. “Speaking of which. I can’t take fourty thousand prisoners. I have a war to run. So here is what I’ll offer: walk away. All of you. Leave your entire equipment where you stand and go back.”

She let them sit with it.

“It’s more than Lucien got.” The last words dropped without weight, without emphasis, and somehow that made them land harder than anything else she’d said.

She folded her arms again and waited.