Peculiar Soul

Each living thing is engaged in a cycle of give and take with those around it. When the balance suffers, we name it strife. This is no more or less than the reestablishment of lost balance; it is the process by which divinity reconciles itself with itself, consolidating and settling into a pattern which elevates it from its prior state and allows it to move forward.

When the balance is not disturbed, however, we have two names for this. For some the balance becomes stagnation. The divine stays isolated, broken, and waits for a chance to be more. For others, the balance is equilibrium. Divinity dances with itself, burgeoning and knowing the joy of its own being.

Strife is a necessary and holy course, but do not neglect the joy of balance. There is peril in contentment; yet contentment it remains.

- The Book of Eight Verses, the Verse of Growth. (New Kheman Edition, 542 PD)

Michael spread his hands slowly. “We don’t have to fight,” he said. “I’m not here for you. I’m here for Luc.”

“Are you?” Friedrich asked. “What purpose would that serve? He is a broken creature, holding tight to his delusions. A child with a pistol.” He shook his head. “There is no value in fighting such men, and no satisfaction in killing them.” Friedrich began to pace in a slow, leonine arc around where Michael stood. “But the child said something of interest even so. He said that you had broken the rules you set for yourself, and that you now wielded terrible power. It frightened him, disgusted him. He hates you for it.”

Friedrich paused, his eyes glittering bright. “But the weak hate the powerful. The timid hate the brave. I came all this way, Michael Baumgart, because in his pallid words I saw the reflection of something you lacked when we last met. Something I might sharpen myself against. Tell me I saw correctly. Tell me that you have grown beyond the man who slunk away from me in Ardalt.” He clenched his fists. “Or better yet, show me.”

Michael saw the attack a bare instant before it came; the air shivered as it was parted. Behind him, one of the wagons collapsed inward. Before he had stopped moving, the next strike followed, scything out above the churned mud. Michael jumped up, the world slowing around him as the wagons clattered down, horses screaming in blind panic. His sight found Friedrich smiling, a third ghostly edge forming to intercept the arc of his leap.

He knew Friedrich was capable of more than this; he had seen it when they last met. These strikes were mild by comparison, playful - testing. The actions of a man who did not want their fight to be over too quickly.

Michael grimaced and called fully on Stanza, watching the world burst with gold. The edge tore through the air where he had been, but he was no longer there - Stanza’s pull guided him on a different arc. Friedrich began to laugh, redoubling the speed of his blows. The mud twitched and leapt, the screams of horses cutting off sharply as new blades found them.

He paid them no attention. Michael kept his legs half-tensed, ready to leap to one side or the other, holding the potential of movement - and then reaching back with his soul to invoke that potential. A new path was chosen, one where he had already dodged; the attack sailed by harmlessly. The same trick had availed him back at Friedrich’s house; here, he bent it in every way he could.

Their fight blurred into a kaleidescope of shifting perspective and position, Michael’s body flickering in and out of place. Friedrich allowed him an extra moment of respite, and he used it to draw upon the sun, the air, the chill mud. The world went dark, and heat raced towards Friedrich-

There was a twist, an ending; the flow of heat was suddenly disjointed. Michael flared with a sudden abundance of energy, light and heat blooming uncontrollably from his skin; he stumbled to a crouch in the mud with steam rising in gouts from his bare arms. His trouser leg was aflame. He batted at the fire hastily, stumbling back from his opponent.

“Good!” Friedrich laughed, clapping his hands slowly. “Show me again, Baumgart. Show me more.” He waved a hand lazily, and a patch of their surroundings became a foul slurry of sawdust and offal. Michael was dimly aware of the others outside the wagons, fighting against an increasing press of soldiers; he saw a flare of light, of fire, silvery metal slashing above a heap of bodies - and then only golden lacework as he dodged Friedrich’s next attack.

Michael tried twice more to throw heat at Friedrich, and once to steal it away; the attempts only seemed to delight the other man, his soul deftly lashing out to interrupt Michael’s flow before it could harm him. Through the fear, through the blind panic of reacting to Friedrich’s assault, Michael felt the stirrings of other things begin to take root. He could not touch Friedrich, no-

But Friedrich could not touch him. His dodges through Stanza’s golden web had lost their panicked, mindless urgency. He began to see a path through the fight, Friedrich’s blows bending to the side as Michael leapt between flows of position and momentum. He ceased to be in another place when Friedrich struck; he ceased to be in any one place at all. Michael rode lightly atop golden light and danced farther, closer, side to side.

It was a dizzying vantage. He saw himself from every angle and none, his face bearing half a dozen different expressions. Michael dodged another blow and saw the images twist, flicker; he stood within a storm of mirrors. He expanded his sight and found no end to them, the mirrors branching out along Stanza’s golden web.

The images changed as he looked farther out, becoming less-familiar. It was his face, but changed - weathered, contorted, happy, anguished. Far beyond these mirages, though, there was yet more - paths converging on a distant glimmer of light, bright and oddly familiar. He could not help but look closer-

Michael staggered as his head burst with pain. His feet dropped down into the mud. He raised his head, his sight clearing in time to see Friedrich’s next attack forming. He pulled desperately on Stanza. Gold reappeared around him, and Michael reached out for a way clear. It came, though as the storm of mirrors formed once more he saw a great cloud of them shatter, flashing with visceral crimson as paths came to an abrupt end.

He reeled away from the chaos, though the normal flow of possibility quickly reasserted itself. Michael breathed heavily, dodging the next attack almost without thinking; his mind strayed towards the glimmer of light once more. His head remained down, though, focused on the immediate peril; this was not the time to brave untested waters.

Instead he drew Spark up around him, sliding between attacks to draw closer, closer; the flows converged to a point, and Michael was standing next to Friedrich, looking up with lambent eyes. Friedrich startled, spinning to face him; not quickly enough, though. “Shatter,” Michael murmured, half gone into the flow of light already.

It was still almost too late to escape the storm of destruction that sprang up around the other man; it reached beyond the physical, shattering every path that drew close to Friedrich even in Michael’s half-seen hiding place of branching ways. Gold turned to red, red faded to dark. Friedrich straightened back up from the abyss with his hands clasped over his ears, blood painting his face, staining white, white teeth that were exposed in a rictus grin.

He lowered his hands to show the blood flowing freely from his ears, another fit of laughter coming in frothing red bubbles from his lips. “More,” he bellowed, his voice distorted with deaf exuberance. “He doesn’t fear you for this, Baumgart! Show me! Show me!”

Michael let the paths converge to a point again, not to attack; he felt the compulsion to look Friedrich in the eye. The contact lasted for a bare moment before Friedrich let loose a merry bellow of laughter, annihilating the space between them. Dust billowed; the smell of ozone and metal tainted the air. Michael was already gone, standing everywhere but where the attacks fell.

He realized that he, too, was grinning madly, his teeth bared against the flurry of death racing his way. Michael’s heart was pounding, his breath roaring in his ears, and the exhilarated joy he felt was not solely Friedrich’s. He had not felt it since he fought Galen, wresting the danger of the battlefield to his control. The sharp tang of fear, the challenge, the mad scramble to seize any advantage against an overwhelming opponent.

Friedrich wanted his best. Michael found that he was ready to give it. He took stock of the paths around him, expanding his sight to take in their luminous spread, careful to keep his eyes from that distant, baleful glint. He watched. He waited. And in between Friedrich’s exuberant waves of destruction, he seized his moment.

“Stop,” Michael said, speaking in a single voice; the paths condensed down to a shining river. Friedrich gasped as the command took him. Veins bulged, and blood welled in a fractal net.

Michael kept his entire focus on the moment, guiding the path with his words. “Be bloodless. Wither-”

Friedrich gave a low, animal groan, his soul twisting wildly around him; Michael cursed and sprang back as it scythed across his intended path. More wild blows followed, and he was forced to let the paths branch back into possibility, giving him cover to hide from the frenzied counter. Before Friedrich had recovered his equilibrium, though, Michael pushed them together once more.

This time, Friedrich saw it coming; he intercepted Michael’s intent with a broad, sweeping strike that completed the destruction around them. Where there had been wagons and horses, there was now only sodden mulch. Beyond that, Sobriquet and the others had marked their perimeter with a mound of bodies. Soldiers sat impaled on spikes of twisted gunmetal, or lay shattered where blows had crushed bone.

It was as much attention as he could spare for them; Friedrich’s hacking laughter returned. Michael danced around his attacks, trying to find his opening once more. He wove possibility into a weapon he could wield against Friedrich, and was rebuffed each time by lacerating force splitting those paths back apart. Anything he contrived was undone as soon as it met Friedrich’s soul, and the other man was becoming increasingly adept at responding to Michael’s provocations.

Michael found that wherever he turned, Friedrich’s soul was already there waiting, cutting away the golden flows of possibility as soon as Michael seized them. Mirrors shattered wet and red around him. He saw his own face sightless in the mud more times than he could count, flashing by in the periphery of his vision as he bounded past, ahead and beyond those deaths - yet there was still no opening. Try as he might, it was not enough to exert his control upon the world when Friedrich was there to undo it.

The thought resonated in his mind, finding its echo in a notion he had examined and abandoned days before. Carefully, holding Stanza tightly, he called out to Spark as well. Almost immediately his steps faltered. Friedrich’s blades came perilously close; a glancing cut opened on his thigh. He hissed with pain and sealed the wound, staggering upright to try again.

He drew possibility into a single strand, materializing out of the skein in front of Friedrich. The other man laughed and raised his hand, but before the attack could come Michael reached out with Spark. The cascade of being that was Friedrich twisted and bucked in Michael’s grasp. It refused to be constrained.

Michael let his breath out between gritted teeth. He and Friedrich stood stock-still, invisible energies raging between them, annihilating where they met. The air shimmered, and through that haze Michael raised his eyes to look at his opponent.

Friedrich’s face was a bloody mask, staring back with wide, white eyes and a manic smile. The eye contact was all either man could spare. Michael took Stanza and Spark in hand once more, pushing the twin loci of control closer together. He felt a wetness on his chin; blood dripped from his nose to paint copper on his tongue. Every step closer brought a monumental increase in strain.

It was not merely that the two souls were separate; to Michael, what Spark felt of Friedrich was a resonant and alien being entirely distinct from Stanza’s golden web. He could not see a way to reconcile the two, nor even to make the two souls work in concert. He tried, though; he could do little else, for Friedrich pressed against him with such force that Michael would be dead the second he allowed an opening.

He felt his control slipping. The task was too great. Michael changed tack to pull at the heat around him. The mud froze solid. Blackness swallowed them, save for a white-hot ember that he thrust through the darkness at Friedrich, who cried out - a raw, angry scream, the sound of a man denied a prize. His disappointment manifested in a crushing blow that intercepted Michael’s attack. The blade met the fire with a cracking noise, and force burst outward from between them. Mud churned upward, bellowing steam; the air rippled with distortion as pure destructive force slipped sideways with frightening speed.

Michael felt every moment pass like a day. To his left he saw a group of Ardan soldiers soon to be annihilated by the blast, and to the right - Sobriquet and Charles, standing on the flank of their formation. They saw it too, their eyes widening, feet working against the churned mud. Slow. Too slow. Michael grasped at his soul, still reeling from the blast.

It was too much, at too great a distance. If he had time to collect himself, to speak, then maybe - but he had none, and could only watch. He saw an echo of that hopeless realization in Charles’s eyes, followed by something muted and calm. The artifex twisted his body, his metal bracers sliding down his hands-

Charles planted his feet and struck Sobriquet across the back, sending her sprawling away into the mud. His eyes stayed locked on her until the end. Steam burst, followed by light, radiant and shining from nowhere. Panic gripped him as he realized what was happening. He tried to shout, to rail against his unresponsive body, but managed little more than a slurred groan. Michael felt nothing as he fell bonelessly to the bloody mud; the last thing he saw before darkness took him was Friedrich’s bemused face.

“No!” Michael shouted, sitting bolt upright. He looked around in a panic at the idyllic garden, the blue summer sky; he was sitting beneath the large apple tree that shaded Jeorg’s house. He slammed his hand into the soil, jumping to his feet.

He couldn’t be here. Friedrich was out there. Sobriquet and the others were fighting. Charles-

The realization of Charles’s death slammed into him fully for the first time. Michael didn’t bother denying it. He had felt it, bright and overwhelming, and it had taken him here. Frantic, he cast his eyes around; there was nothing but the quiet trees and fields.

“Jeorg!” he called. “Jeorg, I need to wake up. I can’t do this now, not with the fight still going-”

There was a snort behind him; he wheeled to see Jeorg leaning against the tree, his pipe stem protruding from between weathered lips. The old man took a drag on it, then let the smoke out in a long, unhurried exhale. “Why are you asking me?” he asked. “You know where we are. What this is. You are the captive and the jailor.”

“I don’t know why I bother,” Michael muttered, turning again and finding nothing new to aid in his predicament. “Do you have any helpful advice to see me out of here?”

Jeorg said nothing, lifting his eyebrow and taking another drag on his pipe while Michael steeped in his anxiety. He exhaled again, then tapped out the pipe against the tree. By the time Michael had finished his agitated pacing, Jeorg had replaced the pipe in his pocket and was watching him with an amused expression.

Michael made an exasperated noise. “We could die, you know. Friedrich-”

“You’re concerned about time,” Jeorg said. “Reasonable. Not necessary, though.” He straightened up and began to walk down towards the orchard. Michael followed him irritably.

“I know,” he said. “This is me, confronted with things my mind can’t face. You’ve told me a hundred times, or I’ve told me-” Michael grimaced and shook his head. “So help me do what I need to do. Guide me towards Charles’s soul, let me - make my peace with it.” He swallowed heavily, the words tracing uncommon weight on his tongue as he spoke. His mind was grappling with the artifex’s death piecemeal, each moment a sharp and unpleasant reminder of what he could no longer change.

Jeorg snorted again. “Still asking me. Why?”

“Lack of options,” Michael grated, his words hissing through clenched teeth. He reached out to grab the other man’s shoulder, halting his leisurely walk down the orchard path. “Please, Jeorg. I know you’re more than - me. You know things I can’t. See things I don’t. While I’m dealing with this, the others are alone with Friedrich and a literal army of Ardans facing them. If more of them die-”

“Then you’ll feel it,” Jeorg noted. “Won’t you? And you haven’t. They’re all fine. You’re not.” He nodded towards Michael. “So help yourself first.”

“How?” Michael asked, flinging his hands upward. “Where’s the soul? Where’s the void? Every other time I’ve been here, we have a lovely conversation, I deal with whatever fresh horrible thing has happened, and then I fucking leave. But now we’re walking around in the trees like nothing is wrong, when it very much is.”

Jeorg grunted. “This time is no different from the others. You come, you face the problem. The soul’s not here. You’re here, talking to yourself.”

“The implication being that I’m the problem,” Michael sighed. “Fine. Except that I still don’t have the slightest idea where to begin. I don’t even know what the issue is.”

“Hmm,” Jeorg said, tapping a finger lightly against his chin. “You recognize this place?”

Michael stopped and looked around. The orchard was bright and sunny, its branches waving gently in the wind. “It’s the orchard,” he said impatiently. “Of course I recognize it.”

“That’s a no, then,” Jeorg muttered. “Perhaps some help.”

There was a quick movement at the periphery of Michael’s vision; he looked down to see that roots had tangled around his foot. “Ah,” he said. “You meant this particular spot. Hard to forget.”

“And yet you seem to have managed,” Jeorg chuckled. “First thing I ever taught you.”

Michael bit back another testy response and took a breath, looking around. “Mind frees the soul,” he muttered. “Soul frees the body. Okay.” He took a deep, steadying breath, trying to let some of the anxiety bleed out from his posture.

A very short time passed.

“I still don’t understand what I’m meant to be doing,” Michael said, throwing up his hands again. “I’m the problem. I’m trapped. I need to accept that I am where I am. Fine. Except that I’m not actually here. I’m dreaming that I’m stuck in the orchard because my friend just died, and I don’t see how any of this-” His voice failed him; he lashed out and pounded his fist into the tree. It hurt. Michael winced and cradled his hand, scowling down at the root still stubbornly wrapped around his foot.

He took another breath, then looked back up at Jeorg. “I am having difficulty freeing myself,” he said. “In every sense of the word.”

Jeorg shook his head, smiling; he walked over to a nearby tree and leaned against it. “You had quite a fight with Friedrich,” he said.

Michael blinked at the non sequitur. “I suppose I did,” he said. “I never thought I could do that kind of thing. Blurring myself into different places, riding the paths forward.”

“And then a giant lunatic tried to chop your head off,” Jeorg noted. “So you stopped thinking you couldn’t do it, and did it.” He straightened up from the tree with a grunt of effort and began to walk around Michael slowly. “Wasn’t so long ago that you had to close your eyes and spout off some verse to do anything of note. What changed?”

“I did, is the obvious answer. Stanza is the same.” Michael shook his head. “You told me to change with intent, but I don’t think I’ve listened to your advice there, either. I’ve barely kept up with the pace of things, and by the time I noticed myself changing I could scarcely remember how I started.”

Jeorg laughed, shaking his head. “Foolish,” he said. “What, you think people set out to change themselves? Even if you tried, you’d fail. What matters is that it was your action. Your intent guiding the circumstance.” He looked Michael in the eye. “The way it’s always been, back to that first choice you made.”

Michael frowned as he took Jeorg’s meaning. “That was the only choice I could have made,” he protested.

“Wrong,” Jeorg said. The levity had gone from his voice, and his eyes glimmered with some of their old light. “There was the path where you took the lesser soul. Where you returned to your father and lived under his boot. The path that saw you wither and die long before you drew your last breath.”

Jeorg leaned close, the light in his eyes intensifying, taking on a familiar shade, one that battered at Michael’s mind, deafening, unbearable - then faded, leaving only the faint glint of amusement. “Most people would have chosen the first soul.”

Michael shivered, blinking away spots from his vision. “What are you?” he murmured. “And don’t say you’re me. That lie has worn thin.”

“Not a lie,” Jeorg sighed. He looked up, squinting into the sun. “Only a different perspective.” His eyes returned to Michael’s, and this time they looked entirely human. “You drew on Stanza deeply. Differently. Enough to learn something. Tell me what Stanza does.”

“I have no idea,” Michael said, without hesitation. “I never have. I know what it feels like, and some of what I can do with it, but that’s it.”

“You’re afraid of being wrong,” Jeorg noted. “Speaking carefully. You know better than anyone alive. You’re the expert.” He smiled. “And you’re talking to yourself. You can speculate.”

Michael shot him an irritated look. “Fine. It feels like I’m shaping the paths around me, guiding them towards the end I want. I have to - envision what I want in my mind, then use the soul to make the world take that shape.”

“Lorezaina. The Gardener. Mendiko don’t call it that because the soul has a way with plants.” Jeorg chuckled, shaking his head. “Possibility grows wild, unruly. Stanza guides it from your vision. Makes the world fit the shape you create for it.”

Jeorg began to walk in circles around him again, slowly pacing. “You. Michael Baumgart. A perspective. An experience. A cascade of thought tumbling forward in time, as Vera said.” He smiled. “And that is you. Not wrong to think that way.”

“I do get the feeling you’re about to tell me that it’s wrong, even so,” Michael muttered.

“Only limited.” Jeorg gestured to a tree beside him. “Like saying this tree is made of wood and leaves.” He gave Michael a sharp look, holding up a finger. “Which it is. But not only those. There is the water within it. The tiny life upon it. Its shadow. Its fruit. The next trees that sprout from it, and the richness its decaying wood provides.”

Michael sighed. “Broad, but I follow your reasoning,” he said.

Jeorg held up a finger, grinning; Michael followed it with his eyes. It traced along a small gap between the crowns of two trees, where the leaves stopped shy of touching as if by a silent accord. “Where your life touches the tree,” he said, “you build an image of it in your mind. The parts important to you. If the image is true, the tree fits into the shape your life builds. If it is flawed-”

There was a knocking noise as the wind picked up, causing branches from one tree to clatter against its neighbor. “There is conflict,” Jeorg said. “It continues until you or the tree change. Most people realize they can’t change reality. They alter the tree in their mind, and the conflict ends.”

“But I have other options,” Michael said slowly, looking down at the roots holding his foot. “Stanza takes what’s in my mind and makes it real.”

Jeorg stopped his pacing. “Yes, but you don’t need Stanza for that. We shape the world to our image in small ways. Shape other people against us.” He nodded up to the trees, once again swaying peacefully apart, their crowns interlocking perfectly. “The line they draw forms the edge of a greater self.”

Michael saw the brief echo of mirrors flashing against a golden skein, showing countless variations of himself stretching out to a distant light - one he still did not dare to dwell on too deeply. He winced and shook his head. “Okay,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Okay, fine. That’s actually sensible, despite how it sounds. We are the sum of our actions and interactions.” He let his hand drop. “Still trapped here.”

“Ask yourself why,” Jeorg suggested.

“…conflict?” Michael ventured. When Jeorg said nothing, he frowned. “Conflict with myself? Which I resolve by - what, agreeing to shift myself to, ah.” He paused. “To adjust to the reality of myself? Jeorg, this makes very little sense.”

Jeorg smiled thinly. “Does it not?” he asked. “Haven’t you been worried? Laying awake at night. Wishing you could sleep. Clinging to your peaceful life with Sera. Trying to pretend the rest of you doesn’t exist.” He tapped the trunk of the tree next to him, and it shrank away until there was little more than a sapling left. Above it, the neighboring trees swayed in sunlight, their leaves still hewing to the outline where the first tree had grown. “You wonder why there is violence when this-”

He tapped the tender young leaf of the sapling.

“-meets with that.” He nodded upwards to the conspicuous hole in the canopy. “They shape themselves around a Michael Baumgart that you refuse to recognize.”

Michael looked up at the patch of sky. “But they’ve always thought more of me than I am,” he said quietly. “And I thought I was doing better. Learning to step forward when I was needed. Have I backslid so far that I can’t even wake up without confronting - all of this?”

“It’s not a question of better or worse,” Jeorg said. He sighed, then shook his head; Michael’s eyes went blurry, and when they cleared the tree was once again swaying at its proper height. “We can’t see what we’re not looking for. Unai showed you what could be, with acceptance. Friedrich made you look beyond your limited self.”

Jeorg reached out to clasp Michael’s shoulder. “You’re not backsliding,” he said, tears sparkling in the corners of his eyes. “You’re growing. Enough to challenge things you were forced to accept before. This is a beginning.”

Michael nodded once, his throat tight. “I’m not sure I can learn to see myself like they do,” he whispered. “Nor that I should. It’s - arrogant. Dangerous.”

“You’ve heard Sera’s answer to that thought,” Jeorg chuckled. “And Antolin’s. Many others. You don’t have to convince yourself. Let them speak. Listen.” He turned to the side, inclining his head.

Heat prickled Michael’s skin from the direction Jeorg indicated; Michael turned and saw a glowing orb of light hanging between the trees. His breath caught in his throat, moisture prickling at his eyes.

“Hello, Charles,” he said. “I-” Michael paused, looking down. His foot was still stuck fast in the root. He turned his eyes to Jeorg, but found nothing but empty orchard.

Michael let out a long, slow sigh, then closed his eyes. He thought of the first time he met Charles, the crude, violent man shadowing Sobriquet’s steps. Of his easy violence, the barbs he cast Michael’s way. The hoarse rasp of his voice when Gerard had died. The sly look in his eye when he found something new to needle Sobriquet with. Brief flashes of something more, long-buried under a man who had cast aside the unnecessary.

When he opened his eyes, there was no orchard. There was only black, save for a glowing river overhead - and Charles, standing wrought in Stanza’s gold. Michael smiled to see him, though he did not trust himself to speak. He made to walk closer-

Then paused, and looked up at Charles, and waited. A moment passed. The glowing figure smiled, and its face was Michael’s own. It crossed the distance to him, its pace sure and confident. A man who bent a lord’s arrogance into a shield, who thought too much of himself to fail. A man who set impossibly high standards, and met them. The one who assumed that everyone was as good as he was, even if they had spent long, painful years showing they weren’t.

A friend, despite everything.

A luminous hand came up, waiting. Michael took it. There was a rush of light and heat, a metal bracer snaking from the man’s arm to wind around Michael’s own. The hand squeezed once-

Michael’s eyes slid open. It was dark. He was lying in a structure of some sort, propped against a pack and covered loosely with a camp blanket. He drew off the blanket and rose to his feet, feeling none of the groggy lethargy he had expected; his movements were light, sure.

As he moved, he noticed a weight on his arm. A battered metal bracer hung loosely from his wrist, still flecked here and there with chips of brown. Michael stared at it for a long moment, then reached to touch it with his free hand.

It took barely a thought; the metal flowed and rippled under his touch. The battered surface became smooth and unblemished, blood and dirt flaking away to fall below. He watched the gentle ripples spread upward; when it was secure around his arm he relaxed his hold on it. The metal stilled. He took a deep breath, then turned to head outside.

He saw the others as soon as he exited; Sobriquet’s head was already looking at the door to the building, an expression of relief on her face. Her eyes flicked to the glint of metal on his arm; a pang of grief rippled through her. “You’re up,” she said.

“I am,” Michael agreed. He looked up at the starry sky, then around at the countryside. He recognized none of it. “What happened?”

“You collapsed when Charles died,” Zabala said. “We thought Kolbe was going to kill you, but he walked off like a kicked dog. Eromena.” He shook his head. “We got you out and extracted before reinforcements could come. Went deep into the countryside. That was three days ago.”

Michael blinked, his heartrate quickening. “Three days?” he repeated. “That’s-” His hand came up, finding the fresh growth of stubble on his face. “No. The Ardans?”

“They’ve begun their advance,” Lars confirmed. “Marching up the coast. We were keeping pace with them at first, but we didn’t know-” He flushed. “You didn’t wake up.”

Sobriquet stepped closer, her fingers threading through his; Michael saw that her eyes were red. “We couldn’t risk tailing them too closely,” she said. “If Sibyl spotted us, we’d be facing potentes on horseback. The Ardans pulled away. They’ll make it to Gharon before us, no question.”

Michael looked around and saw the expressions on the others’ faces. They were angry, dejected, grieving - though in each there was a glimmer of something else. Determination. Shame. Love. The ephemeral motes of feeling hung between them, listless, waiting for a man who had not yet arrived.

He closed his eyes, then opened them - and stepped forward. “Then we should move,” Michael said. “And meet them there.”