The Quelling Of The Mist (Closed)

[Lillith]

The Quelling Of The Mist (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1qpGpfbtaE)

3688


The final part of the Greater Oni Saga.

Closed to Glories of Myrmidion.

Prologue

“There's only one place for us to go,” Lillith said sombrely.

Arden looked up from his cup and sighed.

“I know what you’re going to say,” he said.

“You do?” She raised her eyebrow.

With a nod the swordsman rested back onto the cushions and tried to appear nonchalant.

“Then you’ll know why I have to say it…,” she continued.

Arden nodded again.

“We have to go to the Palace of the Kami.” Her voice resonated. The air crackled. The skies darkened. The idea was blasphemous but Lillith did not allow pathetic fallacy to undo her resolve.

“What will you do once there?”

“Kill the Komodo,” she said without hesitation.

The conflict with the Greater Oni had inflicted a tiredness upon Arden he fought to defeat. Although the kingdom was rallying beneath the burning banners they had lifted to the ashen clouds, the swordsman fought on. Though Akashima would suffer the wrath of the Crab, the Jurugumo, and the Crane no more, one monstrosity remained. One more sleepless night lay ahead.

“Will you?” He did not attempt to hide his scepticism.

The spring wind stopped blowing through the abandoned teahouse. Not all that long ago people had travelled everywhere to drink Uncle Sei’s fine brew. But, since the war, the steppes had become a graveyard.

“Yes, we will,” she corrected.

“You sound confident, but I can’t help worry.” He paused to reflect. “The Komodo is the antithesis of everything Akashima stands for.”

“His strength lies not in power, war, and fear…” Lillith looked out across the distant cliff face. Mist danced over the jade green treetops. “His strength lies in truths and lies. The Komodo wields information, misdirection, and secrets better than you wield a sword.”

“I know. I’ve killed him once before, remember?”

Lillith chuckled.

“What’s funny?”

“If you’d done your job four centuries ago, ‘Lao Sheng’, we wouldn't be fighting for Akashima’s future now.”

Arden looked around the teahouse. The upturned chairs, shattered bowls, and tattered walls reflected the wider state of the country. He cursed the Oni under his breath.

“We all make mistakes…,” he said after a long, torturous pause.

“Let's not repeat ours.” She turned back to Arden.

“What did you do?” His eyes sparked with intrigue.

“I let you stand alone.” Lillith sighed.

“You did only what Oblivion wanted, Sister…”

Lillith shook her head. The wind blew in roils of autumn leaves.

“We can’t hide behind that forever,” she said. She exhaled. As though the winds were hers to command, the leaves swept back out into the gardens.

“Your determination makes me nauseous.”

Lillith bolted upright. With deft hands the assassin tied her hair back into a tight bun and moistened her lips. She picked up chopsticks from the table and jabbed them into the bun to secure it.

“I think it’s time we stopped reminiscing.” Her tone flat and depressed, Arden blinked, struggling to read her intentions.

“We cannot leave.” He looked around her at the entrance as though expecting a guest. “He isn’t here yet.”

Lillith grunted impatiently but returned to her seat.

“You’re right…,” she mumbled. She closed her eyes to fight off the voices haunting her mind. “We need him…,” she continued. “He will help us def…” She trailed off and began to rock back and forth. Her eyes glowed vermilion.

“…Lillith?” Arden asked. He reached for his blade.

He would not have hesitated to force the Oni back into their tomb, but voices drifted into the teahouse and snapped her out of her waking nightmare. They stood in unison to greet their guests.

[Glories of Myrmidion]

Act I

Akashima.

Land of soul, land of spirit. Land of mysticism and mystery. Isolated bastion of independence, engulfed but undevoured by the fires of Corone’s civil war.

The road from Radasanth had led them astray from their scheduled sojourn to Underwood. Lionel and Seth argued against the distraction, unconvinced that it served any purpose to learn more of the island nation. Jehan grinned and ignored their protestations. Hectorus hid a resigned smile as, in the end and as always, his big brother got his way.

Thus, in a twilit haze caught between the humidity of late summer and the briskness of early autumn, a mounted procession of four knights from the far foreign north wound a path down the Comb Mountains. The hooves of their steeds raised puffs of dusty cloud, drumming a steady slow beat upon the hard-beaten earth. Dying flame shone in the burnished steel of their breastplates and glimmered upon the points of their lances. The banners of their order fluttered in the breeze, golden eagle upon field of night, framed in a halo of evening sun.

Loamy petrichor, gifted by the rains earlier that evening, wafted from terraced rice paddies carved from emerald hillsides. The song of sleepy katydids serenaded their meandering. Languid warmth washed over their swaying forms. Their horses’ tails swished in lazy annoyance at swarming mosquitoes. None could blame the knights for nodding off in their saddle.

Instead, Asar Lionel Botha frowned at the wayhouse coming up at the side of the road. Waning light smouldered in the contours of his coal-like complexion, darker than the Fallienese couriers who sometimes docked in Yambo Harbour. He shifted his weight in the saddle, flexing a shoulder that had yet to heal from his encounter with the demi-god the natives called the Crane. He spoke in a deep-throated thrum as pleasant as his facial features.

“Seth. How would you even defend such a flimsy home?”

Asar Sethry Roantree, second in the column ahead of Lionel, grunted without committing interest. Older than the rest of the knights by a considerable margin, he tugged at the thick bandages wrapped about the creased valleys of his brow. Grim grey eyes considered the wood and paper structure approaching them upon the road ahead. His leathery tanned features folded into an approximation of a solemn chuckle.

“Reminds me of the Eastern Quarter outside Blightwater,” he said, his manner almost fond and quite detached from his usual dourness. “They built it like a labyrinth. Hard to know where you were going. Had the most vicious street fights.”

“Apparently they survive earth tremors and strong winds well,” the youngest of the knights chimed in from the rear. “Not fires, though, I would imagine.”

Of the four, Asar Hectorus Leitdorf had the features most Coronian. Now, he composed them in an expression youthful and studious. His dirty brown eyes gazed with a scholar’s hunger into the lonely structure, eschewing the lush hillside terraces basking in orange warmth. Movement behind the paper windows piqued his interest, along with the thoughts of a warm bath and a soft bed. Giving his destrier a gentle kick in the flanks, he moved up the line until he rode alongside the leader of their band.

“Your steed grows weary, m’lord. Would you fancy a rest for the night?”

High Asar Jehan Leitdorf grinned in genial mirth at his younger brother’s accusation. He towered in the saddle even over his armoured men, muscular shoulders bearing with ease the burden of his rank as First Knight. The crags in his broad features crinkled into pleasant crow’s feet as he too contemplated a good night’s sleep. A passing hawk cast a shadow over his unerring sea-green eyes, disappearing down the valley with a piercing, haunting cry.

“We could do with one, I suppose,” he answered, in a rolling timbre that trembled amongst the verdant shoots of rice by the roadside. A quick glance backwards took in Seth’s wounded head and the bandages around Lionel’s shoulder. Neither knight complained of the wounds they had suffered in their previous skirmish against a Greater Oni. But Jehan knew that they would nonetheless appreciate the luxury of slow recuperation.

“… yes, let us,” he decided a moment later as they approached the wayhouse, surprising everybody by swinging out of his saddle. His men followed suit, Hectorus helping the grimacing Lionel. The dying sun oversaw the cacophonous clatter of steel plate, and the impatient whinnying of steeds unsure of whether they would keep on travelling or settle down for the night. Jehan motioned to his ebony-skinned subordinate to accompany his sure-footed stride towards the low door. “Let us see what they are able to offer.”

“Food,” Lionel began, again massaging his wounded shoulder. In boisterous boast he continued as together they ducked beneath the threshold. “And drink. And a hot bath, and a woman. Make that plenty of women. I wonder how they’re built in these…”

He trailed off, taking in what Jehan had already seen. A familiar face, not unwelcome but tinged with bloody memories. The lady called Lillith, who they’d met outside Radasanth, who they’d allied with against the Crane. Lionel’s shoulder throbbed one final time in reminiscent pain.

“… parts,” he finished in abrupt shame. He had not parted with Lillith on the best of terms. His inability to see her fallen companion Neko as anything more than a demi-human pet, an attitude common in his homeland, had driven an irreparable wedge between them. His jawline hardened in a defiant glower, his eyes growing cold and hard.

Jehan had no such inhibitions.

“Lady Lillith,” he rumbled, raising one hand in a casual salute. “What brings you to this part of Corone? I trust you are well?”

[Lillith]

“Lord Jehan, we have been expecting you.” Lillith bowed in the traditional manner and stepped forwards.

“You have?” The knight raised an eyebrow and began to his riding gauntlets. “How did you know we were here?”

Arden stood behind his sister. His red cloak, crimson hair, and scarred smile told the knights all they needed to know of their kindred swordsman. He was marred by war and bound by duty just as they were.

“You rattled and clanked all the way up the path,” He gestured to the others and chuckled. “You must be weary, so join us. Rest and partake in Uncle Sei’s hospitality.”

It was only then that the Knights of Olbina drew their attentions to the teahouse. It had been resplendent once. People had travelled from as far as Capitol to partake in the celebrated Akita Grey – Akashiman soft leaves with western breakfast blends.

“I am afraid it has seen better days,” Lillith bemoaned. She walked to the counter to prepare refreshments. “Take your fill.” She lifted a lid off one of the cube boxes on the counter and examined the contents. She sifted through the leaves with her fingertips. “The owner will not mind,” she sighed.

Jehan knew better than to refuse the assassin. He gestured for the others to enter proper. They re-arranged the low tables into one large rectangle at the centre of the main dining area and tried to arrange themselves on the cushions.

“So much artistry here, and yet no table legs,” Seth grumbled.

Lillith chuckled. She held a cup in one hand and a teapot in the other.

“You can stand outside with the horses if you like,” Arden offered.

Lillith walked around into the kitchen to begin preparing the tea. Perfection would take time to prepare. It was an intrinsic ritual that was as enjoyable as drinking the tea itself.

“There will be no need…,” Seth said.

Jehan smiled, but looked at Arden questioningly.

“My name is Arden Janelle. I am Lillith’s sister.”

With his curiosity satisfied the First Knight set his gloves onto the veneer table top.

“He’s not as hairy as Neko, but equally as loyal,” Lillith chirped inappropriately from behind a cast iron pot. Seth glared at her.

“I am still so sorry for your loss, Lady Kazumi,” Jehan said with sincere remorse.

“Thank you, but his death was temporary. The nekojin do not die so long as they are needed and loved.” It did not make the grief easier to bear, however hard she tried to hide it.

Lillith returned to the table with a delicate smile. Sweat beaded on her brow.

“How fare you both since we met that ill-fated day on the road?” the First Knight asked. He watched Seth drink some Sake bemusedly.

“We’ve all evening to talk, gentlemen. First, you must be hungry?” She did not wait for an answer. “We have udon on the stove, a type of noodle. Every type of regional dish is within my means to prepare.”

Arden sighed. “They will not know the difference between Sanuki and Hakata udon.”

“Lord Jehan loves to indulge in the culinary practices of all nations,” Lionel said glibly. The knights laughed nervously at the First Knight’s expense as they recalled the incident with the ‘stew’ in Radasanth.

“We will relish anything you lay out, my Lady.” Jehan nodded to the spirit-warder.

“Excellent. I’ll prepare a selection, or as we say, <kaiseki>.”

Lillith returned to the kitchen. Arden cleared his throat and continued their carefully rehearsed exposition.

“In answer to your question Lord Jehan, we are both well enough.” He did not wish to tell them how tired they truly felt. He gestured to the lotus flower bottles full with warm sweet Doragun sake at the centre of the table.

“What is it?” Seth enquired cautiously.

“Sake. Good sake at that. Help yourselves though drink it slowly, for goodness sake.” He did not wish to clean up after such mammoth men.

“Might I approach the topic of why we’re here?” said Jeren softly.

“We need to call on your charity, skills, and prowess on the battlefield once more…” Arden replied.

Lillith returned laden with steaming bowls, soya sauce, and seafood appetisers.

“One Greater Oni remains.” She set the tray down tentatively.

“Tell me. What do you know of the Komodo?” Arden continued as they began to eat.

[Glories of Myrmidion]

The blood-red fish melted in the mouth, fatty and succulent. It contrasted with the buttery texture of its rusty counterpart, and the delicate tickle of the white one. The octopus, lightly salted, tasted of the sea with every fragrant chew. The sumptuous aroma of the eel, grilled and basted in a sweet sauce, caressed the nostrils.

The knights attacked the fresh bounty of the sea in its myriad forms, leaving the thread of conversation dangling in unanswered limbo. Every adventurous bite unlocked expanses upon their tongues that they hadn’t known existed. In a matter of moments they demolished the first set of plates, apologetically abandoning unwieldy chopsticks for sticky fingers. The dainty cups of pungent but smooth rice alcohol, they found much to their liking.

Long minutes passed, until they returned to Arden’s question.

“The Komodo?”

Hectorus frowned, alone of the Olbinans not partaking of the alcohol. The life of a knight errant enforced strict terms of abstinence upon those that walked its path. Many of the young male initiates to the Order chafed against the forbiddance of drink that clouded the mind, but he found it little issue, preferring to keep his thoughts clear.

“I’ve heard the term. Haukell used it to refer to the dragon lizards of the southern seas.”

The red-cloaked sellsword, the one Lillith had called Arden, raised an impressed eyebrow. Either he hadn’t known that particular nugget himself, or he hadn’t expected a bumpkin country knight to have picked it up from obscure texts on esoteric beasts.

Of course, he’d also referred to himself as Lillith’s sister… but that must have been a simple figure of speech.

“Your Order must have some impressive scholariums.” Holding Hectorus’s gaze for a moment longer than necessary, he laughed when the younger man chafed. “Yes, the word does refer to a dragon. In this case, perhaps, not a true dragon but a spirit that takes such a form.”

“A Greater Oni,” Lillith repeated as she returned to the table. Her hands held a lacquered tray laden with small bowls. Fluffy white rice, a luxury even in the most expensive of establishments, enticed them in steamy fragrance. The broth, rich in the back of the nose, promised dainty sensations upon their taste buds. The light fish starter had matched the sake and allowed conversation to flow; now the simple combination of rice and broth braced the stomach for the true meal to come. “Like the Crane we defeated together before.”

“Ah. Now that was a fight worthy of an Oration,” Jehan rumbled, resonant and low, face flushed as the alcohol loosened his tongue. Seth rubbed his head in chastened memory, ruddy and weary. Lionel grimaced at his bandaged shoulder, reminded of how the Crane had almost cut short any further glorious endeavours. “But tell me, is this true? Yet another of your demigods to defeat?”

Lillith could not quite discern whether it was concern or eagerness that suffused the First Knight’s features. Given what she knew of the big man, though, she dared say the latter. She did not show how much the thought chilled her.

“There were five once,” she said, masking her fears as she dutifully replaced the empty dishes with the full. “The Komodo, thank be the kami, is the last of their number.”

“A true dragon-slaying.” None mistook the bright spark in Lionel’s eyes. His dusky skin veiled the effect of the sake, but the exuberance in his breath spoke of one who had imbibed without inhibition. “Now that would be a true legend, not a mere hearth-tale. Oh, how they would scramble to inscribe our names upon the Column of Heroes.”

“… and how quick they would be to scatter our ashes were we to fail?” Hectorus spoke, the only rational head left among the knights. “If it leaves that much of us behind, that is.”

“You think too hard, little...” Jehan began, only for Lionel’s bellow to interrupt his thoughts.

“An honour!”

The knight raised his wine high. In an instant Seth and Jehan echoed the gesture. Such dainty drinking vessels did not befit the moment, pinched betwixt such meaty fingers, but none begrudged them their enthusiasm. Their declarations resonated in the twilit stillness that had settled upon the wayside inn.

“For glory!”

“For Olbina!”

“Gentlemen!” Arden interjected, having mentally prepared himself for such boisterousness. Raising his hands in appeasement, he sought to calm the merry gesticulations of his guests. Lillith stifled a smile as she turned away from the table, back to the kitchen and the varied dishes that awaited her there. Vegetables simmered in sweet sauce, fish broiled in naked flame, meaty broth awaited on the boil. “As much as I admire your enthusiasm, the quest ahead will bear little resemblance to the dragon-slayers of your myths. The Komodo has no permanent physical form. He sustains his existence through manipulating, and possessing, others.”

“A puppet master.” Jehan growled, sober once more. His flailing fist knocked a piece of discarded armour – Hectorus’s left vambrace, by the looks of it – against the wooden doorframe on the far side of the room. To his sensibilities, there was no foe more cowardly than one who dared not show his own face while others fought in his name.

“Not quite,” came the correction from the Scarabraean mercenary opposite him. “As I said, he has no need to maintain permanent physical form whilst he enacts his ploys.”

“A mind parasite, then,” Seth observed, scratching at the coarse stubble on his chin before draining another thimbleful of wine. “Which makes it even worse. There is nothing for us to strike at unless he reveals himself to us first.”

“Which of course he isn’t going to do until the odds are overwhelmingly in his favour… or we can coerce him into the open.” Hectorus reached over to retrieve his stray vambrace, then paused at the gleam in Arden’s eye. “I’m assuming you know the body he currently inhabits, then?”

“We do,” Lillith called from the kitchen. “We also have a plan for how to approach him, and how to get him to expose himself to you.”

Arden chuckled around a mouthful of rice before washing it down with the last of his soup. “But first, let us introduce you to the Komodo’s vessel.”

Reaching into his robes, he removed a piece of parchment onto the table, between two bowls of rice and the last of the octopus. A closer glance revealed a hand-drawn caricature of an old fat man with heavy jowls and a prominent triple chin.

“Gentlemen, I present to you the trade viceroy of Akashima.”

[Lillith]

Lesser men would let the alcohol, laughter, and high altitude get to their head. The atmosphere however was precisely what mind, body, and soul needed to prepare for the days ahead. Their laughter alone was uplifting, never mind their piety and unfailing brotherhood.

“Strange, to hide in such a mundane person,” Seth mused. He waited for the laughter to die down. “Why this man?”

Arden smiled. Seth was a hardened, intuitive man the silent swordsman could identify with. The other Olbinans were too, but faith did not blind Seth’s soul quite so much.

“The Komodo intends to open Akashima’s borders.”

Seth frowned. “Is that so bad?”

“...To Ronin,” Lillith continued. “He means to allow bands of fallen back into the country to besiege Capitol city.”

“To get close enough to stop, we need you,” Arden continued.

He pushed himself upright. The food, sake, and lateness of the hour were beginning to take its toll. He unwrapped a sash from around his waist and stripped away his overcoat. He rolled his shoulders to ease away the stiffness. The evening drifted further still into dusk’s embrace. Crickets began to chirp.

“Acting as a trade delegation from Olbina, you will make the court an offer they cannot refuse.”

“You sound sure of yourself, Arden,” Jeren said cautiously. He rested forwards hand on chin.

“When I’m done seducing the trade minister’s aide I daresay they will be…open to suggestion.” Lillith’s grin left little to the imagination.

“That sounds like you mean to go ahead. A scouting party of sorts?” Seth was beginning to like the idea.

“We have already sown the seeds.” Lillith produced a scroll from beneath the table. “Your documents and your charter. You will need to know it by heart by the time you get to the meeting chamber.”

Seth took it and unrolled it. He noted the parchment was speckled with blood and the scent of lavender.

“A ledger of goods.” He continued to read the spidery text intently. The crickets trilled on. “An offer of Olbina’s natural resources to help rebuild Akashima’s cities.” His eyes widened.

“Which we will never deliver of course,” Lillith clarified. “If the court agrees to the trade agreement they will present you to the Komodo.”

Lillith stood next to Arden and they demonstrated the courtly bow together.

“You must learn the formulaic way in which that presentation must unfold. One slip, one sleight, one falter…," Arden said sourly. His expression soured the knight’s happiness. “It will mean death for us all.”

"Up you get and let us see you bow!" Lillith gestured for their guests to stand.

[Glories of Myrmidion]

Act II

Polished cedar floorboards sweltered beneath an unforgiving afternoon sun. A lone late-living cicada droned its song from the drooping green shade of an ancient willow. Adventurous mosquitoes ventured forth from the stagnant grasses at the edge of the garden. The windless humidity hung over his mind like a smoggy curtain: uncomfortable, heavy, sleep-inducing.

Jehan held the correct posture, bowing from the waist with his back ramrod straight and his hands held at his sides. He had to fight the temptation to flourish his left hand outwards, to scrape the back of his right boot across the meticulously brushed sand. The manners of the Olbinan court had no place upon the terrace of the Palace of Hidden Flame. The four ministers arrayed between him and the viceroy, Akashima’s council for foreign trade, would have scoffed.

“We salute your arrival.” The leftmost of their number, teeth blackened and face painted alabaster, imitated the cicada’s high-pitched intonation. “You are most welcome here, may the Royal Family be ever merciful and wise.”

A dozen courtiers accompanied the viceroy and his ministers, a riot of rustling robes settling into place beneath the eaves on the terrace. Twice that number of ladies-in-waiting observed the proceedings from peeping holes in the thin paper partitions. A score of elite soldiers stood guard, adorned with half-lamellar cuirasses and long ceremonial glaives. Restrained hostility glimmered from behind face-obscuring masks.

Lillith had prepared him well. Jehan and his little brother wore only their breastplates beneath sleeveless surcoats. The fine embroidery of the golden eagle emblazoned across Jehan’s chest marked him as the senior official of the delegation. Sealed crates at their feet contained the gifts they had brought from their homeland.

Seth and Lionel sweltered at stiff attention in their full plate, two steps behind the brothers and one to either side, silent shining sentinels of silvery steel. As a gesture of trust and peace they carried only their daggers on their belts. Lionel in particular could not tear his eyes from the intricate folded paper flowers that adorned the courtyard in celebration of the visitors.

Hectorus swallowed, tempted by a ridiculous thought to reach out and strangle the tension in the air before it consumed him whole. His hair clung limp and lifeless in clammy embrace of his neck. The stink of his sweat stung his nose amidst all the artificial cleanliness.

Jehan waited.

It had taken them three whole weeks to journey this far from the abandoned wayhouse. For two days they had travelled from Akashima’s mountain borders to the fertile plains surrounding its capital. For four more they had awaited audience with an official, and only Lillith’s documents had satisfied his dismissive demeanour. A day later they’d met with a junior bureaucrat from the council, but a week of endless discussion had achieved nothing. Then a further week of fretful and frustrating silence had passed, until at last the trade viceroy summoned them to the third and least significant of his palaces. Now they paraded before him in the heat of the midday sun, like trophies or prize livestock.

Had Lillith managed to pull the right strings in the shadows? Or, by treating them like cattle, did their foes plot to keep them off balance? Perhaps the truth lay in a combination of the two.

“We have heard much of your magnificent kingdom to the north,” the painted official spoke in that irritating whine. The anointed spokesman of the four ministers, his fondness for bombastic procedure did not bode well for their sanity. Neither did his atrocious accent. Jehan could only assume that the trade viceroy deliberately meant to slight him. “We look forward to discussing a relationship between us that can benefit both of our great nations.”

At some point between Lillith’s etiquette lessons and Seth’s tutelage on diplomacy, Arden had taken him aside to pass on three simple maxims when negotiating with the Akashiman. Jehan remembered the first of them now as he opened his mouth to reply.

Be polite. Be humble. Above all, be prepared for long-winded formalities.

“We thank you for your kind words. We look forward to a long and fruitful relationship both with your glorious country and with worthies such as yourselves.”

The sonorous rumble that emanated from the depths of Jehan’s chest continued to banter pleasantries back and forth. He bore no illusion that the Akashimans would mistake him for a mere ambassador or trade official. The first real flaw in their plan, to disguise himself as such would have required the effort of disguising the sun as the moon. At length they had decided that their best chance of working around it lay in an honest bluff. If Jehan could convince his counterparts that they would find it worth their time to treat with him as a learned knight, then negotiations would proceed. If all went wrong and the Akashiman ministers exposed him as a simple warrior, then they could reveal Hectorus to support his elder brother. During the tenuous early stages of negotiation, much rested on the diplomatic finesse of Jehan’s broad shoulders.

Somehow he survived. An imperceptible nod passed from the senior minister – a grizzled country lord with a coarse beard and a battleaxe of a glare – to their spokesman. Immediately Jehan grinned with disarming ease, aware of how incongruous it looked amidst all the ceremony. He was gaijin, outsider, and they would expect a small amount of disrespectful familiarity of him.

“With your permission, may we proceed?” From a concealed pocket on the inside of his surcoat, he removed the ledger of goods. “Perhaps we would like to begin by discussing what Olbina has to offer to your great nation?”

A shiver ran through all four ministers at the foreigner’s bluntness. The painted effete hid his discomfort behind a wave of his fan against the vagrant mosquitoes. The hostility of the grizzled country lord steamed from his stocky frame into the low-hanging sky. Assembled courtiers stiffened; watchful guards inched closer to their scabbards. The cicada’s lonely drone cut through the tension.

“We agree,” the ministerial spokesman replied after only the faintest of delays. “Yet we believe it would be more productive to first discuss the particulars of your proposal as it pertains to the export of our grains for your consumption?”

Never give a direct no. They too will pretend to agree, then suggest otherwise in the next breath.

“Of course,” Jehan agreed quickly, fighting to keep his features impassive as he cursed his over-eager haste. Any greater a slip than that, and with but one heartbeat he could flush the whole endeavour down the garderobe. Perspiration trickled from his brow, green-flecked eyes narrowing in the bright sun. How could simple wordplay exhaust him more than the clash of swords or the command of armies? “As your worthinesses decree.”

He covered his flushed uncertainty with a deep bow, buying himself the time to compose his thoughts. Two deep breaths of the warm air, of the perfume and the sweat and the metal and the sand, steadied his nerves. When he rose once more, his features reflected only the calm of a windless sea.

“Then perhaps the envoy from Olbina wishes to enumerate what his nation would like to receive in turn?”

Be wary. They will try to trap you into losing face. The best way to gain their respect is to sidestep this trap.

Arden’s final admonishment flickered through his mind. The briefest of pauses it elicited in his thoughts allowed him to spot Hectorus’s frantic hand signs. Swallowing the honest answer he had just about been ready to give, instead he bowed low and demurred.

“The skilled craftsmanship of Akashima’s goods and the quality of its produce holds great renown even in the distant north. I am certain that we would be able to come to a satisfactory agreement.”

A subtle ripple of surprise through the assembled ministers rewarded his careful praise. Jehan blessed the fact that he had paid close attention to Arden’s advice, and that fate had ensured that Hectorus’s warning reached his eyes. The Akashiman ministers had not expected the foreigner to deflect the dagger with such poise. In doing so, he rose somewhat in their estimation.

Perhaps they would take him more seriously in the negotiations to follow.

Tugging at the collar of his sweat-stained silken shirt, Jehan braced himself for the next round of talking. The afternoon was still young, and they had a long way yet to go.

[Lillith]

After a round of rhetoric and riotous applause, the group swept away through a grand portal into an adjacent chamber. This appeared to mark symbolic promotion from outsider to welcome guest. It was another step towards the trade minister and the inevitable conflict.

“Please be seated.” The viceroy gestured with sticky fingers at the black square table in the centre of the room.

Lillith and Arden sat on the eastern edge, the knights on the north and south. The dignitaries sat west, their backs to a mural of Akashiman exploits and a golden door. Lillith presumed it lead to the trade minister’s chambers.

“You did well before the ministers Jehan-san.”

“I had a good teacher,” he smirked in reply. The dignitary gestured at the sake. As instructed, the First Knight poured a measure of the steaming rice wine only for his compatriots.

Lillith poured herself, Arden, and Neko a glass. Then the dignitary poured his own. It was an old custom devised by bitter men who feared poison, not dragons.

“Your offer came as quite the surprise. We often receive requests from Corone for trade, but beyond these borders few have heard of Akashima.” The delegate scrutinised every inch of the trade party. His stare was cold and calculating.

“Your kingdom’s beauty and your people’s honour kindles hope in Olbina’s citizens for a new age of trade.” Arden’s guidance wove Jehan’s words into a powerful weapon. The First Knight vowed to thank the swordsman should they survive the ordeal.

“They spoke fondly of the execution stalls and slums on the way here, Okoshi-san,” Lillith said bravely.

“I am…,” he glanced sideways at Lillith disdainfully, “very pleased you found it homely.”

The assassin examined the mural behind the oafish man. She recognised it; the Trade Charter Uprising. Sixty years ago, the common folk and merchants of the city had brought a petition to the emperor. The emperor ignored it. The resulting war for democracy had been bloody and bitter.

“It would be a great honour to see more of this city should you allow?” Jehan asked.

Arden bit his lip, but when the dignitary chuckled he relaxed.

“Once the treaty is signed you have free reign of Capitol and all the lands beyond First Knight.” The minister held his hands out wide, long sleeves standards to a new forged friendship. “Drink! Tell me more of what Akashima can do for your noble country?”

Glasses emptied, glasses filled, and glasses emptied again.

“Jehan-san was telling me of his country’s troubles with…,” she paused to think. “What was it?” Her eyes sparkled. Her hair danced with fox’s fire.

[Glories of Myrmidion]

“Orcs, my lady.”

The glimmer in Arden’s eye and the warning twitch of the veins in Hectorus’s neck warned him to behave. His little brother shared much with the sellsword from Scara Brae, not least an inherent desire to see things proceed exactly according to plan. Jehan, in contrast, had more in common with Lillith. Despite the inherent danger, sometimes a sojourn added spice to the journey. The warm glow in her cheeks came not only from the alcohol she had imbibed, of that he was certain.

“The land of Olbina lies far to the north,” he said, his love expansive. The assembled dignitaries already knew that, of course, but the clumsy repetition exaggerated the apparent effect of the sake. “It is an open land of rolling moors and dense forests, of constant drizzle and cold blustery winds. We have no majestic soaring mountains to shelter us from the whims of the outside world, no sparkling blue coastlines providing access to the bounties of the sea. We skirmish frequently with our neighbours in the Five Dukedoms over riches and petty rivalries. Still, it is a beautiful land, and bountiful too to those who seek the Lady’s favour and persevere.”

Lord Okoshi and his companion nodded, enthralled by the knight’s account of his homeland. The painted effete and the grizzled country lord savoured the relief from their duties, paying only scant attention to his words. In a ceremonial setting, none of them would have allowed themselves to let their guards slip. But Lillith had forewarned Jehan to expect a lull in the formalities at this stage. Precious breaths of tranquillity separated the grim ritual of introduction from the strict procedure of actually meeting the viceroy. Now was their only chance to probe another question that Hec had raised: how far had the Komodo’s poisonous fangs penetrated the ministry? Could they get away with decapitating the beast in their quest to defeat the Greater Oni? Or would they have to subdue its bloated torso too?

“This same beauty and bounty makes us an attractive target to the many raiders who pass westwards through our lands. Beastmen, winged and scaled and horned. Lost giants wandering from refuge to refuge. The occasional dragon.”

The knights stiffened, as did Arden. Lillith alone remained unperturbed, her acting so much more professional than the rest of her entourage. But none of the ministry officials showed any signs of reacting to the verbal dagger. Their sake-brightened eyes betrayed only intense curiosity or affected boredom. Did they wear masks for his benefit? Or had they grown so adept at concealing their true selves that they could afford to ignore such a blatant prod?

“The greatest threat is the orc menace,” Jehan continued without pause, though the questions raged through his mind. He could trust Hec, brow furrowed and eyes intent, to do the thinking for him. His job was to be bold and decisive. “They are more numerous than the rest, and more tenacious too. And unlike any other raider they are intent not only on driving us out but on taking over the lands left behind as well. If we allow them to grab a foothold in our lands…”

He left the rest of the sentence hanging, playing to their xenophobic tendencies. Then his features creased in a grin as cold as the lands he hailed from, one that allowed a bare hint of his bridled battlelust to show.

“Still, I have yet to meet a warband that could hold their ground against a wall of lance tips and the thunder of charging hooves.”

Seth and Lionel felt the chill race up their spines, reminder of the battles they had won and lost beneath that same bloodthirsty grin. Hectorus shivered in tune, but his was a reaction born more of fear… fear that he too might someday succumb to the same red mist as his elder half-brother.

Arden and Lillith exchanged perturbed glances of their own. This too strayed beyond the boundaries they had set for their conversation, too far for even Lillith to remain aloof. And this time, Jehan seemed to have struck a nerve.

Eyes glowing in newfound strength like charcoal embers, the senior minister came to life. His battleaxe of a glare pinned Jehan’s in place. Two ferocious wills circled through the deepening twilight, elemental forces clashing in the most fleeting of confrontations. Both sides withdrew before inflicting further harm, but the aftertaste of violence hung heavy in the lazy humidity. A single mosquito droned in the sudden silence.

“These dragons,” the grizzled warrior, as out of place in this meeting as Jehan himself, growled in his best approximation of cool detachment. “You would slay them… personally?”

Warning signs flashed. Lionel’s hand twitched at a scimitar he no longer wore, and Arden’s eyes flitted about the room in anticipation of the worst. But Jehan’s sea-green gaze deepened in the same terrible humour that suffused his features.

“Personally.”

The assurance he gave his counterpart once again embellished the truth, though none dared to doubt it. Ignoring Hec’s frantic hand signs, hardly even daring to breathe, the First Knight tensed for action.

A single bead of sweat fell to the straw mats at his feet. Lantern flames whispered in weak upon their wicks. The silence stretched thin and taut, like too little butter spread over too much bread, broken only by the mosquito’s whining drone.

The grizzled lord never got his chance to respond. Lord Okoshi’s hand flashed out to his side, a wound spring uncoiling. The mosquito died a messy blood-splattered death within his clenched fist.

“I see,” he spoke slowly, relaxing the muscles in his meaty fist one by one to allow the remains of the unfortunate insect to spill to the floor.

“I see indeed.”

[Lillith]

Jehan remained composed even though the air crackled with tension. Lillith remained on edge, because behind the minister’s calculating eyes a darkness lingered. She advanced their meeting to its natural end game.

“A man’s struggles makes him turn to friends favoured,” she said softly.

“Indeed they do, Lillith-sama, indeed they do.” The minister pushed himself upright. He seemed to rise on thermals, his robes unflinching in their perfect folds. “The affidavit you sent in advance of your arrival lacked one piece of crucial information.”

“What was that, ser?” Jehan enquired.

The minister pulled a document from the sleeves of his kimono and unfolded it. The cracked wax of the Olbina seal reminded Lillith of dried blood.

“You offer much grain and cattle, yet I am wondering…” The minister turned. He started to sound less dignified and more dragon-like. He shuffled to the door to his chambers. Lillith took the opportunity to warn her companions.

“He’s turning,” she mouthed to the others. Muscles tensed. Fists clenched. Calm diction cracked and crumbled.

“How I am to fulfil this agreement when…”

He pushed against the door and it gave way.

“…Akashima has but a handful of grain left for its own people?”

The Komodo grew tired of its masquerade. The minister’s golden cloth fell away and his skin hardened into diamond scales. Before the knights could rise the Komodo lashed flame through the portal. Arden leapt to push Jehan out of the way of the fiery projectile and Lillith fell prone. They rolled and tumbled out of harm’s way amidst cries and the sound of air burning.

Lillith rose slowly. She rose calmly. She unsheathed a tanto from beneath her kimono and glared at their ‘host’. Arden and the Knights smashed aside the paper divides between the meeting room and antechamber where their gifts to the minister were stored.

“<I should have been less patient and more war-worthy,>” she admitted. The folds of her golden silk kimono shimmered. Her face furred into fox-like ferocity. Whatever magic trapped the demons within the Akashiman began to fail. Komodo and Kitsune stared at one another.

“<Caution is Akashima’s way. It will be its ruin,>” the Komodo said hatefully.

Pots, wine vats, and crates of winter’s harvest crashed to the floor. Out flowed concealed swords, shields, and vials of blood. Rallied to war by the Komodo’s dramatics and arrogance, they armed themselves quickly.

“Gentlemen, you can forget politics now.” Lillith snarled in Common. Speaking Akashiman would only give the Komodo power.

They arrayed behind her in a show of solidarity. Arden held his sword in a reverse grip. He was bloodied and sweating. Jehan burnt bright with furry and kinship. He was ready to fight. Hectorus, Seth, and Lionel rallied to their lord’s side. Together, the Olbinans were a reckoning force.

The Komodo licked his lips with a long, serpentine tongue and clicked his fingers. Candles flickered to life. Daylight fell to night.

“You will kill no more of my kin, kusotare.”

Jehan ordered the charge.

[Glories of Myrmidion]

When they had last borne arms against a Greater Oni, they had allied themselves with the lay of the land. They had trapped the Crane in a thick grove of sturdy redwoods, robbing it of its wings, of its talons, of the wind through its feathered mane. They had tethered it to its leafy tomb with shackles of blood and battle-forged steel, and there they had slain it.

But the Komodo turned the tables on any such thought. It had outwitted them. It had surprised them. Now it laughed at them, bitter malevolence underscored by primal fury.

Only one word could describe the response to the Komodo made manifest.

Pandemonium.

Lashing flame fed upon mural-decorated sliding walls and singed wisps of Jehan’s fine fair hair. The ensuing panic answered any questions they still had of the ministry’s true allegiance. One of the ministers gave a shrill shriek and fled, barrelling through the wall behind him. The effete retreated to a corner, squealing in dismay and masking his face against the Komodo’s gruesome bestial visage. The grizzled warrior dashed for the flames before they could devour the tinderbox of paper and wood, bellowing at the top of his considerable lungs.

“Guards! To arms!”

The wall behind him slid open. Two red lamellar-clad guards rushed in, both already reaching for the short swords at their waists. Spying the beast, one grabbed instead for a ceremonial glaive mounted against the wall. The other halted in fear, mouth agape behind face-obscuring mask.

Even as they recoiled, the knights of Olbina swept to the attack.

“FOR GLORY!”

The chamber narrowed near the door where the Komodo waited, gloating in taunting challenge. The final few steps funnelled into a corridor with barely enough width for two grown men to stand shoulder to shoulder. But still the knights sallied as one, every stride sounding their charge upon the hardwood floor. Blurs of steel and swirling surcoat, they surged forth in seamless precision they surged forth. Together they formed a single engine of war, bent only on the destruction and eradication of their foe.

In one fluid motion, Lionel retrieved his scimitar from the overturned boxes of tribute. He feinted low, then reversed with contemptuous ease into a high flick aimed at the Komodo’s vulnerable neck. In a protracted battle the nick of a carotid artery, the faintest trickle of unstemmed blood loss, could spell the difference between victory and defeat.

Wisps of shadowy smoke breathed through blunted nose. The Komodo curled reptilian lips in scathing contempt. Hidden monstrosities writhed beneath its skin, rippling like tidal waves across a sea of muscle. The blade struck home, but it struck not vulnerable flesh but impenetrable scale. It sung there for the briefest of heartbeats, a death note chiming pure and beautiful. Then it snapped.

Broken steel shards flashed past the slits of Seth’s barbute helm. But they didn’t stop the warhammer swinging down in a two-handed arc that would have broken trees and sundered rocks. The heavy head tore through the low ceiling, showering splinters of seasoned wood upon their shoulders.

The Komodo’s serpentine tongue flickered in amusement. Rules of reality warped to its whim. In a blur of flesh and scale, too swift for the mind to comprehend, it slipped away from the blow. In the same movement it reached out to brush Lionel aside. The armoured knight grunted, air leaving his lungs as though struck by an unseen battering ram. Polished boots took flight from cedar floorboard.

Jehan’s greatsword swung as his comrade went flying. Even the Komodo could not escape its vengeance. A horse’s weight of honed steel bludgeoned into the Greater Oni’s shoulder, a blow that would have clove a naked man from collarbone to pelvis.

Dragonscale buckled but held firm. The Komodo bared fangs in mocking grin, its features that of a misshapen beast but its eyes so disturbingly human.

But neither was the greatsword as delicately forged as Lionel’s scimitar. Grating and chewing upon adamantine hide, its wielded momentum tore it free. Jehan matched the Oni’s bared teeth in battlelust and in glee. The taste for blood flooded across his tongue. The scent of battle nestled in his flaring nostrils. Mantras of war sung like choral hymns through his veins.

Paper walls crashed to the floor in a crescendo of chaos. Lionel’s steel-clad form followed in cacophonous climax. The bellow of fury and pain as he further wrenched his already-wounded shoulder only punctuated the impact. But Seth’s warhammer swept in once more as his First Knight ducked away. Jehan’s blade swung in from below. Together they continued to press their dance against their malformed, Firmament-bending foe.

Adrenaline-fuelled emotions surged through Hectorus’s veins, as he too retrieved sword and readied shield. Pride that he could call himself a Knight of the Golden Eagle, that he could count himself among men who fought together with such skill and unerring determination. But also shame that the High Asar had ordered him to stay out of the initial exchanges, that he should conserve his strength and not get in the way of the more experienced trio.

The young man grit his teeth. One day, he swore, he would not be a knight errant any more. One day he would stand at his brother’s side as a full knight.

For now, he guarded the Lady Lillith as she awaited her own moment of opportunity. He could see Arden circling around the knights in search of space of his own to join the battle. But the narrow confines of the Komodo’s chosen position limited his opportunities. Paper partitions, gilded with intricate scenes of battle but stained with blood and flame, pressed in upon them from on all sides. Lionel’s curses grew ever louder and more explicit behind him. The distinct stench of tarnished steel wafted over the grassy scent of the straw mats.

Hectorus dared not abandon his post to go to his fellow. They could not afford to lose Lillith. Acidic fear sprinted through his mind. Terrible failure fumed at the back of his throat.

Jehan cared not for the thoughts careening through his brother’s head. He grinned in berserk fury, and charged once more into the fray.

There was method to his madness. They had to drive the Oni away from it could take any stray bystander hostage. They had to drive it back towards where the boundaries between its realm and theirs were thinnest. They had to take the fight into the Viceroy’s chambers where the Komodo had first manifest upon its victim. There – only there – would they be able to put an end to its tyranny.

Unfortunately the Komodo knew that too, and had no intention of playing along. With Lionel falling away from the line of battle, Jehan and Seth had to fight twice as hard just to keep their opponent at bay, much less shepherd him backwards. And unlike their supernatural foe, they were human. How much longer could they keep fighting without allowing the Komodo an opening to tear them in two? A minute? Two at most?

Less than that.

The Komodo disappeared in a blur of movement, swifter than anything before. Jehan’s battle-honed peripheral vision saw the serrated obsidian talon sprouting from the middle finger of the minister’s left hand.

Seth had even less chance to react. Midstrike, with no time to adjust the haft of his warhammer to parry, somehow he managed subvert momentum and twist his torso away from the blow.

Not far enough. Metal rent and tore, screaming in agony almost human. The tip of the obsidian claw tore Seth open from shoulder to hip, trailing streams of blood. Artful splatters of bright red sprayed upon the partitions. The older knight staggered backwards, two swift steps.

Free of the flies that had hindered its movement, the Komodo reached up with both arms to yank in vicious vengeance upon a crossbeam. Burning, roiling sky appeared overhead. One of the guards screamed as the sudden backdraft caught him in gluttonous fanned flame. His glaive, glowing with reflected heat, fell to the floor like an abandoned toy.

Seth disappeared in a deluge of wood and slate tiles as the weakened roof gave way.

“Se..!”

Jehan never finished the syllable. The Komodo sprouted a powerful, sinuous appendage somewhere beneath his robe. Tight-coiled muscles lashed at the Olbinan knight like an unleashed spring.

Pure instinct alone saved the First Knight from certain death. Only his greatsword, braced in the floor with no regard whatsoever for the fragile decorum, stood in its way. Grunting, the steel of his blade flexed beneath the mighty impact… and held, though it tore a gouge the length of his arm through the sturdy wood.

He had no choice left. In an ideal world he would have gained ten steps more, five even. But they were out of time, and out of luck.

“Now!”

Hectorus reached for the other objects that he had retrieved from the overturned tribute, alongside his sword and his shield. They had come from Lillith’s collection of battle-baubles: a pair of small, unremarkable spheres of black iron fitting into the palm of his hand. An instrument of war, she had assured them, that no honourable warrior would ever stoop to wielding.

Of course, she’d added a moment later, what use was honour if they could not claim victory?

Given the might of the foe they faced today, Hectorus had to admit that she had a point. He could almost feel her eyes digging into the back of his legs to reinforce it. A flick of her wrist lit the stubby flax fuses that sprouted like errant hairs from the gleaming smooth metal.

By the time the Komodo recovered from lashing out at Hectorus’s brother knights, he had rolled the two spheres into perfect position at its feet.

[Lillith]

A flicker of flame. A moment of clarity. Torches burnt incandescent. Silence.

“Lillith!” roared Arden. His eyes teared up.

The swordsman caught her before her head could crack against the floor. He rested her gently to the ground and abandoned his weapon. Blood poured from her abdomen.

“Grenades,” she sputtered through bloodied teeth. It was a sign of her defeat. Death.

Arden looked up towards the Komodo, eyes glistening with worry and heartache. He failed to shield himself from the second eruption. The Komodo had seen his opportunity to hurt them whilst their guard was down and took it. A gout of flame so hot, so fiery, that nought in their arsenal could withstand it filled the room. They had made the grave mistake of underestimating their opponent.

“<Rise Hidaka, rise!>” Arden roared, still burning and bleeding.

He shunted his shoulder forwards and let lose the shadows held within the steel pauldron. A hound’s face formed around the mastiff, and out from nothing came Arden’s faithful friend.

“Now!” shouted the Olbinians. It was the sign they had been waiting for.

Hectorus charged the dazed Komodo alongside Arden’s hound. The sound of battle returned to the ruined chamber. Ruin and rubble continued to fall from the skeletal remains of the room overhead. Fire danced in torches. Wood creaked. Incense from far-flung antechambers and ritual cloisters trailed in, mimicking the Komodo’s tendrils, and lifted senses anew.

“Sister…,” Arden mewed. He lay Lillith down peacefully.

Silence. Reverence. Anger fuming beneath rippling muscle. To the troupe, though immortal, a death was just as severe and traumatic as any other was. Born anew another day, every second of pain and every moment in the world between worlds – tortuous nightmares lived eternal. He clenched his fists and let the whitening of his knuckles steel senses against darkened skies.

“No one else will die today,” he pledged. “Except Him,” he snarled. He willed his cloak to grow over his bloodied body and crossed the threshold into the Komodo’s lair after the knights. The battle had only just begun.

[Glories of Myrmidion]

Jehan halted at the edge of the gaping maw to the Komodo’s lair, the tip of his longsword caressed by tendrils of milky oblivion. The portal that lay beyond flickered at his approach, unstable even to his untrained eyes. But something cold and icy built in his stomach.

He should have led the charge. Still, he would never have hesitated to follow his little brother through the threshold. He would have stalked in on the Mastiff’s heels, had Lillith’s death not shocked him from his incandescent glorious rage. He held no doubt where his path lay. But not Lionel’s. Not Seth’s. Not when he lacked any guarantee that they could return by the same route.

“Lionel,” he growled in a voice that brooked no argument. Turning to meet the eyes of his younger sword-brother, his gaze held equal parts of steel and compassion. One always looked a man in the eye when asking something of him. And one never asked that man to do something that one wasn’t willing to do oneself. “You are responsible for the Lady’s vessel. You are to shield her with your life, and to return her to her people once we have finished here. That will be your penance.”

Glittering tears streamed down the handsome knight’s dark features. His pride had never allowed him to apologise for his discourteous treatment of Lillith’s bestial companion Neko. Now, he would never get his chance. Neither would his broken body or sundered armour allow him to accompany his lord to his death. How he had failed them both!

And still the First Knight saw fit to task him with one last duty.

He would see it through to the end.

Lionel’s good arm let loose his scimitar, letting it fall to the floor with the crackle of hungry flame burning in its broken wave-beaten steel. He reached instead for another shield from the overturned piles of tribute. Its golden eagle glinted in its field of night, perched in tender embrace over the Lady’s head.

“Seth, you as well,” Jehan commanded. “I leave you here responsible for...”

“With all due respect, First Knight.” The elder of his sword-brothers hefted warhammer to shoulder and grimaced beneath bandaged brow. Jagged edges of his armour shone red with spilt blood, rent and torn by the Komodo’s claw. His injuries alone would have incapacitated a greater man, and yet still he meant to accompany his lord into the grip of terror manifest. “Olbina will learn of our glories soon enough. My place is by your side.”

Yet circumstance had other ideas. Something whistled past their ears into the portal: a curved blade mounted on a pole taller than an average man, capped with a tassel of crimson-dyed horse hair. Darkness swallowed it whole, but by then their attention had already snapped to its thrower.

“Gentlemen.”

Two figures approached through the milling smoke. Two lords from the Komodo’s table: the effete and the warrior, their faces set in calm translucent stone, their faces set in calm translucent stone. The panic of their fire-fighting underlings swirled over and around them like water from a cliff. The warrior bent down and drew a sword from the corpse at his feet. The arm-span of artisan-crafted steel shone in perilous appetite beneath the naked flame. But it was the effete who spoke first.

“The woman is dead, and you need aid.” His features twitched in the flickering shadows, the mask of a raccoon dog caught in a kaleidoscope of radiance. His eyes slitted narrow and thin. Little remained there of the useless noble who lived for naught but ceremony and ritual. Pudgy hands reached into the folds of his robes, then cast a handful of calligraphic paper talismans about him with a graceful flourish born of years of dance and song.

“Go. I will keep this gate stable for as long as is necessary. It may be that you will survive your battle, and will have need of my services to return.”

“Or not,” the warrior beside him growled, feet planted upon the unstable floorboards as they held unerring the tip of his sword. His death glare focused on the injured Seth. The grizzled knight lowered his weapon to an attack stance in turn. “My duty requires for you to remain and face me. I did not sell my soul to the devil only to flee at the first opportunity.”

“Lord Konishi, my boar-headed colleague here, disagrees,” the effete said with a smile whimsical and sad. “If only you had come earlier, perhaps, when the Greater Oni’s grip was not so strong, we might have been able to convince him otherwise.”

“Button your lips, Lord Hosaka,” the country warrior retorted, “and be thankful that I do not carve your head from your neck where you stand.”

“But you need me here, just in case Lord Okoshi... or the Komodo, I might say... is so injured against these brave men that he needs my help to return.” Again the poignant smile played about Lord Hosaka’s full, pouty lips. “Go, brave knight. And take these with you... may they protect you and yours from harm.”

A wiggle of his fat fingers detached three of the calligraphic talismans from their formation around the gate. They whistled like arrows onto Jehan’s breastplate, clinging there like banners from a banner-pole.

“Go, my lord,” Seth echoed, in grim acceptance of his fate. His warhammer never wavered from the glare of the warrior-lord’s sword. Lionel nodded from the floor beside him, one arm useless at his side, the other bracing the shield over Lillith’s fallen form.

“Farewell my friends, my brothers,” Jehan murmured in turn. He did not trust the courtier, nor did he think highly of Seth’s chances against an uninjured warrior of Lord Konishi’s obvious stature. But in the daemon realm beyond the threshold his little brother waited, and another man to whose cause he had pledged his blade. Green eyes closed to the smoky blaze, remembering a Lady’s solemn vow to rid her land of the darkness that infested it.

All men died. The question was sooner or later. The question was whether his ashes returned to the Hall of Swords to scatter over the lands of his forefathers. The question was whether they carved his name into the Wall of Heroes, whether they spoke in admiring whispers of his deeds for ages to come.

Jehan breathed one last time of the soot and burning wood. He took one last glance at the armoured heads of his brave companions, at the foreign dignitaries who hid behind their masks of power and duty and let others do their dirty work.

Then the First Knight turned on his heels and stepped towards the darkness that led to the daemon’s realm. The Eagle that Soared.

Glory awaited.

[Arden]

The room beyond the antechamber was unremarkable. Paper-thin walls bamboo closed him in on three sides. The gallery room stretched far to the north and a single river of fire ran along its length. A pious illumination of the great hall at its end told Arden that he had entered the Shogun’s sanctum. The prongs of flame flickered devilishly, daring those who pursued the Dragon to enter.

“Lillith-sama…,” he whimpered. How had he been so foolish?

The scream she had let out tore at his mind still. He stared ahead, the light of the doorway between worlds dancing over floorboards. Determination and stubbornness began to focus his efforts.

“I will see you again,” he said softly. The reality of immortality settled his nerves.

He advanced into the gallery. The hound on his pauldron danced red in the shadows, hellfire glowing in its eyes. The walls on either side of him spoke of ancient battles and treachery. Deep etchings, lacquered with varnish and sorrow recounted the long history of the Greater Oni. Arden paid it no heed and ran forwards as quick as he could.

He reached the end of the gallery and tumbled through the portal. A brief flash of light interrupted his vision and then he arrived. What he saw took his breath away and he stumbled. He fell to a knee, but instead of wood, his armour crashed into a jade blanket. Yellow blossoms danced between flecks of grass.

“What is this?” he mumbled. He clenched his teeth. His mind raced.

The smell of death and fire left his nostrils. He took in the air, fresh as a spring breeze, and looked up into the maelstrom overhead. His eyes widened when it dawned on him that, in his guile and trickery, the Komodo had brought Arden Janelle to the one place where the swordsman could die.

He said one pained word as he rose, cloak bellowing behind him as he took tentative steps forwards.

“Tengoku.”

A blue palace surrounded by floating islands stood before him. A pillar of light, Heaven’s edifice rose upwards into a stormy hurricane’s eye.

[Glories of Myrmidion]

What manner of trickery - divine, daemonic, arcane, incarnate, or otherwise - had brought him to this forsaken realm? Hectorus’s swordarm fell towards the cloud upon which he stood, and his jaw soon followed.

“Where in the known world is this?”

“Nowhere,” Arden replied in reverent whisper. Though his mouth moved, his eyes never left the archipelago of floating islands that lay before them, defiant of all known physical law. “This is a fragment of the plane of the Tap. This is Tengoku, where the Kami rule.”

Wrenching his attention to the young knight who had led the way through the rift, he fixed Hectorus with a gaze so intent it froze him in his tracks.

“This is where they are at their strongest.”

Hectorus swallowed, quashing the thousand questions dancing on the tip of his tongue. He settled for finding his fingers a new grip upon their sword, and asking the single most relevant one instead.

“And that...?”

The tip of his shield, golden eagle on field of black, pointed upwards into the sky of swirling stormy azure. A single beam of light ascended into the blinding heavens like a spear through layers of silken cloud. At its base it illuminated a sprawling palace in the distinctive Akashiman style. The main keep guarded the base of the spear, a forbidding castle of red tile and white lacquer. Cascading watercourses linked its verdant gardens, leaping without fear from one isle to the next. The two warriors had emerged below and before the palace, on an island that served as some form of gateway to the Kami’s realm. Two painted pillars as thick as a gargantuan’s foreleg stood behind them, one now transfixed by an Akashiman glaive.

“That is the Komodo’s lair,” Arden informed him. Behind the Mastiff the air shimmered to spit forth a third figure to join their motley party: Jehan. Even the sheer strangeness of the vista did nothing to shift the grim determination writ upon the First Knight’s craggy features. He took two heartbeats to take in the situation, then focused sky-blue glare on the doors in the clouds so high above. It taunted him back, unreachable and unattainable from their lowly stature.

“In which case, that is where we must go,” his voice rumbled through the crisp, frigid atmosphere. Where Hectorus found it difficult to breathe the pure air that entered his lungs, Jehan inhaled until his breastplate strained. Then he released every last pent-up shred of frustration and anger, defiling the perfection and beauty of the Kami’s realm with utterly human emotion. In that moment, the younger knight knew that something had gone wrong.

“Where are Seth and Lionel?”

“They will not be joining us,” Jehan answered, calmness personified. One casual sweep of his scabbarded greatsword cut through the air before them, revealing the faintest outline of a staircase of translucent condensed air. With no trace of hesitation whatsoever, the First Knight stepped out into the sky. Somehow, the oblivion beneath him bore his weight without complaint, revealing the next step in sequence in a puff of arcane wind. “Come, Arden, brother mine. Our host awaits.”

Hectorus spared one last look at the portal behind him. Beyond the veil between the realms, his fellow knights fought to their death. How his heart tore in two! Compassion, honour, virtue demanded that he not allow his comrades to die alone. But duty and courage ordered him forth to stand at his brother’s side. He had to accomplish their mission, such that the others did not give their lives in vain.

In the end, he’d made up his mind long ago.

One step at a time, he walked with Arden in Jehan’s wake.


***

“The Crane could not retreat to this realm, for it was neither prepared nor able,” Arden explained as they rose through the sky a step at a time. Only Hectorus listened; Jehan strode ahead muttering the stanzas of the Litany of the Knight Templar beneath his breath. The younger knight found himself grateful for something to occupy his mind other than the emptiness of the sky below. Or rather, the inevitable fall that would ensue should the magic guiding them upwards fail.

“But the Komodo is both crafty and a caster of consummate skill,” Hectorus surmised. Staring upwards at his brother’s steel-clad form, he could see now that the gates of the palace keep loomed a lot closer now. Stray spray from the cascading garden falls wet his cheeks, so he forced himself to pay attention lest he slip to an undignified death. His breathing came swift and shallow, fighting to feed his encumbered form with enough oxygen.

“Indeed,” Arden replied, unencumbered by the all-too-human failings of the younger knight. That said, even Jehan pressed on with endurance and vigour that would have surprised the hardiest of mountaineers. Sometimes Hectorus wondered how he might keep up with such a demi-god of an elder sibling. Then he would realise, as he had done a million times before. That he could but try.

It took them an eternity to make the ascent, a dozen minutes stretching into a dozen hours. The shimmering pillar of light that Arden termed the Ascension Bolt, the path of the Kami, seared their retinas and scorched their skin. Myriad outer palaces danced on the islands around them, a kaleidoscope of pale greens and sick yellows. Lightning coruscated in the azure heavens above. The warlike red of the keep beckoned them onwards, and towards their goal they continued, unerring.

“But the Komodo cannot make use of the path now, for it is yet weak and not restored to its former glory.”

“So we can kill it here?”

“Yes.”

Hectorus sensed the truth disguised behind Arden’s averted eyes, preying on the mercenary’s heart. But the Mastiff pulled away on the invisible stairs before he could ask about it, long-legged stride opening the distance. Against his better sense the young knight let it slide for now, hoping against hope that he would not regret the courtesy later.

At length they arrived at the entrance to the palace proper. At almost twice their height it towered over their heads: a pair of red-lacquered oaken doors barred tight against their passage. Jehan raised an armour-clad boot. Leaning into the kick, he broke them asunder in a single blow.

“My word in the soul shall be as my blade on the battlefield,” he recited in a booming bellow.

The last line of his creed echoed like solid steel into the cavernous cool of the Komodo’s throne room. Stale dust retreated beneath the mana-rich blast of wind induced by their entrance. Behind the rows of gilded pillars, silence watched and waited for their next move. In the vaulted ceilings overhead, wreathed in darkness too distant to make out with the naked eye, further shadows threw Jehan’s words back at him and tittered in amusement. Rich velvet gave way beneath their booted feet, a river of red surrounded by a slippery void of polished starstone.

Twin serpentine pinpricks of light awaited them at its source. The Komodo’s nostrils flared as it exhaled its amusement. One by one, the candelabra lining the carpet lit up in obeisance.

There it lounged on a throne of sculpted jade, framed by a pair of gold-wrought dragons: reaching for the heavens above, despoiling the earth below. One arm rested at its side. The other propped up its head in languid lassitude. A hundred choice trophies piled at its feet: the gilded blade of an elven hero, the gryphon-winged helm of a northern knight, the scalp of a southern deathseeker. The strewn shadows revealed ten thousand more, scattered like gravestones. Of shrivelled corpse or charred bone, naught remained.

Hectorus stepped forth, placing his shield to the fore of the fray. Arden shifted stance alongside him, ready for the charge. But Jehan pushed past them both in full stride, unsheathing his greatsword as he stalked long-limbed towards his foe.

“Stand back, little brother. This one is mine.”

[Arden]

The Komodo made no attempt to respond to the knight's challenge. He observed the swordsman as he advanced, rising only when he could see the white of Arden’s eyes.

"You, <baka>, are mine," he said. His voice both screamed and whispered into the party's mind. The corpses writhed in the shadows. The otherworldly realm roiled.

Arden switched stance to a two handed grip. He bent his knees slightly, as though to take the weight of a titan. He held back only at Jehan's request. When the Komodo was stood fully upright he realised his error.

"Jehan, watch out!" He had been a fool to think the Komodo could be defeated in a duel.

The swordsman's bark was drowned out by the oni's swell of power. With a wave of his hand, a cruel and clawed reaper of men, four corpses in the shadows rocketed skyward. Each was as titanic as the Komodo. They fell like bone comets before their Lord, and began to assemble, creak, and crack into upright guardians.

"I will avenge my brothers," the First Knight bellowed. His defiant cry raised his blade, and his stubborn oafishness drove it in a cleaving arc through the nearest corpse's side. "Alone."

Arden ran after his companion too late. He came to a halt before their new opponents, and recognised them with a shrill whelp. Here, before the remnants of their party, were the Yurei. Anathemas to his beliefs, the creatures faint and dim were echoes of their former selves. The Greater Oni named Crab, Crane, Jurugumo, and Fox closed ranks.

"Stay together," Arden commanded. The aura of the oni flickered out like steam from their bodies. It mingled together. It was a wave of purple, red, gold, white, and green. It became a blanket of illusion that drew the eye and tried to steal the heart. Jehan and the Komodo were lost behind it.

"I assume you have a plan?" asked Hectorus.

"They're reflections." He pointed to the Crab. A fat ronin in red armour that carried two double-bladed axes echoes of pincers and a diamond hard shell. Flower Drum Song echoed in Arden's ears. "Human versions of themselves as they would appear in Heaven itself."

"Wonderful," Hectorus erred. He edged away a few feet from his companion, so they could both swing swords freely. "How does that help?"

Arden was not sure. It had been centuries since he had seen the creatures as they were now. He was more worried as to why the Komodo was commanding them like puppets. Yurei were usually self-directed. Revenge kept them whispers, flickers of light. Were they real? Were they just forgotten heroes with a new glamour? The Komodo's power lay in deception, as much as it did war.

"Don't think of them as gods. They're not monsters. They are just humans, and they bleed just like we do." He snarled. His fangs elongated. "Do you follow?"

Hectorus inferred Arden's meaning and they dove in unison into the swirl of colour.

[Lillith]

"I...," croaked the assassin.

Face-down on the tarnished tiles, Lillith stirred. Her hands scrabbled for a grip, something to use to push herself upright. She slapped a plank, dredged through dust piles, and clawed at a crack in the flagstone. The explosion had torn the room apart as well as her unfortunate body.

"I swear to the gods, old and new." She rose, teetered back and forth, and then stood upright and triumphant.

The room span. Corpses and collapsed rafters formed a scene of destruction. The trade minister had pulled quite the number on the party. She turned to where the portal to Tengoku had been when last she lived. Nothing.

"Fuck...," she cursed.

Only when she took in her surroundings did it occur to her that she had indeed died. She began to touch herself, arms, legs, hips. She examined every inch of the body she now occupied. She remained roughly the same height and stature, as the troupe oft did when they reincarnated. She looked at her hands gingerly, and then realised the truth.

"Double fuck."

Three hundred years ago, when Arden and she had fought the Greater Oni for the first time in a war that rivalled all over conflicts in Akashiman history, she was called Amaya Kazumi. Daughter of the Matriarch of the Spirit Warder clan Kazumi, she led the final charge in Capitol. Her dagger burst the Komodo's eye, and the blood from that wound the Janelle clan used in a ritual that ended the war. If she was reincarnated as that heroine, then history had need of them again.

Bracing for the coming storm, Lillith approached the spot where the portal had been and began to draw kanji in the air. Her pallid skin shone in the flames and moonlight. Her black hair, cut into a bob, glimmered like the night sky. She was wearing a short kimono, double folded, and plated in key parts with black lacquered metal plates. The traditional garb of the Spirit Warders. No geta on her feet. No make-up. No scent. Only the moonlight. Only the bare human soul.

"I'm coming, brother...," she whispered as the vortex cracked space and time and she fell from earth into heaven's throng. Now she was Amaya again, she knew there was purpose to her death, and knew what she had to do to survive the conflict with their direst adversary. Jehan, First Knight of Olbina, was about to claim his place in history.

[Glories of Myrmidion]

A true knight addressed no evil, save with stern heart and tempered steel. His awareness never left the abomination upon its gilded throne and its manifold guises of glamour and illusion. Beneath its bulk of crimson lamellar he saw only the cesspit of corrupted arcane energies lairing within. His heart swelled with disgust and disdain. This was the Komodo in its primordial form: a spirit, a deity, but blighted by long millennia of pain and neglect.

Jehan did not speak. He stepped forth, and instead he sang.

His blade sang: an overture of ringing salute, a first movement of whistling fury. In its arrogance the Komodo had allowed him to close the distance. Now it allowed him again to sunder its crimson armour, like so much chaff before the hurricane. Shards of broken metal tore the magnificent throne to shreds. In its place loomed a spectral apparition of chaotic essence and swirling shadow. Demonic eyes flared in malevolent amusement, a triumphant leer revealing row upon row of serrated fangs. It bent its tremendous will upon him, and the air trembled solid and still beneath its attention.

Against all odds Jehan stepped forth again. And still he sang.

His blood sang: a roaring crescendo of pulsating heat, a thunderous drumbeat pounding through his head. In its conceit the Komodo had not considered that he might defy it. Now its briefest hesitation gave him time to reverse his stroke. His greatsword clove a mighty gash in its sinuous scaly neck, though armoured skin and flesh reformed in the wake of the wound like cloying smoke. In turn the dragon’s meaty paws tore at his torso. Talons like those of a hunting hawk pierced battle-hardened steel, knives through wet paper. Flowing crimson blood spilt through rent pauldron and gambeson. The weight of the blows alone should have hurled the knight halfway across the audience chamber.

But against all odds Jehan stepped forth yet again. And still he sang.

His mind sang: a reprise of flaring battlelust, a coda of sweat and effort. In its pride the Komodo had underestimated its foe, but even so the mortal faced no less than a maddened deity. It towered over and around him in its nightmarish ethereal form: three times his height, ten times his weight, a hundred times his equal. Its roar of fury reverberated within his skull as it manifested its own sword, a broad single-edged blade of red pain and shadowy oblivion. Again and again it battered him into submission, batting aside his parries as though they did not exist, raining blows upon his person that he could only deflect, never evade. His arms strained with the sustained exertion. His lungs burned in acidic fire. Little more than smouldering willpower kept him moving.

But never once did the Komodo penetrate the enchanted breastplate that took the brunt of its fury. Even when it breathed white-hot flame upon his person, the triplet of talismans gifted to him by Lord Hosaka warded him from danger.

Against all odds Jehan stepped forth one more time.

And though he had yet to even scratch his foe, this time he forced the Komodo to take a step back.


***

How?

Hectorus caught only glimpses through the hues of the hallucinogenic veil. He and Arden could only dance their own dance of death against the Komodo’s undead minions. He wondered whether the Greater Oni felt threatened by their presence. He wondered whether the beast’s vulnerabilities extended further than it dared admit. If so, their best chance of victory lay in finishing off its minions with haste, and in combining their efforts with his brother’s.

A gaunt swordsman advanced to his right, wielding a blade almost as long as it was tall. To his left a cross-legged spellweaver floated on a cushion of air, surrounded by the distorted tendrils of its magic. The Crane and the Jorogumo, their remnant spiritual essences inhabiting long-deceased corpses as vessels.

The Crane lunged forth, empty eye sockets burning scarlet flame in clear recognition of Hectorus as the one who had killed it three weeks prior. Its nodachi outranged Hectorus’s arming sword, and the undead swordsman had learned from the suppurating gash across its forehead not to allow the knight close. Downwards it struck, steel glimmering like the swoop of a silver swallow as it slid from Hectorus’s retreating greaves. Then it reversed the blade in a continuation of the same fluid motion. Chain mail severed where the knight’s vambraces failed to protect his upper arm, drawing a thin line of red upon pale skin.

Hectorus timed his counter well, but the Jorogumo struck even as he balanced on the balls of his feet. Thin tendrils of arcane power, like the silken strands of a spider’s web, spat at his armoured form. He brought his shield up to deflect their entanglement, but the stench of burning steel only strengthened as they corroded his aegis. His pause gave an opening for the Crane to swing to the attack once more, its oversized blade whistling towards the gap in his defences.

How? he asked himself again, wracking his mind for a breakthrough tactic. The Hound fared better against Crab and Fox, matching their supernatural skill with bared teeth and controlled fury. But even Arden would take at least a few more minutes to wear them down. Hectorus knew that he had to force the issue. They could not spare the time for him to adopt a defensive approach.

You think too hard, little brother.

Something in Hectorus’s mind snapped. Instead of dancing away from the Crane’s blow, now he leant into it with shoulder primed. The impact of steel on steel jarred his flesh and bone. The tip of the swordsman’s blade shattered, chiming against the nose-guard of Hectorus’s barbute. Then an even greater impact followed, as he slammed into the Crane and bowled it from its feet.

With greater urgency the Jorogumo’s silken tendrils spiralled in. But this time Hectorus didn’t just deflect them. Sheltering behind his shield, his boot-clad feet stormed across the wooden floor littered with broken arms and armour. He ignored the sizzling agony as the Jorogumo’s powers ate away at his aegis. He ignored the growing shriek in his eardrums as the undead spellweaver fought back with greater pressure against his advance. He pressed the attack.

His sword found her neck but a heartbeat later. Decapitating her in a single vicious strike, it embedded deep into the pillar behind her. Her bloodless features contorted in blind fury as they spilled to the floor, imploding before they could finish their fall. The violence of her death washed over and through the entire hall, extinguishing half of the veil that obscured Jehan and the Komodo from view.

In the meantime the Crane had found its feet. Not even its chipped blade stopped it from delivering a mighty blow against Hectorus’s cuirass. The young knight staggered twice before finding his balance, then converted his momentum into a drunken lurch through the Crane’s next stroke. Pain blinded him as sharp steel bit into the gap in his thigh between tasset and poleyn. But the mail hauberk he wore beneath his plate held firm. And then his shield met the Crane’s face, and again, and again, and again...

He came to sense on his knees, fingers clenched in a death grip on the broken fragments of steel. Mere heartbeats had passed since his brother’s words had speared through his mind, but to the young knight they felt as long as any eternity. Only puddled ectoplasm on the floor, and a shattered nodachi alongside him, remained of the Crane. His muscles ached with expended effort. His thoughts struggled between recoiling in shock and trying to form a coherent explanation.

Now he could begin to understand Jehan’s strength in this realm. Tengoku was not bound by physical law, but by spiritual: here, mental strength reigned supreme. The Komodo had drawn them to its demesne as insurance, to protect its temporary mortal form - so vulnerable, so weak! - against the off-chance that they might harm it. Had it ever thought that a mere mortal could challenge it in the spiritual plane as well?

Jehan had done just that, drawing strength from his brothers-in-arms: from Lionel, still cradling Lillith’s broken body; from Seth, doomed to die fighting against grizzled Lord Konishi. He had channelled that strength into determination and fury, and even now pressed the onslaught against the Komodo.

And from you, a silent voice whispered through Hectorus’s head. Always you have looked to him, aspired to him, spurred him onwards to ever greater heights. You are as much a pillar of his strength as any.

Hectorus, too, had drawn strength from the sight of his brother in danger. Strength enough to defeat the Jorogumo and the Crane. Strength enough, perhaps, to challenge the Komodo?

But that strength had sickened him. Never again did he wish to lose control over his thoughts. Never again did he want to charge into danger, gambling on a blind whim that he might emerge unscathed from the other side. His entire being rebelled against the folly, the foolishness of such a deed. In death, he knew that he would regret making such a choice.

And in life, he now knew it was his duty to make sure that Jehan never had to.

Somehow, Hectorus Leitdorf rose to his feet. Clarity suffused his gaze as he took stock of the situation.

He could barely feel his right shoulder, wrenched beneath broken steel pauldrons. His left leg trailed behind him, dribbling cold sticky blood down his inner thigh.

In the chaos of his berserk fury he had lost both sword and shield. He reached out for the nearest weapon at hand, and to his surprise his mailed fingers wrapped around the haft of a glaive-like polearm, capped with a tassel of crimson-dyed horse hair. How it had arrived here from the gatepost where he had last seen it, he would never know.

He was only grateful for its weight in his hand, for the glimmer of the fire-forged steel reflecting the braziers that lit the Komodo’s lair, for the support as he took one tentative step towards the fray.

And in his clarity, he knew something else. In his current state he would never be able to aid his brother in defeating the Greater Oni.

But he could still be of use.

“Arden!” he called, clarion and clear even as chaotic magic continued to suffuse his surroundings. “I will hold this line! Help my brother!”

One swipe of his weapon demarcated the sooty dust and corpse-ash upon the smooth mahogany floors. Then the naginata returned to rest in his hands, aimed point-first at the Komodo’s remaining undead minions.

“Go!”

[Arden]

The swordsmen needed no further command. Steeling himself as he advanced, he pressed into the maelstrom of colour and madness. The moment he was out of Hectorus’ sight, time seemed to stand still. He had experienced this sensation before. The colours were manifestation of Heaven itself, the souls of the Greater Oni were venting from their corpses, held against their will in bone tombs.

“Jehan!” he roared.

Desperation struck Arden’s face. A visible display of worry and fear. He realised what the Komodo was doing and feared he was too late. The greater Oni were not fighting by his side. They were enslaved. For the Komodo to resort to such desperate measures could only mean one thing; the Komodo was vying to manifest fully in the mortal realm.

“Jehan!” he tried again. His voice was coarse and echoed with a hollow ring.

Bloodied and broken, the swordsman pushed on. He could see shapes and shadows but was not certain where illusion began and madness ended. Somewhere, through the cloud, the First Knight and the Komodo were engaged in a duel. He hoped and prayed that the human’s stubbornness had served him well again. He had joked with Lillith that the Olbinans were unkillable, and the First Knight more so than that.

“<Curses>,” he grumbled in lazy Akashiman.

He was growing tired beyond measure and if he did not draw blood soon, adrenaline would fade from his body and his injuries would consume him. Doubling his efforts, he continued on and shed his cloak and pauldron. They dropped to the ground like deadweight. When he emerged on the far side of the miasma, he was naked from the waist up and scarred and eyes bloodshot.

---

As Lillith entered the grand hall the miasma began to subside. She appeared surrounded by floating kanji, floating letters that burnt deep purple and flickered with power. She combined all that she knew and could remember, and when there was enough clarity to see her companions, she flung them towards the Olbinans in a flurry of punches, battle cries, and promises.

---

“It is good to see you Arden,” Jehan cried with jubilation and pain. He ducked a calculated swing from the Komodo’s executioner blade and rose with his sword hilt brandished like a knuckle. It struck the dragon’s chest plate again, and again, and again.

With hope renewed, fate favoured the mortals who arrayed against the Usurper. The sound of an egg cracking echoed through the hall ominously. Confused, both swordsmen stepped away from their opponent and took defensive stances.

“It broke…,” the blood mage whispered. Disbelief weakened his aggression. Hope fuelled his resolve.

Jehan turned to his ally and, though bloodied and sweating and dirtied by war, took on a glamour. He smirked. It was a trusting, charismatic smile that lead mean to deeds of valour and melted hearts on false promises.

---

“What deception is this?” Hectorus’s confusion only bolstered his onslaught. He repeated the question three times as he drove the naginata into the Crane’s shoulder, pulled it out, and then split open its chest plate with a thunderous double thrust.

“There is no time to explain Brother,” she informed. Her heart was racing and her eyes were ablaze with purple fire. In the realm of Heaven her lacklustre grasp of Spirit Warder Techniques was bolster with fever and zeal. She was soon to become intoxicated if they did not vent the power that swelled within at a more deserving foe.

“I saw you die, Lillith.” The sombre circumstance did away with civility and etiquette.

Hectorus kicked the corpse of the Crane backwards and unceremoniously the creature tumbled into a pile of crumbling bones and ancient armour. Effervescence wisps trailed up from it, last vestiges of the Komodo’s corrupting influence freeing the enraged spirit to sleep at last.

“I did.” She glanced around the battlefield and counted the corpses. Two. “I mean, I do.” She could barely explain the troupe’s origins to herself. Explaining to another was an impossible task under duress.

“Then are you a ghost?”

Hectorus question was sincere and pained. Whilst Lillith had expressed Neko still lived as a guiding spirit, their grief had been real and they had mourned for their feline companion after the battle with the Crane’s corporeal form. Grief was still raw in the Knights of Olbina for their female ally.

“No.” Lillith traced two more kanji in the air in front of her. One with her left hand and one with her right. They together described a brave men driven to brave deeds. With a flick of the rest she bade them advance towards Hectorus.

He leant on his weapon as a staff to compensate for the swell of energy that followed a brief fatigue. Immediately he felt confident and level headed. The kanji gave him the clarity of foresight, to know danger and risk when it stared him down as well as the subtle direction to act first, ask questions later. Lillith had no time to feel guilt for her actions. They had little time left to save Arden.

“Here, in this realm, despite our immortality…,” she erred. “If Arden dies here, Hectorus, then he will not reincarnate.”

The white lie would save them all much heartache in the end. Truth be told, Arden would indeed return to life if the Komodo felled him in battle. The trouble, however, would be because the Komodo would possess his body before the hero Lao Sheng had time to reform in the Aria. Lillith would do anything to spare her brother that cruel fate. She would kill for it, and she had no discerning differentiation in her state between friend and foe.

“And what about Jehan?” he asked. His voice began to strain, as oni spirits roiled in his limbs. He gripped the naginata tightly. It creaked under the strain.

“Let us not ask questions. Let us instead resolve do something about it.”

It was all the encouragement he needed.

“We are coming, brother!” they cried in unison.

[Glories of Myrmidion]

Volcanic glass flicked through tendrils of black mist. Darker than the deepest night the broad executioner blade chopped downwards, a succession of hammer blows. Jehan’s own steel parried the Komodo’s first strike, a willow branch brushed aside by the howling gale wind. The second sheared through his right pauldron. The third glanced across his inner thigh and drew a steady stream of blood. The fourth penetrated the mail beneath his vambrace and nearly dislocated his left shoulder. Only then did the reverse stroke from Jehan’s parry force the Greater Oni back another step.

Battered and bruised, bleeding through his armour from a dozen wounds, still the First Knight advanced. The Komodo snarled in fang-baring malice and ducked behind a thick ebony pillar. A single stroke of Jehan’s sword shattered the lacquered wood like a sledgehammer through tinder. Carving through the miasma wreathing his foe, it slid from the Komodo’s adamantine hide like rain from a mountain. The obsidian blade fought back, sundering the steel that protected his limbs again and again. Jehan hammered the quillons of his sword into the Komodo’s face and chest, chipping minuscule fragments of ebony scale onto the mist-wreathed floor. The Oni reeled, still snarling, and fell back one step more.

Wisps of vapourous breaths curled from his lips, reaching for the broken rafters overhead. His muscles screamed for a reprieve, their exertions threatening acidic cramp. The razor-sharp concentration that had kept him alive this long threatened to slip through his fingers. Only cold reality waited in its wake. Victory flickered through the Komodo’s slit pupils, in recognition of the mortal and his weakness.

And still Jehan laughed. And still his sword sang.

As a knight of Olbina, he stood ever ready to give his life in service of the realm. The Komodo was a foe worthy of such a death. In a century, or a millennium perhaps, somebody might stumble upon his ashes and return them to the Hall of Swords. Perhaps they would infer his deeds and tell the tale of Jehan the Valiant, He Who Challenged A God.

But, by the Lady’s grace, tonight he would make the Oni work for its prize.

“First Knight!”

The Hound bounded into his bloodshot vision. Fangs bared, he darted through the Komodo’s defences with all the finesse that the knight himself lacked. Gaunt muscles rippled across Arden’s bare chest, straining to widen the cracks in the Oni’s armour. Sweat and saliva dribbled from his chin, and something desperate brightened the whites of his eyes against the writhing black fog.

The Komodo spun on its heels and tossed him aside like a rag doll. The mercenary swordsman slammed into the sundered pillar. Brute impact caused lacquered tiles and broken beams to cascade from the ceiling overhead.

“You,” the Oni snarled. “Within my grasp at last.”

Arden’s fingers struggled for purchase upon the hilt of his sword. Lost behind anger and defiance, a third incongruous emotion flashed across his hardened features.

Fear.

Jehan stepped between the Komodo and his comrade-in-arms, poised on the balls of his feet. The heat of his foe glowed bright red upon his breastplate, and in the steel of his blade as it met the Oni’s obsidian in a breathless flurry of strokes and counter-strokes. But within the space of a few breaths his sword had spun away into the obfuscating fog. A backwards slash caught him across the side of his helm and blinded him in a world of white and red. For the first time in their duel, his guard lay in tatters.

“Out of my way, imbecile,” the Oni snarled.

The blade of obsidian thrust towards his vulnerable stomach. Visions of disembowelment, of bleeding out on the sanctum floor while the Komodo dealt with the tastier prey, flashed past his eyes.

Jehan’s lips curled into a bloodthirsty smile.

The dark sword snapped upon contact with his breastplate. Shards of volcanic glass drew thin lines of blood across his face. The upper half of the blade scythed through the fog before burying in the mahogany walls behind him. In its wake rose a breath of fresh wind, coalescing for a heartbeat into the form of an ethereal woman. Her presence cast aside the enveloping darkness in a moment of violent clarity, blowing out the dark torches and bathing them in gentle white illumination.

For Olbina, she whispered in his ears.

In that brief heartbeat the Komodo hesitated. Surprise at the resilience of the knight’s armour? Shock at encountering another deity in the depths of its demesne?

Neither man saw fit to give it the chance to recover. Jehan grabbed hold of its arms, pitting his vast strength against the fathomless power of the demigod. On the ground at his feet Arden did the same to the Komodo’s legs, fanged shadows enhancing his grip upon scaly claws. The Oni’s eyes narrowed in belated recovery, gathering the strength to repel the last throes of resistance from its prey.

A curved blade tore through the Komodo from behind. Its tip shattered against the breastplate that had broken the obsidian executioner. The tempered steel glowed in the same soothing orange as the warding talismans upon Jehan’s armour, the same talismans that the effete Lord Hosaka had said would protect him from the Oni’s flames.

“For glory,” Hectorus growled from behind the Komodo. Grunting with exhausted effort he wrenched his naginata upwards. The enchanted blade tore through miasma and armour alike, with the same ease that a honed knife might part human flesh. Spewing black blood like some grotesque fountain, upper torso split in two, the Greater Oni staggered to one side.

“Nrrggaaaaarrhhh!”

Its convulsing roar of rage and pain crescendoed into a furious tremor of absolute denial. A tidal wave of sound sundered the walls of the palace and shattered the lacquered rooftiles. Reverberations forced Jehan to one knee alongside Arden, even as he stretched in vain for his greatsword just out of reach. Corrosive miasma ate away at Hectorus’s polearm like hot acid, forcing the knight errant to drop the weapon and reach again for the arming sword at his waist. The Komodo’s broken vessel writhed in pain, the epicentre of a violent eruption of corrupted power as viscous as fermented viscera and as pungent as rotten flesh. Dissipating miasma regathered beneath its will as it fought to maintain physical integrity.

Until Lillith’s clawed fingers, wreathed in the purple aura of an arcane character, stabbed into the pulsating mess where the Komodo’s heart had been.

Its scream died, cut off mid-note.

Then its body imploded.

[Lillith]

Long before the essence of the Komodo dissipated, Lillith fell to her knees and began to cry. Uncertain as to wherever or not they were tears of joy or sorrow, she let them flow freely down her cheeks and drop like diamonds to the bloodstained battleground. They glistened on the wooden planks for only the briefest of moments, mirroring the length of their victory.

Her hands, returned to their mortal form steamed. The blood on her fingers was black, like her own heart from slaying one of the beings that crafted Akashima. She looked at them, heartfelt, and then realised the levity of what they had done.

“It’s not over…,” Arden growled.

Rising from his striking stance, the swordsman turned to the Komodo’s throne and watched the vespers of his taint drift up into the rafters. In the passing of a single breath, the throne vanished, leaving naught but a memory burnt into the heavens themselves behind.

“It never will be,” Lillith spat. Her head throbbed. Her heart ached. Her body, battered, bruised, and broken struggled to keep going.

“Not now,” Arden barked. He bolted around to his sister, and dropped to her side. A gentle hand, despite the rage within rested on her shoulder. “We have to get our friends to safety.”

Silence. The knights of Olbina looked on, their own short lived victory washed away by a growing sense of dread. They looked at the siblings expectantly. They did not have time to stop to pay attention to their wounds. The whispers of their Lady lingered in their bones, a force higher than the bested wrath of the Greater Oni.

“Now!” he roared. No shadows inhabited his words. No spirit of the oni coiled around his heart drove him to shout. Desperation, and a force of will alone roused Lillith from her depression. She stood, slowly, and then wiped her hands as clean as she could on her clothes.

“The gate will be closing,” she said softly. Arden nodded. “The stairs shattered.”

Behind them, where once stood platforms carved into heaven’s breath now lay a broken sky fall of spiralling boulders and grass clods. The stairs, the path back to the portal looked as though it had been smashed asunder by a celestial hammer. It would be dangerous to cross even in the best of health. As a group, wounded so, it would be impossible.

Hectorus advanced to where the great hall’s eastern wall had stood. It too was fading. The fabric of the Komodo’s realm was coming undone. Heaven, no longer oppressed by his presence, was rebuilding itself in its own image. The Greater Kami that remained in the vestiges of their senses began to remerge from their prisons. Dragons in the wind. Hawks in the clouds. Though the knights saw the deities of Akashima, they would never know it – too focussed on their flight to safety.

“How are we to escape?” he enquired, eyes narrowed on the sky fall, heart beginning to race once again. He rested on his blade’s tip, strength failing him.

Lillith drew a symbol in the air, the kanji for guidance, and waited for the purple fire around the spell to simmer down. Hectorus returned to their brief council of war and watched, curious.

“We can’t…” she spirit warder sighed. The symbol showed her what to do, how to be free of this place. She did not like the answer.

“What is it, Lillith?” Arden’s grasp of his native tongue not as strong as his sisters, he only stared intently at the swirl of invisible writing they could both see around the symbol.

Lillith clenched her fists and let the congealing blood ooze. She took a deep breath, turned to the First Knight, resplendent in his victory and more magnificent for his wounds, and bowed.

“I am sorry, Jehan. To leave this place, we must leave you.”

The Olbinians looked collectively worried.

“My lady?” The knight’s breath was pained, the Komodo’s blow not as rebuffed as first appeared.

“Lillith?” Arden echoed the lord’s question. He leant in, breath iron tinged, blood on his lips and heart. “What did you see?”

She replied with a single, decisive action. She unsheathed a kunai and drove it through her left palm before anyone could stop her. She whelped, too fatigued and agonised by death and life to feel the true extent of her pain. Blood flowed freely to the floor, pooled, then dripped through the floorboards.

“No!” Arden roared, but in pain, not anger.

“When you return to Akashima, sers, we will await you in the inn called Fortune’s Folly.” She refrained from calling its true name, Journey’s End, and used the common tongue colloquialism that the merchants who frequented it preferred. It was the first inn when you entered Akashima from its western land gate.

Jehan committed the instruction to memory and tensed. He did not know how he knew, but ahead, a riotous flight from the battleground.

“Go.”

Lillith’s words echoed with weakness but also power unseen. Arden slumped, drew together the last of his strength, and bit through his own right palm with canine fangs. He slapped his wound against his sister’s, and immediately, the heavenly realm convulsed as blood magic and the arts of the spirit warders combined.

“GO!” something screamed.

Lillith’s image flickered. Her face morphed between Akashiman and fox fire. The spirit within unleashed, just long enough to lend its weight to proceedings. Arden’s eyes burnt with fire. In an instant, they had given up their lives to unleash a fragment of an ancient spell the four fragments of Oblivion knew. The Last Song. It could shape reality, but required great sacrifice, oft their own, to work.

The stairway began to pull together, broken rock combining to a foothold strong enough, but still dangerous to traverse, to carry the knights back to the portal. In the distance, the blue swirl of energy was shining brightly and erratically. They did not have long before the heavenly realm came undone proper, and they too along with it.

“GO!” Lillith screamed a second time. As they dropped to their knees, leant against one another, and let the fires of spell song and blood magic burn away their souls and bodies, she turned just in time to see the true heroes of the hour burst into a hurried run – one last fight. One last winged charge. She closed her eyes.

All heaven broke lose as the fires around them exploded outwards into a web of comets. Nothing remained of them save a crater.

[Glories of Myrmidion]

His right hand pushed before him, upon a wall of steel and flesh almost as reluctant to leave as he. His left flailed in his wake, caught in a futile fight to ward off their flaring doom. Arcane energies whipped at his sweat-matted hair and tore at the jagged edges of his shorn pauldrons. Voices from the nether shrieked in his ears, cursing in a dozen indecipherable languages his pitiful attempt at a retreat. His soul unravelled beneath their grasping words, fraying in the maelstrom like a badly woven carpet.

Something solid caught him in the small of the back. The breath left his body in an exhalation of static lightning. Half stumbling, half falling, he followed his brother through the diminishing halo of light.

The world changed. Searing arcane anger faded to the soothing balm of reality. A light cool touch brushed against his skin; his mind took a moment to recognise it as an evening breeze. He breathed again, flooding his lungs with sweet precious oxygen.

He opened his eyes, and once again found himself in hell.

But at least he knew this hell. Crossbeams of charred Akashiman redwood retained the scars of the Komodo’s angry retreat. Paper walls, rent by a dozen great gashes for every step the Oni had taken, oozed the pained whimpers of the dead and the dying. The blessed wind that had brought him such beautiful fresh air died with that realisation. He inhaled instead of choking humidity and the sulphurous stink of remnant brimstone.

His brother spun on his spurs, fighting a final futile attempt to rescue Lillith and Arden. But before he could do much more than make eye contact, the vortex behind them dissipated with one last suppurating slurp. A wordless cry died on Hectorus’s bloodied lips.

“Remember this day, little brother,” Jehan spoke into the sudden grim silence. “We who put our lives on the line are but soldiers, we who do our duty and are happy to see it done. It is those who give their lives for such a noble cause who are the truest of heroes.”

Something in his older sibling’s voice slapped Hectorus across the face, firmer than the metal gauntlet of his discipline sarjeant back in wistful Kingsfort. He turned again, following Jehan’s hard sea-green gaze into the Firmament. The pall of acrid smoke, through which distant insects serenaded the blood-tinged twilight, did little to obscure what had arrested the First Knight’s attention.

Lionel, as pale as a sheaf of bleached lambskin, braced a golden eagle over the empty ground where Lillith had once lain. Blood dripped from the grotesque tear in the steel upon his shoulder, settling in a growing pool of viscous red at his knee. Chapped lips moved in silent rhythm, an incantation caught halfway between prayer and apology. The Komodo’s searing flames had danced close enough to his face to blister his dusky skin and char the device on his shield. But not once had the knight flinched from his duty and his penance.

Sethry slumped in somnolent slumber a dozen paces to Lionel’s right, propped upon the haft of his warhammer. His eyes failed to greet them from beneath his bandaged brow, shut tight against the soot and smoke. If his armoured chest moved in time with his breaths where the Komodo had torn it asunder, it did so only barely. If his limbs stirred where a keen-edged blade had gouged great gashes in the battle-forged steel, they did so beneath the notice of the two brothers who approached.

Lord Konishi lay on the dais opposite in a pool of drying blood: armour sundered, long sword shattered at his feet, short sword embedded in his own guts. The lord had died well, honour intact and duty fulfilled, an ephemeral smile caught in the set of his bloodless lips. What had driven him to honour his liege so? For whom had he fought, for what unspoken cause? Who now would speak of his legend and his legacy to those who would follow in his footsteps? Jehan searched for answers, but found none in this strange land and its foreign traditions.

The counterpart of the fallen noble, the painted effete Hosaka, rose on unsteady legs from the floor between them. His pudgy cheeks, drenched in sweat, leaked streaky tears of alabaster powder. Jehan knew not whether he owed his life to the man’s promise to keep the portal open for as long as he could. Neither did he care. Irritation flared in his eyes when the Akashiman lord moved to intercept him before he could reach his fallen brothers.

“It is done then?” the man asked, his words filled with a curious cocktail of elation and despair, relief and foreboding. Jehan wondered if he had any inkling of what his nation had lost that day amidst its victory.

“It is done,” the First Knight spat back. Only a brave man would dare Jehan’s wrath in full flow, and none of the Olbinan knights had pegged Lord Hosaka as such. But the Akashiman lord held his ground for one last question.

“Your two comrades?”

Jehan’s voice broke as he forced his way past the effete towards his men.

“They stayed behind.”


***

In the end Lord Hosaka had his revenge for the First Knight’s lack of manners. Three days later, smiling like a tanuki, he lauded them as heroes in a three hour ceremony of droning liturgy before the assembled Akashiman nobility. The same assembly elected a new trade viceroy to replace the unlamented old, and delegated funding to rebuild the devastated palace. For what little the Knights of the Golden Eagle cared, life went on in autumnal Akashima.

Lionel walked away from his deathbed on his own two legs, albeit leaning on Hectorus’s shoulder. His muttered litany mutated from prayer to pained curses, only increasing in volume and strength as he realised just how badly the flames had scarred his good looks. Neither Leitdorf brother found it surprising that Lionel never once complained about the wrenched shoulder that relegated him to the back of an oxcart rather than his saddle. But they often caught him staring into the distance, his expression haunted beneath his bandages.

Seth survived as well, aided by Jehan grabbing hold of the nearest court physician and dragging him bodily to where they needed his skill. The Lady herself had smiled upon them all when, the day before the ceremony, the grizzled Asar had opened his eyes at long last and made a surly demand for them to stop keeping vigil as though they meant to bury him. He had even sat through the entirety of Lord Hosaka’s longwinded speech, glowering at the noble and at every red-armoured guard in the vicinity, his presence as sturdy and as dependable as ever at his commander’s side. But the effort had exhausted him, and for now he lay alongside Lionel in the cart, sleeping the deep sleep of the recuperating wounded.

But neither knight displayed as much sudden change as Hectorus detected in his older brother. A cloud settled over the First Knight’s brow in the days preceding Lord Hosaka’s ceremony, one that even Seth’s miraculous recovery could not lift. When they left the Palace of Hidden Flame the day after their honours, Jehan paused for only the brusquest of farewells towards the Akashiman minister, one that brought even the inscrutable Hosaka up short. Then he’d rode off alone at the head of their makeshift column, and had spoken only a single sentence since.

“Brother,” he’d told Hectorus once they’d left the lacquered rooftops of the Akashiman capital behind the first rise in the western road, “stay a day in the Fortune’s Folly, then catch up with us before we reach the border. For this purpose alone, I release you from your vow of abstinence.”

Hectorus had not dared to ask the reason for his older brother’s sullenness. Emerging now from the stables after saddling his steed, he made out the First Knight only as a shining speck against the setting sun. A trundling oxcart followed Jehan’s path into the shadowy foothills, two warhorses tethered to its back gate. The fabled floating mountains of Akashima stood silent sentinel on the horizon, silhouetted like titanic castles amid the dying flame.

The young knight errant stared after them for an eternity longer. But even the glimmering stars that speckled the crimson-tinted velvet could not confide in him his brother’s mind. Hectorus took two deep breaths of the moist autumn petrichor, then tore himself away from the picturesque scenery. Civilisation and duty awaited.

The inn at which he found himself - a prosperous affair, if typical of the dirt-strewn floors and uncomfortable ceilings of this country - maintained a low-key bustle that matched its location on the main trade route between Akashima and Corone. The tantalising scent of salty fish broth, accompanied by occasional bouts of laughter, wafted from the main eating area. Towering over the native population in his plate and mail, he followed the trickle of merchants and porters into the main building. He knew not what to expect there.

But by the Lady’s grace, as long as it’s not another Oni, I do believe I will survive.

[Lillith]

Sister and brother embraced at the bar of the Fisherman’s Foley, their torturous separation over at last. Whilst neither would admit their sleep of late had been plagued by the memories of their fiery sacrifice, their smiles could not hide the signs of torment and fatigue on their faces. Ordeals were seldom fuller of hardship than those endured by the Knights of Olbina.

“I am glad to see you,” Lillith said, her voice hoarse from the long walk south from Capitol. She shuffled onto a stool at the bar on uneasy feet. She nearly slipped, caught by Arden and proffered to safety.

“Not a moment too late, it would seem,” he said softly.

Of the two, the swordsman had suffered less from their reincarnation. In his heart, only one Oni dwelt, its rage tempered by aeons of meditation and composure. Lillith, new to the duties of a spirit warder, fared much worse from the weight of burden that threatened to crush her. The souls of the Greater Oni, their ki, were hears to imprison eternal.

“Yes…,” she yawned. “I am afraid you came out of the conflict much fresher than I.” She turned her attentions to where she felt they were needed the most, the bar.

The tavern was lively than either remembered it. Though, as they reflected on when they last came here, neither could truly remember. Lifetimes ago they wagered, before putting the thought to back of their minds. Wizened faces that were perhaps young soldiers and ambitious artisans when last they met cast the newcomer furtive glances before returning to overly mustarded sushi and suspiciously cheap sake.

“Shall we order once Hectorus joins us?” Arden half-asked, half suggested.

More observant and alert than his sister, the swordsman turned to see the Knight enter. The drop in chatter and slow lowering of chop sticks to reach for kunai was a tell-tale sign that a foreigner had entered the inn. He smiled warmly, remembering how that felt all too well when he had been reborn as a Scarabrian.

“Hectorus-san,” he shouted, waving coyly for the man to join them, “<let us trade!>” he added, to abate the suspicions of the locals and by them a little more privacy then otherwise they might.

What the swordsman forgot, despite his relative good health to Lillith, was that the Last Song changed not only the course of the battle, of Akashima’s history, but the features of his face. The placid and bone brow of the swordsman that had taken tea with the Olbinans weeks prior was a distant memory. Sat next to an effaceable vixen in black silk was an Anglo-Akashiman red-head unkempt and intimidating as a tattooed pirate.

Fortunately for them, Lillith’s oni blood had protected her from one of the many drawbacks to the duo’s pseudo-immortality, and she turned to wave at their friend to ease his suspicions. She could not turn away from the bar for too long, and whilst Hectorus approached, she went about ordering enough sake to stun a giant.

[Glories of Myrmidion]

Like a thunderclap across windswept grassland, the exuberant invitation reverberated above the murmured conversations. It stopped Hectorus in his tracks, as all eyes not already trained on the foreign intruder turned to him as one. Who dared to disrupt the harmony of their inebriated camaraderie? Who dared to disturb their florid sagacity as they dissected the wrongs of the world? Waves of displeasure, if not quite outright hostility, radiated from the rows of hunched backs as vapour would rise from a hot spring.

The knight, for his part, could only scramble in search of a friendly face. He found it but a heartbeat later.

“Lady Lillith!”

She sat alongside a swordsman whose hair stood out like flame in the dark, whose tattoos garnered him equal measures of fear and respect. Even now his neighbours shrank from his enthusiastic wave and the diminishing echoes of his shout. Instead they occupied themselves with dark mutters and sidelong glances. Hectorus couldn’t place the face, though something about the manner in which the man held himself nagged at the back of his mind. His low centre of gravity, the poise of his footing on the dirt floor...

“Arden?” he asked as he approached.

“It is I,” Arden acknowledged, favouring him with a broad grin. It struck Hectorus as exactly the manner in which Jehan would have greeted him, given the circumstances. That thought alone gave him the strength to accept the change in his erstwhile comrade’s features.

Reed mats creaked below the soles of his bare feet; according to Akashiman custom, he’d left his sabatons with his saddle bags and his travelling boots at the door. A miraculous space opened up between Arden and Lillith, into which he gingerly lowered himself. Never before had he felt so graceless, knees sticking out from folded legs like knobbled growths. His shoulders rubbed against the patrons behind him as he twisted in search of a comfortable seat. They ignored and shunned him, as though he inhabited a different world than their own. He was a knight, after all, and they were peasant. He was foreigner, gaijin, while they were of the land of the kami. Hectorus had learnt enough of the Akashiman mindset in the past few weeks to understand that now.

Settled at last, he looked up to find that the grin on the face of the flame-haired swordsman - he had to fight to think of the man as Arden - had grown. Hectorus struggled to swallow, to wrap his mind around the fey magics that must have claimed Arden’s old appearance in exchange for saving his life. It came as a relief, then, that the other man seemed happy enough to continue the conversation.

“You are alone?”

“My brother sends his regards, and his regrets that he cannot join us.” How many times had Hectorus rehearsed these very lines? For the briefest of moments, his expression darkened. “He is burdened by your sacrifice. He feels responsible too for Seth and Lionel, that his task now lies in escorting them to safety, to where they can recuperate and recover.”

He glanced from Arden to Lillith and then back again, as if trying to ensure they understood.

“He was prepared to die in battle against the Komodo. He hasn’t quite yet realised that he didn’t.”

“In which case, perhaps the knowledge that we live again may help him recover.” Lillith’s silken touch feathered the back of his hand. He shook himself from his reverie.

“Indeed. Perhaps Asar Sethry will be able to convince him that his efforts were not in vain. In the meantime, it is my duty as his squire to take his place.”

“Seth is well, then?” Arden asked. “Lord Konishi was well respected as a swordsman. It was no small feat to defeat him in single combat.”

Hectorus smiled, relaxing at last. “By the Lady’s blessing, I am pleased to report that he recovers well.”

“And Lionel?” Lillith’s robes rustled as she leant across the low table, tracking the innkeeper as he loaded a black lacquered tray with chilled porcelain bottles and thimble-like cups. Smoke from a nearby kiseru whispered through her fine black hair, lending her eyes a mystical quality as she focused again on her guest.

“I was asked to deliver something to you from him,” the knight said, reaching into the folds of his tabard as deep furrows lined his brow. His blind fumbling disrupted the delicate balance of the crowd around him, once again making him feel awkward and brutish. But at length his hands emerged with a folded origami flower, a splash of bright yellow colour amidst the dingy dimness of the low-hung beams and colourless robes. Once upon a time the Akashiman nobles had welcomed their presence in the capital with dozens of such blossoms. How Lionel had laboured to repay the kindness with one of his own.

Lillith reached out to take it from Hectorus, allowing her fingers to dwell on the rough-textured paper. Her fingers could taste the apology, the guilt, the regret in its clumsily folded lines. Breath caught in her throat as she remembered friends who had fallen in their war against the Oni, and her close comrade Neko in particular.

“Sir knight... Hectorus...” With great effort she leashed her emotions, allowing only a single tear to spill down the contour of her cheek to water the origami blossom. “We have yet to thank you for your aid in this endeavour. Without it...”

Hectorus bowed back, a poor but sincere imitation of the courteous Akashiman gesture she had taught him, as she faltered.

“As we have yet to thank you for granting us so worthy a foe, Lady Lillith.” The timely arrival of the innkeeper, his tray laden with drink and his smile bland and toothless, forestalled any further expression of gratitude. Unlike his brother knights, Hectorus’s vow of abstinence had prevented him from cultivating a tongue for the pungent rice wine. But in the same way that his brother knights had not hesitated, in the dilapidated wayhouse on the road into Akashima, he did not give in to caution. “Perhaps, then, we should toast our victory.”

He raised his alcohol high, in the Olbinan manner.

“To the death of the Komodo!”

Brother and sister exchanged glances, and smiled as if sharing a secret only they could know. They too raised the delicate cups that contained their drinks.

“To the quelling of the mist!”