Dain was floating.

  That was the first thing he noticed—that he wasn’t lying, sitting, or standing, but hanging weightless in a vast, soundless void. There was no stone under his back. No ache in his ribs. No hole in his chest where the one-eyed had stabbed him through the heart.

  Right. That.

  “I died,” he said out loud, or thought out loud. His voice didn’t echo. It barely felt like sound at all.

  He waited for something grand to happen. Trumpets. A great cosmic ledger. Maybe the Curator Gods arguing over how many teeth he’d lied about in his appraisals before, and then him getting dragged off to some afterlife.

  Nothing of the sort happened.

  Instead, the void around him suddenly twisted. Colors bled into it all at once. Shimmering streaks of violet and green and molten gold swirled like paint in water, and the void became a world of iridescent, all of it funneling past him, around him, through him. Watery sounds rushed in afterwards, distant and muffled like he was underwater and someone was shouting several lakes away.

  It was too much. He squeezed his only eye shut. As the rushing sounds grew louder and the colors pressed closer, he felt as though his entire being was being compressed into a thread and being pushed through the eye of a needle, then stretched thin, pulled far, and—

  The world stopped swirling around him.

  His stomach did a slow, belated somersault, but when he dared to open his eye again, he was hovering over a mountainside. The first thing he saw was sunlight. Then, below him, a village. It clung to the slope of the great grey mountain like a barnacle to a ship’s hull. The houses were built from dark, rough-hewn stone, their roofs steep to shed snow and rain, with iron chimneys poking up like stubby fingers. Terraced paths zigzagged between the houses, all of them leading to a central square carved straight into the mountain’s broad flank.

  Morning, he realized. But the sky was a sullen smear of dark clouds, thick and low, so it felt more like late dusk. It also looked cold enough to bite, but he didn’t really feel anything on his skin now. In fact, when he looked down at himself, he saw no skin at all.

  He was a ghost. An ethereal eye hovering above a village. He could see and he could hear faintly—and he could float as well, he supposed—but otherwise, he couldn’t interact with the rest of the world.

  Huh.

  If this is death… I guess it’s not so bad after all.

  He drifted lower on instinct, and his ‘body’ obeyed without any help from wings or muscles. He simply thought ‘down’ and moved down, gliding over slate tiles and chimney pots like an owl in a dream.

  This is cool.

  I could get used to this.

  As he flew across the village, he scanned the people moving below. They were all villagers in thick wool and stitched leather, shawls around their shoulders and rough gloves on their hands. It was cold here. Winter season. They hauled buckets from the well in the square, stacked coal by low doorways to keep in the heat, and shook blankets of snow off balconies. No children chased each other along the terraced paths. No laughter was muffled by the heavy air.

  He recognized the cut of their clothes. Obric fabric. Mountain district, old patterns, old make. He’d bought and sold a few back in his relic merchant days.

  But why here?

  Am I haunting strangers now?

  Before he could figure out why he’d been drawn here, hoofbeats in the distance reached his ears.

  He looked to the winding road that clawed its way up the mountainside and saw an envoy of armored riders, their four-horned mountain rams picking careful steps over the stone. The men wore metal plates over thick gambesons marked with Obric colors, and their cloaks were the deep, muddy red of army uniforms. They weren’t townsguard or adventurers or simple mercenaries. Dain hadn’t seen them before up close, but he recognized them in an instant, too: soldiers of the Obric Independence Army.

  But the Obric Independence Army was disbanded twelve years ago after the war ended. Now it’s just the Obric Army.

  This means…

  The Darkmind Key worked.

  He was looking at the one-eyed’s darkest core memories.

  As the soldiers approached, the village stirred like a disturbed nest. Work slowed as people noticed the rams riding up. Conversations died. Villagers put down buckets and mining tools and drifted towards the square, pulled by curiosity and dread in equal measure.

  By the time the dozen riders reached the open square, a good crowd had formed around them—men and women squinting up through the gloom, children hiding in the shelter of older arms.

  Dain drifted closer, passing cleanly through a chimney so he could hover right above the square.

  The lead soldier swung off his massive ram with a grunt. Surprisingly, when he took off his ram-horned helmet, he seemed just a normal young man anyone could find anywhere. His face certainly didn’t seem like that of a hard-fought warrior, but there were bags under his eyes and gaunt in his cheeks. Despite his obviously young age, he looked like he was several decades older, and the way his hand rested on the pommel of his sword as he dismounted said he’d used it more often than he’d liked.

  He raised his chin, ready to speak—

  An elderly villager beat him to it.

  “You cannot take any more,” the old man said hoarsely. “A year ago, you came and took ten of our strongest. You told us they’d write back after the harvest. They did not. Half a year ago, you came again and took twenty of our miners. You said they’d be home in a few months. They are not. Now you come again, with that same dreary look in your eyes, wanting more? To feed this war we never asked for?”

  Murmurs rippled through the villagers like wind through loose scree, and the soldier’s jaw clenched. However, he didn’t reach for his sword.

  “... Yes,” he said finally. “The decree from Karatash, written by the Grand Minelord himself, is clear. Even the mountainside villagers must provide arms. This time, though, our quota is only twenty in total from the three villages of this valley. If each village gives just seven healthy, capable fighters, I can—”

  “You said ‘only’ last time as well,” someone snapped.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  “We never asked for this!” someone else shouted.

  “What use is ‘Autonomous Land’ to us when our sons and daughters are fed into your mines and armies?”

  “We had peace under the old lords! Why should we bleed for the Minemasters’ quarrel with Auraline?”

  Oh, Dain thought, drifting a little higher. This is a bit awkward.

  Discontent mounted. The soldiers who hadn’t dismounted shifted, hands tightening on their spears as the lead soldier tried to calm the crowd.

  “This is not my desire either!” he said. “I’ve walked these paths since I was a boy as well! I know every roof and every face in these valleys, but the decree is from the crowns above us all! If we don’t fill our share, Auraline’s Argent Crowns will come to do it in our stead, and you know they don’t ask with gentle hands!”

  “That’s not our problem!” someone shouted back.

  “Get out of here!”

  As the villagers’ shouts grew louder and the soldiers struggled to calm the rising tide of voices, a single, small hand lifted at the back of the crowd.

  “I’ll go.”

  The square fell silent at once.

  Dain’s gaze sharpened as the villagers slowly shifted aside, revealing a thin girl in threadbare robes. Her nails were caked with soot, her face streaked with the grey dust of a miner’s child—an orphan, by the look of her. But despite every eye turning toward her, she didn’t flinch. She only lifted her chin at the lead soldier and looked at him tiredly.

  “The last time you came… you took my mother,” she whispered. “The time before that, you took my father. You have no problem taking me too, right?”

  Unease flickered across the soldier’s face. Even he seemed unwilling to press a child into war, but when he glanced around and saw no other volunteers—only a sea of hardened stares and clenched jaws—his shoulders tightened.

  “How old are you?” he asked quietly.

  “Thirteen.”

  Before anyone could protest, she reached back, took hold of a smaller hand, and pulled a second girl out from behind the crowd. This one looked no older than ten, equally dust-stained, equally silent.

  “This is my sister,” the older girl said. “She’s staying with me.”

  “And how old is—”

  “Would you rather tell your boss you couldn’t recruit anyone from this valley?”

  The man didn’t answer.

  Couldn’t answer.

  So he worked his jaw once, turned away, and climbed back onto his ram. The other soldiers followed him as he began to ride through the square, heading towards the next village in the valley.

  The two sisters walked after them as though it were simply another chore the world had demanded of them.

  No one tried to stop them.

  And the world lurched again.

  One heartbeat he was hanging above the mountain village, and in the next, the air twisted and folded in on itself. Color smeared, sound warped—shouts, steel, thunder, all layered on top of one another—and then everything snapped back into place.

  Now he found himself hovering over a stone garrison plopped in the middle of the vast, rolling plains. Thick ramparts ringed a central yard choked with bodies and noise. Soldiers shouted. Smiths hammered at dented armor on portable anvils. Racks of spears, swords, and shields lined the inner walls, and in the middle of it all, a training ground sprawled in the yard with red-tinged Obric banners lining the edges.

  He looked past the garrison for a second, frowning at the horizon. Earth cracked and thunder boomed in ragged waves, as if giants were tearing the sky apart in the distance.

  … The Black Exhibit War.

  This is… the western Obric front?

  He drifted lower until he floated above the training yard.

  Hundreds of young men and women filled the training yard, all in mixed leathers and plates, all orphans of circumstance by the look of their eyes. Each of them were paired off and sparring against hulking stone golems with all sorts of weaponry, but it was immediately obvious who, among the recruits, were the most talented at taking down their golems.

  He found the sisters almost at once.

  Several years must’ve passed, because the older one was taller now, leaner in the limbs and stronger through the shoulders. Her black hair had been tied back with a strip of leather, her robes replaced by a soldier’s gambeson and hardened vest. In her hands, a steel sword flared briefly with faint etchings of light—a relic blade—and she tore into her golem with powerful, sweeping strikes. Her footwork was clean. Her guard even tighter. When the golem swung a rocky fist at her head, she slid aside, slammed her blade into its elbow joint, and finished with a low sweep that took its legs out from under it.

  The golem crashed to the ground in a burst of dust. She stepped back, blade up, then drove the tip into its chest, making it crack and shatter into inert rubble.

  Oh, she’s good at this.

  Across the yard, the younger sister struggled. She hadn’t grown as much as her older sister—still slim, still a little too narrow in the wrists—but there was a stubborn set to her jaw as she circled her own golem with twin daggers in her hands. Where her older sister fought like a standard-bearing soldier trained for the frontlines, the younger sister moved like a gutter cat. Her steps were light, always just outside the reach of the golem’s swings. Every time it lunged, she retreated just far enough, then darted in to carve shallow lines glowing across its stone hide.

  She looked like she was losing. Every clash sent her skidding back. Every near-miss almost flattened her. From Dain’s perspective, it was an ugly dance that’d inevitably end with her getting knocked onto her ass—until the golem wound up for another hammer-like punch.

  This time, the younger sister moved first. She slipped under its swing, rolled between its legs, and slashed upward with both daggers as she passed beneath it. She struck the exact same spot she’d struck dozens of times, and each one of those strikes had counted. The golem staggered as the repeated carved lines along its spine flared, and then—abruptly—its legs folded. It collapsed face-first into the dirt with a heavy thud.

  Only then did the younger sister let herself sag, shoulders rising and falling as she panted for breath.

  She’s not bad, either.

  A smart fighter over a strong fighter.

  The older sister finished wiping her blade on a rag and sheathed it. As she did, the sword retracted into a band of metal around her wrist. An Armament-Class relic, if Dain had to guess. The younger sister did the same, flicking her wrists to fold her twin daggers into matching bracelets.

  He watched as the older sister crossed the yard and rested a soft hand on her sister’s shoulder, wearing a tired smile.

  “Still in one piece?” she asked. Her voice carried enough for him to hear. “That golem nearly flattened you twice.”

  The younger sister didn’t look up. Her eyes were locked in a death gaze at the rubble that was her former opponent.

  “... Will we see mama and papa again?” she asked quietly.

  The older sister’s face hardened. There were new lines there that hadn’t existed in the village square, and for a heartbeat, her lips pressed thin and honest as though she were about to say what Dain thought she was going to say.

  Then she forced a smile back into place.

  “I heard from one of the captains,” she began, “that they’re still holding out in Fortress Yorvikar. Once the fighting stops, I’m sure all of them will be recalled. We’ll see them in no time. We just have to do our part properly here, yeah?”

  A lie, probably. Or, at best, a half-truth smeared with hope. But the younger girl studied her sister’s face—as if trying to find any seams in the story—before nodding once, hopeful.

  She wanted to believe her older sister wasn’t lying.

  Before the older sister could rub her head, bells rang across the garrison. The sound cut through sword-clatter and shouted drills like a blade. Every head snapped up. Instructors barked orders and trainees scrambled to grab shields, helmets, and whatever weapons they could get their hands on. Dain turned as well, because even in this strange spectral state, his instincts reacted to that particular urgency.

  He followed all of the trainees’ gazes to the sky.

  The clouds above the garrison were black and swollen, but something bright was trying to punch through.

  Then—like a spear ramming through wet canvas—a single, gigantic javelin of lightning punched through the clouds.

  He felt no heat and no force, but the memory of old terror clamped around his nonexistent ribs, making him flinch. He knew what that was. It was the same type of lightning javelin that’d destroyed half of Corvalenne. The same type that’d killed his maman and papa in less time than it took to think of their names.

  The javelin fell straight at him, and the world started swirling again as he squeezed his eye shut, bracing for a second death.