The firefight at the stables was brief but intense. By the time the last white-coat stopped shooting back, four patrol officers had fallen of the dozen that had accompanied Kera and Lycera from their encampment into Ventium. One of those four seemed only gravely wounded, rather than dead, but they couldn’t stop to help him. By then, Albion’s occupation forces around the whole city were roused to their intrusion.

  But they were almost away, once they clambered atop their riding birds. Successful in their objective, however decimated.

  Lycera had taken only a few moments longer to climb atop her own mount, as she’d needed to bind the wrists of their captive, and sling him over the neck of her riding bird with the help of another officer. She had one foot in the stirrup, and was reaching for the reins, when rifle fire and projectiles of vis buffeted their company’s position once more. The first fresh squadrons of military policemen redeployed from elsewhere across Ventium had arrived on the scene, and had opened fire from across the street.

  Lycera fell back onto the straw, bleeding through the blouse of her civilian disguise.

  “Return fire!” Kera ordered their company’s survivors, as she leapt down from her saddle. “Do not dismount!”

  At Lycera’s side, she threw her arm over her shoulder. Along with the other officer who’d helped with the hostage, she tried to help her stand.

  “Go. You’ll doom yourself for me.” breathed Lycera through a contorted grimace. “You have him already… get the intel, take it back to Tanhkmet… then free the others…”

  “No,” said Kera. “We have you now. You can still ride. C’mon, up you go.”

  It took another twenty seconds under fire, with bullets whistling past and splintering the stable’s roof and wooden supports. A beam of indigo vis-flame took another patrol officer off his bird, and he fell to the ground unmoving. But then at last Lycera was upright in her saddle.

  Their final straggler was the officer who’d helped Lycera with the hostage. Just as Kera took the reins of her own mount once more, another beam of indigo light cut through the stable, piercing that soldier's lower back. She tumbled to the straw.

  The wounded officer locked eyes with Kera, where she'd fallen.

  “Don’t— Don’t leave me!” she begged. She couldn’t stand up on her own.

  But Kera knew that only more Albians were filling the streets outside. In perhaps another few seconds, they’d be storming in.

  And when she looked down, she didn’t see a person beneath her.

  But rather, a broken tool that had served its purpose, and was then too costly to salvage.

  Even as some distant part of her knew that was wrong, and that it was a human being begging her for help — for an instant, it was as if she was incapable of empathy, while she saw only the unfeeling truth. The strategic truth.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  She whipped the reins.

  “Ride!”

  As the survivors of their company burst from the stables on the outskirts of Ventium, blue-white fire crackled in the air above Kera’s head, even as she had not willed manifest her vis.

  * * *

  Aurelia looked over her shoulder, as she rode north with Roskvir atop the haunches of He-Who-Tends-Gardens.

  A shape in the far distant sky seemed as if a second moon, half-shrouded in the evening atmosphere’s deep blue refraction. In regular intervals, it flashed bright, and so beneath a great swath of the southern forests of Setet burned to the ground, filling the air again with smoke.

  “You’re shrinking,” said Aurelia, as she held tufts of the beast's fur.

  ‘Yes. By the time the insolent whelp finishes his tantrum, he will have greatly reduced my power on this plane, and my present form is a projection of that power. But worry not, little one. Still, most of me will remain. As long as mortals nurture that which is feathered, furred, and green-leafed, I will remain.’

  “You’ll still be bigger than people?”

  “Who are you talking to?” murmured Roskvir. He seemed still exhausted from his various ordeals.

  ‘I think so, little one,' said He-Who-Tends-Gardens, with another telepathic chuckle. ‘I have a very long way to go, before I am that small. And in time, perhaps mortals will rediscover their love of things that sprout and wither, and I will grow larger once more.’

  “But maybe people will stop growing things, and destroy more of your places,” said Aurelia. “Then you could get very small. Maybe… too small to fight things?”

  ‘Perhaps. I find that unlikely, but it is possible. The day I grow smaller than the whelp will be a very sad day indeed.’

  For a time, Aurelia only watched the forests burn, behind them.

  “Roskvir,” she said. “Can you teach me how to use my vis?”

  “Hmm… are you sure? In Albion, usually, children are not taught to attune to their sjael until they are a good bit older.”

  “Why?”

  “First of all, because they don’t trust young children to be responsible with that kind of power," said Roskvir. "But… I suppose that’s not why I’d be reluctant, to teach you.”

  “Why, then?”

  “The other reason Albians don’t often teach children... is because wielding a weapon makes a person a combatant. Almost no adversary will harm children if it can be helped. But if a child raises a sword, pistol, or sjaelsvaben, even in self-defense, an enemy won’t see them as a child anymore. They’ll see a soldier, whom they won't hesitate to kill.”

  “Oh. that makes sense, I guess,” said Aurelia.

  She thought for a long moment.

  “But I still want to learn how to use my vis."

  “...Very well,” said Roskvir. “I’ll teach you, on one condition.”

  “What?”

  “You must promise to never use your sjaelsvaben unless first you are attacked by someone with lethal intent. I couldn’t…. I couldn’t bear to be responsible for teaching you a technique that caused some violence to escalate, and bring you to harm without reason. Can you promise me that? Never to use it, unless you are directly attacked by some enemy, who truly means to kill you?”

  Aurelia looked down. She knew she was bad at lying.

  “I promise,” she said.

  "The blade itself incites to deeds of violence."

  Homer