Chương 1: Prologue - Count The Living

The rain had stopped, and the yard steamed. Ant stood in the middle of it with his sword still out and no one left to use it on. Smoke still rose off the wreckage, thin and grey, off the collapsed barracks, off the wagon burned down to its iron bones, off the black glass scattered through the mud where lightning had struck dirt and left something a man could see his face in. He counted eleven of those plates without moving his feet. He stopped counting after eleven. The smell was the worst of it.

Char and wet ash, ozone still sharp enough to taste at the back of the throat, and underneath all of that, thick as a hand pressed over his mouth, the butcher-stink of the thing lying dead across the far half of the yard. It had been the size of a building. It was still the size of a building — the mountain of scarred brown fur, the tusks that had ploughed furrows across the yard deep enough to bury a man in, the wound burned into its flank the size of a doorway with rainwater pooling in it, pink and cooling.

Nearer to him lay the serpents, both of them, forty feet apiece, their grey-green armour burst open in craters where the killing had finally found a way in. One of them lay bent hard around a single arrow driven in to the fletching, its plating cracked open at the fold. His clan had done this. All of it. And the yard had taken everything they had to give in return. His palm still held heat. His own palm, cupped loosely at his side, low and banked, the kind that didn't come from exertion.

He wasn't ready to think about that yet, about what had left his hand in the trees and what it meant, so he did what he had learned to do with things too big for the moment. He stored it for later. The chime sounded behind his eyes. It always waited until the fighting actually stopped before it rang. He opened the screen. [LEVEL UP] ANT — LEVEL 10 Strength: 30 Endurance: 31 Agility: 40 Magic: 20 HP: 80/80 Mana: 130/160 Two levels in one night.

He read the Strength line twice — twenty-five had been his number long enough to feel like part of his name. It wasn't anymore. [SKILL UNLOCKED] FLAME FIST Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work! Channel your bonded Kithren's flame through your hands. He read it three times. The words didn't change. The heat in his palm matched them exactly.

He pulled the experience bar up last — the newest habit he owned, hours old, and already he couldn't remember how he'd stood not knowing. [EXPERIENCE] 3, 435 / 8, 800 Every point in that bar had a body attached to it tonight, his or theirs. He didn't have it in him to sit with that yet. Twelve thousand, four sixty on mine. The voice came through the bond, low, worn down to threads. Out of sixteen thousand. Before you ask.

Mahkir limped out of the dark and stopped at his shoulder, and the two of them stood there matching, mud to the belly, scorch-marked, breathing. His red fur had gone the colour of old brick under the filth. There was a stripe along one flank where the fur had burned away entirely. He didn't favour it. He never did, no matter what it was. Stop reading your screens, he said. And count them. Ant closed the screens. He turned in a full circle, and counted his people. Six Kithren down.

A tiger with its flank burned bare, breathing slow and deep beside a man whose forearms were blistered to the elbow and who was talking anyway, because he always talked, and tonight the sound of it was medicine. A gorilla the size of a cart, flat in the mud, a small fierce woman kneeling at his ribs with both hands spread on them, feeling every breath arrive and refusing to look away between breaths.

A bear with scorched fur, an old man stretched alongside him in the muck with one leg dragging useless and both hands buried to the wrist in that fur, saying the same words over and over, worn soft. A turtle with its shell split. A panther that had leapt to clear the lightning and been followed into the air.

A scaled, fire-bright creature lying in the shadow of the wall it had been thrown against, its glow gone the colour of banked coals, and a woman standing over it with a hammer she had never once put down, all night, not once. An archer who couldn't stand, propped against a wagon wheel, one leg wrong beneath her and one hand resting on a small, pale fox curled against her collarbone. The fox didn't have a mark on it.

It had simply given out mid-stride, spent past whatever kept it standing, and she held it close against her, both hands, not moving. And at the barracks, at the slide of stone and timber that had been the barracks, a giant knelt in the wreckage, six grey arms hauling the collapse apart a course at a time, thin lines of pale fire laid into its hide from wrist to throat, glowing steady and unbroken. From somewhere under the stone came swearing. Detailed. Unhurried. Alive. Ant let one breath out. Hurt everywhere.

Dead nowhere. Every one of his people had made it through the night, though not one of them had made it through whole, and the yard was theirs now, the territory with it, and none of that would be worth anything until the swearing under that rubble was standing on its own feet in open air. They'll want you over there, Mahkir said. You're the leader. Leaders dig.

"I know what leaders do." Then why are we still standing here? Ant looked down at his own hand once more, the palm, the heat still sitting there that hadn't belonged to him before tonight, and closed his fingers over it, and put it away with the rest. Then he crossed the yard to dig his teacher out.