A cavalry of heat, fire, and pressure threw me backward. The world did not return—it reassembled itself in jagged, painful fragments.
First came a field of solid, blinding white, the ghost of the blast burned onto my vision. Then a low groan—my own, I realized, as the white began to crack. Darkness seeped into the edges of the void—not true black, but a deep, pulsing murk, shot through with splinters of raw color.
Shapes began to congeal from the chaos: a darker smudge against the grey, the hard line of a pauldron, the wet gleam of churned mud. My eyes refused to focus, the images sliding apart, doubling. The sharp, regrettably familiar scent of cooked meat and charred cloth flooded my sinuses and the back of my throat. A pressure built behind my eyes, throbbing in time with a heartbeat I could feel hammering in my skull.
Slowly, stubbornly, the fragments of the field locked into place. The smudge resolved into a discarded boot. The gleam became a shattered blade. Depth and distance returned not as a whole, but one object at a time, each piece pulling the next into grim, solid focus.
A great sphere of dense, black smoke blotted the sky where the central Amplifier had stood. On the ground, a firestorm raged, consuming everything in its path. The priests' bodies lay scattered amidst the ruins. Some had their white robes ignited, flames crawling along hems and sleeves, devouring their still forms. Others were torn apart, pieces of limbs and viscera blackened by the heat, flung across the field in a grotesque harvest. I could not look away, yet my mind screamed to do so, each inhale carrying the sweet, acrid stench of burning flesh.
With a grunt of effort, I pushed against the ground and hauled my body upright. My gaze remained fixed on the firestorm. Slowly, painfully, the reality of what had transpired began to creep into my mind. I forced my eyes across the battlefield, taking in the full extent of the devastation.
Eleven foul wounds had been torn through the ranks of the Legio—eleven blooms of destruction flourishing simultaneously and without warning. Death had spread like a spring's overflowing stream, sweeping away the ground, the souls that stood upon it, and every trace of cohesion that had once held.
I stumbled, my senses reeling through the landscape of ruin and fire. The ringing in my ears gradually gave way to the guttural thrum of a drum. It took me a few breaths to realize the sound was no drum at all, but my own heart, hammering a jagged rhythm against my ribs.
Reality forced its way through the confusion. I saw men tearing off their helmets, their faces contorted by nausea and pain. Others had collapsed—some groaning, others lying awfully still. The devastation our enemies had unleashed stretched across the entire formation. Even the Amplifiers on the flanks had been struck, their priests scattered before they could begin their prayers. Fortune had it that those instruments had fallen silent without unleashing the kind of ruin I had just endured.
Amid the stillness of the fallen, a new sound broke through—the Hierophant's laughter.
It was a thin, cracked thing, weaving upward to join the traitors' triumphant cries from the walls. The sound came from the heart of the crater where the Amplifier had been. There, wreathed in shimmering heat, the Hierophant twitched and convulsed, pinned mid-air by an unseen force. Light pulsed from him in sickening waves.
The last Amplifier, I told myself, the thought, a spark in the smoking ruin of my mind. Felix is still up there.
I had to give the signal for the counter-attack. We had to destroy those blasphemous tubes on the walls before they could unleash another volley. There would be no surviving a second.
"Come on," I snarled, the words a raw scrape in my throat, meant for my ears alone. I tried to shove myself upright, but my legs buckled, betraying me under the weight of my own armor and the dawning horror.
I faced the walls. Through the haze, I could make out the small, dark-clothed figures moving among the militia, their celebrations already giving way to purpose. They swarmed over their blackened tubes again, their movements precise, rehearsed.
They are reloading.
The realization was a cold lance of pure terror. I had to move. I had to reach the signal flags, the horns—anything.
A wave of twitching motion ran through the Hierophant's cackling body.
I spotted a horn dangling from one of the fallen, its frame blackened by ash and heat. It lay just ahead of me—yet beyond it stretched the field of smoldering robes where the Hierophant writhed.
If I leave him like this, his unraveling will consume the entire flank. If I don't signal Felix now, we will be obliterated by the next volley.
My hand pawed at the hidden pocket beneath my pauldron, fingers scrabbling for the Ring Claw. The Magister's words in my quarters came back to me—I hope you know how to use that little claw of yours—and suddenly its familiar weight felt less like a relic and more like a small, hot promise. A promise of a different kind of sin.
My hand closed around cool metal.
I inhaled deeply, smoke searing my lungs. It didn't matter. I forced the breath out slowly, the copper tang of blood mingling with the ash and soot in my mouth.
"Sorores, me amplexu vestro obscuro celate et peccatum meum a Patre abscondite."
("Sisters, cloak me in your dark embrace, and hide my sin from the Father.")