The battlefield smelled the way all battlefields smelled—copper and ozone and something older, something that had no name in any language because it predated language itself. It was the smell of a thing being unmade.
Vael knelt in the ash and placed both hands on the chest of a dead devil. The body was still warm. It had been a low-ranking soldier, one of the Horned Seventh, its charred skin split along the ribs where an angel's blade had opened it from collarbone to navel. Its eyes were open. They were always open. Vael had harvested ten thousand bodies over three centuries and had never once found a dead devil with closed eyes. He had stopped wondering why.
He pressed his palms flat and began the Reclamation.
Light gathered beneath his hands—not holy light, not in the way the temples described it, not the golden radiance the preachers spoke of during Morning Devotion. It was pale and thin, more like the light that leaks from a dying star. It pulled upward from the corpse in threads, passing through Vael's skin and bones, traveling down his arms and through his chest and into the vessel strapped to his back. The vessel hummed. The threads kept coming.
The devil's body deflated. Not rot—nothing so natural. It simply reduced, as though someone were turning down the volume on its existence. The skin went thin as paper. The bones went brittle as glass. In forty seconds, what had been a person—an entity with a name, with memories, with whatever passed for a life in the endless war—was a gray silhouette on the ground, a shadow pressed flat into the dirt like a flower in a book.
Vael stood. The vessel on his back was fractionally heavier.
Around him, hundreds of other Harvesters moved through the corpse-field in silent rows, their white robes already stained beyond recognition. The sky above the Torn Lands was the color of a bruise—purple and black and sick yellow where the light of distant stars bled through the wounds in reality that never healed. This close to the Front, you could sometimes hear the World Tree creaking in the distance, its roots digging through the fabric of space, searching for a source of nourishment that no longer existed.
The sermons said the World Tree had withered after the Abandonment. That God, in His infinite cruelty, had turned His face from creation and let the Tree starve. That the angels, in their infinite mercy, had built the Soulforge to replace what was lost.
The sermons were wrong about the Abandonment.
Vael knew this because Vael had read things he was not supposed to read.
He also knew this because the dead devil's soul, in the half-second before the Reclamation consumed it, had whispered something into his mind. It whispered the same thing they all whispered, in the end:
The war is a farm.