The Broken Herald

I walked by the gates of Fordis at dawn, arms full of feverfern cuttings that I couldn't afford to drop. The thirty-foot walls loomed over my head, black rune-carved stone thick enough to stop pretty much anything with a pulse. The city had stood behind them for centuries, absolutely certain it was invincible.

  Having a comet in the sky over our heads for the past eighteen months hadn't changed that opinion yet. I knew Fordis wasn't invincible, but nobody else wanted to hear it.

  I handled my plant bundle like it was something special, which it was to me. It had taken hours of back-breaking harvesting to collect, and the garden cuttings were all I had to trade for my mother's medicine.

  I wasn't built for garden work. I'm too heavy, too inflexible. Garden labor is harsh on joints that were used to armor and long marches. And three months of civilian life had left me soft. The kind of soft that meant extra weight around my middle and knees that complained about stairs. At least feverfern harvesting didn't require speed. Just patience and a strong back, and I had one of those. Barely.

  I was down to three days left of my mother's medicine supply. Maybe four, if I gave her less than she needed. Her bloodsugar flux sickness didn't like to cooperate with that approach, but I'd resolved to be an optimist about things I couldn't control.

  There were more than the usual number of guards lining the city walls, even for a dawn shift. Before the comet and all the wall attacks, mornings were just skeleton crews, but now the city kept full rotations posted around the clock.

  One of them near the gate straightened when he saw me. "Voss? Darian Voss?" He nodded toward a grain wagon with the busted axle that was blocking the gate threshold. "Are you here for that?"

  I looked at the wagon, then at my feverfern. "Uh…no. I'm retired." I replied.

  "Since when does someone retire at your age?"

  "Since three months ago."

  When eight people died under my command. I didn't say that part.

  "Right. Well, if you change your mind—"

  The emberbears picked that really fantastic moment to crash out of the jungle.

  My mind was still on dosing schedules and trade prices, so it took me longer than it should have to process what I was seeing outside the gate. Feathered bodies taller than me moved through heat that made the dawn air shimmer, their orange eyes glowing like forge coals.

  Even at two hundred paces, the damn things were looking right at me. Five of them. Moving together. In formation.

  Emberbears didn't do that. They were supposed to be territorial, solitary hunters. Every bestiary said so. They didn't coordinate, didn't pack up and charge city walls like they had somewhere to be.

  Apparently, they hadn't read the bestiary.

  The gate behind me was still open. Four guards hauled at the broken-down wagon with looks of wide-eyed panic, while two more stood at the gate pulley, useless, waiting for a clear path.

  Fordis always had something broken. Usually at the worst possible moment.

  Ninety heartbeats to move the wagon, maybe more with the axle dragging. The creatures would be here in forty-five.

  Perfect timing. As usual.

  Around me, panic flooded through the early-morning crowd as they figured out something was wrong. An old woman tripped on the cobblestones and almost fell, but recovered before going down. Parents grabbed their children and ran, heading for doorways and alleys, anywhere that wasn't out in the open.

  I could run too—away from the gate, away from the monsters, away from the whole situation. Maybe find a nice, solid building and wait for it to be someone else's problem. Probably the smart move.

  I looked down at the feverfern in my arms—hours of work—and pictured my mother's face when I came home empty-handed again.

  Then I dropped the plants and ran toward the gate.

  I had a plan. Well, 'plan' was generous. More like: don't die doing something stupid.

  Two other civilians had the same idea, or the same lack of self-preservation instinct. I joined them at the wagon while three guards shoved from the opposite side. At least I had the build for this kind of work—a big frame and arms that remembered being soldier-strong—but I was second-guessing the three months of gardening and way too much eating.

  We heaved. Boots planted, muscles burning. The cart jerked forward inch by grinding inch.

  The man beside me slipped on a crushed melon and went down hard, orange pulp smearing his trousers. He scrambled up and kept pushing without a word.

  Another heave. Somewhere behind us, something wooden cracked as a creature crashed through it—a market stall, probably.

  We gave another heave. A scream from my right was cut short suddenly when I heard bones snapping, a wet sound that meant someone wasn't getting up again.

  The wagon still hadn't cleared the threshold.

  Then the lead emberbear arrived, and things went from 'fixable' to 'oh, shit'.

  A guard on the cart's far side died first. Claws punched through leather and flesh as if the armor wasn't even there, blood spraying across the cobblestones. He screamed for maybe half a second before talons found his throat.

  A second guard ran. He took three strides before the creature's beak closed around his spine, and I felt the crunch in my own teeth.

  The emberbear tossed him aside like yesterday's garbage.

  Every part of me wanted to follow the guard's example. The running part, not the dying part.

  Instead, some idiot reflex I thought I'd beat out of myself kicked in and I started cataloguing the tactical situation. Three monsters inside the walls now, two still outside, a blocked gate, civilians running in circles instead of finding cover. The surviving guards were frozen or still hauling at the wagon.

  I had a clear escape route. I could still take it. Nobody would blame me.

  But the wagon probably only needed one more push.

  I scrambled to the cart's rear, bit my lip hard enough to taste blood, and threw everything I had into one last shove.

  The wagon cleared the threshold.

  Metal screamed above me as the guards worked the chains. The massive ironwood doors groaned shut, and the wards carved into the city's black walls flared blue-white as power raced through the stone. Convergence magic channeled through the foundation and walls.

  The light stuttered twice before it caught.

  Carved conduits threaded the whole damn city like veins. They looked about as healthy as mine felt, too.

  Only three of the feathered things had made it inside the city to hunt.

  The dead guard's weapons lay scattered across the bloody cobblestones—a sword, bow, and quiver just lying there, waiting for someone dumb enough to pick them up.

  I was apparently that dumb.

  The sword came first. I fumbled the clasp twice on the blood-slick grip before getting the blade free, then grabbed the bow next and yanked the quiver off the corpse's back. Arrows spilled everywhere.

  Dread crept through me. My hands went through motions they remembered better than I wanted them to: nock an arrow, draw the string, settle into a four-count breathing pattern.

  My lungs didn't cooperate. Too shallow. Too fast.

  The nearest emberbear swiveled its head toward me with that owl-neck rotation, predatory and smooth. Each heartbeat, those orange eyes got brighter, light bleeding from under feathers like coals through furnace cracks.

  It charged.

  My first arrow took it deep between shoulder and bone—a good shot, actually. Would have dropped most things. The creature didn't even slow down.

  My second arrow hit the eye socket directly, the orange glow going out in a spray of black fluid that steamed where it struck the stone. The emberbear kept coming anyway, half-blind now, hunting by scent and sound as much as vision.

  I dropped the bow and drew the sword. Swords weren't really my weapon—I performed better at range, where my general slowness mattered less—but the beast was too close for arrows now.

  It lunged. I rolled left, tactically the right call but hard on my knees, and came up behind its shoulder.

  My blade found the joint where leg met body, and I felt tendons part under the edge. The leg buckled.

  The damn thing pivoted away on three limbs anyway.

  It reared up, talons raking toward my head with speed that shouldn't have been possible for something that size. I ducked, and my entire body disagreed with that plan about halfway down. 

  Claws caught my raised forearm, parallel lines of fire erupted from elbow to wrist. My skin tore, blood welling up and running down toward my hand.

  That was going to be a problem later.

  My sword pierced the thing's throat, and I threw my weight behind it. The blade sank deep, and the emberbear tried to bellow, the sound coming out wet and broken. 

  It swayed, clawed weakly at the air, and collapsed in a heap of stinking feathers and twitching muscle. Finally dead.

  I looked around for the next threat, forcing my grip steady despite blood making everything slick. My arm throbbed sharply, but underneath that... warmth, spreading from the wound through muscle into bone.

  My body was doing something it shouldn't. Changing itself in ways that went beyond fixing damage.

  This wasn't the first time I'd felt like this. After Thornhaven, the mages ran tests and asked questions I couldn't answer, then just declared me a "mutation-adjacent anomaly" and sent me home.

  Guild research at its finest.

  The warmth faded as quickly as it had come. My fingers still tingled. I shook my head, clearing the distraction, and scanned the square.

  Movement caught my eye. The second monster had cornered a woman and a small boy against the wall base, both frozen, the kid clutching his mother's skirts. The thing stalked them like something that knew its prey had nowhere to go.

  On the wall above them, a Guild analyst in black robes watched the whole courtyard, notebook clutched in one hand, and her eyes moved constantly as she evaluated the scene below.

  Her fingers tapped against her thigh, doing the math as she tracked threats and counted bodies. Her gaze found the emberbear at my feet, flicked to the one stalking the civilians, then narrowed.

  She called across the square toward a senior guard trying to organize some semblance of a defense. "The third one's flanking! A coordinated hunting pattern! Check the north side!"

  The senior guard didn't seem to believe her. "Emberbears don't coordinate, analyst. Tell me what you see, not what you feel." He squinted at the walls. "But you're right—something's off. North side, you said?"

  The third emberbear lurked exactly where she'd predicted, hidden in shadows along the north wall. It had snuck away in the chaos—the guards hadn't tracked it, the other mages on the walls hadn't noticed it.   Only the analyst.

  Before anyone could shout a warning, it reared up behind the senior guard. He went down, and the sound was awful.

  I didn’t want to look.

  The guards finally coordinated to converge from three directions, spears driving into flank and throat and the joint behind the skull. The emberbear thrashed, beak snapping, but the shafts held it pinned against the stone. Someone found the heart and the thing finally stopped moving.

  Two down. One left to go.

  On the platform above, a Guild mage pressed his palms flat against a rune-covered channel carved into the wall, one conduit that carried power out from the convergence chamber beneath the Guild tower. His hands glowed faintly where they touched the stone, but he grimaced. "I can't hold the draw!" Strain cracked his voice. "The convergence point's barely feeding through!"

  A second mage stepped up beside him, adding her hands to the stone, sweat already beading on her forehead despite the cool morning air. A third joined them, and together the three mages did what one should have handled easily reluctantly coaxing the runes into a sluggish blue glow. 

  Six months ago, one mage could have handled this. Now it took three just to keep a single magic spell from collapsing entirely.

  Fire gathered in the first mage's palm, white-hot and spear-shaped. The convergence channels in the wall flickered, dim and stuttering, like a lantern running out of oil. But the spell still launched across the square and struck the last emberbear in front of the woman and her son.

  Hide smoldered while the creature staggered. Another fire lance hit it, then a third. It died with flesh blackened and bone showing through, collapsing in a smoking heap ten feet from the two people it had been about to kill.

  The mother grabbed her son's hand and ran. They disappeared into the crowd without looking back. 

  A good strategy. I didn't want to stick around either.

  Quiet settled over the square, the kind you get when everyone is too shocked to speak. The mages on the wall bent forward, gasping, hands trembling as they released their connection to the convergence power, wiped out by a spell that was just slightly more powerful than glorified fireworks.

  Eventually, the guard commanders pulled themselves together and started organizing cleanup. Debris moved outside the gate while the wounded went to the medical station. Bodies went to... somewhere.

  I didn't want to know.

  At the makeshift medical station, more mages arrived to deal with the aftermath. They placed healing stones on the rune channel that ran along the main sidewalk, then triaged the lined-up wounded. It was a slow business putting people back together, and the mages frowned a lot—the infrastructure wasn't cooperating.

  I leaned against the wagon that had caused all the problems and looked down at my scattered feverfern. The cuttings lay trampled across dirty cobblestones, crushed under boots and bodies, broken stems and torn leaves lay everywhere. Hours of work gone along with my best shot at mother's medicine. Not good.

  I'd lived in Fordis my whole life, bled in its streets more times than I could count, taken contracts to protect it from the jungle. Three months ago I'd made decent money.

  Now I grew weeds and prayed they'd be enough.

  My forearm throbbed, blood seeping through my sleeve and dripping down the back of my hand. The gashes were deep, deep enough to need proper healing, which meant waiting in line with everyone else.   That would take a while, judging by the queue.

  Instead, I found a cloth strip on the ground, torn from someone's tunic during the fighting. I wrapped it around my arm and pulled tight with my teeth until the pressure hurt. 

  The makeshift bandage went dark with blood almost immediately.

  I'd fought competently. Killed efficiently. And then bled anyway. 

  I probably shouldn't have been surprised. Gardening didn’t keep anyone in fighting shape. I pulled the bandage tighter, watching a thin trail of red drip onto the cobblestones beside my ruined feverfern.

  My wounds wouldn't close quickly. Neither would the gap in my mother's medicine supply.

  Some days it just didn't pay to leave the house.