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THE WINTER WIND howled through the meandering streets of the city, dusting the tall figure making his graceful way towards the harbour with fresh snow. He paused for a moment and tilted back his head, blinking obsidian-dark eyes against the spiralling flakes settling on his face. They were almost invisible against his ivory skin. A cloak of midnight blue billowed around his slender form, marking him as an Adjudicator – an elite officer among the invading army.
Isaac had walked these streets many times before, but only since the First Fleet’s arrival had he done so without needing to conceal his true nature. The ability to beguile the lesser races was a rare skill he shared with his sisters: a blood-talent handed down by Zakarian, one of the original Pilgrims now lost to the Void. As he resumed his trek to the harbour, Isaac offered silent thanks for the Pilgrims’ great sacrifice. A sacrifice made to prevent the extinction of their kind.
Humanity will receive no such reprieve, the Adjudicator thought grimly. He recalled when the land this grey city was built upon had been untamed wilderness. The kingdom of Andarr had been a handful of primitive huts when Prince Obrahim called the Great Migration and the fehd withdrew west. Isaac’s kind had left the flourishing young race of man much of their knowledge. It was an act of monumental generosity, a parting gift for a people who would inherit a continent much changed following the titanic conflicts between the elder races.
Two thousand years later, the humans had sailed across the Endless Ocean and sought out their benefactors. Isaac’s own sister, Melissan, had offered succour to the voyagers. She even consented to allow two of the fehd to accompany the humans back across the ocean. Aduana and Feryan were eager to learn about the lands over which their people had once held dominion.
Isaac’s breathing quickened in anger. His hand inched towards the crystalline longsword at his waist; a weapon sharper than that forged by any man. He forced himself to calm, willed his anger to melt away like the snow flecking his golden hair. Such emotions were the mark of the lesser races. He was a fehd – and more, he was an Adjudicator.
He stared south beyond the harbour. Towards the flooded ruins of Shadowport where his kin had been imprisoned and tortured. Aduana and Feryan had been little more than children by the standards of his people, barely a few centuries old. The Magelord Marius had subjected them to horrors unimaginable.
Even across the vast distance of the Endless Ocean, Isaac and his kin had felt the deaths of Aduana and Feryan. Only a handful of the ageless fehd had perished since the Great Migration; now two had been murdered in the darkest of circumstances.
Two decades of mourning had followed. Two decades of grief before thoughts turned to vengeance.
Isaac stared at the humans cowering on the streets as he passed them on the way to the docks. Most were afraid to even glance in his direction. Some sobbed, while others turned and ran. Few had any place in which to seek refuge: rows of burned-out buildings led all the way to the docks, homes and offices reduced to blackened shells of melted stone by the First Fleet’s artillery. Beyond the harbour, entire districts had been destroyed in the days following the arrival of the fehd army. A third of the city’s population was newly homeless.
Dorminia’s resistance had proved pitiful. The city’s Magelord was dead and gone, its ruling council massacred by Isaac’s sisters in public view. None among the humans could stand against even a handful of regular fehd soldiers, let alone elite Adjudicators. Their swordsmanship had been refined through centuries of practice. Their empathetic projection was strong enough to reduce hardened warriors to quivering heaps. And the weapons his people possessed were beyond anything humanity could muster in defence. Isaac and his sisters were as gods among these short-lived creatures. Gods, or something close to it.
Isaac felt the briefest flicker of sympathy when he saw the children draped in rags huddling in the ashes of what had once been their homes. The oldest of humans seemed to him ephemeral creatures, their lifespans a cruel joke. But these children, they were half-dead already.
You chose, he reminded himself. You spent four years among these humans, judging them. Your verdict was harsh but it was just. Nothing less than utter annihilation. A purging of every human on the continent. Beginning here, in this place men called the Trine.
The ten ships that comprised the First Fleet filled Dorminia’s harbour. They were gunmetal behemoths all, each of them larger than the biggest human warship ever constructed and propelled not by oar or sail but by great engines that had eaten up the expanse of the Endless Ocean with ease.
Isaac’s sisters Melissan and Nymuvia were waiting for him on the flagship’s deck. The dark blue cloaks that marked them as Adjudicators fluttered behind them in the winter flurry.
‘Brother,’ Melissan greeted him as he joined them. ‘You appear troubled.’
Isaac stood at the prow and watched the thralls milling around on the deck. There were hundreds of them, men and women he had kidnapped and smuggled into the city to hasten its fall. The implants within the flesh of the thralls overrode thought and emotion; forced absolute compliance with the directives given by Isaac and his two sisters. They would serve their immortal masters unquestioningly until death.
‘Is it right to reduce them to... this?’ Isaac said eventually. ‘The Pilgrims taught that slavery was the greatest of evils. In the Time Before, to place a person in chains was to make of them a thing no better than an animal.’
Melissan came to stand before Isaac. They were of equal height – a head taller than any of the human thralls on the ship. Her hair was like spun gold, her eyes as black as ink. She was his full-blood sister, born of the same parents.
‘They are animals.’ She raised a delicate hand and frowned as a snowflake settled on her palm. ‘They fight, they fuck, and then they die, and in their passing they leave nothing more significant than this.’ She turned her hand and the thawed snowflake trickled to the ship’s deck.
‘Remember what they did, brother,’ said Nymuvia, placing a hand on his shoulder. She was the youngest of the three siblings, and though she was born of a different father to Melissan and himself, Isaac cherished Nym more than anything else in the world. ‘What they did to Aduana and Feryan. What the god-killer who ruled this city, Salazar, did to his neighbours across the Trine in his misguided effort to placate us.’
‘They are poison,’ Melissan added. Her voice was soft yet seethed with a great anger. The nearby thralls heard her fury and flinched away. ‘A poison that must be purged from the land. How can a race so short-lived ever rise above the mud from which they crawled?’
‘They are not all as you say,’ Isaac replied. ‘Not all. There are some worthy of our respect.’ He knew whence his sister’s anger came. She still blamed herself for the deaths of her kin. For saying ‘yes’ to Aduana and Feryan. That decision would haunt her for eternity.
Melissan brought her face closer, locked him with her gaze. ‘You should dispose of the Halfmage, dear brother. I fear your fondness for that particular human clouds your judgement.’
Isaac returned his sister’s stare. ‘It is true he fascinates me. But I have known others among his kind who surprised me also. Warriors loyal enough to die for each other, as any of our kind would. Is that not worth something?’
He recalled Brodar Kayne and his friend the Wolf. Very different men, but they had shared a bond that had seemed to him as strong as the steel deck now beneath his boots.
‘Humans know nothing of true loyalty,’ said Melissan. ‘They are creatures of convenience, motivated only by greed and fear. They do not feel as we do. Their “love” is but a poor imitation of ours.’
At the mention of ‘love’, Nymuvia’s eyes seemed to shine. ‘I have news for you, brother. It is why we summoned you here. The Second Fleet’s work at the Celestial Isles is finished. The general is coming. My betrothed is on his way.’
The smile on Nym’s face almost chased away the shadow her words cast over Isaac’s heart. ‘Saverian,’ he repeated. The general was a living legend among his people.
Isaac remembered the massacre of the humans at the Isles. A necessary act. One that Saverian had not shied away from. ‘He will lead us to victory,’ he said, though the words sounded inexplicably hollow.
‘As he always has.’ Melissan pointed towards the south. ‘This “White Lady” is all that stands before the next part of our crusade. Her city will fall swiftly once the general arrives. When the last remaining Magelord of the Trine is dead, Thelassa will serve as our gateway to the continent.’
Isaac nodded. Magic was the one question to which the fehd had no easy answer. Their people stood outside the Pattern, outside the plan the Creator had designed for this world. Magic was as alien to Isaac’s kind as their own abilities were to humanity.
But the fehd had equally deadly weapons. Weapons that had broken worlds. ‘They will be Reckoned,’ he said softly.
Nym’s smile was proud. ‘Like the elves before them.’
A thud and a scream shattered the brief silence that followed. One of the thralls had fallen from a mast. He lay groaning on the deck, his right leg clearly broken by the impact. Isaac recognized the man. It was one of the thralls he had captured near the city of Carhein in the first year of his return to these shores: a farmer who had been working the fields, oblivious to the true nature of the stranger approaching down the old dirt road.
‘I will have a thrall bring him down to the medic deck,’ Isaac said. ‘That leg can be fixed—’
Melissan reached for her hip and drew the deadly weapon holstered there, the motion a blur. There was the harsh crack of a shot being fired and an instant later the injured man’s head exploded in a splash of red spray. His body twitched a few times and went still. A puddle of crimson spread from the ruin of his neck, steaming in the winter air.
‘Clean it up,’ Melissan ordered, gesturing at the nearby thralls with her smoking hand-cannon. She replaced the weapon in its holster at her waist and turned to stare out across the city of Dorminia. ‘That was an act of mercy,’ she said. ‘The Reckoning will not be as swift.’
Despite his unease, Isaac couldn’t argue with his sister’s assessment. When the general arrived, the time remaining to the humans in these lands would be measured in days.
Then again, to the fehd, such had always seemed the case.