The landscape wore its beauty like a mask.

As far as Captain Ephrenna Brynn could see, wetlands gleamed beneath the sky’s unrelenting glare. Light caught on every ripple and every outcrop of nacreous rock. Curtains of thin mist drifted over the limpid pools, blooming with luminescence. This far into the reaches of Hysh, the illumination of day made everything a shining wonder, and it drowned her vision in a tide of brilliant detail. It was simply too much to encompass with mortal eyes.

Behind Ephrenna, a ragged column trudged through the silty muck. The Dawnbringers numbered more than a thousand, a heaving rabble of soldiers, pilgrims, zealots and opportunists. Most stared around in guileless awe, blind to any danger. The eyes of her own vanguard company, one hundred hand-picked veterans of the Five Nails Freeguild, were dark with smeared ash-black to ease the intense radiance, and they alone were ready for battle.

Ephrenna had striven hard to stand at this crusade’s fore, as she had for everything since she scrabbled her way out of the dust of the Spiral Crux. The faith that fired the pilgrims’ hearts seemed distant to her, and she knew Azyrite lordlings and Freeguild officers alike resented the authority she, as a Reclaimed clanswoman, had earned over them. It didn’t matter; she’d pay whatever price necessary for another chance to carve her name in the world through her deeds. Whether they liked her or not, they would carry her to the greatness she believed, in her heart, she was destined for.

It was hard to pick out individuals amid the mass of Dawners, but Ephrenna saw the gesture of the crusade’s commander nonetheless, beckoning for her. Only Anaximandra could exude such imperiousness in this realm, as if her pristine white-and-silver robes put even the clear Hyshian sky to shame. The wizard moved in a different world to the rest of them. Even trudging through the mire, she had somehow kept the hem of her garb free of muck.

Ephrenna pushed through the column of Dawners to reach her commander, as strange as it still felt to defer to the authority of the wizard. Though Anaximandra was neither general nor priest, her vision and hold over the crusade was absolute.

Anaximandra graced the captain with a brief glance as she approached, then turned her gaze to the horizon. ‘We approach Elucidae.’

‘A day’s march maybe, magister,’ Ephrenna said. ‘We’ll be there tomorrow, if you let me push this rabble.’

‘No, captain. We stand in its hinterland, and will proceed with caution. I must assess the geomantic energies at work. These pools were once fields, these rocks once menhirs. Whatever power Elucidae harnessed still lingers in their shape and alignment.’

Ephrenna snorted dismissively. ‘The city fell centuries ago, and you think whatever sorcery these mystics practised might still be at work? If this is what the outskirts look like, there’s nothing left but rubble.’

‘More than mere centuries ago, captain. Nonetheless, the aelves’ reports were strikingly clear. Elucidae still stands, and we do not yet know what calamity erased it from the annals of history. We will approach the city without haste. For now, find us dry ground for tonight’s camp.’

Ephrenna frowned but did not argue. Anaximandra was a wizard of the Collegiate Arcane and the beating heart of this expedition, the one who had willed it into being. It was she who had petitioned for the crusade to be issued forth, who convinced Lector Vieglund to call the faithful to arms, and who negotiated safe passage from aelven nobles. Whatever arcane secrets she believed the human mystics of Elucidae wielded, she would clearly move heavens and realm to reclaim them.

The captain hurried ahead, catching up with her command retinue beneath the regiment’s fluttering banner. Lieutenant Malerich loomed in the rust-and-grey heraldry of the Five Nails, the drab colours a balm for Ephrenna’s eyes amid the glaring light. Behind him scuttled Caustus, the pseudo-oracle’s face a ghastly mess of sutures wrapped in an elaborate duardin-made breathing apparatus. His hand eagerly fumbled with the pouches of glimmering phials at his belt, a considerable sum of harvested prophecy that had cost Ephrenna dearly in the markets of Excelsis.

‘Captain.’ The burly lieutenant gave a curt salute, then scowled. ‘This light’s giving me a bloody headache.’

‘You should be used to it by now,’ Ephrenna said. ‘Anything from the scouts? We need to find somewhere in this sodden mess to pitch camp.’

The lieutenant shook his head. ‘They’re overdue back, which worries me. These fens are hard to make headway through, it’s true, but…’

Ephrenna’s gaze flickered to Caustus. She didn’t need to ask; he thumbed a phial into an aperture on his breathing apparatus, twisted it, and greedily inhaled as shining vapours flooded forth.

Caustus was a false prophet, an artificial omen-seeker whose insight came solely from the fragmented power of Excelsis glimmerings, but his sensitivity to those brief flashes of revelation was stronger than most. He was entirely loyal to Ephrenna’s stockpile of purchased portents, and the fascinating thread of her own supposed destiny. He wanted to see her future almost as much as she did.

His ravaged face creased in a blissful grin of discovery. ‘Death,’ he murmured.

Sudden movement stirred the misty haze draped across the landscape. Ephrenna saw it then, too late: ranks of hunched shapes among the rocks ahead, each raising a shield of burnished metal that now reflected the shining light of Hysh’s noon sky. A moment later, and she could see nothing else but the blinding display of this false dawn.

Disarray. Pandemonium. Dawners shouting, fighting, screaming.

Ephrenna tried to blink away the afterimage of the shields, but before her watering eyes cleared a thunderclap tore the air. Slivers of metal pinged off her plate armour, and the side of her face, unprotected, erupted with stinging pain. A terrible, sulphurous stench billowed through the air.

‘Explosives?’ she mumbled thickly, mouth bloody and ears ringing. Wiping her eyes clear, she saw the first hail of crossbow bolts rake in, each barbed and dripping with slime. Five Nails soldiers slammed their shields together into a shelter over her head, holding back the deadly rain. Others among the Dawner throng were not so fortunate. The bolts found faces and throats with frightening accuracy.

Anaximandra stood resolute amid the madness, straight-backed and hands aglow as raw power swirled down from the sky and into her grasp. For a moment, as the wizard shone like some hero out of legend, the nearest Dawners looked upon their leader with awe, and the fire of hope rekindled in their hearts. Then a bolt slammed into Anaximandra’s neck, and another punched through her shoulder. Pristine white robes marbled with arterial red, and she toppled into the dirt.

And just like that, the crusade was decapitated, its commander slain. Shock and dismay rippled through the ranks of the Dawners.

Ephrenna gawked in horror for a moment, before the relentless rain of death all around snapped her out of it. ‘Lieutenant!’ she shouted at Malerich. ‘Keep the front line in order!’

Her second-in-command saluted and pushed forward through the press of bodies, leaving the captain to take stock with as much rational calculation as she could still muster. Anaximandra was dead, the Dawners reeling, and Ephrenna had no idea who the foe even was. She clambered up onto the frame of the nearest wagon, shield bearers close, noting with relief that Caustus had scrabbled beneath the cart to some measure of safety.

Aloft, she could get some sense of the battle’s shape. Dawner zealots and Freeguild milled in confusion, and she was nonplussed at the lack of order until she saw a lieutenant from a different regiment fall, transfixed by bolts. She could see few officers still standing at all. Lector Vieglund, brandishing his warhammer and howling prayers, vanished amid muck, flame and smoke as another grenade erupted in the crusade ranks.

Orruks, long-limbed and lean, were rushing the Dawner lines with barbed spears and gleaming shields. Their skin glimmered in the light from some paint of crushed nacre and crystal, blurring their movement into smears of reflection. Smaller, grot-like figures cradled those terrible grenades, and beyond, clambering atop rocky outcrops, more orruks aimed heavy crossbows. The orruks were fewer in number, but trying to force the rest of the Dawners into order would take too long. Ephrenna knew she had to act now and seize the throat of the foe before this turned into an outright rout.

She shoved her way back to the forefront of the column. Malerich had done a good job; the soldiers not only held against the leering, howling foe and their blinding shields, but were also pushing back against the weight of the orruk line.

‘Five Nails!’ she shouted over the din of battle, and raised one nail-studded gauntlet. ‘One fist!’

‘Five Nails, one fist!’ they roared their assent.

Her veterans were not panicked Dawner pilgrims nor common Freeguild soldiers. They were the finest of the Five Nails regiment, heavy infantry clad in munitions plate from the foundries of Vindicarum, and many bore keen-edged zweihanders capable of cleaving right through an orruk with a single strike. They had weathered far worse than this in battle.

‘On my command… charge!’

As one, the soldiers thundered forward, throwing the orruks back with the weight of their advance. For a brief, shining moment Ephrenna thought they would hurl the fen-dwellers into the disarray of a bloody rout, but as orruk horns howled out over the wetlands, the enemy simply melted away. They slid and slithered out of her veterans’ grasp through the pools and mud and, in moments, vanished back into the haze and light of the landscape.

Ephrenna winced again as the field surgeon’s probing tweezers picked the last splinter of metal from her cheek, followed by the sting of cleansing fluid. The pain was nothing to the apprehension now roosting in her gut. She surveyed the camp table before her, covered in maps, aelven reports, and Anaximandra’s notes about Elucidae, and desperately tried to hold it all together.

The orruks’ bolts were smeared in iridescent poison, and had reaped a deadly harvest among the crusade’s commanders. Ephrenna was now the senior surviving Freeguild officer and, through bullying anyone bold enough to stand up to her and cajoling the rest with promises of their imminent destination, she had managed to keep control for long enough to make camp on the least sodden patch of fen around.

The problem was, Ephrenna wasn’t Anaximandra, and she didn’t command the same respect. The wizard’s eldritch research had unearthed mention of lost Elucidae and its once mighty magics in the Collegiate archives, and her tireless campaigning had convinced the priesthood to dispatch a Dawnbringer Crusade thither. Her expertise, her connections, and her raw arcane power had earned her the coveted position of command, blessed and sanctioned by those same priests. The others had followed the wizard without question because they knew that without her, there would be no crusade at all; she had expended every drop of hard-won influence and political sway that she had accrued to realise her ambitions and her destiny. For that, Anaximandra had been willing to drag a thousand souls into the maddening reaches of Hysh. Ephrenna admired that utter conviction, for all that it had got the woman killed.

She waved the surgeon away and peered at Anaximandra’s spidery handwriting, trying to fathom its meaning.

…Elucidian theories on external thought-forms as manifestations of inner will…

…like the prism of Ptholemie’s fable, unclouded truth facilitates self-enlightenment…

…the city simply vanishes from records without mention of war or strife…

A shadow fell over her, and she blinked as the silhouette resolved itself into Caustus. He peered down at her, rheumy-eyed. ‘When we marched through the realmgate, I told you that your hour would soon come.’

She stared at him. ‘This is what you meant? Anaximandra’s death?’

‘It seems so,’ he rasped. ‘The course of this crusade is now yours to shape, and its rewards yours to seize.’

‘The others won’t listen to me for long.’

‘They heed you, for now. Would you flinch from that opportunity?’

Ephrenna massaged her temples. ‘I… I need to know. I need you to tell me what will happen.’

The oracle’s watery eyes flashed with hunger, and he twisted a phial of prophecy into his mask. Sickly vapours washed through its pipes, and he gurgled in rapture.

‘Light,’ he said, after a long moment.

‘I thought Hysh had brought your visions more clarity,’ Ephrenna snapped. ‘I need more than that.’

With a shaking hand, Caustus plugged in another phial. ‘Light, yes. Your light, and the moon’s light, bright against the night.’

Ephrenna felt a hunger of her own stir. She leaned in. ‘And the orruks?’

The prophet fumbled another phial, but this time it fell from his shivering grasp. Ephrenna snatched it up and plugged it in, watching the glistening vapours roil so thick that Caustus choked and coughed. Something dark and glistening dripped from the mask’s seals.

‘Ambush,’ he managed to sputter. ‘Many mirror-clad killers, waiting in ambush, waiting to trap you.’ He groped at the mask with one palsied hand and opened a valve, venting foul mist into the air as he gasped for breath.

‘The city, will I make it there? Will I lead us to victory?’ She hated the raw need in her voice.

‘Maybe,’ Caustus said wetly. ‘I can only show you the path. You are the one who must walk it.’

She turned from the wretched man and shouted for her aide-de-camp.

Malerich came to her side, pausing only to glare at Caustus. ‘Captain?’

‘One hour, then we break camp and march for Elucidae. Spread the word.’

He blinked. ‘Captain? I thought the commander’s plan–’

Ephrenna cut him off with a shake of her head. ‘Anaximandra wasn’t a soldier like you or I, lieutenant. If we sit here and dither, those orruks will bleed us dry, and I don’t know how much longer I can keep the others in line.’ She stabbed a finger down at the aelven map of Elucidae’s environs. ‘The southern gate is nearest. The wetlands on that side open out into lakes before they reach the sea, but once we reach this raised road between the lakes we can follow it right to the gatehouse. We’re so close to completing this damned crusade, Malerich. If we march through the night, we’re there.’

‘They won’t like it,’ Malerich said.

From his tone, he didn’t much like it either. Still, she and Malerich had been comrades-in-arms since Five Nails recruiters had first visited the Reclaimed clans at the fringes of the Rusted Wastes, and she knew he’d trust her to the end.

Besides, it wasn’t like they could turn the crusade back now, not when they were so very near. Fate had chosen Ephrenna to be the one who would make this decision for the rest of them, and she trusted in Caustus’ portents. Glory awaited.

‘They don’t have a choice,’ she said. ‘One hour and the vanguard marches, whether the rest are ready or not.’

Thick fog crawled over the wetlands but Elucidae rose above it, shining upon the horizon like an earthbound reflection of the moon above. It still stood, just as Anaximandra had said – a city sheathed in silver, stark against the gloaming that served as night in this realm.

Another light challenged that of Elucidae. The exhausted Dawn­bringers marched on towards the city amid a blaze of their own illumination. Every lantern, torch and wagon-borne brazier roared with flame. They had made a dawn of their own, a sun to the city’s moon.

At first the Dawners had protested Ephrenna’s command to ignite the torches, fearing it would draw the orruks like wetland moths. She knew, though, that the creatures would find them regardless, and the light now served them as a shield. When packs of orruks came loping out of the gloom to harry the column, they faced a blurry haze of radiance refracting through the rolling mist. It confounded the cruel eyes of orruk snipers, who could no longer pick out prey, and glinted off their metal shields in stark warning when they closed.

As the crusade advanced farther into the night, repulsing a few probing attacks, Caustus’ prediction of an ambush weighed more heavily upon Ephrenna. She watched another gang of orruks retreat into the darkness after a fruitless sally, slithering away into the deep water of the fen pools like eels, and realisation stabbed through her weary mind.

‘The lakes,’ she said to Malerich. ‘The damn lakes flanking the road. That’s where they’ll ambush us. These fen-dwellers could hide hundreds of warriors in the water, right at the road’s edge, and we’d never know until they were upon us.’

‘So much for the “Ten Paradises”,’ Malerich snorted. ‘It’d be a killing ground. We’d have nowhere to manoeuvre without drowning our soldiers.’ He glanced at the distant, moonlit city. ‘What do we do?’

‘The other gate, on the northern side. According to the maps there’s no road left, and hard going through the mire, but no lakes to funnel us either.’

The lieutenant gestured back at the column of torchlit crusaders. ‘The orruks will see us change course. They’ll intercept us.’

Ephrenna chewed at her lip. Part of her wanted to slow down and retreat rather than rushing in, but she told herself it must be some flaw in her conviction. She needed to take the initiative if she was to overcome these orruks, and right now she had an advantage – she’d figured out the ambush. If she didn’t exploit that for fear of the risks, she’d never seize her destiny.

Caustus had shown her the path. Now she had to be bold enough to walk it.

‘We douse the lights. It’ll buy us time before these raiding parties report back to their force at the lakes. We march round on the double and rush into the city before they realise, then hold it from within.’

The lieutenant stared into the roiling fog, weariness etched on his face. ‘The Dawners are already tired. You said yourself, it will be hard going through the mire, especially at that pace. They won’t all be able to keep up.’

Ephrenna felt sick, but forced a composed expression. ‘Then those too weak to march will keep the orruks distracted, and buy us some time.’

Cries still echoed from beyond the walls. Ephrenna rested her hands on the balcony of Elucidae’s tallest spire and surveyed the city sprawling out below her, trying to ignore the lingering sounds of torment and despair.

Her city.

Malerich had been right, of course. The exhausted column of Dawners, stumbling towards Elucidae’s shining promise, had unravelled. Wounded, weak and old pilgrims could not keep pace. Many – most – had made that mad rush through the yawning maw of the gatehouse, and found within the city walls a fractured marvel: mirrors by their hundreds, each street and structure like some glassmaker’s mad dream. Many mirrors were cracked or shattered, others spotted and spoiled with black fingers of silver corrosion, but to Ephrenna’s incredulity just as many were intact. She’d bawled orders at the soldiers and pilgrims pouring into the city, sending most to the southern gate for when the foe realised their ambush was foiled. Others she dispersed through Elucidae’s streets in a torrent of relit lanterns, filling the ancient mirrors with ruddy reflections as they hunted for orruks or any sign of the magic that Anaximandra had been so determined to find.

Those who had fallen behind, she had left to their fate. If they were strong enough to be on this crusade, she tried to convince herself, they would make it out of the fens alive. It wasn’t her fault they had tried to walk a path to glory that they were sorely unsuited for. By foreseeing the ambush and changing course, Ephrenna was sure she had saved the greater crusade. If a few lives had to be spent to buy her victory, so be it.

Through bone-deep exhaustion, she tried to focus on the silvery chiaroscuro of the moonlit city. The streets lay in geometric order, rising to elegant walls beyond which the gleaming wetlands emptied into the embrace of the sea. She tried to tell herself it was beautiful – beautiful because it was hers, claimed by her leadership. Yes, notionally the crusade was in the name of Sigmar, but it was her name that would hold pride of place in Elucidae’s renewed histories.

Her life had been a long struggle, yet only a mere mote against the grand sweep of the Mortal Realms – just a backdrop for the great deeds of gods and heroes. From a child playing in the dust of Chamon, to Reclaimed clanswoman, to Freeguild soldier, to captain and then, if nothing else had tilted the scales, back to that same dust once again – just one among countless thousands like her, unremembered, unmourned, lost to the churning passage of time.

Not now. Finally, they would all see Ephrenna.

She warmed to the line of her thoughts. Caustus had been right. She was destined for greatness.

Something gnawed at her, an irritant that punctured her dreams of grandeur. She couldn’t shake the thought that the beauty she wanted to see here was, itself, just another mask.

Ephrenna squinted down at the city beneath her. Something was wrong near the southern gate, though the movements seemed tiny and gnat-like at this distance. The place should have been aglow with hundreds of Dawner lanterns, but only the moonlight shone there. Her blood ran cold as she finally realised what she was seeing.

Orruks swarmed through the gate.

As the horizon began to lighten at the first approach of the coming morning, Elucidae echoed with wails that spoke of fates far worse than death upon an orruk’s barbed spear.

Ephrenna hurtled from the spire’s spiralling stairs into the command post they had established at the tower’s base. It was as if a mad delirium had swept through the chamber, contorting those within into poses of miserable horror. Officers curled up and wept. A priest, some minor cantor among the lector’s retinue, ranted angrily at someone or something only he could see, shouting denials against unspoken accusations. A noble who Ephrenna had never bothered to speak to bled from hands shredded by broken glass as he struck again and again at a mirror inlaid in the wall.

Ephrenna ran to where Malerich lay slumped, his head jolting with spasmodic jerks. She shook him, but his bulging eyes wouldn’t focus on her.

‘I’m not alone,’ he groaned. ‘I’m not alone. I’m not alone.’

She looked away from the fallen lieutenant in search of answers, and glimpsed the mirrors that hung all around. None of the others in the room were reflected there – just her, dozens of times over.

Fear. The thought welled up, unbidden, from the depths of her mind.

She stood slowly. The mirrored Ephrennas did not match her movement. They drew closer instead, pressing against the glass panes that separated them from her.

Ephrenna forgot Malerich. She forgot all the others.

She fled.

Run as she might, Ephrenna could not outpace her own reflection. Wherever she turned, a hundred broken copies of herself rushed at her from every side, framed in the shattered teeth of each fractured mirror. She threw aside her lantern and its illuminating flame, but now the moonlight denied her respite instead, piercing through windows to throw long shadows around her.

Half-hearted echoes of battle now sounded through Elucidae. Bursting out onto an open colonnade, she could see in the streets below that some Dawners had held enough wit to try and fight the orruks, though most were caught in the mirrors’ enthralment. The feeble resistance was worth little as the fen-dwellers struck and slew without hesitation.

One of the orruks, larger and girded in scraps of salvaged silver, looked up and noticed her. A smile slowly spread across its fanged maw, and she saw her mirrored selves staring back at her in each facet of its glinting armour.

Seized by a frenzied panic, Ephrenna fled on through the labyrinthine structure, throwing open an ancient door to plunge into blessed darkness. For a brief moment, she felt the giddy euphoria of safety; the moon’s vantage offered it no purchase here. Somehow, though, light crept in regardless, revealing high arches and mirrored walls.

She realised dawn was coming. Its first, glimmering vanguard was already in that distant patch of windowed sky, and it mercilessly filled the chamber with Ephrenna’s reflections.

Fear, they said as a chorus with her voice. I am a flawed, wretched creature, terrified that I have achieved nothing and that I will amount to nothing. In my heart, at the core of my soul, I am defined above all else by my fear.

‘No,’ Ephrenna denied, struggling to her feet. ‘That’s not true.’

I saw a world bestrode by gods and legends, and I felt so small. I am still that child, sitting in the dust, hoping that somehow I will tell a story worth remembering. I fear that I will return to that dust and be forgotten like the rest. I fear I have never mattered, and never will.

‘I am not afraid!’ she shouted. ‘I am a captain of the Five Nails! I have waded through blood to be here, and made decisions that others would falter from! I am not afraid.’

I know that is a lie, her reflections said.

They were no longer content to stay within their broken frames. The air around her bled and blistered with refractions of light. ‘Stay back,’ she roared, but they were all around her now, closing in like the jaws of a trap.

A trap.

Horrific understanding dawned upon her.

I wanted so badly to believe that I was destined for something special, but in this age of heroes I am just another fool, and now I’ve been outwitted by orruks.

‘They let us in. They… they knew,’ she stammered. ‘The orruks knew this would happen. This is the magic Anaximandra sought, and it never died.’

They crowded about her, a hundred of her innermost thoughts plucked forth from the recesses of her mind and illuminated with a cruel, merciless light. She screamed in terror and fury, but it was useless against the choir of self-loathing. Then she ran again, and as she ran, they – she – chanted the awful truth.

I cannot stand to see the truth of myself, even now, at the last.

She found Caustus in a grand rotunda marred by cracks and lances of crystalline growth, blessedly without mirrors. He knelt amid discarded glimmerings, head tilted back to stare up at what remained of the ornate vault above. The light of the approaching dawn crept through the colonnades beyond.

Ephrenna rushed to his side, fearing the worst. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked. ‘Did you… The mirrors, the things in them, did you see them?’

‘They are beautiful, are they not?’ He turned his head to face her and she saw, in the ravaged scar tissue of his countenance, an expression she had never witnessed from him before.

Joy.

‘Clarity at last,’ the false prophet said. ‘Truth, unfiltered and raw. No veil of omens between us and this moment. No possibilities or predictions clouding its radiance. We are here at the end, just as we should be.’

Ephrenna studied the shadows of his ruined face, hoping for some scrap of sense to express itself. ‘Caustus, the orruks are in the city. If I don’t do something to rally the crusaders, they’re going to slaughter us all. The damn things don’t seem to care about the mirrors, like they… they…’

‘Like they are completely accepting of their own nature,’ Caustus said. ‘Everything the mirrors reflect back at them, they already know. They do not lie to themselves, only to others.’ A touch of admiration crept into his voice. ‘The mystics of Elucidae wanted to perfect their people, to cleanse them of their flaws, and that meant first facing those flaws.’

‘I don’t have time for this,’ Ephrenna snarled. She seized the man by his shoulders and dragged him to his feet. He was strangely light. ‘I need answers. I need you to tell me what to do.’

Caustus reached up and pressed his fingers to the brass fixtures of his breathing apparatus. ‘I won’t need this any more,’ he said. ‘Freedom, at last.’

With a hiss of escaping fumes, the addict prised the apparatus away and let it fall to the floor. Ephrenna reeled from the acrid vapours as she beheld his face, in full, for the first time in their long acquaintance. Caustus’ smiling mouth was a dry slit of ragged flesh, his corroded teeth stained in iridescent, queasy hues. Livid skin puckered around brass sockets. Worse than the disfigurement and decay, though, was the ecstasy of his expression.

‘How did this happen, Caustus?’ she demanded. ‘I told you to read the portents! Why didn’t you foresee this?’

‘I did,’ he said.

Ephrenna stared at him, aghast. ‘You saw this, and you didn’t say anything? No, you… You were supposed to tell me what you saw. You were supposed to guide me!’

Caustus’ beatific smile never wavered. ‘I’ve crawled through a haze of portent and prophecy for so long. Always giving, always watching, but never living. Never living, Ephrenna!’ He laughed, a wet gurgle that spattered his ragged lips with glimmers of saliva. ‘A hundred stories unfolding that I would never experience myself, beyond the vicarious scraps I could glean from the glimmerings. A thousand futures that mattered, but never one that was mine. Until now, Ephrenna. Until you! I saw the threads that could bring us to this place, so I gave you the truths you needed to keep your feet on the path.’

Fury rose up within her and she knew, with the relentless clarity Elucidae’s sorceries had forced upon her, that it was an impotent rage born of desperation and fear, not righteousness. She hit him anyway.

‘You betrayed me,’ Ephrenna shouted. ‘You said I was destined for greatness! I was… I was supposed to be a hero…’ She trailed off as the rage subsided. ‘I was supposed to matter.’

Caustus looked up from where he had fallen, blood oozing from his face. ‘I didn’t lie, Ephrenna. You have manifested your destiny here at last. Rejoice!’ His voice held no trace of mockery, only a dreadful earnestness. ‘You have brought about the destruction of this crusade.’

‘No,’ she whispered. Strength fled her limbs, and she slumped down onto the marble steps. ‘No. You’re lying.’

‘You mattered. Your actions brought this about, and the handful who survive will not forget your name. Few others in these tumultuous days will be remembered as you will. It’s what you always wanted.’

‘I didn’t want this,’ Ephrenna hissed.

‘Liar,’ said Caustus. His tone was gentle, not condemnatory, but it brought her no solace because she knew he was right. ‘You were willing to pay any price for greatness. And now, you have.’

She tried to meet his gaze again. The day had not yet risen in full, but its wakening glow limned the false prophet’s form. ‘You did this,’ she accused his silhouette. ‘You made this happen, not me.’

Caustus shook his head. ‘I guided you to the path you already wanted to follow. I never told you how to walk it.’

Ephrenna stared at the contrast of his dark form against the brightening light. She wanted to throw his words back in his face, deny them yet again, but she could no longer bring herself to lie in this place of cruel truth.

‘You’ll die too,’ she said, at last.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Death, in all its raw and real intensity. The end of my story. You don’t know how I’ve looked forward to this. It is the perfect culmination of everything I’ve striven for.’

Ephrenna stood and hefted her sword. She waited for some kind­ling of murderousness, some hunger to end Caustus’ life for his betrayal, but it didn’t come. She felt hollowed out, left with only the dregs of her shame and her horror.

‘I won’t give you the satisfaction,’ she said.

He glanced past her. ‘I know. But they will, and they will make it so very painful.’

She turned, and saw the shapes slinking into the rotunda.

The orruks had found them. The new day dawned into full, glorious brilliance, and Ephrenna Brynn knew she had run out of time.