George sat right up in bed the moment his door slammed open. He blinked tired eyes until Balangor's haggard face swam into view.

  “Ready yourself,” the blue-robed wizard snarled. “Our helots are hard-pressed in the East. We must go to fix their mistakes.”

  “Finally!” The dead rat danced a little jig, its dangling intestines wiggling grotesquely. “Now we can escape!”

  “Shut up!” George thought at it, feeling anger rise up. Now that the rat had suggested escape, it HAD to be a bad idea. “Why do you always ruin things for me?”

  The rat stared at him with unmoving eyes. At least it had stopped dancing now, so that was good. “Georgie, I AM you—”

  “Shut. Up.” George thought. But aloud, he simply said, “I understand. I’ll dress and be out shortly.”

  It was a long climb up the tower stairs, but it seemed to grow easier every time they made the trip. Part of it had to be that godawful boring oatmeal slop. It was the only thing he was allowed to eat, and George was sure he’d lost at least ten pounds as a result.

  He wasn’t sure WHY they were holding off on giving him the good food, and he hadn’t had the chance to ask.

  But the point was moot. Though George’s stomach felt like it was gnawing at his spine, he had to see this through.

  After all, this was a valuable chance to gain intel on both the wizards and whoever their mysterious enemies might be.

  That said, it was a chance that George almost blew.

  When they reached the bare top of the tower, Balangor waved a hand to something that looked like a Huckleberry Finn style raft with a couple of sleeping bags attached, and said, “get in.”

  “No thanks, I just woke up.”

  “It is not for sleep, though you can if you wish. It will make the flight go faster.” Balangor said as he stepped onto the raft-like platform and studied several symbols carved into the structure.

  “Flight?” George said, looking from the platform to the wizard. “This thing flies? Why didn’t we take it to that Terminus place?”

  “I told you already, flying too close to the palace would be death,” Balangor said, settling onto the platform and arranging his legs into grooves that ended in footholds. “Now get in the pouch or stay sitting but we have to go NOW.”

  This was a vital chance to do aerial reconnaissance! And though he had never done that before, he knew that he would be a master at memorizing geography from aerial views. “I think I’ll decline the bag,” he decided, climbing aboard eagerly.

  Four minutes later, he realized his mistake and tried to clamber into the sleeping bag mid-flight and almost fell to his death.

  “Stay down!” was what George thought Balangor was saying, but it was difficult to hear over the wind. The cold, cold wind that felt like it was ripping at his exposed skin. It’d be a miracle if he got out of this without frostbite.

  His plan to try and memorize aerial landmarks was thoroughly kaput. They were above the clouds, and all he could see was green light. No, George had… he had obviously screwed up… well, mistakes had been made. By someone. Who had failed to warn George about this possibility.

  George glared at the dead rat. “You fink. Once I figure out a way to punish you for this, you’re gonna get it.”

  The dead rat just sat with its hind legs and guts dangling over the side and shook its head. An obvious admission of guilt!

  It was a long and cold flight. George kept himself warm by remembering every slight and insult and wrong that everyone had ever given him, and imagined the many and myriad ways he’d get his revenge.

  But finally, Balangor waved a hand to him and pointed downward.

  George got the message and hung on to the platform as tight as he could.

  The clouds broke, the green light growing more and more muted as they descended. A stretch of swamp yawned below, green and brown… and black, with a wooden palisade in what was obviously a burned-out circle bigger than a football stadium.

  There were people down there, both on the palisade and scurrying between tents and huts. Several of them looked to be rapidly shifting supplies out of the way and collapsing tents, probably so Balangor could land.

  “They’re not good at this,” he told the dead rat, forgetting his prior ire.

  “Oh?” The rat asked.

  “They should have had a proper landing strip. And the camp’s laid out poorly. The perimeter’s a joke. Sure, all they’ve got to worry about is bows and arrows and such, but the palisade’s not even high enough for those. The Romans would decimate any legion that did this crappy a job. The Nazi SS would do even worse.”

  The Nazi SS were George’s measuring stick for a lot of cool things. It wasn’t HIS fault that the rest of the world couldn’t see that they had been top-notch specimens of humanity.

  Balangor circled until the way was clear, then brought the platform down into an easy landing. Only then did George unhook his clenched hands from their holds and stand up all the way. And whoops, uh-oh, that was a bad idea, everything ached now. He bit his lip and tried not to fall over, as numbness was replaced by pain.

  George snuck a glance at the wizard, to see if he was reeling as well. But if Balangor was feeling the same, he gave no sign of it. The magical bastard just pointed and barked out orders, and the soldiers obeyed. Orders that George could understand, thanks to the translator charm they’d given him. But the orders were all pretty basic stuff, not much useful as intel or secrets. “You, move my skelran under a tent. You, get us food. You, find us quarters to rest and bathe in. You, tell your commander to be ready to brief us after we have bathed and eaten. Do this now!”

  George had been hoping for some good intel, but it was pretty obvious that anything useful would be in the briefing later. So instead of trying to eavesdrop, he stared at the soldiers.

  And holy shit, three of the ones he could see were female!

  Maybe… maybe they were nurses? Or cooks? But no, they wore the same black-and-white uniform as the rest of the troops. Their armor was the same as the men, if a little bigger in the chest area. (Okay, a lot bigger in the case of one of them. He checked several times when she wasn’t looking, solely to make sure that his report would be accurate, of course.)

  And all were armed just as the men were. No, his current allies were obviously forcing women to be soldiers.

  “No wonder they’re desperate,” George told the rat, forgetting to think and saying it aloud instead. “They’re relying on GIRLS. Of course they’re on the back foot.”

  He got some confused looks for that. Balangor threw his hands up. “You, apprentice. Silence! Follow me to our lodgings and speak then if you have something to say.”

  George DID have something to say! He was the chosen one, who was this sonuvabitch to call him out in public like this?

  “George,” the dead rat hissed. “This is like Sturmond and the coffee spill. We’ll get him good later, oh yes we will.”

  It took a monumental effort of will to shut up, but the rat was right. Balangor was building up a hell of a tab. George would just add this blatant disrespect to the balance already due. And eventually, he’d find the right moment to collect what he was owed. With his fists!

  “And stop smiling, you look like an idiot!” Balangor snapped.

  “Yessir,” George muttered, adding a groin stomp to the tab.

  That said, the next hour was pretty good. They got a tent with a few cushions thrown in, two large bowls of that oatmeal stuff, and a wooden tub with relatively clean water. Balangor looked confused when George refused to bathe with him, but didn’t press the issue.

  And just after George had bathed and finished putting his robe back on, the tent flap opened and a bald soldier entered and knelt. This guy was another of those ash gray skinned, red-eyed mooks. They tended to be big, and George took some pleasure in seeing him kneel.

  “Great ones,” the soldier rumbled. “You have bathed and eaten and I am here to brief you as ordered.”

  “Then do so,” Balangor said, folding his arms.

  “We are holding, but barely. The canyons of Q’arsh are filled with unnatural fog. The caves beyond shift and change, and the few times we have fought through, either the grach repulse us or the scouts we send in never return. We are down to less than three-hundred helots. We beg your direction.”

  “What of the Warden?” Balangor asked. “Has she been sighted again since the last report?”

  “No,” the Commander swallowed, hard. “But we hear her. When the scouts disappear, when the fog creeps forward and helots disappear, we hear her moving past us. We hear the screams and the tearing, and we find what is left of—”

  “Enough,” Balangor said, rubbing his finger and thumb into his beard. “Would you call the Warden… the giant’s shadow that kills unseen?”

  George froze. He’d heard that before. His mind flashed back to Terminus, to that room that smelled like old blood, and sounded like a chorus of mad locusts whispering secret after secret… the room where they thing they called the Unicorn sat unmoving…

  George closed his eyes, squeezed them tight.

  But the commander didn’t know what was wrong.

  “Yes, great one,” he bowed from his sitting position. “She is not the only thing we face, but she is the greatest of—”

  “Silence,” Balangor commanded. He consulted a bundle of scrolls, nodded, and stared at George. “The chosen one shall lead twenty helots below to face the giant’s shadow that kills unseen. He shall win at great cost.”

  George blinked. “Are you casting a spell? That’s a pretty long one to do.”

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  But a low squeak from the Commander’s direction drew their gazes. The bald man’s red eyes held wonder, as he stretched out a hand. “Great one! Please, we are so far from the Unicorn’s light! My faith has been withering, as the dead pile up. Please let me look upon his words with my own—”

  Snap.

  Squelch.

  The commander convulsed, coughing blood.

  “Weakling.” Balangor scowled.

  George watched as the Commander tore open his armor, watched as the blood poured out from the three ivory spears that had burst out of the floor and pierced him from backside to ribcage.

  The tent flaps peeled open at the Commander’s death gurgle, and pale-faced helots stared at the sight, then slowly sheathed their swords and knelt.

  “Good,” Balangor said. “Find the second and tell him he is first now. Take my apprentice with you, let him pick twenty helots for a mission below. Obey his orders.”

  And with that, he put the bundle of scrolls into a nearby brazier. They flared up and started blackening immediately.

  “Hey!” George said, standing up. “What if we need those later?”

  “You will not.”

  “You don’t know that.” George said, and for a second, just for a SECOND, he thought might have gone too far. For a second he thought he was next in line for an elephant trunk enema, set to join the impaled, still-kneeling corpse bleeding all over the cushions.

  But the moment passed, as Balangor rolled his eyes. “Do not assume you know how this works. And that is all I will say here and now.”

  “Then where and when do I get to hear it?” George balled his hands into fists. With the thumbs inside, of course, to add just that extra oomph to a blow. He’d yet to test this technique, but he was sure it would work well.

  “Kill the Warden and return alive, and we will speak,” Balangor said. “Unless you think you are incapable.”

  “Fine,” George said, puffing his chest out. “You heard the great one,” he said to the kneeling helots who were staring at his fists with what had to be awe so great that it looked like utter confusion. “Lead the way.”

  George was still a little tired from the trip, but he was far too wound up to sleep, And, once the new Commander had lined up the men, (Specifically the men, George had ordered there to be no weak girl soldiers here!) for his perusal, he wasted no time in picking the finest twenty soldiers he could find for his first ever command position.

  Then he spent half an hour teaching them the basics: the American salute, the Roman salute, and the words to both the Star Spangled Banner and the Horst Wessel Song. And once he was sure they were ready for their victory parade, he led them into the fog, singing at the top of their lungs.

  *****

  After they were well, well out of earshot the newly-promoted Commander turned to his newly-promoted Second. “Why did he pick only males? He had at least five Agaths he could have taken. A single Agath could have slaughtered half his squad in seconds!”

  “I’m more confused as to why he only chose Morkers and Viseri,” his second said, shaking her head. “Perhaps because they were the palest among us? Maybe he thinks their skin will hide them better in the fog?”

  That seemed a very silly notion, so they dismissed it immediately.

  That man was a Great One, and touched by the Unicorn’s infallible prophecy.

  Of COURSE he knew what he was doing. No matter how idiotic it looked to the unenlightened.

  *****

  She heard them coming.

  That was a surprise in of itself.

  Oh, not that she heard them, of course. She had been made with quite sensitive ears, so sensitive that her creator had to put in multiple nictating membranes to shield them when things got too loud.

  And beyond that, she could hear things that others could not. She could hear the things that her creator had called runes, hear them as they rattled around the nerves and blood and marrow of their hapless hosts. Dust crystallizing inside living dust, shouting its name over and over again, trying to be born into the world anew.

  She was the opposite of a midwife in this process. And she had been made to do her task very, very well. Her creator had come to regret that, at the end.

  At least, at the time, she had thought that the end. But the little ones, the innocents, had come begging and she had awakened from her long slumber to find invaders on her world.

  Worse, they were trying for the Tower! Not even the old tyrants had been that foolish!

  So she set to work again, making strange alliances and killing the runebearers.

  Trying to, anyway. After the first death, they settled for keeping her busy with their servitors.

  But now they were trying THIS? Marching directly into her breath, singing, with one of her favorite prey leading them in?

  No, she thought to herself, trusting wrongly to her millenia and a half’s experience as an apex predator. No, this was some kind of trap. She would wait and study them before she acted.

  Besides, all that noise they were making would bring the tarquals down on them shortly enough. Maybe that would render this whole business moot.

  *****

  Ten minutes, five dead, and several wounded helots later the last of the three lizard-things was slain. George sat on the ground holding his right hand and trying not to cry from the pain. When one of the monsters had lunged for him, he’d punched it in the snout as hard as he could. It has saved his life, but his thumb, cradled inside the fist, had snapped like dry kindling. Fear and shame built up inside him, fear that he’d let his troops down.

  But thinking of kindling gave him an idea.

  He knew how to kill fear!

  Turning his gaze upon the shaking remnants of his command, he swallowed his pain and bellowed, “Do you fear them?”

  They looked at him, blinking and confused. A few nodded.

  George’s eyes fell on the dead rat.

  Yes.

  This was the way.

  “Then eat them!”

  Fear turned to general confusion. A few stammered, and one tried to explain why this was a very, very bad idea.

  George marched straight up to that one. “When I was a child a monster scared me!”

  “Heeeeeeey,” the dead rat whined.

  But George ignored it, kept the momentum going. “So I cooked that monster! And I ate it! The fear left me! And it will leave you too. Now prepare our feast, all of you!”

  And only after they were good and busy, did George sneak off into the mist and have a good cry, as he tried to splint and bandage his broken thumb.

  *****

  The Creature the little ones called the Warden drew closer, half-surprised, half-suspicious.

  Surely they weren’t going to eat TARQUALS? Were they truly THAT stupid?

  Mind you, it was stupid for them to eat the flesh of any living creature here, and most of the plants would be bad for them to eat, too. They simply weren’t from this world, and most living things were toxic to them at worst, or inert at best. If they hadn’t found a way to process sweethusk, the war would have probably been over by now.

  But all this was moot because for whatever reason, they were about to eat tarquals.

  This the warden HAD to see. So she crept closer, and because the runebearer was so loud and wouldn’t shut up, she made her second mistake, and muffled her hearing even more.

  *****

  The meat was delicious. George took a few bites, and left the bulk of it to his men. Oddly enough, they weren’t hungry, so George polished off a bit more, then shrugged and tore into some ribs.

  Horrified, they watched him eat it.

  And then the first one collapsed.

  *****

  There are quite a lot of very good reasons not to eat creatures you happen to kill while visiting alien worlds. (Even if they are trying to eat you.)

  The helots all knew this, even if they didn’t know the exact reason why it was bad, or much about biology in general besides the very practical and observable applications of their own and their foes. They just knew that doing this sort of thing usually meant a slow and painful death. Usually.

  The problem was that they also knew that defying direct orders from any wizard or superior was always a fast and painful death. Always.

  So they ate just enough to be polite, and waited and hoped. And hells, at the rate the wizard was eating, he’d probably die first.

  *****

  The Warden blinked her seven remaining eyes in slow amusement. It knew exactly what was going on. And though it was not a creature to gain joy from suffering, this was too much karmic justice to NOT be amused, at least on the principle of the thing.

  The problem didn’t lie with the tarqual meat. The problem lay with the parasites within the meat.

  The parasites which usually got into the tarqual’s system when the tarqual consumed worms that crawled up out of crevasses that led to the hottest parts of the world.

  And these fools had thought to kill the parasites with FIRE?

  Those parasites would be all the livelier now that they’d been exposed to heat. Burrowing into the nearest nerves they could find, looking for the brain.

  It was a pretty bad way to go. Normally the Warden might be moved to mercy, and kill them quickly to end their suffering. But again, they had brought this entirely upon themselves. And they WERE her enemies.

  She’d learned that lesson early on; never interrupt your opponent when they’re making a mistake.

  *****

  “Georgie!” The rat shrieked. “Georgie! Something’s wrong! They’re sick! They’re dying! And oh, oh, Georgie we ate it too! We ate it TOO!”

  George stared, eyes bulging in fear, at the three fallen soldiers convulsing and twitching and screaming. A few more were staggering, some were lying down and shaking.

  A few were just sitting and staring at him. Their eyes were hollow and accusing mirrors, and George scrambled, up, dropping the rack of ribs he’d been gnawing.

  He watched as they quivered, even the sitting ones, and more and more slumped over, their screams filling the air.

  And to George’s horror, he felt a weird tingling, sharp little pains moving slowly upward from his belly.

  It wasn’t bad yet.

  But looking across at the dying, he had no illusions about how the next few minutes were going to go.

  “Do something, Georgie!” the rat squealed. “I don’t wanna die!”

  George sat down again. He would die if he did nothing.

  Only magic could save him.

  But the only magic rune he had to work with was corruption. How can I use that? George wondered.

  Then it came to him.

  George cupped his now burning gut with his good hand, screwed his eyes shut, and concentrated.

  *****

  Oh, the runebound was trying to pull magic? It was a bit late for that, the Warden thought. But just in case he had something to save his life, the Warden decided to get ready to ruin his day. And so she made her third mistake, and moved through the mist until she was behind him, with a pair of scythelike arms raised high…

  *****

  The first spell nearly killed George. Well, faster, anyway.

  “Corrupt my diseases to death,” George whispered.

  And immediately the pain turned from a rising burning sensation to a spreading acid wash of torment that had him writhing on the ground as every potentially hostile micro-organism in his body fell to goo and rot, and ruptured.

  Say this for George, though.

  Say that he was pretty good at managing pain.

  Thrashing as his very nerves were filled with a toxic goop, he still managed to visualize one last spell.

  “Cleanse me!” he commanded, and bubbling purple goop fountained out of every orifice.

  *****

  There were limits, even for the Warden. She backed away into the fog, shuddering and wiping her claws clean on some nearby moss patches.

  Behind her, the runebearer was finally silent, probably dead. The ones he had brought were mostly silent now, so she opened her ears again…

  …and realized just how she had fucked up.

  Her ears, those wonderful and delicate ears that let her sense the magic of the runes, heard it now. The music was strongest on her claws, whispering and chiming and dying.

  But she heard it WITHIN her as well. And there it was finding purchase and growing.

  The runebearer had infected himself deliberately, changed the disease, and like a fool she had let him lure her in to infect her.

  The Warden fled, then.

  There was a chance, a way to perhaps survive this, but every second counted.

  *****

  Back in the canyon, George was unaware of this. Unaware of everything, really. He had finally, mercifully gone unconscious.

  And as the twitching, dying remnants of his first and only command expired around him, George breathed a bit easier as their chakra leaked into his own.