Reedmund knelt, cleaning the blood off of his blade while his men did the dirty work emptying the village of what little resources it held. Reedmund always gave himself the hardest part of erasing a village from existence: the inhabitants. They lay around him in the sand now. Bodies with their hands tied and their necks opened beneath the bags on their heads.

  It took great precision to properly execute an Adalaantian, especially a wicked one. A simple bully like Reedmund's older brothers could never accomplish it. You needed to pass swiftly through the neck, not decapitating the target but still severing the jugular. You couldn't allow the weapon to get caught; the less time it spent in contact with unholy blood, the better. That was why he cleaned it after every stroke, and why he cleaned it now while his soldiers finished the requisitioning.

  It was absolutely critical that the victim bleed as much as possible before their soul departed. Blood carried wickedness around the body, and the more they lost, the easier it would be on their judgement day. Reedmund would never accomplish the pale, drained husks the Inquisitor Clerics could, but he did his best for these condemned people.

  The Fade churned overhead. Reedmund frowned. He knew the suns protected the Ochre Company when they carried out their work this close the Fade, but he'd never seen the thing so active before. Gouts of hot purple mist splashed on the village, narrowly missing his men and deforming the corpses and structures they struck. Reedmund's blade was clean. He rose, stepping over bodies large and small on his way to the stockpile forming in the road.

  This village was supposed to be erased months ago. Reedmund had replaced the Ochre Purge Officer responsible for a reason. He was driven. He was passionate. He was efficient. His rapid ascent through the ranks of the Ochre Company surprised his spoiled older brothers, but not his neerda, his care-father. He would make that man proud till the day he too departed for the sun.

  "Sun speed, men," he called. "We depart in five minutes. Leave everything else beh-"

  Reedmund heard a sharp hissing sound overhead. Every helmeted head turned upward.

  A twister of purple mist had formed. It poured itself downward like a finger of a god on a chessboard. Reedmund's men backed away as it touched down at the end of the village. He raised a hand to hold position; shouting would have been useless in the hiss and roar. Tornadoes were not a rarity in Adalaant, but this one was hardly making his uniform's skirt blow in the wind. It was so weak, yet it did not dissipate.

  The twister did not move after touching down. Reedmund peered at it. To his surprise, it now seemed to have two tips touching the ground beside each other like legs. No, those were legs. The twister was cutting off from the Fade now, and from the bottom up, it left a purple-stained human woman standing in front of Reedmund and his men. He put a hand on his sword, and stepped forward.

  The woman hung at an angle to the left. She had been partially bisected. Her top half nearly toppled off, but tendrils of mist shot out of her body and latched to the ground like construction rigging, pulling her back together. Mist coalesced around the injury, and after a horrid fleshy noise, the tendrils retracted back into her. Black fluid dotted the sand at her feet.

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  Reedmund unfroze when she took a step forward. The creature raised her head, revealing a face which mist was still reconstituting. The lower jaw was just teeth, one of the eyes was missing, and the nose was half-formed. The rest of the purple, husk-like skin formed in short order, but Reedmund knew what this creature was.

  "Sir?" one of his men said nervously. "What do we do, sir?"

  This wasn't right. Reedmund had been on time. He knew he had. High command had told him this village was still salvageable. They weren't too late to get here before the Fade expanded.

  Reedmund drew his sword and pointed it at the Fadewraith. With his other hand, he made the warding sign of the Suns, passing his fingers over a symbolic orb.

  "Depart at once, abomination," he commanded. "The suns will burn you for your trespass if you – "

  There was a heavy clang of metal from a massive axe that was now in the Fadewraith's hand. She spoke with the same voice as the twister.

  "You have allowed a lunomancer into your lands. I will have her, and the suns will not protect you until I do."

  Reedmund lowered his sword, ever so slightly. "Where is she?"

  "Too close, and yet too far, for you to survive."

  Before Reedmund or his men could react, more tendrils of mist shot out of the wraith's torso and impaled multiple soldiers. With a yank, they were thrown to the ground, coughing and spluttering. She marched forward. The tendrils squeezed, tore limbs off, and crushed necks. Several of Reedmund's soldiers ran, but they were the tendrils' next targets. The mist ignored the ones who froze in place like Reedmund.

  Reedmund had been cornered before. His brothers had done it many different ways. Reedmund knew there was no running away from this creature. There was only one way forward, and that was forward.

  The creature's gaze was locked on him. He held his longsword in both hands, and strode forward to meet her. One of the tendrils closest to him dropped a screaming man's leg and swooped for him. An unthinking, disciplined slice later, and it dissipated around Reedmund like a discolored cloud.

  The Fadewraith tilted her head. He thought she was about to say something, but she rushed forward instead. She moved fast despite her huge weapon. It arced up through the air toward his side. There was no blocking such an axe. He ducked below it, then thrust forward with everything he had.

  The sword buried itself in the Fadewraith's torso, protruding out the other side. Reedmund knew she could take more than that, so he pulled upward as hard as he could, toward her head. The blade stopped at her ribcage. She halted, but didn't scream. Her legs didn't even buckle. Her expression was that of a bird that's just been bitten by an ant. There was an unpleasant sizzling sound mixing with a noise like hot mud bubbling.

  The axe came down again on Reedmund's shoulder, cleaving him all the way to the spine at an angle and forcing him to his hands and knees. The sword clattered to the ground in front of him. The lower half of it, anyway. In his dimming vision, he saw the top half laying behind the Fadewraith, purple mist curling where it had been melted in two.

  The axe dissipated inside of Reedmund, and purple gas laced the blood coming out of his mouth. A foot pressed his head the rest of the way to his pool of blood. It didn't stop pressing until his head was indistinguishable from the red sand.