The forest canopy was dark as pitch, with only small parcels of stars winked between the leaves. From all around came the busy sounds of the forest, utterly unconcerned with the death of a ragged man on the muddy riverbank.

  Riot’s thoughts came sluggishly. He’d been here before, hadn’t he? Weeks ago, when the hedron unbolted his mind and trapped him in a walking sleep. Only now he lay still, pinned down into the mud by the unstoppable pressure of the ley line as it bore down on the shattered barrier. An enemy at the gates sensing that the long siege was drawing to an end.

  In the darkness, he saw the faint glow of arcane light. Perhaps it was Moran, come to look down on him? Or Natalia to chastise him. Or perhaps Price, come to blind him.

  Riot laughed, the sound coming out as a strained wheeze. No-one was there! The light was coming from him! Curling tendrils of leypower seeping from his skin and floating across the mud and water like a carpet of mist.

  He wasn’t dead, so why couldn’t he feel leypower searing through the channels in his body? The burning had tormented him for days, but now that he needed it to warm his frozen limbs, it was gone.

  He cycled. One deep breath in, then out, until his ribs cracked and black spots appeared in his vision. He seized the bloated mass of arcane power and squeezed, willing it to distill. Then, when he thought he might pass out, he took a gasping breath and felt some small warmth trickle down his arms and legs.

  The light bleeding from his skin dimmed and winked out, and he cracked a smile in the darkness.

  See him now, the last man, not dead yet.

  He cycled several more times, each time the leypower thickened and returned burning hotter in the channels in his body. It wasn’t true heat, and he still shivered, but it gave him the strength to stagger to his feet.

  There was no sign of Price, but he knew the other man had fallen into the river. Slow and steady, Riot told himself, or he would end up crawling out of the forest, blind and mutilated like that poor Faelen bastard.

  Taking off his wet clothes exposed him to the chill of the night and he shivered again, but death would find him faster if he left them on.

  He would follow the river, then try to find the priory Moran spoke about and hope that the others had made it out. If he found some shelter, perhaps he could risk a fire.

  He only took one step before a shout in the darkness made him freeze. Straining his senses, he saw four dim lamps deeper in the forest, and one had strayed too far away from the others.

  He could run, but the gently bobbing light meant food, water, dry clothes, weapons—all things he needed. So he slipped through the undergrowth, the forest taking on a different sound now that he was the hunter.

  The sharp smell of pipe smoke drifted in the air, and Riot crouched, moving forward noiselessly to find his quarry huddled down in the lee of a fallen trunk. His greasy hair was pushed back from his head around his pointed ears and he had a large clay pipe clamped in his teeth.

  Riot grit his teeth to still the shuddering in his muscles, and when he was close enough to see the glow of the pipe coals, he struck. The rock should have cracked the Faelen on the temple and collapsed him in a heap on the forest floor, but the Faelen turned with a look of horror and the rock glanced off of his skull, ripping a chunk out of his scalp.

  In desperation, Riot threw himself forward and tackled the Faelen to the ground, wrapping his hands around his mouth to stop him from crying out a warning. The Faelen bit down hard on Riot's hand, his teeth puncturing the skin, and Riot recoiled and lashed out with his knee, driving it into his enemies stomach.

  The Faelen thrashed around, clawing at Riots face before a punch to the neck collapsed his throat.

  Riot rolled off to the side panting on the wet forest floor as the pitiful wheezing beside him became softer until all was still.

  He found a short sword with so many notches it could have been used as a saw and the Faelen’s pack which contained half a dried sausage, a heel of stale bread, and a square of hard cheese.

  Riot ate it all greedily, then seized the canteen and took a deep drink, almost choking on the bitter-tasting Faelen wine before he gulped it down, feeling it burn his throat and put a fire in his belly. There was also a tinderbox and a lump of Faelen weed in greasy paper. He pocketed the tinderbox and hesitated before tossing the weed in the undergrowth. Chewing the stuff was good for pain, but it was a slippery slope toward wild eyed cravings.

  The grubby red jacket and woolen trousers were itchy but dry. The boots were too small, so he sliced them open and crammed his feet in, tying them with strips of blanket.

  Voices called out in the darkness, and Riot hurriedly snuffed out the lamp and stuffed his old uniform into the pack, before stealing out into the night once again.

  A cry rose up, signaling that his victim had been located, and Riot pressed on. The voices followed at a steady pace, and the winking lights spread out as they swept the forest. They were herding him, he realized, closing the net on him to trap him against the river. There was no way he could survive another trip in the frozen water. He could fight, but he was exhausted, better to try to outrun them.

  He felt alive, jumping through the forest ahead of his pursuers. The wine burned in his gut, and the leypower was a pressure on his senses that made him keenly aware of each sound of the forest. The shapes of trees, branches, and rocks were picked out in the gray light and helped him to move faster.

  A dense grove of ancient trees squatted in a slight depression, and he leapt down the bank to avoid leaving tracks, hissing in pain as he landed awkwardly in the darkness. The slope was much deeper than he expected, and he tumbled wildly, cracking his head against a tree before coming to a stop.

  The pain in his head blossomed, and the barrier to the leyline trembled.

  No, Riot thought, desperately reaching for the crumbling walls and trying to shore them up. But cracks were appearing all over the great edifice. The ley line seemed to pounce on his dark thoughts, and the pressure thrummed against the barrier.

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  The rotted-out trunk of a fallen tree offered its decaying embrace and Riot curled into it, shivering among the damp wood. He cycled, desperately crushing and releasing the thickened ley power. But each time, it was more difficult to compress, and he tried not to think about what would happen when the leypower lay thick in his system like black tar and he could cycle it no more. He should have asked Natalia, or Fletcher, or Moran, or any of the twenty Leybound. Now, for his pride he’d die here, his bones interred in a rotten tomb.

  There were voices nearby, but they held no fear for him now, not while the barrier that shielded him from the leyline was crumbling. Great cracks appeared in the high walls as the leyline continued its unrelenting assault.

  Riot could barely draw breath, and he floundered like a drowning man, clawing at the filthy, rotten wood and dirt. He tried to rebuild the barrier, but it was like a dam bursting, and he retched as the power surged up his neck into his nose, tendrils of dirty gray light leaking from his skin like mist.

  Was this how he died? After surviving as an immigrant in the slums of Fallow-Neck, then Alric Rook, and twenty years of battles, skirmishes and bastard officers and marching and fighting?

  The wikkan, Ritta Kerne, had engineered this, but they were all to blame. Mercer, Williams, Riley, Roveran, Moran, and Natalia Qinn, Alar-dal and Tarir-dal. Fools born of money, privilege, and power who treated the world like pieces on a board to be moved around and tossed away.

  Riot had an anger that he kept bound and chained. He nurtured it with his resentment, his petty jealousies and the injustices he felt. It was this anger that had killed Alric Rook, and carried him up the ridge to assault the Faelen and now it strained against its chain now, a beast thrashing to be released.

  But the ruined barrier was indifferent to his anger, and as it crumbled away, the leyline surged into his body, just as it had done weeks ago in the chamber underneath the Erudoran embassy.

  Riot's eyes bulged as his bones were driven into the ground and a tortured groan escaped his lips.

  And the chain that held his rage simply snapped.

  His anger hurled itself, roaring, spitting, and thrashing against the leyline. He battered it with his wrath, screaming maddening curses. It was an enemy, like any other, and he bore down on it with his fury to kill, to survive, to be the last man.

  And the leyline retreated. The latent promise of the crushing force remained, but the power was held back, like a tiger wary of the ferocity of a mouse.

  Riot seized on the moment like a drowning man gripping a piece of driftwood. He pictured the granite walls of Helgan’s Rest, and hammered the slabs into place, his spirit trembling as each one thundered down. No gates, not now. He blocked the leyline out and when the last searching piece of gray light disappeared, he fell to his face, covered in sweat and shivering uncontrollably. He vomited, the wine acidic in his mouth and nose.

  The barrier had been replaced, but now leypower surged through him, leaking from his skin in misty tendrils. He was drunk with it and there was no longer any pain. In fact, he couldn’t feel anything at all.

  Raised voices came closer, and he heard snapping branches as bodies thundered through the forest. His stolen sword was nearby, and he grasped the hilt, using it to help him stand and stumble out into a clearing as four Faelen surrounded him.

  They wore the ragged uniforms of rank and file. Dirty, common Faelen, like Riot and the men of the regiments. One of them spoke, but Riot heard only thunder in his ears and felt the trickle of blood coming out of them.

  Grey light fell from his skin in waves, and with each breath, misty tendrils of leypower flooded from his lips. The Faelen were cautious, keeping their distance, and one of them made a sign in the air before him as if to ward off evil.

  Death, cold, and leylines were things to fear, but three and a half ragged-looking long ears with notched swords were not. Riot laughed, the sound so unfamiliar that the muscles he used to do it felt like they were tearing apart.

  Two of them shared a quick glance, and their muscles tensed, but even at the edge of his strength, Riot was faster, driven by the anger that coursed through him.

  The one who struck first usually strikes last. Advice given to him years ago that he had forged into the first law of his own survival. Riot attacked the closest of them with a savagery that he saw reflected in their wide-eyed look of terror.

  The Faelen was battered backwards by Riot's overhand strikes until his back hit a tree trunk and Riot continued to hammer away, screaming senseless words and swinging the sword like a club until the Faelen’s guard collapsed and the blade clove through neck, shoulder and snapped ribs before bursting his heart.

  There was a twang, and Riot stumbled forward, feeling like he had been punched in the shoulder, reaching around to feel a thick crossbow bolt sticking out of his back.

  He spun, snarling at the three remaining Faelen and leapt. The first swung wildly, and Riot stepped close and ducked under the blade, thrusting his own sword right through him, twisting the blade so it wouldn’t stick and stepping over him as he crumpled to the floor.

  The second held a knife in one hand and a sword in the other and crouched warily before lunging. He was fast, but Riot’s parry knocked the sword from his hand. He swiped desperately with the knife and Riot seized his wrist, dropped his own sword and seized the Faelen by his scrawny neck, almost lifting him off the floor. The Faelen flailed his fist desperately, but Riot squeezed, hearing the neck bones crack and the soft wheeze as his enemy tried to draw breath.

  A small part of him registered surprise at his own strength, but a darker voice whispered the truth. The leypower gave him strength, but like a candle aflame at both ends, he would burn out, leaving only a pile of ashes on the forest floor.

  He heard the creak of a crossbow reloading and hauled the body of the choking Faelen around like a scrawny shield. The bolt thunked into flesh, and Riot tossed the corpse aside.

  The remaining Faelen had a bloodied bandage on his head, and he backed off, whimpering as he tried to reload his crossbow with shaking hands. Warm blood dripped down from Riot's shoulder, and he felt light-headed, but he surged forward and tackled the Faelen to the floor. Riot seized the crossbow and battered him in the face, the stock cracking through flesh and bone, until his face caved in.

  Riot crawled off of the dead and rested on his knees, breathing heavily. The new barrier was as dark and silent as the walls around the kingdom of death, but he was bloated with leypower. He tried to cycle, but it was so thick it was almost solid, and no matter how much he tried to crush it down, it would not distill any further.

  There was movement in the forest before him, and he reached for his blade, but it was too heavy. He peered into the gloom under the trees. There was nothing there; he was delirious.

  Gray mist leached from his skin and flowed over the damp leaves on the floor like a death shroud. The forest seemed to hold his breath as each of his own rang out impossibly loud in his ears.

  A small rabbit scurried out of the undergrowth. Perhaps there was something there, but he was too tired to run. He drew a knife from the waist of the dead Faelen next to him. A whisper of fabric, a carefully controlled breath, or was that his own breath he was hearing so loudly in his ears? He turned his head, trying to find his enemy, each movement grating his neck bones together.

  A section of the darkness was textured differently, his gaze sliding off even as he tried to look at it. The bush warped, and a figure stepped out. Riot held up his hand, the hedron scar facing out, and he reached for the greasy barrier Riley had placed there. His last act of defiance to a broken world would be to burn it down.

  Natalia Quinn stepped out of the darkness and placed her hands around his. “Not yet, Nathaniel,” she said.

  There was another noise in the shadows of the forest, and Loic appeared. The big northman's eyes were wide as he stared at Riot and then took in the clearing around him, making the sign to ward off evil as he took in the bodies that lay scattered like broken dolls.

  “How?” Riot knew he said the words, but they sounded like they were spoken by a corpse; his mouth and tongue wouldn’t obey to say any more.

  “Nathaniel, come with us; you need help,” Quinn said.

  “He needs a damn priest,” Loic whispered.

  The Kickstarter for The Last Man kicked off with a bang – we hit our target in just eight hours and are already on track for our first stretch goal!

  19 days. If you know anyone who loves gritty, military fantasy, please share the link with them!

  Peter