Douglas smoked a quarter of the cigarette in one drag as he sat on a crate next to Erik. The two pilots of Raptor sat and watched as Kassandora stalked the airfield. She had passed them, they had saluted, she returned the salute, and then continued.

  And that was perfect, because now they were watching the woman tear into some of the officers. The pilots themselves had been told off, called braindead, called utterly cretinous and told to pull a million. They had all collapsed after some five dozen push-ups, forget a million. Yet the exertion had wiped their sin, whatever it was, Douglas was too far away to hear anyway.

  It must have been some logistical issue though, as now the officers and command crew of third squad were getting told off. “What do you think of Draft-Keeper?” Erik asked, Kassandora had just finished explaining the newest plan: ‘Operation Draft-Keeper’. All of KAF was on high alert, and every plane was being transferred to the westernmost airfields in the country. Alcohol had been prohibited, sleep was mandated and not a single member of the air-force was allowed so much as even thinking of leaving the base. Douglas took another large drag of the cigarette. Frankly, how was a man not supposed to smoke in this line of work? He ran his fingers across his camera and finished the cigarette as Kassandora huffed angrily and dismissed the soldiers before her.

  “How much for a picture?” He asked.

  “What?” Erik answered in stunned shock.

  “How much for a picture of Kassandora?”

  “A proper one, not from here?” Erik asked.

  “A proper one, I’ll ask her.”

  “Two hundred.” Erik said immediately.

  “Three.” That was a good chunk of cash, especially here where there was nothing to spend it on.

  “Done.”

  “WHY!” Neneria once again sighed as Fer shouted from ahead. “ARE!” And she took another pause. “YOU!” And another. “SO!” Neneria looked at her sister with the flattest glare she could conjure up, it wasn’t even difficult to accomplish, it was Death’s usual neutral expression. “SLOW?!” Fer finished the shout with such exasperation that Neneria was honestly stunned as to how the woman could be so loud and yet so tired at the same time.

  “Because I am.” Neneria said. She was riding on ghastly Pegaz, her horse that had been pulled into the Legion several millennia ago. It had simply died, killed by the malaise of age supported by the wounds of disease, so the creature looked just as it did when it was still alive. The horses wings were folded down as if they were a giant battledress for the mount, to allow for Neneria to sit so that both of her legs swung off the same side of the animal. It silently trotted on the ground, its hooves not even dislodging the dark ground and grey mud as it wandered onwards.

  “What a stupid answer.” Fer said as she took another dozen steps. The women simply moved too quickly, if she kept at Neneria’s steady pace, then she could keep on walking. But no, Fer had to run, Fer had to be difficult. The Goddess of Beasthood stopped, sniffed the air, and looked up. A gust of wind blowing in from the seaside cast her great mane of golden locks to the side. Fer stood straight as she inspected the landscape, still sniffing.

  Neneria looked around, from above, the world had here been only an ugly mass of grey and brown and black dirt, as if the giants who had painted these landscapes simply created a baseline of colours by spilling their starting materials out onto the paper, and then abandoned it mid-project. But down here, there was actually a surprising amount of colour, every few steps, a new gleam of some coloured plastic or painted metal would catch Neneria’s eye. Shards of shattered glass reflected the setting sun like twinkling snowflakes and metal that had been washed to perfection by the sheer force of the wave lay scattered about the ground. “Stupid question, stupid answer.” Neneria finally thought of something to reply to Fer with. Her younger, albeit taller, sister turned to Neneria and raised an unimpressed eyebrow.

  “Really?” Fer asked.

  “What really?”

  “That’s the best you can come up with?” Neneria sighed and shook her head from side to side. She was the Goddess of Death, why did she need to humiliate herself with these stupid word-games? They were for children! And she wasn’t some child!

  “I have other ways of making people stay quiet.” Neneria said coldly.

  “Even on me?” Fer cooed like a kitten, those great vulpine eyes of hers got large as the colour almost devoured the whites.

  “I just ignore you.” Neneria said and Fer chuckled to herself.

  “We both know that doesn’t happen.” Fer said as she sniffed and looked up at the air again. “Look!” She pointed and Neneria turned her head, ready to call upon her spectral soldier the moment she saw any sense of danger. There was none though. Fer had not spotted anything important, she was merely pointing up at a giant white eagle, it’s wings black. “I’ve always wanted to see one of those.”

  “You’ve not seen them?” Neneria asked. When Fer had said that she spent a whole millennia in the eastern tundra, Neneria had expected… Well, she had expected exaggeration. Even she herself got bored of a spot after a while, and Death could be a patient Goddess indeed.

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  “Never.” Fer said. “Not once. Look at it though.” Neneria turned her eyes away from her sister and towards the bird once again. That was impressive? It was just a bird at the end of the day, but maybe Fer saw some beauty in it that Neneria could not.

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, with no warning, with no charge-up, without so much as even a gust of wind, Anassa stepped into Neneria’s field of vision. Or appeared rather. “I’ve scouted out the immediate area.” Anassa said as a dozen more Anassa’s appeared nearby, they looked to the first Anassa, then blinked out of existence. And the Goddess of Sorcery did not even give them a look of acknowledgement. “There were some looters in the city ruins. Or raiders. Or treasure hunters.” Anassa’s voice got progressively more annoyed. “Or survivors. Or rescuers.” She listed off the options one by one.

  “You don’t know what they were.” Fer corrected Anassa from up ahead.

  “I know what they are now though.”

  “What?”

  “Dead.” Neneria closed her eyes and tried to feel the new souls. At this distance, she should be able to pick them out individually even if there were tens of thousands, instead, all she felt was just a mass communion of the lost. The ones closest to her noticed her and Pegaz, but none of them gave any reaction, they simply drifted in the wind like thin, weightless strings being whisked off in the wind, or sat on the ground in pools of dark-grey-green depression.

  “On the topic of dead.” Fer said. “How many can you feel Nene?” She cooed from ahead, jumping in the mud from side to side. Anassa disappeared from Fer’s side and next to Neneria’s to avoid getting hit by the drops of mud.

  “I…” Neneria said. She looked around and refocused her eyes. Long ago, it was difficult to see past the green mists of mass souls, now though, she had simply figured out how to see through them. “There’s a lot.” Too many to count, above fifty-thousand, she could feel them all individually, but they crowded into her senses. Her ears buzzed with the low drone of ghosts, her eyes saw the mixture that obscured the ground and horizon in the distance.

  “Too many to count?” Fer asked, the Goddess of Beasthood started cresting a hill. Neneria and Anassa followed on.

  “Too many.” Neneria confirmed. She didn’t say anything else, there was no need to. Frankly, Neneria didn’t even want to talk, the overwhelming feeling of death, like a thousand tiny different landslides trying to wash her away, was coming in from all sides. Pegaz slowly trotted up the hill and Fer reached the top and whistled at what she saw.

  Neneria’s breath caught as she crested the hill. Fer and Anassa both turned to see the blood drain from the cheeks of the Goddess of Death. Skin usually pale became a perfectly cleansed ivory. Fer’s eyes widened, her ears jumped, her tail swished from side to side as Anassa turned to look at the landscape. Both turned to the landscape, but looked to Neneria, both looked at the ruined city once again. “Am I supposed to see something?” Anassa asked. Neneria blinked as she tried to look through ghosts on the ground.

  Neneria had seen battlefields before. She had wandered through the middle of mass graves, through church yards that housed hundreds, if not thousands of dead. She had been through cities that Olephia had annihilated. She had heard tears of family who could no longer acknowledge their regrets. Phantoms had begged her to be driven away, so that they wouldn’t have to see those they loved anymore. Rage-fuelled ghosts, intent on harm and revenge, were a common sight. If there was one Divine on this world that should not be surprised by suffering and sadness, by the crying tears of those who had been lost, it should be Neneria.

  Yet all Neneria saw was a mass of dark-green. A formless drop of ethereal energies and ghosts that was the size of an entire city. It moved and breathed, as if it was a set of fortress-sized set of lungs and beating heart which had been dislodged from a body.

  And without any ground blocking them, Neneria felt the power. The sheer scale of it, it rushed over her like a scalding desert wind. Neneria wanted it to fling her hair back, to move her dress. She wanted Pegaz to suddenly go wild and start thrashing. She wanted…

  She wanted acknowledgement.

  That it wasn’t just her seeing this, she wanted someone else to witness cries of two million souls with her. Not to carry the load, not to help her, not to share the weight, but rather so that at least one other person would know exactly the sort of feeling Neneria felt when she had to clean up the damage of another Divine.

  Fer and Anassa, of course, did not see it. “I see the foundations.” Fer said, pointing to a patch of ground. She turned, saw Neneria’s expression, and looked back to ground. “But I assume we’re not shocked about that, are we?”

  Of course neither of them could see it the masses ahead of them. They weren’t attuned to death in the same way Neneria was. “Can you really not?” Neneria asked.

  “I feel…” Fer said and lifted her arm up. The tiny golden hairs on her skin were stood up. “Something.” She said. “But what, I can’t tell you.”

  “I feel cold.” Anassa said. “But that’s it, as if this area doesn’t want me to go further.”

  “We’re not.” Neneria took charge of the group. Travel, combat, planning, cooking even, all of those were things that others excelled in. Yet this demesne of death was hers and hers alone. Anassa turned to look at Neneria, opened her mouth and Fer yawned loudly to interrupt her sister.

  “We’re not going further.” Fer said. “If Nene says no, then no.”

  “Since when did you get so nice?” Anassa asked.

  “I trust Nene.” Fer said, she cast her arm straight ahead of her, once again bringing attention to the hairs that were stood on ends. “And I trust myself.” Anassa looked from Fer’s arm to the ruined city which had been washed away. Anassa could not see it, she just stared at that malignant ethereal tumour of bodies which had settled in its place.

  “I’m not going to argue with the two of you.” Anassa said and took a step back. “I assume you can see them.”

  “It’s more than I expected.” Neneria whispered quietly. She took a heavy sigh and Pegaz started to drift downwards, his hooves and then legs disappearing into the mud. Neneria’s boots touched the soil and she straightened as the ethereal animal underneath her disappeared, recalled into her heart. “But…” Neneria looked to her sisters. “Nothing actually.” She didn’t even know what she was going to say, it was just another job at the end of the day. A big one, she would feel good when it was done.

  “Are we going closer?”

  “We’re staying here.” Neneria said. “This is a good vantage point.” She looked further along the coast, her eyes reached the next town over, there was more there too. The entire beach was filled with souls, what had they been doing? Did they simply go outside to watch the wave because there had been no hope of survival?

  Neneria’s dark heart opened up and green lightning cracked from her eyes and in between her fingers. That’s how she knew it would hurt, small amounts were easy to contain, when it started to spill out, it would be difficult. “You may want to step away.” Neneria gave her sisters one last warning.

  And two million souls from all around the countryside began their slow march to Neneria, enthralled by Death’s call. A funeral procession to a conscription office. A draft for eternity.