CHAPTER SIXTEEN
An Unexpected Arrival.
Maddie poured on the speed.
The forest blurred around her in shades of deep green and shadow, the massive bamboo-like stalks of the ancient trees towering overhead in columned rows. She moved with an urgency that left no room for anything else, her entire focus narrowed to the path ahead. Her feet hammered against the uneven ground, finding purchase on terrain that demanded absolute precision. A thick branch appeared in her path, and she vaulted it without breaking stride, her body rotating cleanly over the obstacle. Another came at her from the side, lower and closer, and she didn’t slow. Instead, she phased through it, feeling the strange sensation of her body passing through solid matter as the wood passed through her like she was nothing at all. Her armor caught the dappled light filtering through the canopy and threw it back in bronze glints as she pushed harder, faster, every movement economical and purposeful.
The river emerged from the trees like a divide in the world itself, a torrent of dark water that sprawled across the landscape with force and volume. The boulders were large here, worn smooth by centuries of current, and she used them as stepping stones, her feet barely touching each surface before she was already moving to the next. The water sprayed around her as she pushed through the shallows, her feet splashing hard against the rocks as she drove toward the far bank. Then she was climbing, scrambling up the slick earth of the raised bank, pulling herself free of the current’s reach.
Her breath came hard and fast now, her lungs burning with exertion. She could taste the metallic tang of it, the sharp edge of adrenaline that came with moving at full sprint through difficult terrain. The forest on this side of the river was different, younger, more aggressive in its growth. Vines and thick undergrowth made the passage treacherous, but she wove through it all.
The creek appeared before her, and she could hear it before she saw it—a low, rushing sound that had grown deeper and more insistent than it had been three hundred years ago. She followed its path, tracking the waterway as it twisted toward the keep. The creek grew wider as she ran alongside it, the water becoming more forceful, the sound of it building with each stride she took.
The wall appeared through the trees like a sudden shift in the world itself. One moment there was nothing but young growth and tangle, and the next the forest simply stopped. Massive stone masonry bricks rose up before her, smooth and fitted so tightly that you could barely see the seams between them. The bronze cladding that covered the outer face caught the afternoon light in fragments of gold and amber, a polished mirror-shine that stood in stark contrast to the weathered green and shadow of the forest around it.
Above the wall, the pyramid of the keep rose into the sky, its top cut flat and broad, crowned with battlements. Maddie couldn’t help but marvel at how quickly ARi had restored it. The structure stood as a reminder of what she was truly capable of.
She didn’t bother with the gate.
Maddie built speed for the final approach and launched herself at the wall, her body phasing through the stone and bronze without slowing. The sensation lasted only a moment, and then she was through, bursting into the courtyard on a dead run, her feet hammering against the ancient cobblestones in a rhythm that echoed off the walls.
The courtyard was broader than she remembered, the training ground beyond it well maintained and clear. The cobblestones lay smooth and even, the walls surrounding the open space in good repair.
She ran toward the main keep, toward the hearth and the voices she could hear drifting out from the open doors. Her lungs burned, her muscles screamed, but none of that mattered. What mattered was the message, and the excitement that came with it.
She burst through the doorway into the warmth of the keep, and every eye turned toward her.
“Architect, Ward!” Maddie said, her voice sharp and breathless, “they’re coming.”
ARi’s eyes went wide.
For a moment, she just stared at Maddie, processing the words. Then, without saying anything at all, she turned and walked toward the door. She moved outside with a purposeful steadiness, as she made her way across the courtyard to the outer wall and began to climb the stairs.
“Wait, what?” Tanya said, pushing up from the bench where she’d been sitting.
“Who’s coming?”
We were already moving, following ARi up the stairs. Tim was faster, taking the steps two at a time. Kyle grabbed Yumi’s hand and pulled her along as Hannah struggled to dismiss her powered armor, pieces of it fell to the ground around her and disappeared as she raced to catch up.
When we emerged onto the wall’s crest, the view opened up before us.
The canopy of the forest stretched out in all directions, a sea of deep green and shadow. We stood above most of it, though not by much. The wall gave us maybe twenty feet of height advantage over the treeline, enough that our eyes could follow the longer sightlines where the ancient trees thinned. And through those gaps, we could see them coming.
Three massive shapes were moving through the sky above the forest, low enough that the air displacement from their passage moved the trees below them in their wake. They didn’t have the bloated envelopes of traditional airships, These were something different entirely. Great platforms of metal and wood that seemed to simply defy the fundamental laws that should have kept them grounded. The hulls were dark, bronze-toned with streaks of what looked like patina or decorative work along their sides. They were shaped like elongated rectangles, flat-bottomed and ponderous, with railings and structures that rose from their decks like the superstructure of ships.
And they were covered with kobolds.
The formations were perfect, ranks and files of armored bodies standing at attention on the decks of each vessel. Among them, standing in the fore ranks of that central vessel, I could see a figure I recognized even from this distance: dark-clad kobolds stood on either side of her, bearing banners of black and gold.
Tony.
The three ships crested the wall of the keep with a grinding, creaking sound that reverberated through the stone beneath our feet. The air beneath them seemed to compress and expand in waves, a pressure that pushed outward and down from their sheer mass. The wind they displaced was warm.
They slowed as they passed directly overhead, and I found myself holding my breath. The decks of each ship were a landscape unto themselves. I could see weapons mounted at intervals, supply containers lashed to the railings, and the organized chaos of a military transport in flight. The legions stood in perfect formation, their armor catching the afternoon light and throwing it back in fragments of gold and bronze.
Then they were past us, moving beyond the walls toward the fields that stretched out on the far side of the keep. The sound of their passage continued for long moments even after they’d crossed above our position. We watched as they began their descent, the leading edge of each ship tilting slightly upward as they bled off speed and altitude.
They landed without drama, their bellies settling against the earth with a finality that sent a visible shudder through the ground. Dust rose up in great plumes around each vessel, obscuring the base of the ships for a moment. But it cleared quickly, and when it did, we could see the gangways beginning to lower.
Kobolds began to disembark in organized columns, their movements precise and practiced. The legionaries came first from the flanking ships. Great masses of soldiers, each one armored and weaponed, moving in perfect synchronization. They deployed into the fields in neat formations, spreading out to establish a perimeter. Behind them came more specialized units. I could see what looked like heavy infantry, warriors with larger shields and longer spears. There were archers with their weapons held at ready. And among the various units, commanding figures. Officers with plumes and insignia, leading their troops into position like they were conducting an orchestra.
The central ship’s ramps were the last to descend, and the kobolds that emerged from that vessel moved differently. They walked with a weight that had nothing to do with their armor. These were the veterans, the ones who had waited three hundred years in the city of Malune while we were gone. Tony appeared at the head of one column, and even from this distance, I could see the command that radiated from her posture.
I turned to look at ARi, and found her standing at the wall’s edge with her hands gripping the ancient stone, her eyes locked on the figure of Tony and the formations spreading out across the field beyond the keep. She was grinning ear to ear.
“Ari,” I said, moving to stand beside her. “What are we looking at?”
She didn’t take her eyes off the legions. “Ten thousand soldiers from Malune,” she said. “Three full legions. The cohorts, and the troops the city spared to reinforce the keep.” She paused, and I watched her jaw tighten. “This was more than what I asked for.”
I watched her face as she stared out at the formations spreading across the field. She had known they were coming. When she projected herself to the temple in Malune, she’d asked Tony to gather the cohorts and asked if the city could spare any soldiers to help man the keep. But this was not what she expected. The three airships alone represented what they’d been able to accomplish with the repository ARi had left them, the accumulated knowledge of Earth and everything recovered from the ancient libraries. Engineering at a scale that should have taken decades to master, condensed into three centuries of application and iteration.
And then there were the soldiers, the sheer number of them, the precision of their formations, the way they moved like a single organism under command. Three full legions. This was what Malune deemed necessary to send.
Below us, the last of the legionaries moved into position, and the fields beyond the keep transformed into a sea of soldiers. The banners that hung from each ship caught the wind and began to flutter, displaying colors of gold and black, red and purple. I could make out symbols representing Malune, intricate and formal, but woven among them were other designs I recognized. The six-legged drakes. The same symbols that had marked the cohort’s banners and shields. The soldiers stood at attention, thousands upon thousands of them, waiting.
Then a single voice cut through the silence. A random kobold somewhere in that sea of legions, screaming out across the field.
“Aye, yay Ae yay I yay!”
The response was immediate and overwhelming. Ten thousand soldiers answered in unison, their voices crashing together like a wave. They stomped their feet and drove their spears into the ground with a synchronized force that shook everything around us. The stone beneath our feet trembled. The ancient walls of the keep seemed to shudder with the impact.
“Arou! Arou!”
The ground convulsed. Small creatures erupted from the grass in panic, scattering across the savannah in every direction. Dust rose up in great clouds, swallowing the formations for a moment before settling back down. The chant continued, building in intensity, each iteration sending another tremor through the earth.
They all stopped at once. There was a long quiet moment before a lone kobold screamed, AREEE!
And 10,000 Kobold warriors knelt. All at once.
I felt ARi’s hand find mine on the stone wall, gripping it tight.
