Chapter 5
Theira rode on top of one of the golems as they marched the army to the Aurelian Empire.
They trod a tunnel through what Theira had come to think of as "her" forest. It would recover, and she would help, but part of her still ached at the sight.
Another part of her, though, burned.
Yes, her golem army—their golem army—would leave a mark.
Let them try to stop her now.
She was ready.
She'd been ready.
All she'd needed was Varius. Now he was with her, mind, body, and spirit.
And no one would take him from her.
Unless he himself decided to leave, but that was a different battle.
Now, they talked strategy for today.
Theira could animate the golems to march on her own, but Varius was still inside his.
That way he was already armored, if they met resistance sooner than anticipated.
And, frankly, given the noise a traveling group of giant clay soldiers made, they could hear each other more easily through her sorcerous array.
She missed the chance to touch him, but they both needed to focus.
With the vision he could access through the golems, Varius went grimly quiet as they approached the border of the Aurelian Empire.
The smoke was visible first. The fires, the shouting—closer now.
But since they were coming from Korossia, even amidst local unrest—perhaps especially amidst it—soldiers were still watching their direction.
The booming sound of the army's footsteps alerted the soldiers before they were in sight.
Sentries scurried, scouts ran ahead. Ran back even faster, sending up signal flares in case they didn't make it.
Show time.
A legion of Aurelian soldiers formed up on the border to meet them, a shield wall at their front even as smoke billowed behind.
"Theira," Varius said, "would you mind flying from here?"
Theira stood up on the golem's shoulder, playing with the light just a touch to make sure the soldiers saw her in her signature amethyst battle garb.
The Sorceress Transcendent, leading a sorcerous army straight at them.
The front held steady, because they knew it was their doom otherwise.
But at the back of the legion, the lines faltered.
At that, Theira launched into the sky.
And Varius took over controlling the golems.
Their gait shifted.
One step, two, three, and then with great booming crashes, the giants were running at a full sprint toward the Aurelian line.
When the golems reached the human legion, they blew through the front lines, and the rest collapsed behind in a stampede to get out of the way.
They had the advantage, but from there Varius' job grew more complicated. The more the soldiers spread, the more tasks he had to manage separately for the golems.
But mostly, he let them run.
He'd told her he'd focus on breaking the legion's resistance first, and only now did Theira understand that wasn't going to look like the kind of strategy she was used to from him. Breaking their resistance to the golems wasn't the same as breaking them.
Theira's role was different.
She surveyed the ground and chose her spot deliberately, letting her opponents come to her.
Because as she had expected, taking advantage of the chaos in the Aurelian Empire, a contingent of sorceresses had arrived.
Ten first-tier adepts. Tychon wasn't leaving this opportunity to chance.
That was... a more difficult problem than she'd anticipated. Theira over-prepared for every situation, but this would strain even her available resources.
A woman with brown hair and serious eyes greeted her. "First-Tier Adept Theira."
"First-Tier Adept Lysithea," Theira greeted her in return.
Unfortunate. Lysithea had always done the exact amount required of her and no further, its own kind of resistance. Theira respected her immensely, but Lysithea did not play games.
And she demonstrated it, bluntly stating, "Korossia thanks you for creating this opportunity. We are instructed to claim this ground. It is not our remit to take you in."
So Tychon was still mad, but he wouldn't let that cause him to miss this chance. And Lysithea would let her escape. That was a shocking endorsement, frankly.
But it only worked if Theira stood aside and let her own people invade the Aurelian Empire, as they'd been trying to do for decades.
Theira hadn't done all this just for the Sorcerer Ascendant to have more power.
"With regret I must decline," Theira said.
Lysithea's eyes narrowed, no doubt confused that Theira was deliberately refusing this extremely generous chance to escape Tychon's wrath. "It was not a request."
"And this is not an opportunity," Theira said, flinging a potion from her belt that detonated in the air and spread fire in a rush. Behind a wall of flames she said, "Not for Korossia."
The sorceresses snapped into action, and so did Theira.
She'd prefer not to kill Lysithea, as well as several others she'd thought also chafed under Tychon's rule, unlike Kryseia and her team. That made everything more complicated—especially if they noticed.
Maybe her role was like Varius' after all.
Fortunately, Theira could very easily make it look as though she was occupied just with trying to keep them from killing her.
The trick would be to not, in fact, let them exhaust her resources and kill her.
Varius was busy tearing a path of destruction through his own city. She'd told him she'd handle it, and he'd trusted her without question.
She couldn't back down now.
She would hold the line on her own.
Theira didn't hesitate, and reached for her own power.
Varius broke the lines of his own soldiers as he marched toward the city.
In his training with Theira, he hadn't needed to worry about damage. But he wasn't fighting sorcerers now; he was facing his own people.
Varius was glad he'd put some effort into learning how finely he could control the golems, because today, the challenge would be whether he could be careful enough.
Whether he could use his prodigious skill at destruction to free them, rather than just lead them into more death.
He didn't deserve forgiveness, but maybe he could avoid compounding his sins. Maybe he could even, finally, give them something that mattered.
Varius had won plenty of battles, but he had never been in a position to win a war.
The lines at the border had shattered, not even a token effort to reform, without the golems doing any more than approaching at speed. Whoever Sobanus had pressed into taking his place was either incompetent or a coward.
Considering he hadn't seen anyone wearing a legatus' helmet, he was guessing the latter.
That, or his soldiers had already taken matters into their own hands.
They'd abandoned all attempt at unified formation, but Varius was pleased to see a significant percentage of soldiers staying nearby, following his path. He kept the golems' pace even, allowing the soldiers to predict his movements and avoid them.
Varius wasn't here to sacrifice their bodies or trample their spirits. He had to find another way.
A conundrum, when the tool at his disposal was a giant sorcerous army.
But the continued presence of his soldiers gave him hope. They might not have wanted to fight the empire's wars, but they did want to protect their people. Some of them were even smart enough to notice that as long as they didn't stand in front of his golems, he ignored them.
His first step was clearly to circumvent dealing avoidable damage, but that wouldn't fix anything. He had all this power, but all he could do with it was break things.
Varius wielded tools of destruction, and maybe he couldn't build with them. But he could make space for others to, creating the structures and monuments that mattered in their lives.
Like Theira had.
And that meant daring to dream as boldly as she had, too.
So: since he had no interest in breaking his own people, what could he break? What needed breaking?
Power. Always, it came down to power.
And there were several ways he might break the power that mattered.
Maybe. If his years of service bought him anything, and if he played this just right.
So Varius cleared the streets of combatants.
But also of statues of patricians, by the simple expedient of swinging the golems' mighty arms, every crash more satisfying than the last, a rhythm building.
Advance.
Destroy.
Save.
That stone could be put to better purpose. The patricians didn't deserve veneration or even deference.
Varius directed the golems around buildings as much as possible, but some of the sturdier ones allowed the golems to pile on top of each other to scale them for better visibility through the smoke.
One golem he also pushed off a roof to shatter a particularly large effigy of Caius Sobanus.
Inexorably, the golems dispersed any remaining pockets of soldiers doing Sobanus' bidding and fighting against the citizens they had taken up arms to protect.
Some soldiers tried launching arrows, to see if they could even faze the golems, to no effect.
One brave contingent piled on a golem in an attempt to overwhelm it with numbers, which effectively blocked that one's vision but not all of them. Varius used another golem to, as gently as he could with giant clay fists, brush them off.
Still the soldiers tried to deflect this invasion on their city, launching fire.
Not stupid, and not giving up.
Until Varius used a golem to catch the fire and instead of hurling it back at them or just knocking it away into a building, he carefully set it in a fountain full of water, putting the flaming ballistic out safely.
And then his golem picked up a bucket of water and passed it to another, a line forming toward the center of a fire that only indestructible clay soldiers could get close enough to put out.
Watching that, finally, seemed to turn the tide.