Max
Adozen armored transports and a platoon of infantry crested the northern ridge at full speed and found nothing left to fight. Their tires skidded in the blood-soaked dirt.
Mutants’ corpses littered the ground, among them four Spartans and eight soldiers.
I learned the number before I learned the names.
Men and women who’d trained for years to earn the Spartan designation, who’d survived the gauntlet and the trials that broke ninety percent of candidates.
Elite. Irreplaceable. And now they were cooling on the ground, their blood mixing with the blood of the beasts they’d killed.
Victory always came with a price. Raw grief permeated the air.
I saw it in the set of the warriors’ jaws as they moved through the field, checking bodies.
In the way a scarred sergeant knelt beside a fallen woman, straightened her armor with careful hands, and closed her eyes.
In the silence that replaced the banter. No one spoke unless they had to.
I stood at the edge of it all and felt useless.
The armguard sat warm against my wrist, Coldiron finally quiet, dozing like a predator after a full meal.
I wanted to carry the dead, clean the weapons, haul the wreckage.
But every time I moved toward a task, a Spartan would glance at me and shake their head. Not unkindly. Just a look that said—
Not this. This is ours.
I understood. In the mine, when someone died, the crew handled it ourselves. We carried our own. We mourned our own. And we didn’t let the overseers and the guards touch the bodies, because the dead deserved better than the hands that had killed them.
So I stayed out of the way and tried not to think that these mutants had come for me, costing those warriors their lives. Guilt and worry were a hook in my gut that wouldn’t come out.
Greyhold’s medical team was busy in the field: stretchers for the wounded, body bags for the dead. The earth mage sat beside the fire mage while a medic packed his gash with spell-treated gauze, her hand on his shoulder.
Colonel Karrik, who had arrived with the reinforcements, ordered one mutant corpse preserved for study. Two more were tagged for transport to our base in Denver. The rest—over a hundred carcasses scattered across a quarter mile—were dragged to the southern edge of the field and piled.
Drakken burned them.
He didn’t shift to do it. He walked to the pile in borrowed trousers and held out one hand.
Dragon fire erupted from his palm, a jet of orange flame turning the pile into an inferno.
The stench was immediate: burning fur, charred bone, dark magic combusting under the dragon fire.
A thick column of smoke rose into the sky.
He stood there until every corpse turned to ash, fire reflecting in his gray eyes. When it was done, he turned and walked away without a word.
We buried our dead at dusk.
The Spartans built the pyre on the eastern edge of the camp, facing away from the DarkVeil and turning the fallen toward the dawn. They built it with their hands, no tools, no orders, each piece of timber placed with the careful deliberation of people building something sacred.
The warriors’ bodies, wrapped in their own cloaks, lay at the base. Weapons cleaned and placed across their chests. Insignia pins removed. Those would go back to the fortress, to the memorial wall where every fallen Spartan’s name was carved into black stone.
The camp gathered. Every Spartan who could stand. The soldiers from Greyhold at a respectful distance, heads bowed. Frost at parade rest, blood dried on his temple. Marco pale and still, bandage wrapped around his shoulder.
The heirs stood at the front. Aelindor in his silver coat, buttoned to the throat. Caspian had found a shirt but left it unbuttoned, and for once the wolf prince carried no smile, no easy charm. His green eyes were dark. Drakken stood rigid and regal, grief and rage rolling off him.
No one gave a speech.
The dead didn’t need to be praised. They needed to be mourned, honored, and remembered.
All three heirs stepped forward. A Spartan held out an unadorned torch. Drakken took it and struck the flint himself. He didn’t use his dragon fire.
Flame bloomed. He walked to the pyre and set the torch against the base. Fire climbed the structure in a rush of heat and light.
And then Aelindor began to sing.
We carried iron when the world went dark,
We held the line where the ground gave way.
We did not ask for the fire to start,
We only swore that we’d stay.
His voice was low and rich and so achingly beautiful that my breath stopped. The stark melody hit something behind my ribs like wind through ruins.
The Spartans joined him.
Now lay them down where the embers climb,
Where ash returns what the war has claimed.
Their blades are still. Their watch is done.
We speak their weight, not their name.
For the ones who stood when the ranks fell thin.
One by one, then in waves, the entire assembly started singing, a deep, rolling harmony that filled the camp and pressed against the DarkVeil’s shadow like a wall of sound pushing back the dark.
The fire takes what the earth can’t keep.
The wind will carry them past the veil.
We’ll hold the line until we sleep.
We’ll hold the line until we fail.
We’ll hold the line until there’s no one left to hold.
Aelindor’s voice held the last note alone until it faded into the crackle of the pyre and the hiss of the DarkVeil and the silence between the two.
I stood at the back of the assembly, tears running down my face, and I didn’t wipe them away.
The pyre burned. Sparks lifted into the gray sky, climbing, scattering, winking out one by one.
Caspian threw his head back and howled. Long and ragged and full of a grief that didn’t belong in a human throat.
The Spartans howled with him—rough, defiant, proud, answering their wolf prince. And a low, hoarse howl tore out of my throat.
We’ll hold the line until there’s no one left to hold.