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Rothe jumped free of his broken magitek armor, slipping up the wooded hill to put some distance between him and the damn thing before it exploded. He had a great view of the castellum from here. A clear, beautiful view of the bridge taken by a resistance that should have been in tatters, the imperial flag glamored over with the white griffin of Ala Mhigo. The bridge that bitch Fordola had lost, then fled with her tail between her legs. Pissing the whole way home, if he had to guess.
He spat. The one path back swarmed with stinking Ala Mhigans, and him on the wrong side. The Skull patch itched against his breast, and he tore it from his uniform and threw it in the dirt where it belonged. He should have tried harder to get out of that regiment.
Some vital cog in the magitek gave out with a resounding clunk, and the sad thing belched a stream of grease and black smoke. Rothe gave it a reproachful look. Too wrecked to get him out of here, just enough working parts left to broadcast his location to every savage scout with a bone to pick. He hightailed it into the forest.
He wasn’t twenty yalms into the trees before the armor went off like a bomb, shrapnel whistling high into the air, flaming bits of it streaking through the trees. A sleek panel embedded itself into the pine next to him. He should have been glad, but it would have saved him a lot of trouble if the debris had better aim.
Resistance scouts would be shot through the area like weevils in bad wheat, and he could only run so far. He came across a tangle of thorn bushes and figured he wouldn't find a better chance before his time dwindled away. Pinning his hopes on the setting sun–it wasn't entirely impossible that the long shadows and coming dark would hide him, just hideously unlikely–he crawled into the mess of frith and briars, picking off the brightest parts of his armor and leaving them covered with dead leaves.
Brambles didn't make for the coziest accommodations. No room to twitch without touching thorns and everywhere strange little plants poked through the leaf litter, but Rothe was used to imperial barracks and could have slept there if he needed to. He clung to wakefulness instead, thinking he might prefer to see his death coming. That way, he could curse them before he died.
The first group came from downhill, a small squad dispatched to check the wreckage of the armor. They’d find no scavenge from it; the thing was well and truly wrecked. He’d send it off with a prayer, saying how well it had served him and how far it had run, but it had done neither. Maintenance teams seldom visited the Skulls, usually when a mechanic lost a bet.
The second patrol passed some distance away. They tramped through the underbrush in high spirits, voices light with victory and attention far from their task. His hand closed over the hilt of his knife, but they were far enough to be no danger to him, and him no danger to them.
Night fell before the third came. Rothe debated the merits of moving further away, but couldn’t fight the certainty that an entire horde of resistance fighters would materialize as soon as he was out from cover. Hesitation pinned him, and he bemoaned his decision–or lack thereof–when the next patrol cut directly in front of his bramble patch. A group of three, quiet and focused, the lead carrying an antiquated little lantern.
Lamplight grazed him, and he shut his eyes. There’d be something right about it, to die at the hands of an Ala Mhigan. He’d been one once, after all.
But the twigs and leaves obscured him. The light swept on, the clumping footsteps of the soldiers fading away as they descended on the castellum. They’d hole up there like rats, and it’d be hell getting them out again.
He waited until the sun fell under the lip of Baelsar’s Wall, then quite a while longer for good measure. Surviving as the lowliest sort of conscript dug deep wells of patience, and the deepest hours of night were his best chance. He could creep his way down to the river, a rat himself, and float down the trackless water until he found somewhere to go to ground. He spent the time glaring at the wall and cursing Baelsar, an idealist and an idiot who'd thought a unit for Ala Mhigan conscripts would give them room to prove themselves. Well, now they had. They'd proven themselves failures to the exact estimations of native-born Garleans, neatly consolidated into one regiment to demonstrate their inferiority in unison.
Rothe couldn’t stand to look at that wall a moment longer. He squirmed out from under his bush and started down the hill, crouching in one shadow before leaping to the next. Pine needles crunched under his feet, the loudest racket he’d heard in all his life. Twice, branches snapped around him, probably beastkin shaken from their sleep. Each time he bit his tongue to keep from screaming.
He lost track of time before the banks of the Velodyna appeared through the trees. It’d been long enough for the moon, nearly full, to sail free of the wall and drag its flickering reflection along the river below. A soaring sense of relief surprised him, and he realized he hadn’t expected to make it this far, kept the image of it out of his mind. He took a moment to stare and catch his breath.
It was good he did. Someone else worked their way down to the water, a fat-bladed scimitar on their hip–another poor sod from the Skulls, the same as he. They’d left their turban and mask on, though the orange twist of the wrappings was too bright for stealth and the mask reflected every spark of light. If Roche was following the same plan as a fool, perhaps he ought to reconsider.
The fool’s plan doomed them, though they did not know it yet. A man walked out from the treeline, unhurried, with hair the same color as the moon on the water and a quicksilver tail snaking out behind him. He fit an arrow to a bow that looked too thick for one man to draw. Roche’s one-time comrade did not turn–perhaps the rush of the water was too loud. He thought of crying out. He did not.
From here, the impact of the arrow made no sound. It slipped through the Skull's head and into the water without a splash. Its victim followed a moment later, inelegantly, their turban unwinding and tugged downstream by the current. The archer–hunter, his mind supplied–stooped and turned the Skull over, checking them against something he held in his hand. Roche leaned in, deathly curious about what the man sought.
After a lifetime of poor choices, that one topped the list. With jarring speed, the hunter snapped upright and locked eyes with him over the bank. Roche couldn't catch the man's expression, his face shadowed by a mask, but something about the way that head tilted with deliberate smoothness dragged a memory from the murky bottom of his mind. A quiet moment from his last week in Garlemald, a time he did not care to remember often–the training too brutal, the downtime too dull. He'd been assigned graveyard shifts, awaiting the muster call. Not much to do but work, and wait, and talk. So people talked.
Every legion brought back tales from their deployment, the good ones retold until every regiment had their own version, by then exaggerated and outsized beyond belief. The recent campaign in Eorzea spawned all kinds of nonsense: locals that could summon eikons on a whim, bleeding the land of aether. Spoken races allied with beasts, living among them and learning their magics. Exotic experiments producing a panther with poison breath, roaming the battlefield.
Roche, who tried to spend as little time as possible being a gullible child, didn't put stock in any of it. Most were the type of rumors that only scared native Garleans, unfamiliar with magic and lacking the wherewithal to learn that it wasn't as wild and strange as they imagined. Three-eyes would hear the most outlandish tale from a friend of a friend's cousin and repeat it breathlessly over the very next meal. Only one story had ever left an impression on Roche, one told only to him.
The source had been a woman, a conjurer, one of the few who came back from Castrum Meridianum. She’d been unconscious for two days after her arrival, fighting the effects of an unidentifiable toxin, but on his last round through the infirmary, he found her awake and staring into the dark. Something in her expression pulled at a loose string in his chest, and he drew up a chair to sit at her bedside.
He asked for her name; she didn’t give it. She leaned close to peer at the skull half-hidden under his coat. “You’ll be stationed at the Wall then, boy?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Her gaze slid back to the corner. He glanced at it, but it was bare. “Trained him up or found him, I don’t know. But the Eorzeans have someone new. Saw him myself, I did.”
“I… I don’t follow you, ma’am.”
“Wish I hadn’t. Eloise was next to me, and she went down, one right through the eye. Impossible shot, from where we were hiding. That’s what we were doing, you know. Hiding. Our gate had fallen, and we thought we’d take cover in the bay, behind the machines.”
A few errant tears slid down her cheeks. Rothe put out a hand for her to take, but she didn’t seem to see it. “The head technologist went out to talk to him, to discuss terms. We weren’t about to die for that place. I saw him walk up. He was alone, just a bow and a mask over his eyes.” A violent shake went through her, like someone seized her head and jerked it. “But that man, that thing, it… It can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with. Eloise fell on me, covered me, and I stayed there and listened. It didn’t stop until everyone else was dead.”
She closed her eyes and laid her head down again. “May the Emperor protect you, boy, if you ever see it,” she said. She didn’t look at him, not once.
All of this came back, in flashes more emotion than memory. The bow, the mask–he thought it would be over then, and there would be a hole through his heart in the space of a blink. On the edge of the river, the hunter rolled his shoulders, lowered his weight, and Rothe had no time for fear or confusion or anything at all before the man threw himself into the air. Black against the moon, the long silhouette of a barbed arrow slid free from its quiver.
Rothe bolted back into the forest, weaving around trees to put cover between them. He only saw the ground in front of him, only heard the beat of his own footsteps and the rasp of his own breath. The ground dipped and rose again, and he grabbed at the thin trunks of pines to pull himself along. He itched to check over his shoulder and knew it would be the end of him if he did.
The glow of moonlight dispersed into scattered beams. He didn’t know where he was, and worse, he didn't know where he hoped to go. No fortress awaited him, no brothers-in-arms to fight when he could not. He ran for the same reason a rabbit did, understanding what it meant to run even as the fox's jaws closed around his neck.
Yet the teeth never touched him. Not even when his legs failed and he had to stop, lungs wheezing and hot as an engine. He stumbled over a mass of roots to lean against a monster of a tree. Moss furred it so completely, it could have been the severed limb of some giant beast, left to rot in the gloom. Evil-looking mushrooms sprouted from damp cracks in the bark, and Rothe fell to his knees beside one of those hollows, careful not to disturb it.
He needn't have bothered. A thunk in the wood next to him. An arrow as long as his arm, dead center through the largest mushroom. Spores sprayed out as if pressurized, and Rothe, gasping for air, was helpless not to breathe.
He thought his lungs had burned before. That had been nothing, for now the fire was all he could think of, all any sense could perceive. It burned him down and within and back up again. His mouth opened to cry out. He could not.
The hunter appeared at the top of his vision. A kerchief tied over his nose and mouth, he leaned over to poke at the mushrooms with an arrow, nodding to himself.
“You really had nowhere to go, then.” A deep voice, with an unfamiliar accent. It rumbled at the edges of Rothe’s hearing. “I thought you might flee to your fellows.” The man glanced around, then shrugged. “Then you started running in circles. So it’s just you, I think.”
Something dangled from his fingertips. With a flick of his hand, the scrap spun into the air. Rothe’s vision blurred and he lost sight of it, its form fuzzing into nothing before it landed in his lap. He looked down-his head was drooping anyway–and found an embroidered skull looking back at him, the thrice-damned patch of Fordola’s regiment.
“At least you got to see what they did, at the end. Weren't you curious, when you sat beside them?” The hunter held out one of the mushrooms, speared on the point of an arrow, moving it so close that it filled the whole of Rothe's vision. Red, the sick purple-red of burst blood vessels under skin, pricked with ugly yellow divots. The stem leaked something thin and white. Then the shape of it disappeared, leaving only those pale dots on red. Then red, alone. Then black.