Desolation reigned in Acetyn’s upper levels. The conflict that should have been justly be decided by the few and the mighty? It never came. The erstwhile Pilgrim and the few Knights Celebrant that may have remained in his conquered realm never came forth. Instead, freak vied against freak, vat-born against vat-born, fighting corridor to corridor, chamber to chamber in the endless sprawl.

  In the approach to the Pate Gardens themselves, Jhedothar surveyed the devastation from atop a shelf of ruined bone plate, his centuarian lower body poised over the ragged rubble, shattered shards of architecture, and the broken vestiges of countless battles. He had witnessed warfare before, but never on this scale. Both sides had turned the City into a ruin of scorched marrow and twisted metal, each demolishing entire stretches of Acetyn rather than chance ambush or flanking manoeuvre in the labyrinth of living halls.

  And in truth, Jhedothar had always harboured doubts. Once, not so long ago, he had tried to claim lordship over the Lady Bhaeryn—Bee—seeking to rule with her as consort, to bind their power and shape destiny together. But that life ended when the Eidolon interceded, overpowering him. Then Bee’s own witchcraft forced him to bend the knee as one of her Knight Consorts rather than her lord. He had been under the thumb of Bee’s lineage before, once serving as a Knight Tyrant to the Vat-Mother of Acetyn, sister-clone to Bee’s own murdered Vat-Mother of Sestchek. It was a bitter echo of the servitude he knew all too well—yet still he had followed.

  The acrid tang of burned flesh and seared bone lingered in the air. The once-immutable architecture—arched corridors, towering spines, and the flickering glow of living walls—had been fractured by the harsh logic of war, entire spans reduced to rubble in efforts to deny the enemy advantage. Nothing remained untouched.

  In the distance, Jhedothar’s tired warriors stood ready, arrayed along a makeshift perimeter behind black and gold banners. Their armour chipped and scorched, their limbs bound with emergency aug-splints to hold shattered flesh in place, and their pain dulled by squirming siblings that tasted of their meat. They had fought for what felt like uncounted cycles—long enough that the ordinary rhythms of life meant nothing anymore. Their enemy’s relentlessness had forced them to new extremes, new depths of resourcefulness or cruelty, depending on one’s perspective.

  He, who had once imagined himself a ruler above Bee, now found his centaurian frame towering only enough to shield those warriors who looked to him for guidance. The pride he had once worn so openly was tempered now by an unease that never truly left him. He could taste the fatigue of his people and see the trembling lines in their bodies. Each believed in the Lady Bhaeryn and her mission to stand against the tyranny that had choked the City for so long. But each bore scars—old and new—that whispered of the cost they’d paid so far.

  He had never expected such determined resistance. The Lord of Bones and the Pilgrim had seemed a waning power when first they commanded their march, and then the Lady Hash and the Lady Bhaeryn united in arms. Their pale warriors looked few, and the Ossein Guardians stretched thin in a vein attempt to shield a collapsing regime. Yet in time—through the chaos—others came, freaks in crude plate and bearing fanatical eyes, throwing themselves into slaughter for the Pilgrim’s cause. Ragged lines of zealots, half-augmented or cobbled together from substandard vat-birth, yet unstoppable in their mania.

  Now, at this standstill, Jhedothar heard the crush of a City that had learned to cower from violence. Neither side pushed forward. Their weapons lay dormant in an uneasy ceasefire, only waiting for the next unstoppable collision of wills.

  The centaurian knight exhaled, letting his gaze flick over the scorched ground. He could see the stiff forms of the fallen, pale or azure or black-bannered alike, laid out in the charred husk of once-living corridors. The City’s patchers or recycling drones had not come yet, or perhaps they had been destroyed too in the most recent bout of carnage and had yet to be replaced. No breath, no sign of the once-living. A wasteland of ambition crushed by brutality.

  And the strangest, most unsettling realisation of all had come to him only days before. The zealots they fought, they beyed their beliefs as they charged to their deaths. These radical freakish hordes were battling to topple the Immortal’s grand design—the exact cause, in part, that Lady Bhaeryn championed. Their goals, twisted though they might be, echoed what his Lady and her allies had claimed as their righteous crusade. They wanted an end to the Immortal’s tyranny. The Lady Bhaeryn, too, sought such an end.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  Jhedothar tensed, a quiver moving through his broad flanks. All this destruction, the endless casualties, the ever-growing toll upon the City and its inhabitants—he weighed it silently against their conviction. Where did the lines of difference truly lie if even their enemies fought for the same outcome? He did not speak such doubts aloud. His fellow knights and arms bearers, battered though they were, needed him steady, unwavering.

  Yet, in the lonely moments before battle’s inevitable return, he could not help but wonder if the cruelty of it all had overshadowed their cause. Had they become part of the same savage machinery they had vowed to break? The questions settled heavy within him as he surveyed the devastation once more.

  Somewhere behind him, in the half-collapsed spire that served as their temporary command post, the banners of black and gold rippled in a stale breath from the vast depths. Duty compelled him, righteousness too. But the memory of being forced into Bee’s retinue, of kneeling to a lineage he had once served elsewhere, weighed upon him like a chain. For all the loyalty he had pledged—and still believed in—Jhedothar found himself burdened by the war’s cruelty, haunted by the cost of a struggle whose victory might look no different from its defeat.

  And so, Jhedothar stood on the broken ledge of the ruined spire, the roiling wind of Acetyn’s upper levels whipping at his bestial skull and gilted cuirass. Now, looking upon the spire’s shattered heights, he saw them: the Nesta Barshaum, crawling forth on segmented limbs of ancient metal, more machine than beast. They were strategic biocannons of a primeval design, relics from an age when the City of Acetyn was but a whelp. Legends said these very constructs had once marched under the Pilgrim’s banner and more, carving swathes of devastation across the land, cutting young Cities at their roots before they could rise to uncontested power.

  Somewhere behind him, the banners of black and gold fluttered in ragged defiance, promising an uncertain future. The promise of the Rose of Thorns played in his thoughts. He remembered how she had been discovered, entombed in Ymmngorad’s vestigial layers, and the bargain struck to see her awakened. These ancient weapons, not deployed in living memory, brought forth from her annals to the real.

  The Nesta Barshaum advanced with a methodical clank of rusted cogs and biomechanical sinews, each bristling with weaponry that hissed with pent-up fury. Their operators skulked in sheltered compartments, peering from portholes reinforced with bone plating. The colossal barrels lifted to the bone sky overhead, taking aim with a solemn poise. Jhedothar felt his heart drum a beat of warning.

  He didn’t fully understand until the first shot.

  A roar tore the air, and a flash of punishing light ignited the heavens. Bone, sinew, and steel shattered in a cascading burst of chitinous debris. The City’s canopy—its labyrinthine roof of calcified growth—splintered under the Nesta Barshaum’s volley. The thunderous echoes rattled through the spire, toppling half-broken pillars and sending shards of living architecture cascading like deadly rain.

  Then daylight.

  A searing brightness tore through the gloom, raw and white-hot. Jhedothar’s eyes blinked against it, his body recoiling with instinctual dread. The sunlight was a weapon all its own. The freaks near him—the battered mutants and pale soldiers loyal to his command—shielded their faces, snarling in alarm, avoiding the fiery lance of sky that pierced the City. Acetyn’s dwellers were seldom exposed to the day-star, and even this narrow beam was like a brand of searing fire. They shrank back into the spire’s shadows, hissing in wary discomfort.

  Yet Jhedothar could not look away. They shattered the sky. It bled in great, weeping rivulets, inundating the City below.

  He raised a hand to block the glare, and for the first time in his life, beheld the raw colour of the real sky beyond. Its blue radiance, shot through with dancing motes of dust, expanded like a sudden ocean, terrifying and beautiful. The intensity of that unfiltered light made his breath catch in his throat. It was as though the entire world had opened, a realm larger than Enelastoia or the thoracic Mediastinum, larger than any labyrinthine Cruiros or towering Genmabandon or the other realms deep of Acetyn.

  He felt the heat prick at his face, the distant burn even as he stood safely in the shade of the spire’s ragged edge. A silence fell upon his warriors, all of them struggling to process this abrupt invasion of the day star into their world. Some crouched, eyes squeezed shut, refusing to face that harsh glare. Others stared with morbid fascination, uncertain whether to fear or worship such a sight.

  Jhedothar swallowed. The Nesta Barshaum rumbled distantly, preparing a second volley. Above, the bone sky was no longer whole. Torn asunder, it exposed a horizon that dwarfed any ambition the City might have. And despite everything that had come before, Jhedothar the Lance found himself trembling with an awe he could not name.