When Aiur had awoken the previous morning, he had been utterly unaware of how defining a day it would be. He remembered it with perfect clarity for the rest of his life.

  They had arrived in Sturva the day before, and paid with excessive generosity for all the bread and board the hamlet’s inn, The Minehead, could provide.

  He had not slept well, but felt refreshed regardless. Dreams of falling into that empty abyss still plagued him, but there was more comfort to be found in the freshly made bed the inn had provided than the bedroll he’d been using over the last two weeks. He had discovered that, while unquestionably beautiful, a grand view of the stars did little to soothe his soul. The tiny pinpricks of light against a canvass of inky midnight only served as an unpleasant reminder of his overwhelming insignificance.

  He pushed these thoughts aside in an attempt to focus on the reason they were here and sauntered casually down into the main hall. Paying for a meal of bread and soup with a few small coins, he took a seat opposite Rexis around one of the small tables dotted across the room. Each was occupied by Rexis’ hand-picked pack of hunters, trackers and killers, with not a single local in sight.

  “She’s late, sir,” was the first thing the scout mumbled, mopping up the last dregs of his soup with a chunk of bread.

  “She’ll be here,” Aiur said with a shrug, leaning back to make himself comfortable

  “I’m not worried about that; I just want to know when.”

  He shrugged, tearing off a hunk of bread. Cleonar had never let him down before. “Where’s Callia? And that other one…Nyde?”

  Rexis sniffed. “I sent those two out to take a look around the area. Really comb through it. Hoped they might find signs of Cleo and her gaggle of clankers. They’ve probably got lost.”

  Aiur nearly choked on the piece of bread he had been chewing. “Well, I’m sure if they were anywhere close, we would have heard them by now.”

  Rexis smiled, but didn’t laugh. “I’m sure we would. The scouts should be back ‘bout noon…sir.”

  “You know there’s no need to call me sir while we’re out here. You have command over this,” Aiur said, before ripping another bite from his bread.

  “Well I fully intend to, sir. I’m not in the habit of breaking habits,” he said looking over Aiur’s shoulder to see Daiss’ broad form lumbering down the staircase, his tail thumping heavily against each step.

  The hulking lizard stopped, stretched, and yawned, before sliding bleary-eyed into a seat at their table.

  “Ah, the arch clanker himself has arrived! Did you sleep well?”

  Daiss just grinned and nodded, Rexis’ sarcasm going over his head as he reached over to tear off some of his bread, chewing on it dry while Rexis grumbled at him.

  “Expect them to find anything out there?” Aiur asked Rexis.

  “Out this side of the mountains?” Rexis said, leaning back and shrugging. “No. Not really. The land out there is practically dead between here and the coast, bar the occasional snake or scorpion.”

  “Then why bother sending them

  Rexis simply shrugged again. “Well, it’s just-“ was all he managed to say, before the door burst open with a bone-jarring crack.

  The entire room looked up from their bowls. A figure, clad in a Veltari tattered uniform, half ran, half stumbled into the inn before falling onto the flagstones with an unceremonious smack.

  Rexis was on his feet immediately, flying across the room as the figure dragged themselves up onto their knees. Their lean face was bisected by a deep, messy wound that left blood smeared across their features, but it was unmistakably the brown-scaled form of Callia. Her clothes were slashed and covered in blood. She gulped in air as though she may never taste it again, her eyes wide with panic. “Sirs...Sirs!” she gasped between short pants. “Sirs…we have to go…we have to leave now!”

  The whole room had suddenly burst into life with her entrance. Rexis’ Veltari leapt from their chairs, checking windows, doors and rushing out to gather supplies. Daiss exploded from his seat, bounding up the stairs three at a time and returning with his glaive in a matter of second ss. All the while the innkeeper, a portly, yellow-scaled fellow with spines protruding from his chin in a sort of beard, shrieked and dove behind his bar.

  Aiur rose from his seat with a long, slow breath. He walked across the room, crouching down beside the scout as she gasped and wailed. “Callia,” he said, his voice cutting through her panic. “Look at me.”

  Her head snapped up, flecks of blood flying from her wound. “P-please sir…we have to go; we have to leave,” she mumbled, her breath coming short and sharp between words.

  “I know,” he replied, placing a calming hand on her shoulder. “But we can’t leave until we know what happened. So just breathe for me, nice and slow.”

  She nodded, taking deep lungsful of air as she mimicked Aiur’s own steady breaths.

  He kept his hand on her shoulder, squeezing briefly “Good. Now, nice and slow, tell us what happened.”

  She nodded, taking a few more deep breaths to steady her nerves. “We were on patrol out east, as ordered. Maybe we went too far out…I don’t know. But…we found…an army, sir. A huge army. Just…rolling through the desert.”

  Aiur frowned. How could they have failed to notice such a thing? In his experience, an army on the move was rarely subtle. “How big, and whose army?” he asked, forcing himself to remain calm.

  She gulped, her breathing beginning to unsteady again. “Thousands sir…Thousands of them. But they were spread out, like a blanket of ants covering the entire desert! Scuttling and crawling everywhere…” She scratched at her arms, as though she could feel tiny biting insects all over her. “Nyde and I crested a dune and we…saw them stretching on and on and on…” She took another gasping breath. “They marched like no army we knew…scrambling…clambering over and around each other. No ordered ranks sir, just a…scattered mass of bodies. They had no banners…I don’t want to think about what happened to any villages behind them…”

  Aiur shifted around to remain squarely in her sight, and placed his other hand on her other shoulder. This was all madness; the odds alone were astronomical. “Okay. It’s good that you found them. You’ve performed admirably. But you came here in a panic, and without Nyde. Something else happened out there, didn’t it?”

  She nodded again, tilting her chin upward to look him directly in the eye. “Nyde’s dead,” she said, with a tone that suggested the same fate awaited them all.

  Aiur squeezed her shoulders as his stomach seemed to drop out of his abdomen. “How did he die?”

  She gulped. “Badly,” she managed, sinking inwards and clutching her chest. “They spotted us…some of them, at least. A big group came after us…yapping…wailing…shouting, screaming like it was the end of the world.” She took another low, shuddering breath. “They caught up to us, their leader was…so fast…he caught Nyde and he…and…he.” She retched, quickly turning away from Aiur as she emptied the contents of her stomach onto the stone floor.

  Aiur grimaced, leaning back as the smell of bile filled the air. He couldn’t ask her to put into words what ‘he’ did. The recollection alone was clearly unpleasant enough. “Who was leading them, can you describe them to me?”

  She shuddered, nodding feebly as she looked up at him. “N-not a who sir…a what.”

  He nodded, motioning for her to continue. “What then. What leads this army?”

  She took a deep breath, shaking as though on the verge of tears. She sputtered and stammered, and only after multiple failed attempts did she manage to breathe a single word.

  Naga.

  ***

  Aiur had never fought a Naga before, and he did not relish the opportunity now it was before him.

  They were akin to monsters of myth; serpentine creatures from the depth of their past. For centuries, millennia even, the world had been plagued by these megalomaniacal monsters: slave-raids, insurgent rings and surgical strikes. Now he was faced with one such creature.

  Deep down, the prospect terrified him, but he could not show that to those around him, not for a moment. If he crumbled, so would they.

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  It had been a struggle just to get the residents to leave their homes, and many had refused. Everything they owned and knew was here, the prospect of abandoning their lives somehow more terrifying than the Naga. Aiur knew they would soon understand their folly.

  Now the first specks of the invaders were appearing across the dunes. Still, they stubbornly refused to leave.

  An admirable sentiment, to be sure. But one that was about to get them all killed.

  Callia was given the ‘honour’ of leading those willing to evacuate away to any kind of safety she could find. She was far too unstable if it came to a fight, and he couldn’t have her nerves unsettling anyone else more than they already had. She had been through enough already.

  Now he feared the approaching horde would catch them out in the open.

  He could see the outriders bearing down towards the hamlet. Two Saszrukai, clad in mis-matched leather scraps and mounted on foreign, pale horses. They came, whooping and hollering down the slope, one crudely brandishing a spear too long for his stature and the other flicking out arrows from a squat bow.

  They looked for all the world like foreign barbarians. Outlanders. Aiur supposed they must be, of a fashion. He had never seen Saszrukai like this before. Who were they?

  Questions for another time he quickly realised, for now they were barrelling into the hamlet proper. Aiur watched, expecting at any moment to see the rest scrambling down the dune in their wake.

  Rexis tossed out ‘shields’ from a gathered pile by the well as his scouts ran back and forth. The shields were unpainted, carved slabs of wood with hide straps, but they could stop an arrow well enough. The outriders began to circle them and the crude shields had their first test when one of the scouts used his to save his ribcage from a well-placed arrow

  The spear-rider wheeled around, couching his too-long spear as a makeshift lance as he swooped in towards the gaggle of armed figures gathered around the well.

  Daiss strode forth to meet him.

  He took a wide stance and lowered his centre of gravity. Firmly rooted, he held his glaive out and carefully angled it towards the rider.

  Their attacker lunged, thrusting his blade towards Daiss’ face. But Daiss’ response was lightning-fast. He threw his whole body forward, catching the spear just below the blade of his own polearm and pushing back with all his strength. The spear was forced upwards, and Daiss’ glaive scraped down its length, connecting at its apex with the rider’s neck. He didn’t even have time to scream.

  The horse galloped onwards. The near-decapitated corpse of its rider slumped, and then fell from the saddle. Arterial spray pumped feebly from its fatal wound onto the sand.

  “One down. Two hundred to go.” Daiss gave a half-chuckle, straightening himself to his full height as he whirled the glaive around. Blood flicked from the blade, leaving the edge clean.

  “Impressive. Of that there can be no doubt.” Rexis rolled his eyes, plucking up his bow and quiver from beside the well. “But we need you alive, so…please, never do that again.” Without allowing Daiss a chance to reply, he began to loose his own arrows towards the other outrider, who was now chasing after their fallen ally’s horse as it bolted into the desert.

  Daiss grunted, thumping the base of his glaive into the sand as he watched the second outrider leave.

  “You know I agree with him.” Aiur said, walking his way over to the side of his praetorian. “But let’s handle the others in a more traditional fashion, shall we?”

  Daiss chuckled grimly, looking distantly to the dunes beyond. “Of course, sir. But I think we have greater concerns.”

  “What?” Aiur frowned and followed the direction Daiss was pointing his blade in

  “I am afraid my jest of two hundred now seems a comical understatement.”

  A comical understatement indeed.

  They were, as Callia had described, reminiscent of a scrambling mass of ants from this distance, little more than vaguely bipedal shapes, but moving at an alarming pace. With such numbers any defence they could form would be temporary; resistance measured in minutes. They would be upon them too soon, and escape rapidly began to seem an unlikely prospect.

  Then he saw it, and terror froze his heart for a beat. Gliding amongst them, moving with such languid ease Aiur could almost feel the arrogance oozing from it, came a massive serpentine shape. The Beast whose name would be eternally accompanied by a gobbet of spit or hushed curse.

  ***

  At first, there was hope.

  The Veltari had spread themselves out across the hamlet. With only scraps of cloth taken from their uniforms, wood taken from fireplaces, broken shields and their own wits to hand they had set to preparing the hamlet as best they could with the scant minutes fate had provided them.

  The locals, those either stubbornly refusing to abandon their homes or now seeing the futility of escape, emerged with naught but mining tools and cooking utensils. Grim resolve was etched on faces young and old as they huddled together in small alcoves, under windows or behind doors. Each clutched their would-be weapons of murder in shaking hands.

  Yet although their situation seemed desperate, the flame of hope flickered on in Aiur’s heart. With the locals they made a sizable force, enough perhaps for some distant chance that the fiends descending upon them would think twice, even if for only a moment. Even that tiny window could be enough to fight their way towards freedom in the desert beyond. If only they weren’t so damned fast.

  The mass surged forward, a roiling throng of Saszrukai. Each was a messy mismatch of bare scales, tattered leather and cannibalized metal. They carried crude weapons of odd shapes and sizes, lugging and whirling them without skill or finesse.

  Every single one of them had a thick, cast-iron collar clamped around their neck, matched with various lengths of chain, manacles and numerous scars. All serving as constant reminders of their enslavement.

  Just as Callia had warned, they came with shouts and yells down the dune-side. This was not, however, the triumphant battle cries of a raiding horde sighting plunder.

  Instead, the air was filled with the fearful wailings of the horror-stricken; a pair of miners lost their nerve, dropping the hammers they’d snatched and turning to run.

  As a wave of flesh and scale they crashed into the hamlet. Crawling through windows and onto rooftops with reckless abandon, scrambling over one another in the rabid press forward. Some were even crushed underfoot, killed by their own momentum.

  When the hopeful defenders emerged from their hiding places the wave did not stop. Nor did it think twice at the sudden appearance of poorly armed peasants, but washed over them with murderous force. Aiur roared a rallying cry, throwing himself forward, but it did nothing to slow their momentum.

  Innocent people were cut apart, hacked into pieces, stabbed to ribbons or simply pulped beneath the massing throng as it surged forth. In an instant the fight had gone from the peasants and they were herded like cattle towards the well, feebly striking out at their would-be killers.

  Aiur was too embroiled in his own repeated fights for survival; hacking, cutting and chopping with furious abandon to save them. As innocents died all around him, all he could do was watch.

  A young girl, armed only with a bow that should be used for hunting small desert vermin somehow took life after life. But it was not enough. There was always more to fill the fallen’s place. Even long after her thigh and shoulder had been pierced through with retaliatory arrows, and her own blood pooled around her feet, she kept loosing arrows. She died standing.

  He could do nothing as the portly innkeeper smashed a slave’s jaw with naught but a cooking pan, only for four more to leap upon him and begin hacking him into indistinguishable pieces.

  He stared on as the large, stalwart mine boss swung his pickaxe back and forth, smashing bones and piercing bodies with every wide swing. He was a stubborn rock in their defence, until his head was neatly snipped from his shoulders by the beast’s scything blades.

  Aiur took a moment to realise what he had seen, gaping at the monstrosity as it loomed out of the mass. The sight made his heart pound in his chest and rooted his feet to the spot.

  The beast was an immense serpentine figure forged in azure and jade and spattered with blood. Its body was a slim yet lengthy bulk of muscle and power, augmented by four powerful arms each large enough to crush bone. Its lean face leered out with a sadistic grin as it spread its arms wide, while its forked tongue sampled the fear in the air.

  The upper pair of arms wielded a pair of curved, single edged blades each the size of a man, though they appeared little more than sabres in its grip. While the lower each bore matching pairs of rune-etched silver bands around the wrist and elbow. Lightning cackled and filled the air with static as it leapt between each band.

  A wrist flicked; another head sailed through the air.

  Aiur barely even registered the movement. It glided so lazily, with such ease and comfort, yet with every blink another innocent was felled

  Such casual murder and callous disrespect for life made Aiur’s blood boil, but what made it worse, what made him painfully dig his clawed digits into his own palms, was how bored it seemed. It grinned, leered and cackled like some monster of myth, but there seemed to be no effort or enthusiasm in its actions. The darting swipes of its blades were brief snaps of frustration, rather than the displays of skill such a feat should rightfully be.

  The beast’s form was overwhelming in its elegance and power. It should have been a thing of beauty, a pinnacle of serpentine majesty, and yet when Aiur looked upon it all he could feel was disgust. Every moment he stared, the flame of righteous hatred grew hotter in his heart. This wholesale slaughter was clearly indicative of a mind so cruel, so barbaric, that it had turned too far from the light of all that is good and sane and long since revoked its own right to live.

  Aiur pulled his boots from the sand and uttered a small prayer to Aten. He asked his god for strength and deliverance from this depraved evil. Brandishing his weapon as he surged forward, he issued a wordless, bellowing challenge from the depths of his throat, borne of his all-consuming rage.

  He knew he was physically outclassed in every possible respect. Still, he charged on.

  He had resigned himself to fate, at this moment he was naught but a dead man walking. But he would go out with honour intact, and Aten willing, wound this monster before his light was snuffed out.

  His resolve was fortified by the presence of Daiss at his side, echoing Aiur’s challenge with a ferocious roar. Together, they barrelled forward. Carving a path under the beast’s baleful glare.

  It was not impressed.

  It watched, for a moment, out of curiosity if nothing else. Its eyes drifted lazily across their tall, saurian forms. It appeared utterly disinterested as these two…creatures violently hacked down its puppets.

  Then, like a passing cloud, its curiosity was spent. With a casual flick of the wrist, it sent death their way.

  Daiss saw it first. A bolt of lightning danced from the serpent’s fingers towards them, burning through anything in its way and reducing its own slaves to charred corpses in its wake.

  Without even a moment to think, he threw himself upon his charge with a calamitous slap and clatter of metal.

  Straight through the bolts path.

  As one combined mass of steel and scale, their feet left the sand. Flailing together, they dropped quickly into the sand. But Daiss had not been nearly quick enough.

  For a moment Daiss was rooted, upright, as the bolt coursed through the left side of his body, his screams drowning out the sound of battle as metal melted and fused with scale in the most painful forge imaginable. Every muscle in his body locked up for the three heartbeats it took until he passed out from the pain, collapsing in a heap atop his master.

  The bolt continued on its path of destruction, cracking stone to blast apart the well in a great jet of sand and water, before grounding itself in the dirt.

  That crack, and the following patter of falling sand, was the last thing Aiur heard before the bulk of his own bodyguard robbed him of consciousness.