* * *

  The whole of the world was frozen, as if awaiting Kera’s arrival.

  A great warship stalled in its advance, above her. The battlefield below was a gameboard of pawns, inanimate between turns. Bullets, shells and shrapnel, all halted in their mortal arcs, mid-flight. The wind itself, unhowling silent, and stopped.

  To her, perfectly still. As she tore through it all.

  As she warped downward. Every fraction of an instant faster, outpacing sound.

  But then faster still.

  Relativistic, unbound. As fire and plasma, then beyond heat, etching an incandescent scar into the firmament.

  Unbound she was, indeed — yet, all while foreordained. As power essential itself, and yet just its force carrier. But she’d long since realized she wasn’t in control.

  She couldn’t be controlled.

  The dam was burst, perhaps an infinity ago, and so too had she ceased mourning it.

  But as the blade of her being cut through the iris of the sky, and as she came to accept that she couldn’t control her unleashing — at that pinnacle of power, looking down, she saw nonetheless an uncountable multitude of paths she might take to the earth below.

  So many led toward nothingness. Magnetic, bewitching unbeing, whose void drew in all, pulling her closer to its inescapable event horizon. And yet other paths held in store hellish visions of inundating suffering, of torture and executions, gunfire and cruelty.

  But she’d seen something else, she remembered, as her cascade unfolded across time and space.

  There’d been another sight. A vision from her own eyes, discerned an aeon-instant past, before a million microseconds more had come and gone.

  Soldiers in sand-brown uniforms. Fighting, dying, unable to see their formation’s collapse. Tactical minutia from a long-past age.

  But, as well, direction. An outlet for her release.

  A path of least resistance, if but one among so many others.

  She couldn’t be restrained. The maximum of her energy was impossible to measure.

  But still, she pulled.

  With all of her untrained, overwhelmed force of will, she dragged herself against the current of the particle sea through which her coming parted.

  Still down she cast, along a path of least resistance all the same. But a different path, then. Leading to the same final earth, but not yet straight into the open maw of empty void, or the claws of hellish, intolerable despair. All while cutting, and tearing and ripping and burning through the sky, electric fire, heat and power.

  And it was all a faded memory a million lifetimes past, before her destination rushed up to meet her, and the great grounding body of the world sent a return stroke all the way back up the bright lone streak of her path, before coming back down again, and a million voices roared, as all at once they struck the same exact point each a thousand times in the same single instant in pure energetic sum.

  * * *

  At first it was distant and small like a falling star, so far above as to seem suspended in time.

  At first Tanhkmet felt a presence, but one he couldn’t place. Warm, beautiful and fervent, however far it was away. But amorphous, unrecognizable. Nothing more than simply a herald of the coming power beyond compare.

  Then it was bright like day, and like the blossoming of a flower, it revealed to him its nature.

  The singular unknown presence at once bloomed into hundreds, thousands, or more. So many of them familiar, so many he recognized, and each as intense as if mere paces away. The younger Alexandrikon, and Octavia, and the high staff of his Guard who’d been in Atum-Ra that fateful day, those weeks ago.

  Veteran comrades met long ago in the phraintlands. Cadets he’d tutored. Attuned criminals and anarchists he’d apprehended. Among so many more.

  But of all those bursting forth, one shone most radiant.

  A vis unmistakable but for that of sergeant Iumatar. As if the distilled essence of her inexperience, insubordination, and bravery.

  And after the heartbeat it took him to sense that all, the night grew brighter still.

  As a massive pillar of light — one great bolt of lightning — split apart the sky. Unforked along the whole of its towering path, cleaving the world in two.

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

  Thunder ruptured past him, shaking the earth as force blew him backward, almost knocking him over, far as he was from its strike.

  The whole battlefield had been arrested mid-step in its frenzied advance. As he fought to steady himself, it seemed everyone nearby, friend and foe, struggled in the same way to regain their footing and clear their vision.

  Always quick on her feet, Theodora reached again to help him up, despite her own state of shock. Galvanized by confusion and surprise, Tanhkmet accepted her assistance. Leaning on his dented shield for support, he peered beyond their foxhole.

  The momentum of the whole enemy attack had broken. Formations shattered as soldiers scrambled back, away from whatever had just struck the battlefield before them. Yet other long sections of the enemy line had vanished entirely, as if vaporized, including the assaulting elements once nearest him moments earlier.

  And in the vacant space from which they fled, he saw Iumatar.

  Or rather, a vast smoldering crater of burn-blackened earth, in the direction he’d last sensed her. The few white-coated soldiers that remained nearby routed past the depression, stumbling as they fled, their imminent victory forgotten.

  The burying haze of enmity earlier dominating the plane of sense receded in tandem, while transformed to fear more than hate. And so too could he feel the reemergence of warmer auras lost to him in those last minutes. Not all returned, as the enemy retreated. Sprawled, bleeding bodies of many comrades absent from his subconscious tally were scattered up and down the former frontline, he saw, as he staggered toward the crater. But still many others reappeared to him on the plane of sense, too.

  A straggling white-coated rifleman turned back, taking aim. Tanhkmet raised his shield, but a crack from his own line came first, and the soldier fell. Other holdouts were overtaken as his line regained what ground it could, wherever abandoned by the enemy.

  But even just as Tanhkmet crested the crater's rim, he saw the enemy’s retreat was already slowing. As the initial shock wore off, and their vis-attuned soldiers realized they might’ve been tricked — that Tanhkmet’s forces might be still just as weak as they were before, and that victory was still close at hand. Whatever just happened had bought the evacuation precious minutes, Tanhkmet knew, but no more than minutes.

  He didn’t know what to expect, himself, as he slid down the crater’s slope, toward what indeed was sergeant Iumatar, lying fetal at the center of the burnt and upturned earth. He shouted again for his line to advance, then fell to his knees beside her.

  Raw pink scars spiderwebbed across her skin, much like the duller, smaller fractal she’d already borne. Hundreds of the branches covered her, tracing something like the limbs of a great tree down and around her neck, before disappearing beneath the hardened scraps of smoldering black crust that had once been her uniform. It was like no wound he’d ever seen.

  She stirred with a sudden sharp breath. Rolling weakly onto her back, she raised an arm, sensing someone above her. Tanhkmet took her hand in his own.

  “Gods’ above… what have you done?” he whispered.

  She groaned, incoherent. The intensity of gunfire above them began trickling back to strength, as the enemy regrouped.

  “What was that just now?” he repeated. “Where have you come from? What the hell just happened?”

  Her head lolled to one side, and Tanhkmet realized she might be dying. But he couldn’t even imagine how to begin with first aid, given her injury.

  “What have you done…” he repeated under his breath. With a choked cry, a canvas-jacketed body tumbled back over the crater’s lip with a choked cry, crumpling motionless feet.

  Iumatar stirred again. She reached out for something beside her, padding at the earth. A malformed lump of metal lay nearby, still hissing as it cooled. Ash flaked out of pockmarked holes when Tanhkmet picked it up. Anything once contained had been incinerated.

  “In that… evidence… no weapon…” she rasped. A desperate fight still flickered behind her weak and wounded eyes, even then, he saw. “No more… like… Atum… Ra…”

  Her voice withered away, as the effort of speaking became too great.

  But Tanhkmet understood.

  It only made sense, in the shadow of that terrible warship above: the destruction brought to bear upon them that day had been conventional. An enemy that could use more weapons of the type that had destroyed Atum-Ra would’ve simply liquidated them in an instant, the same as the city.

  She’d really done it, somehow.

  Against all odds, she’d called the enemy’s bluff, then went to prove herself right. Even if whatever proof she’d retrieved had been destroyed, Tanhkmet knew she’d done it. She’d mounted a last stand more valiant than any from the legendary campaigns of old history, he realized all at once, there in the crater.

  If only Setet were not still doomed, she’d be known as a hero throughout the empire for all time.

  Which was exactly why he couldn’t stop himself from breaking, as he knelt beside her. Just as he’d broken minutes ago with Belisarion, witnessing her display the same fruitless valor.

  Some perverse miracle had delivered Iumatar back to him, as if just so he could learn of the existence of yet one more person whom he’d failed.

  “It's not enough, Kerauna,” he whispered, almost as hoarse as she. “I wish it was… I wish it was, but it's not enough.”

  She murmured some protest, but he heard nothing of it. The suffocating curtain of despair had returned, shrouding the world behind its veil. He fell over her, as he sensed their barely-reformed line crumbling against the resurgent enemy assault.

  That little lump of metal and her good word, regarding the great weapon.

  He wished it could’ve meant enough. She deserved to have it mean something. But the whole of the world was coming down around them. A single new pillar would not stop the ruin’s collapse.

  “Met… her…” she croaked.

  It took him a moment to even realize she was speaking.

  “Saw… her… will take… to safety…”

  He looked back up at her.

  “What? What did you say?”

  She seemed in excruciating pain. But still she swallowed, and tried again.

  “…Didn’t… betray me… He… will take… to safety… she’s… resisted… and she wants… we… fight…”

  “Don’t—” he choked. “Are you—?”

  Iumatar’s eyes widened with desperate, urgent strain.

  “…the… p…”

  He was still half-deaf from the day’s battery of thunder and cannonfire. But she pulled him closer with the end of her strength, and he leaned down, right over her whisper, one final time. And so against the backdrop of that muted battlefield, at last did her words reach him.

  “Princess… Aurelia …lives!”