The camp was settled in Shepard point, a cluster of rocks much like Eagle point, but with a longer ridge that spanned for over a mile. They had a good view of incoming armies or monsters in the region. Fires dotted the area for the warriors who rested beside it. They’d lost seventy eight men and estimated around three hundred enemy casualties. An astounding victory in any commander’s book, but Kasar sat by the fire wondering if ever there was a world where such a trade didn’t happen.

  Despite all his talk and arguments, even he knew no such world existed. As Vorza said: “this is war.” It was a different game altogether.

  He watched Kier try and spoon some food into Raffa’s mouth. Tears streamed down her face as the poor man glared at her with dead eyes and a limply hanging jaw. Kasar’s face ached as tears pooled in his eyes.

  Saalia tried to console her, but Kier grew angry. “He’s alive! He can be cured!”

  Saalia stepped back and gave a polite nod before returning to her camp.

  Kier wiped her tears.

  Kasar stood and strode over to her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have seen what Morod was baiting me into. I was rash and he suffered for it.”

  Kier sniffed. “I can’t make myself hate you even though it’d be easier that way.”

  “Is there anything I can do? I don’t know what to do…” Kasar wished Vorza was here. “He’s like this because of me… I can’t just do nothing.”

  “He did it for you because you freed us all.” A laugh broke through her. “He wanted to be a dancer. His village had a festival around this time of the year before he was captured. I wanted to sing. He showed me his dance and was so nervous. I thought it was beautiful. I prepared a song to sing as he did it. One that flowed well with it.” She looked up at Kasar. He noted how weathered her skin looked. Splotched and marred by the sun. Her lips peeled and red bags hung under her eyes.

  “We had more time to talk after you freed us,” she continued. “About other things than just the pits. More time to grow closer. To have hopes and dreams. I miss him.” She caressed his face and in those lifeless eyes lay nothing of the old Raffa.

  Kasar had barely known him. Kier had loved him. Now he was gone.

  Kasar did not know what to say or do. He sat in vigil with Kier who sobbed before the shell of a man in silence.

  After a moment she sniffed and wiped her face. “He’s gone. I should… Put him down.”

  “What?” asked Kasar.

  “He’s done, Grim. It’s over.”

  “But what if-”

  “He overcasted Green,” she snapped. “It’s incurable.”

  A shudder passed through Kasar. Of course, he’d known it. To hear Kier say it like that when moments before she also grew angry. It was hard to lose somebody, but harder still to let go. Kasar hated she had to do it so they could proceed with the war. He knew he’d do it too. In some ways he’d done it with his own family due to the pits. A whole year he had to forget the weight of loss so he could just keep moving.

  “I’ll do it myself.” She stood and grabbed Raffa. Kasar leaned forward to help, but she flashed him an angry look. Through grunts and staggered steps, she half dragged, half carried her man away.

  ****

  The rebel warriors continue to scout the movements of Morod’s army. Three hundred casualties did not affect them as much as Kasar would have liked. The harsh reality was that the human lives were worth less than the equipment meant to take lives. The army pushed on through the desert and Kasar ran through several ideas with his captains.

  Saalia suggested a hit and run approach now that they had horses.

  Kier suggested a stealth approach where she used her Blue Magic to conceal their entrance to deal more damage. Perhaps poison their food supplies or assassinate Morod himself. Kasar decided on a merger of the two ideas. The only issue was, only a handful of them were actual riders.

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  This only served as a minor issue. So the plan struck again and Kasar readied his troops.

  ***

  Eighty riders on the northern flank of the camp, and eighty on the eastern flank rode hard toward Morod’s camp. Their mounts kicked up plumes of sand as they barreled toward the enemy. The alarm rose immediately, as the fighting began, a hail of arrows, followed by a quick retreat, Kier channeled Blue and concealed Kasar, Sipha, and several of their best warriors.

  They snuck into the western flank of the camp while the soldiers focused on the other two attacks. Kasar and his party snaked through the remaining supply wagons and equipment. Soldiers stood guard around and his warriors dispatched them quickly with daggers. Once they dealt with the guards, they began placing runic charges. A Vrodian amongst them had worked as a runesmith decades ago. An older man named Iristed, though not as old as Vorza as he continued to remind them, had crafted an explosive. Runes glowed on the packaged wrappings of infused sandstone. He claimed it was harder to work with than the proper ore they used up north, but it served their purposes.

  “If anything, it’ll make it more painful,” he’d said with a grin. Iristed bordered on the edge of whimsy and insanity despite the situation. Kasar heard stories about how he cackled as he butchered countless of the Bronze Guard in the city during the revolt. Some said they could hear his haunting laughter even as he slept. Even his dreams were about the violence in the pits.

  However, during his enslavement he was just another man. No name, or title. Kasar had unchained something unhinged. Now he worked for Kasar to do the kind of damage no one else could.

  Once they set the charges, they heard more the screams of horses. Kasar had prepared himself for casualties. However they never expected an entire front to falter. He sensed something from behind them.

  “They know!” he gasped. “Get ready!”

  The soldiers poured in from behind. Seven warriors fell immediately, and the soldiers of Morod roared in delight as they gave the rebels a taste of their own medicine. Kasar’s warning was all the quickest of their party needed. The rest perished to blade and spear.

  Sipha was first to strike back, launching herself forward. Kier and Kasar darted to the side, using her initial burst of violence as cover. Kasar once again saw firsthand what the best of Akonai’s freed slaves were like, now they were unleashed. This time they fought in uneven odds, and the difference of Morod’s soldiers on the backfoot and his warriors looked like night and day

  The free warriors dove into the jaws of death. They relished it.

  Kier’s spear served as its own volley of piercing death. She represented a vengeful spear wall on her own. Her blinding speed mixed with the illusions she cast upon her foes left the soldiers vulnerable to gutted bodies and skewered limbs. Where one soldier thought a raised shield would save him, her spear found his gut. Another lower it, but her weapon dug into his face. One gruesome death saw the soldier take the spear through his gullet. Iristed cackled, charged forward, and shoved the corpse, wrenching Kier’s spear free. He continued forward with an axe and shield to hew through his foes. His cackles sounded demonic.

  Sipha had ended up in the backline now, a snaking mound of bodies in her wake, and Kasar had torn through the archers by charging headfirst toward them. As they pieced through the ambush, Kasar saw how many they’d just lost. Only eighteen of their original fifty now stood. So many dead and behind them where the two fronts skirmished, only a handful now scattered away. A complete disaster.

  “They knew,” said Kasar. “How?”

  “A traitor?” spat Sipha.

  “Impossible. I can’t believe it.”

  Kasar thought back to every little detail in the time between the first ambush and the current one. Where had he gone wrong?

  “We need to leave,” said Kasar. “We set the charges.”

  More soldiers started to converge on them. An overwhelming amount now that their riders were gone. Arrows pelted in the sand as several clusters of missile infantry began to set up on the dunes.

  The warriors vanished over the dunes and beside him Iristed cackled.

  “Lad,” he said as the arrows fired after them soaring over their heads. “We killed more of them than we lost.”

  Kasar didn’t share the enthusiasm.

  ****

  Pheo healed Kasar’s shoulder wound with Green and he bit down on a piece of leather from one of the saddles. With Raffa gone, she took over as the primary healer.

  He grimaced as he realized how few horses they had now with most of their cavalry dead. They knew they were coming. From the reports, they had proper stakes set up.

  “Could be nothing,” said Saalia. “They could have put up stakes because they knew we had horses now.”

  “If it’s a traitor, I’ll skin them alive,” spat Sipha.

  “Either way,” said Kier. “I think our ambushing days are over. We lost too many, Grim. I know they did too, but they can afford those losses.”

  “We did our job well,” said Pheo. “In the end, we have a better shot at defending the city.”

  Kasar pondered for a moment and when Pheo finished patching him up, he went straight to his tent.

  ****

  He felt something was wrong. An instinctual sense. The kind one got when someone was watching them. He gasped. The pain in his head as they fled on the horses in the first ambush. He curled his fists into balls and closed his eyes. Searching inside him screamed that it had found the culprit. A remnant of Blue Magic.

  Greetings Grim, said Morod’s voice in his head. I have been eager to speak with you.