Give’em Hell, Sigrid.

  Elisia stands center stage, her black cape fluttering as if caught in a draft. Her officers on either side of her step forward, spreading out to create a line of defense in front of her. Konrad and Aurick draw their weapons, more than ready for the fight at hand.

  “Sergeant!” yells Gustav as he leans against the wall with exhaustion. “Leave Elisia to me.”

  Sigrid nods.

  Gustav slips his helmet back on and raises his sword to a forward guard with both hands.

  “Flames of Voltyr,” he says, “burn away my wickedness. Ignite me in holy fire, that I might immolate these servants of darkness.” Flames rise from his sword.

  “By the smoke and lightning of Hastugart,” says Elisia, “I will avenge you, Klaus. By this blade, my path will be made clear.” Red, electric bolts crackle up and down her zweihander.

  “Konrad! Aurick!” yells Sigrid through their internal comms. “Sweep right!”

  The three warriors take the initiative, sprinting to the right to engage the two officers to Elisia’s left. The two officers to her right sprint over to join their traitor brothers. Gustav, channeling his fiery, psychic might, creeps closer and closer to Elisia.

  Aurick reaches his mark first, swinging his axe in a flurry of righteous madness. He presses and turns both officers back with his assault, opening his back up to the other two attackers closing in on him. But his faith lies not in his own prowess.

  Sigrid and Konrad answer Aurick’s trust, intercepting in a blur the two officers charging for Aurick’s back. The sergeant and her soldier cross saber and mace with their foes’ swords.

  After a single exchange, Konrad’s heavy mace and deft arm prove their superiority over the officers and their lighter swords: with light parries, the soldier sends the blades arcing away. He smashes the mace head into the chest of one foe, knocking him on his back with a grim crater in his chest’s plate.

  Taking full advantage of the opening forged by Konrad, Sigrid strikes at the neck of her foe, but the officer wheels his sword around to parry, revealing his real skill level.

  “They’re holding back,” says Sigrid as Konrad’s next strike is also deflected by the officer’s blade.

  “Sigrid,” says the officer before pulling off his helmet. He stares her down with cold, blue eyes, his black, thick hair brushed back, almost hiding the ears atop the corners of his head. “You don’t have to do this.”

  “Lieutenant!” gasps Sigrid. “You’re alive!”

  “More than ever,” he says in a tired voice.

  “You’ve sided against the Emperor.”

  “No. I’ve sided with the future of Vulfos. I’ve sided with my people. Now, this is your chance to do the same, Sigrid.”

  “My people serve the Vulfreich!” she says, swinging her saber at him only to be met with parry after parry. “We stand together. Our will is unwavering, for it is the will of the Emperor.”

  “And why should you share his will? Join us and forge your own will! Fight for the freedom of our people.”

  “Listen to yourself! Join you and forge my own will?”

  “Yes!”

  “And then how can our people thrive if the only thing uniting them is their division from each other?”

  “We will thrive by our own hands, our own freedom.”

  “Then you make every man the ‘tyrant’ you claim to slay. You deny the very nature of creation.”

  “Creation? Truly, there is no reasoning with you.”

  “Your revolution is doomed to crumble.”

  “Our people are doomed without it!”

  “Better doomed together than doomed alone, traitor. We trusted you. You were supposed to lead us to victory!”

  “Follow me now, and I still can.”

  “There is no victory in the selfishness of betrayal.”

  “And there is none in blind loyalty! What do you want, Sigrid! Make up your mind.”

  “I want to live for my people, not against them.”

  “Then fight for their freedom!”

  “What do you think I’m doing, you stupid idiot!” Striking with both hands, she knocks the Lieutenant back as he barely catches her attack with his sword.

  “What?”

  “You think just because we’ve united our wills to that of the Emperor that we’re slaves? Does all I sacrifice mean nothing to you? I serve the Emperor of my own will, and that has made me freer than you can ever imagine.”

  “So be it, conscript. I’ll throw your corpse on the bonfire of the Revolution myself. No one will stop me from freeing my people.”

  Furiously, they continue the dance of strikes and parries, sparks flying as their blades meet.

  “How strange it is,” says Elisia, “that you betray your petty Emperor by wielding psychic fire, yet you still can’t see his heel pressing down on your neck.”

  “I’m not here to talk,” says Gustav. “I don’t have Sigrid’s patience. I’m here to test the sanctity of my flames.”

  “Well then, a soldier who fancies himself an errant knight too good for words.”

  Gustav rockets toward Elisia, crashing into her with a wave of yellow-orange flames, but with one hand, she binds her electrified blade to his. A crimson current of bolts runs across his armor from her blade.

  “Immolate!” A blast of orange flames knocks the officer back. Gustav drops to a knee, his hands clenched tight around the grip of his blade, his body shaking under the psychic strains of flame and lightning. The red bolts still dance around his armor in a sultry tango of buzzes and crackles.

  Elisia catches herself with one hand on the floor, barely managing to stay on her feet as she slides back. The red lightning is gone from her sword. She stands back up and salutes once more as if gathering her focus again. Black and purple smoke rises from her armor. Her cape falls. Her blade ignites again with the red bolts.

  “This is freedom, dog,” says Elisia. “This is what you’re sacrificing. This is the Wildheart.”

  “Madlina… Forgive me,” mutters Gustav. He rips off his helmet, throwing it aside. “Is that all the Yog will give you, whore?” His irises aren’t only red but glowing. “Let me show you what a real Vulfich Wildheart looks like.” His black belt unwraps itself from his waist and hangs from his backside.

  Don’t tell me that’s a tail. First the ears, and now a tail. I guess it makes more sense than tentacles.

  He yanks on it, pulling the black hose off like a sock from a foot. His sandy blonde wolf tail swings behind him, and as it swings, it grows longer and bushier. Teeth clenched, he’s straining every muscle in his body, tendons straining in his neck, veins bulging from his head.

  Elisia lowers her sword to a forward guard. She chokes one hand up onto the blade of the zweihander, holding it almost like a spear, and charges.

  With the back of his left hand, Gustav knocks the point of her blade aside, unphased by the electric currents running down his arm. His face has fully transformed to a wolf’s now, all his fur as white as snow, flames igniting across his shoulders. He swings his sword overhead in a blazing arc.

  Elisia reverses course, jumping back. Too slow.

  Gustav’s blade slices into her helmet. A concussive blast erupts from the contact. She’s knocked back once again, slamming into the ground this time, her helmet torn from her head. The wolf-man, even more hulking now than he already was, dashes forward like a predator pouncing on its prey.

  Still better looking than Lon Chaney Jr.

  Stuck on her back, Elisia blocks his next strike with desperation. As the blades meet in a furious metallic clash, a black cloud of smoke erupts from the point of contact, swallowing both of them.

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  Gustav is thrown from the black cloud, slamming into the wall twenty feet above the ground. He drops down, shakes himself like a hound shaking off the rain, then sprints back to the cloud with just as much ferocity as before.

  But before he can arrive, Elisia disperses the smoke with a swing of her great blade. Something about her has changed now, and it isn’t the blood running down her face.

  Is she trying to do the same wolfman transformation he’s done? Wait a minute … Her eyes are red too, now. They were kind of violet before, weren’t they?

  “Now, you will watch your men fall one by one, Sigrid,” says Elisia.

  What?

  Her hair fades to white.

  “Go ahead. Kill them,” she says with cold command.

  The two officers fighting Aurick quit playing. In another furious exchange, they press him back.

  “You really thought you were something, didn’t you?” asks one of the officers.

  “Only a servant of his eminence, born to fight and ready to die. And I’ll take that any day over being a traitor mongrel like you.”

  “So be it.”

  One officer swings to Aurick’s right. The other, his left. Both of them close in like the blades of scissors, too fast for the soldier.

  He’s as good as dead!

  Aurick pushes the battle tempo even higher: he commits to the fight on his left, wheeling around like the wind to keep one officer between himself and the other. He swings his axe to reengage.

  The officer’s blade, glowing faintly with a purple light, runs through the soldier’s armor and out the back. Not a single fresh drop of blood stains the blade. As Aurick collapses, his killer pulls his sword from his victim’s gut. No trace of any wound mars Aurick’s armor.

  Konrad and Sigrid still trade blows with their Lieutenant.

  “No!” yells Konrad as fury overtakes him. He hammers the Lieutenant like a nail going into hardwood. With blow after blow, he beats him down, then turns and rushes to his sworn brother, leaving Sigrid to finish the traitor officer.

  “Quit playing dead, Sigvald,” says the Lieutenant to the other officer Konrad struck down. His hair has turned white and his eyes red as well. “They’re not changing their minds. It’s time we end this.”

  “The Revolution demands blood!” yells Sigvald, jumping to his feet. With a light dash, he intercepts Konrad, slashing at his head. The blade bashes against the soldier’s helm, dazing him. “And I am happy to deliver!” He lunges, the point of his blade aiming for the gap under Konrad’s shoulder.

  Sigrid surrenders her chance to finish the Lieutenant, tackling the officer, ripping his helmet off, and—

  The Lieutenant tackles her, knocking her off of Sigvald. Red bolts crackle over them as Sigrid cries out in pain. The fight leaves her body.

  “Hold her down while I take my time with this one,” says Sigvald, blocking several quick strikes from the soldier as if he were swatting at flies. “I don’t like how he thinks he can get away with putting this dent in my armor.”

  Konrad swings his mace overhead with two hands, but the officer chuckles with condescension, catching the weapon in one hand, dropping his sword from the other, then pummeling Konrad’s face, crumpling his helmet’s steel snout.

  The soldier falls, landing on his back, his grip slipping from his mace as Sigvald holds it overhead.

  “No!” screams Sigrid as she catches sight of the mace in Sigvald’s hand while struggling under the weight of the Lieutenant.

  “Trial by combat,” says the Lieutenant in a voice as cold as the void of space. “In battle, truth will be revealed. This is the law you live by. This is the law by which you shall die. This is what you wanted. I implore you, Sigrid: change your mind. There’s still time.”

  “Osrick…” says Sigrid as if she’s about to plead. “For the Emperor. Those words will never leave my heart.” Her voice is as strong as steel now.

  Lt. Osrick puts his hand around Sigrid’s throat. “I could kill. I should kill you. I am giving you one last chance, Sigrid!”

  Gustav starts a dash to Konrad, but Elisia grabs the back of his armor’s collar and throws him to the ground. The two tumble on the ground, grappling.

  Aurick awakens, rolling over, trying to stand. His legs are useless.

  “What do you know?” says one of the officers, watching him. “You missed. He’s still alive.”

  “You’re right. I should finish the job,” he says, raising his sword to impale Aurick again as he crawls feebly toward his sworn brother.

  “Nah. Let him keep crawling. It’s cute. There’s nothing else he can do.”

  Sigvald swings the mace down.

  “No…” says Aurick through grit teeth. All he can do is watch as Konrad’s mace rushes down.

  The coup de grace crumple’s Konrad’s helmet like a half-empty can of beans under the heel of an angry child.

  “No!”

  They came all this way…

  Sigvald raises the mace for another blow. “Why don’t you tell me how it feels?!” he screams. He bashes Konrad’s head again. “Maybe use your head next time! Maybe think! Think before you strike your betters, traitor!” He laughs. He strikes again. He laughs even more as if it were all a mad joke.

  “Hit him all you want,” says Aurick. “The Emperor still holds the Lunar Throne. The Vulfreich still stands. Your Revolution is doomed, and you will be forgotten while the world we sacrificed ourselves for lives on.”

  “Look at me,” says Sigvald while turning to Aurick. He is now as cold and calm as a mid-December night after the snow has fallen and frozen the air still and put the beasts to sleep and hidden its secrets beneath the pale moonlight. “I am the Revolution.”

  Sigrid continues to struggle against Osrick. His hand tightens around her neck. She seizes her chance this time; with his mind and body strained from wielding the psychic lightning, she throws him off.

  Elisia throws Gustav against the wall again. She picks her zweihander up.

  “Forgive me, Madlina. I’m so sorry,” says Gustav. His entire body bursts into flames. “Tell Ludvig I died well.” He marches toward the Commander, a black silhouette trapped inside an inferno. “Tell him I died for the Emperor, for my sworn brothers and sister.”

  “You trained well in your art, knight-errant,” says Elisia, “but you know nothing of the secrets the Yog offer. Shame. You could have truly mastered the craft if you’d only been free to do so.”

  Aurick continues to crawl, and the officers continue to watch him, delighting in sick humor. The soldier lays himself across the bloody corpse of his sworn brother.

  “May Voltyr find you,” says Aurick. “There’s no chance he’ll find me. I didn’t take the Faith seriously enough. But you, I’m sure he’ll find you. And when he does, come looking for me in that life as you did this one. I should have listened to you sooner, brother.”

  Sigvald raises the mace.

  “Find me.”

  He swings down.

  “Find me.”

  The head of the weapon crushes Aurick’s helm and his skull along with it.

  Sigrid raises a fist to punch Osrick’s exposed head. Before she can swing, he shocks her again with the red lightning. This time, the electric blades send sparks bursting off her armor, smoke rising from the plates. She falls to the side.

  Gustav collides with Elisia as she impales him on her massive sword. Orange-yellow flames burst from him, slamming her to the ground as a black cloud of smoke envelops her once more.

  As the fire dies, the massive, charred lump that was once a wolf-man, once a sworn brother to the others, lies on the ground as Elisia rises, holding her hand to her left eye.

  “You actually managed to scratch me,” she says with no more than a hint of surprise in her somber voice. “In the eye, too, of all places. I should have been more careful.”

  “Hand me a sword,” says Osrick. “I will at least give her the honor of a clean death.”

  One of the officers tosses him a blade. He catches it, then pulls Sigrid’s helmet from her head.

  Her face is burned into my brain: she is as noble as I’d imagined. Her long, auburn hair tumbles about her face in a thousand coiling curls. Her pointed ears stick out above it just barely. Her blue eyes clench in ferocious, dignified defiance. Freckles dot her white cheeks.

  Osrick points the sword at her chest.

  She fights against her broken armor, getting to her knees, trying to stand. She looks at the point of the sword, then to Osrick’s red eyes.

  “Go to your grave,” she says, “knowing you betrayed and slew the woman you loved because she loved her people more than she would ever love you.” There is so much contempt in her words, I cannot tell if they are true.

  The sword glows purple in Osrick’s hand. Without a word, he runs it through her heart.

  “We’re done here,” says Elisia, still holding a hand over her eye, her face covered in blood. “Set a course for Gothovia.”

  A golden sun rises in a blue sky over the mountains on the horizon. The golden rays pass by drifting white clouds to warm a valley dotted with villages, glittering on the streams and lakes and lighting the forests between them.

  A dame as regal as a princess sits at a wooden table on a white marble balcony overlooking the valley. She stares at a bouquet of ochre and purple rose-like flowers standing in a clear glass vase, occasionally glancing down to write in a notebook.

  Her long, golden hair is pulled back into a high ponytail, tied with a royal blue bow, sending a cascade of golden locks down her back. Two wolf ears sit atop her head. Tresses and curls frame her pale face in which sit solemn blue eyes as noble as any Saint’s in a Church icon. Her off-white dress, tied and decorated with more royal blue bows, elegantly compliments her femininity while retaining all modesty.

  “Momma,” says a small boy as he walks out onto the balcony. He’s maybe five years old. “I’m bored. Can we go to the lake today?” His tousled hair is dirty blonde and thick enough to almost hide his ears. A little white collar sticks out over the top of a gray coat. His pants reach just past his knees, where they blouse into maroon and white striped socks.

  “Have you done your studies?” she asks with a smile to rival the sun’s warmth and glow.

  “Yes.”

  “Come sit in Momma’s lap while she finishes up.”

  “Okay.”

  His little legs carry him over to his mother. He climbs onto her lap and begins playing with her golden tresses.

  “Why are you crying, Momma?”

  She hugs her son, hiding her face from his. Tears drip down her cheeks.

  On the page in the notebook, it reads:

  Another whisper came to my ears today. “Forgive me, Madlina. I’m so sorry.”