In the world of Asgard.
The sky had gone the color of old blood by afternoon, a heavy crimson that made the torn earth look deeper and the bodies look blacker.
The battlefield stretched for miles...
broken siege wagons, splintered banners, mounds of churned soil turned to sucking mud by a day of rain and spilled life.
Knights in dented plate formed lines that broke and reformed, mages stood on hummocks with hands out and faces set, and between them all the abominations moved like a tide that had learned how to think.
Magic snapped the air, leaving the taste of copper on the tongue and the reek of something burnt that wasn't wood.
The abominations came on four limbs or six or a jerking dozen, their bodies wrong in ways a person's eyes didn't accept at first.
Joints bent in directions that would shatter human bone.
Their skin...
if skin was the right word—looked pulled too tight and too thin, and where you saw underneath, it was not muscle or fat but a layered glisten like meat taken apart and put together wrong.
They moved fast.
They moved with purpose.
They made no sound except the clicking scrape of claw on stone and the wet snap when they took someone down.
Spells hit them and worked only half the time.
A bolt of lightning split one open, and it staggered, smoked, and then the crackling lines died and the thing kept moving.
Fire burned, but the flames ran off them in sheets unless the caster held the stream long enough to turn joints brittle.
Ice spears shattered and sometimes the shards lodged and froze deep, but more often the abomination shook itself and ice fell off like slush from a boot.
The knights knew where to aim, learned in an hour of horror what no training yard had taught them—
cut the tendons, take the limbs, break the core.
But the core moved. The core slithered under plates of bone that weren't bone, and every time a man found it by luck or faith, the next one was built different.
They were holding a line, the army. They were not winning.
They stood because the alternative was to run, and running meant the tide washed into the supply camp and then into the cities.
Drums beat somewhere behind the reserves, steady as a heartbeat, and in front of them the heartbeat was drowning.
A horn sounded to the west.
A captain shouted to tighten the flank.
A mage screamed because the spell he had used all morning—his only real one—had finally run dry and his focus stone cracked in his palm like old glass.
In the chaos, the men still saw each other, still hauled one another up, still leaned shields together. People are stubborn. They kept being people even when the world went wrong.
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He fought within a squad that had been fifteen at dawn and ten by noon and seven now.
His name was Daren, son of a cobbler from a village with a single well and a shade tree by the road.
He had joined for the pay and the stories and the iron promise that a uniform might make him into the kind of man his mother believed in when she told bedtime tales.
Daren's spear had a nick halfway down the shaft where it had caught on a wagon wheel earlier and almost cost him his hand.
He felt the nick every time his grip slid.
He had a simple helmet that kept slipping down over one eyebrow and making the world tilt.
His arms ached enough that he was not sure they would answer him if he needed a clean thrust, and every time he breathed, the air burned too hot in his lungs.
He was not useless.
His point went where he aimed it often enough. He knew to step with his strikes, to keep weight forward, to guard his left with the shield.
But he was not a veteran.
When the abominations rushed, their speed made him freeze for half a heartbeat too long, and he drove his spear late, and that meant the thing swept a hooked limb at his knee and he barely twisted clear, and it was
— Sergeant Hal,
three paces over, who put a sword in the joint that made the thing collapse.
"On the right, Daren," Hal snapped without looking.
"Keep your right closed. You're leaving a door."
Daren tightened his stance and nodded though the sergeant couldn't see. He knew his hands were shaking.
He forced them still. He hated the way fear made him clumsy.
He hated how his mind kept darting to the wrong things: the noise, the smell, the way the light leaned on the edge of the world as if the sun were trying to push through a skin of blood.
Another rush.
Jory with the broken nose took the front, bellowed something cheerful that didn't match the tremor in his voice, and parried a blow that would have taken Daren's head off, then went down when a second limb came from under the first.
"Get him," someone said.
Daren stepped in.
He was close enough to see the abomination's eye—if that bulging pearl was an eye—turn toward him.
He thrust for that, and his point skidded.
He thrust again.
This time the spearhead punched into soft meat behind a plate.
He pushed hard, and the thing screamed without noise, and he felt it buck and tear.
Jory rolled free, blood slick on his armor that wasn't his own yet.
"Good," Hal said.
"Again."
Daren pulled back, shoved forward.
His arm shook, the nick in the shaft caught on the creature's plate, and his grip slid.
The spear twisted from his hands and went with the collapsing weight.
He snatched for it and almost fell over the dead thing.
Hal's boot came down on the abomination's throat and his sword went in one clean motion.
Hal kicked Daren's spear back to him.
"Hold it like it's part of you," Hal said, not unkind.
"You let it go, it takes you with it."
Daren nodded again.
He watched the men breathe around him.
He watched an abomination leap and get taken by a dozen blades at once.
He saw a mage, face gray, fire still curling from his fingers, stumble and put a hand to a wounded man's shoulder as if the touch meant anything now.
It did.
The wounded man pushed himself up and went back to the line.
He thought of his mother's stories, of silver helms and banners that never fell. He had loved those stories. He had believed them even after he learned that the silver was tin and polish and that banners fall all the time in wind and in fear.
He had wanted to be one of the names. He knew now that he was not.
He kept moving. He kept the right side closed. He did not let go of the spear.
The squad bent and bent again.
An abomination with a body like a spider and a face that wasn't a face fell on Brann and opened him from hip to shoulder before anyone could say the name.
A second tore Jory's calf as he tried to drag Brann back, and Jory screamed the first time since dawn and kept moving anyway until a third hit him from the side and made the decision for him.
"Fall back by the drum!" Hal yelled.
"Staggered retreat! Move!"
They moved. Not a rout. A step back, a guard, a give-and-take that had the rhythm of men who had done this before.
Daren's rhythm was close but not exact.
He lost it when a woman he didn't know grabbed his sleeve with both hands, eyes wide, and said something he couldn't hear over the noise.
He shook her off and then hated himself and then went to pull her after him and she was already gone, swallowed under a rush that came so fast it looked like the ground rippling.
Five became four.
Four became three.
Sergeant Hal turned once more to cover them and held an abomination by the throat with his shield-edge while he drove his sword up into its core
—Daren saw it this time, a twisting, shivering mass under the plates—and then a second creature took Hal from the side while he was still pushing.
Hal went to his knees with a look like a man who remembered a joke and couldn't finish it.
Daren went toward him without deciding to.
He put his spear through the second creature's shoulder-plate and the spear jammed there and would not come free.
Hal looked up at Daren and opened his mouth and bled.
"Go," Hal said.
Daren went. He hated himself again. He would hate himself more later.
Two became one.
He ran. Not straight—nothing was straight on that ground.
He dodged the fallen and the half-living and the men still fighting, and he felt the field like a great animal pulling at his feet.
He left the drums behind. He left the commands behind.
He left his breath behind and had to reach back and drag it forward.
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The battle of giants began to his left and he had no choice but to witness it.
A hill had been there in the morning. It was a crater now, a bowl with shattered stone at the rim like teeth.
At the center of the bowl, an abomination four times the height of a man stood on pillars of bone that retracted and plunged like piston legs.
Its torso was layered ribs, each rib a saw. Beneath, something swollen beat and glowed with a dull inner light.
Facing it was a knight captain in battered gold, cloak torn and helmet gone.
The captain's sword was two hands wide at the base, narrowing to a razor tip, runes smoldering along the fuller.
Every cut he made left a bright scar in the air that took a moment to fade.
There were three mages on the rim—one in blue with her hands in a circle, one with a staff held high, one crouched and bleeding into a bowl carved of stone.
Their spells braided and struck like a storm.
The abomination took a step and the ground jumped.
The captain met it, sword up, and when the saw-ribs came down he put the blade between them and shouldered hard and pried.
The ribs screamed against the metal.
The mages threw crackling lines of force that anchored in the thing's legs and held it for a breath and then the lines snapped like old rope and lashed back across the hilltop, slicing tents and the men in them.
Shockwaves hit Daren in the chest.
He felt them through his ribs as if someone were clapping him hard enough to rearrange his heart.
He staggered. He tried to pick a path that took him far around, but the fight moved as fights move, without asking him.
When the captain drove the sword deep, a burst of light came from the abomination's chest—bright, raw, white-hot—and the world trembled.
The blast took Daren off his feet and tossed him like a sack.
He felt himself turn once. He heard his own sound, a cut-off grunt that might have been a word.
He struck the ground sideways and something in his lower left leg gave with a sound like a green branch breaking.
He lay still because he had no choice.
Pain came on a slow wave. Not the sharp kind at first. A deep, heavy ache that filled his whole body and then narrowed to the place where his leg wasn't right.
He tried to sit up and saw nothing but the sky because his helmet had slipped down over his eyes again. He laughed once, short and mean, and pushed the helmet up with shaking fingers.
The fight on the hill went on without him. The captain staggered now, blood bright on his cheek.
The abomination had lost one leg and was using a bone-saw arm to drag itself forward.
The mages on the rim were down to two.
Daren watched because there was nothing else to do while his breath found a rhythm that did not hurt as much.
He looked at his leg. The shin lay wrong, angling under the skin where it should not.
His boot had already begun to swell tight around the ankle. He tried to move and a spark ran up his spine. He stopped moving.
He thought, with a clarity that surprised him: I am not built for this.
He had known it before, but he had not let the thought form itself.
He had been telling himself other things. That effort mattered most.
That grit filled the gaps talent left.
That if he showed up and pushed long enough, he would become the man in the stories.
He had envied the gifted without saying the word envy.
He had told himself that gifts were a trick, that luck was the same as skill and that he had the better kind because he cared more.
Now he watched a man who was truly gifted fight a thing that should not exist, and he felt resentment like bile in his throat because the captain had been born to this and he, Daren, had not.
He felt resentment at the world because it had handed some men swords that glowed and voices that carried and backs that did not break. He felt resentment at himself because he had pretended that was not true.
He wanted to matter. He wanted to be the person a squad survived because of. He wanted to have the story, not just repeat it.
He lay in the mud with his leg at the wrong angle and understood that he had been a burden all day.
Not always—a man can block a blow for another without being a hero.
But enough.
Hal had died while covering him. Jory had gone down while pulling someone else back and Daren had been the someone else once, twice.
He could list the ways he had cost and not contributed in equal measure. The list was not short.
The captain screamed something and drove his sword down to the hilt.
The abomination shrieked; the sound was inside Daren's teeth.
Light burst again, smaller this time, and the thing's inner glow went.
The captain fell to one knee. The mages did not get up.
Daren looked away from the hill and saw the battlefield at his level: boots passing, wheels skidding, bodies that had been men and women an hour ago now obstacles.
He put his hands in the mud and tried to crawl. His leg dragged wrong and made a thick line.
He heard the scrape behind him and froze.
The sound was small, almost shy, the sound of something testing its weight on stone.
He turned his head and saw a lesser abomination picking its way through the wreckage.
It was only the size of a large dog, with two forelimbs that were too long and a head that blossomed open like a flower around a set of grinding plates.
It was not one of the giants. It was not the kind of threat that made heroes swing great swords.
It saw him and came on three delicate steps, pausing between each as if to savor the sight.
He grabbed for his spear and remembered he did not have it.
He grabbed for his knife and his fingers found the empty loop because he had dropped the knife somewhere during the last retreat.
He threw a handful of mud because the hand could still close and something in him had to do something.
The mud hit the abomination's face and slid off.
It blinked—or the membranes over its eyes slid once and back—and it kept coming.
"Help," Daren screamed.
He had not meant to.
The word was a reflex no different than a knee jerking when tapped with a hammer.
No one heard him. If they did, they had their own problems.
He tried to pull himself backward.
His leg bumped a stone and a dark fire went through him.
He choked and swallowed it and the abomination was closer, close enough now that he could see tiny hair-thin cilia along its inner plates, waving, tasting the air.
He thought of the shade tree by the road in his village and of his mother's face in the light from the cooking fire and of the way Hal had said "Go" with blood in his mouth as if it were a normal order.
He thought of all the mornings he had woken and told himself he would be better that day.
He thought, bitter as ash: Of course it ends like this. Of course I am the one that needs saving, not the one who saves.
He was angry at that. He was angry that the world had arranged itself so neatly to prove him small. He was angry that he had helped it.
The abomination's shadow fell over his chest.
He put his forearm up and it bit down and bone cracked like thin ice.
He didn't hear his own cry. He felt the pressure and the heat and the wetness and then less of everything.
If there had been a prayer, he had forgotten it.
If there had been a last clever thought, it did not come.
There were only the simple things and the resentment and the regret that sat beside it like a quiet twin.
The creature struck again. The world narrowed to a point and then the point went out.
Boots pounded past.
A cart lurched, its wheel bumping over something that had been someone.
The drums beat on because someone struck them and that was their job.
Smoke drifted and lay down over the field as the sun slid lower and the sky held to its bad color.
Where he fell, mud took his shape and then relaxed.
The lines of his crawl smoothed under new footprints.
By evening, when the stretcher-men counted and gave up counting, there would be no mark that one more had ended here except what he had taken and left, which was less than he had hoped and more than nothing.
A nameless soldier's story closed in the crush and noise.