Varius wasn’t here to sacrifice their bodies or trample their spirits. He had to find another way.
A conundrum, when the tool at his disposal was a giant sorcerous army.
But the continued presence of his soldiers gave him hope. They might not have wanted to fight the empire’s wars, but they did want to protect their people. Some of them were even smart enough to notice that as long as they didn’t stand in front of his golems, he ignored them.
His first step was clearly to circumvent dealing avoidable damage, but that wouldn’tfixanything. He had all this power, but all he could do with it was break things.
Varius wielded tools of destruction, and maybe he couldn’t build with them. But he could make space for others to, creating the structures and monuments that mattered in their lives.
Like Theira had.
And that meant daring to dream as boldly as she had, too.
So: since he had no interest in breaking his own people, what could he break? Whatneededbreaking?
Power. Always, it came down to power.
And there were several ways he might break the power that mattered.
Maybe. If his years of service bought him anything, and if he played this just right.
So Varius cleared the streets of combatants.
But also of statues of patricians, by the simple expedient of swinging the golems’ mighty arms, every crash more satisfying than the last, a rhythm building.
Advance.
Destroy.
Save.
That stone could be put to better purpose. The patricians didn’t deserve veneration or even deference.
Varius directed the golems around buildings as much as possible, but some of the sturdier ones allowed the golems to pile on top of each other to scale them for better visibility through the smoke.
One golem he also pushed off a roof to shatter a particularly large effigy of Caius Sobanus.
Inexorably, the golems dispersed any remaining pockets of soldiers doing Sobanus’ bidding and fighting against the citizens they had taken up arms to protect.
Some soldiers tried launching arrows, to see if they could even faze the golems, to no effect.
One brave contingent piled on a golem in an attempt to overwhelm it with numbers, which effectively blocked that one’s vision but not all of them. Varius used another golem to, as gently as he could with giant clay fists, brush them off.
Still the soldiers tried to deflect this invasion on their city, launching fire.
Not stupid, and not giving up.
Until Varius used a golem to catch the fire and instead of hurling it back at them or just knocking it away into a building, he carefully set it in a fountain full of water, putting the flaming ballistic out safely.
And then his golem picked up a bucket of water and passed it to another, a line forming toward the center of a fire that only indestructible clay soldiers could get close enough to put out.
Watching that, finally, seemed to turn the tide.
Varius marched through the city, and gradually the soldiers followed him, fighting him less and less but keeping a careful eye on his progress. Eventually they formed lines to block certain routes difficult to see through the smoke. Varius recognized belatedly they were places the golems wouldn’t fit, or that might be too structurally delicate to support their passage.
Maybe the soldiers suspected who was controlling the golems, but they didn’t know. Did the deniability matter? And if they did know—
Varius couldn’t let them down now. Not after how he’d left them, to this.
