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It’s become clear to Fenrir over the weeks that he toes an invisible line between the miner’s trust and the authority his station has granted him. His focus on the safety of the mine has saved it enough times to count that the other senior foremen don’t question the time he spends with the men anymore. But the whiff of dissent has been clogging the air for the last year, and Fenrir understands the game he has to play to keep helping who he can. The white lies he needs to tell, the optics he has to maintain.

“Haven’t risked my life keeping us alive just to run at the first chance I get. The mine comes first, without it we’re all dead anyway.”

The senior foremen have begun carrying actual weapons on top of their normal batons. The swords at their waist are tarnished, the handles wrapped in leather that is cracked and peeling away. Guards patrol the surface, each miner crossing two barriers made of pikes and a small gaggle of archers Fenrir can’t help stare at and remember.

Vera, perched atop their wagon, bow in hand, her arrow taking down a Jackdog with one perfect shot.

Is it possible the warrior empress is his mother? Has she finally realized that Fenrir isn’t coming home? Maybe it’s her armies which have razed the land, liberated hundreds, speak of uniting their land under a single banner, rebuilding all that their world has lost.

Fenrir tucks that dream away and descends into the mine to gather his team.

“Something’s up,” he tells them. “Something big.”

The attack comes three nights later, a siren rising with the sun, dawn breaking with the spill of blood.

It becomes very clear that the guards are not there for the miners’ protection when Fenrir is woken to a sword at his throat and a hand in his hair. He’s dragged from his bunk and out into the cool morning, sword tips nudging him into line with the rest of his team and towards the mouth of the mine.

He’s one of the last to enter before the spark of a lit wick catches in his peripheral. Fenrir lunges for Anya at the exact moment the mouth of the mine blasts inward, rock and dirt collapsing to seal him and the rest of the miners in.

Darkness swallows them, lamplight extinguished, shadows eating up the pale morning light. But Fenrir doesn’t need to see, he can hear: a battle cry in the distance, the pounding rush of a thousand feet. It echoes through the mine shaft like the stampede is right above them, a reality they all confront when they realize why they’ve been sealed in.

“Help me with this!” Fenrir calls into the darkness.

The thing about trapping miners in a mine is that they’ve all grown very good at digging.

Rocks pass hands, boulders are shoved into tight corners, and dirt skitters through holes they cannot yet see, but then a streak of gray blue light spills into the darkness, and from that breach Fenrir and the men at his back begin to dig in earnest. The stampede above has grown louder, the pound of feet joined by the clop of hooves in what Fenrir recognizes as horses. It’s an outright charge but the foremen and mine owners are prepared. A rumble tears through the mine shaft, another explosion rocking the mine around them and sending a fresh patter of rocks down the shaft.

“We need to hurry!” The mine owner may have sealed them in this place to keep them from joining the fight, but they apparently weren’t above killing them all in a cave in.

More light spilled through the collapsed mouth, the holes growing bigger, wide enough for Fenrir to see—

A woman atop a black horse with a bloodied sword raised above her head, dust clouds rising up to frame her against a rising morning sun, heroic silhouette forged into impossible reality.

Something fills Fenrir’s chest he hasn’t felt in years: Hope.

He and the others dig faster.

Chapter XL

The Third Spell

The morning of the tenth day, Orpheus watched the sun rise through his window and wondered if he’d made a grave mistake.

She’s coming. With his mind, Orpheus paced his cell, shackled to a floor he had no desire to rise from and a rock bottom he didn’t care to reject.

She’ll be here. He glanced at the window once again, city waking with the sunlight, the future barreling closer despite the fate that awaited him that day.

She has to come, snarled through him like a tangle of barbs, the shadows in the corner of his room moving with his imagination. A pair of eyes here, a shift of movement there.

But no whisper of magic, or curl of smoke. There was no “Hey, Fifi”, or “what’s next?” or “What are we working on today?” to fill the voided emptiness of his prison cell, or the mournful murmur of the city beyond. Only a quiet that seemed reverential, a moment of silence for a city that, on its surface, deserved a day of peace.

Orpheus did not care. The only thing Sanctuary deserved was to burn down in a catastrophe of its own making because they’d killed Fenrir, and people far wiser than him had already decided humanity wasn’t worth the air they breathed. Who was he to disagree?

I’ll kill them all. He imagined what that would look like: the flames and the inferno and the smoke and the screams. Like the power cell’s attack but turned on the city streets themselves, lightning arcing across the cobbles to strike bodies where they ran, Netherflame turning the canals molten, a lava flow of the same obsidian Sanctuary was built from, now forged from the remains of the people who call it home.

And maybe it was a good thing Fenrir wasn’t around to see him like this. Maybe, if he’d lived, he’d have eventually discovered this part of Orpheus that truly did not fucking care about anyone who wasn’t important to him. Those pieces of himself he’d never been able to comfortably fit into Fenrir’s purview hadn’t seemed consequential in the months between Lore’s defeat and today. That Orpheus had chosen a version of himself that suited a life of happiness and peace did not mean the person who had scraped an existence from the murder of a dozen hermits after surviving over a decade of torture at their hands was any less real. They co-existed inside him, and that he needed to become one rather than the other now of all times was simply a testament to the genuine hope he had falsely held that Fenrir was coming at all.

Fenrir wasn’t coming, because Fenrir was dead.