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It was Fenrir who reacted first. Fenrir who clapped Atticus on the shoulder and said, “Don’t suppose you’ve got a sword on hand, friend?”

Atticus went stiff and Daedra began unsheathing hers when Farris stepped out from the crowd.

“Sir!” he called, arm raised, a familiar black and opalescent silver sword catching the light. “Maybe this will help?”

Atticus gasped while Orpheus’ blood ran cold.

The sword sailed through the air, end over end, a slow-motion arc Atticus watched with frozen eyes. Fenrir caught it with a dramatic roll of its weight over his knuckles, familiarity flaunted with ease, a smile the size of the square’s chasm plastered across his face. And it might have done the same for Orpheus if all thoughts of who that sword actually belonged to didn’t slam into his mind.

“Fenrir—” Orpheus rasped, voice breaking too soft to hear when Fenrir turned towards the chain.

Atticus slid from his peripheral, and like a nightmare made real, Orpheus’ leg buckled before he could react. Gwen caught him, holding fast while Orpheus’ vision swam, adrenaline tapped dry and replaced with a light-pulsing fever. She may have been speaking but the ringing inside his head grew too loud, the light too bright, all he saw through his sparkling vision was Fenrir’s arms raised high, sword tight in his grip, and the snap of a white cloak drawing near.

The sword fell, the chain broke, and Atticus’ knife sank in.

“No,” Gwen breathed, and Orpheus realized at the exact moment Gwen did what Atticus held in his hand. “Atticus, no!”

The Iro knife plunged into Fenrir’s side, past the seam of his cuirass and into his flesh with a flinch that recoiled through his bones and a finality that brought him still. Then stiff. And as momentum tipped him over the chasm, as Orpheus finally found the strength to lunge forward and scream, all the light left Fenrir’s eyes, and it wasn’t death that took its place.

It was peace.

Interlude

Hero

The rush of clean air is second to the blinding morning light.

Fenrir stumbles from the mine and into chaos, the miners at his back coming to a similar standstill. They may be free, but with that freedom comes a choice. One many of them had been prepared to make but once confronted with it, quickly realize they hadn’t considered all that meant.

Men moan at their feet, bloodied entrails slicking the dirt a ruddy brown. Where the smoke rises most densely, Fenrir finds himself staring, not at fantastical creatures he spent years plotting the death of, but the guards who, just minutes ago, he’d merely wanted to escape.

Reality, he acknowledges, is entirely different from the battleground inside his head.

“Fenrir.” At his side, Anya pants. “What do we do?”

“Find a sword.” It’s all he can think of—and whether that sword will be used in defense or to cut their way to freedom he hasn’t thought through. All he knows is that when the leather-bound hilt digs into his fist, he stops thinking at all.

The sword sails through the air like it’s an extension of the arm, a sweeping arc that cleaves a head from a guard’s soldier with far less effort than Fenrir thinks it should.

Beside him, Anya struggles to yank a sword from the hand of a dead man. Fenrir reaches down and tears it free for her.

“Have you done this before?” Anya asks, disbelief coloring her voice when Fenrir swings back around and stabs a guard straight through the neck.

“Kinda,” Fenrir breathes, adrenaline compelling him forward, the weight of the sword different from the stick he once wielded. “Cover my back,” are as good last words as any.

He hacks his way forward, through the guards tasked with defending the mouth of the mine and towards the last place he’d seen that woman.

At the top of the hill he comes to a stop, devastation sprawling across the grassy knoll below him. Blood makes mud of the dirt and there’s a taste of burning metal on his tongue, what he recognizes as dynamite and the blown-up pieces of the soldiers below confirm his suspicions. Guards and soldiers alike lay moaning at his feet, but at the center of it all is the horse-mounted woman, dark hair spilling over her shoulder, violet flame leaking from her steed’s eyes, a puff of frigid air expelling from its nostrils.

Magic, Fenrir realizes with a euphoric sense of glee.

This is Empress Lore.

“Anya. Anya.”

“I see her,” she breathes, clutching his arm. “All hells, we have to help.”

At least two-dozen guards have her cornered, what Fenrir recognizes as pikes leveled at her horse’s chest, a few men with guns sprawled out dead in the mud nearest Fenrir. Whatever the horse is made of, it’s not flesh, but even as the pikes glance off its haunches it becomes clear the woman is cornered. She keeps glancing towards the opposite hill but it’s Fenrir who charges to her aid.