I donned my finest hat—the golden-brown one, broad of brim, with a single feather tucked neatly in the band. It curved just so, like a brushstroke laid by a painter half-drunk on pride. I could not recall the bird it came from. Something rare, something foreign—likely one of those coastal fowl the Guild catalogued in boastful ledgers. But what mattered was not its origin. It was the gesture. The finery. The suggestion of times when men dressed for the joy of being seen.

  My coat came next: green linen stitched to smooth wool, lined in white along collar and cuff. It bore the weight of years with grace. No longer stiff with starch, but softened by wear into something noble. My breeches matched—neatly pressed, slightly snug from days of missed meals—and the hose, ah, the hose! White as saints' robes, washed with rain and worry and still holding.

  The polished mirror I kept above the desk revealed little in the way of detail—the glass was old, warbled at the edges. But what it showed was enough. A silhouette of respect. A man worth the dust he’d gathered.

  It looked like taste. Like a better time.

  Like import.

  And I smiled. For once, without irony. It came easily, like a memory uncovered. A familiar curl of the lips, drawn from a theatre long closed but never quite forgotten.

  It felt like opening night.

  I could hear the applause. The kind that didn’t thunder but pulsed—a polite, courtly rhythm. I imagined it now: the crowd leaning in, ready to praise, ready to affirm that yes, Adalbert van Aarden had once more done the improbable. Had given voice to silence. Had made sense of the senseless.

  I bowed to them. Courteously. In the mirror, if not on the stage. But the gesture was the same.

  A final breath. And the task began.

  Not a performance, this time—but something far greater.

  To record the thoughts of silent beings.

  To draw ink from the well of memory, long buried in mute flesh and unspeaking centuries.

  To pen what had never been penned.

  Their world—and now, ours.

  Time to make history.

  I opened the door from my sleeping quarters into the writing—and dining—room. The air hit me like a sigh: stale, slightly sweet with dust, tinged with the ghost of old ink and older dinners. More grim than I remembered. The light had receded in recent weeks, as though even the sun had grown hesitant to intrude upon such clutter.

  Still. It was home. And now, no longer mine alone.

  Lotte stood at the window, back turned, shoulders broad and still. He faced the view I had come to claim as consolation—the slate-grey rooftops stacked like books in a careless library, the distant belltowers leaning in gossip, and the slow, tarnished ribbon of the river threading through it all. That smell—brackish and half-rotten—rose faintly even now. Hasholm’s breath. The stench of life. The price of survival.

  “It is a view, is it not?” I asked gently, not wanting to break whatever had stilled him. I knew his lot once—he slept near pigs, near butchery, near the stink of daily death. I had never asked where he slept now. A failing of mine. One of many.

  “Yes,” he said, voice steady. “I do enjoy it. I see things in a clearer light now.”

  There was something final in how he said it. Not enlightened—cleansed.

  “It is good to hear, friend,” I murmured. “It is good to hear your voice.” I stepped nearer. The floorboards creaked like old men rising to greet one another. There was too much to say. Too much, and none of it dressed properly.

  “I never truly spoke to you, did I?” The words came too fast, but too honestly to withdraw. “I wish I had. But you didn’t seem… receptive.”

  Not cruelly said. But the guilt knotted in my throat just the same.

  “Adalbert, I was not receptive.” His voice, never sharp, carried its own weight. He turned from the window with slow grace, like the shifting of old timber—measured, unhurried. “I know the state we were in. Why would you talk to me?”

  There was no bitterness in it. Only candour, worn smooth by time.

  His eyes—those strange, plate-polished mirrors of thought—flicked over me. A glance up, then down, and he very nearly smiled.

  “You’ve dressed for an outing?”

  I straightened, half-defensive, then caught myself and laughed. “Well, I thought I should dress for the occasion,” I said, gesturing down the length of my bright green coat, the embroidered cuffs, the ivory-white stockings stretched daringly taut. “I do believe this may be my greatest work, and greatest honour, yet in the making. And good writing—” I tapped my temple, then my chest “—only comes when all your matter is in order.”

  Lotte’s grin, now unconcealed, rose slow and wide. “Then let us prepare your matter, Master Chronicler.”

  “Indeed, Master Lotte. Please, make yourself comfortable.”

  I gestured, prematurely, to the armchair across from mine—an invitation made in hope rather than reason. The poor thing had barely survived my own indulgences; to ask it to cradle Lotte’s towering frame would’ve been an act of cruelty.

  Mercifully, he spared both of us. Instead, he turned and leaned—gently, purposefully—against the broad sill of the window. His silhouette eclipsed the ashen daylight, turning the cloudy world beyond into a pale suggestion. In the hush that followed, I fancied him a statue cast in pewter, gazing down at the city like a forgotten sentinel.

  “Now, Lotte…” I smoothed my cuffs, cleared the throat with all due gravity. “I have interviewed a great number of persons. Some highborn, others low, a few who pretended to be both. For coin, for posterity, for inheritance claims and family feuds. But this…”

  I gestured broadly, to the inkpot, to the parchment, to the faded rug beneath our feet. “This is new ground. A fresh stage, if I may be poetic. Still, I find comfort in routine. So let us begin as I usually do.”

  Lotte’s form nodded once—no trace of irony or impatience. Only readiness, a charged stillness, the way some ancient mechanisms must sit in waiting, patient for the right touch. Perhaps he was as eager as I, though he bore it with far greater dignity.

  “Lotte,” I said, laying the point of my graphite to the virgin page, “we begin at the beginning.

  Who are you?

  Where are you from?”

  He leaned back then, face-torso tilting toward the ceiling beams as if tracing something etched there. A pause. A breath drawn from the deeper cellars of the mind.

  “Who am I?” he repeated, voice distant, unmoored. “Oh… that answer has many facets.”

  The room stilled. Even the hearth seemed to hush.

  “I am Lotte, yes,” he said. “But I seem to remember an older name.”

  His chest furrowed—no, his brow, for he had none—and he let his weight shift slowly from one arm to the other. I waited. My graphite hovered above the page, trembling like a leaf on its stem.

  “Wigburg.”

  He said it softly, reverently. As if it were a relic, lifted from the depths of a long-buried tomb.

  “It feels natural to me.”

  I wrote it down before I could even think. Wigburg. The strokes of each letter pulled through the paper like anchors dropped in history’s deep.

  “Very good, Lott—Wigburg. But—”

  “Call me Lotte, Adalbert.”

  His voice interrupted without insistence, only a calming steadiness.

  “I feel no shame in the name. I remember the fondness with which the children gave it to me.”

  The page faltered beneath my hand for a moment. I looked up.

  “Lotte. If I may… Wigburg is an old name. A human name.”

  He nodded again. Slower this time. As if agreeing not with me, but with the wind outside.

  “Who named you this?” I asked.

  Lotte did not answer at once. He shifted his gaze from the ceiling to the window, letting his eyes wander the rooftop sprawl beyond. The city stretched below him like a memory—worn, sullen, restless.

  "I falter here. I am sure I did not name myself thus. I would assume a mother, or father."

  His voice dropped slightly. It was the sound of a truth told from under a blanket, muffled by years and wounds.

  His eyes drifted from rooftop to rooftop, drawn not by the view, but by a quiet, desperate search. As if the tiled lines and chimney peaks might, by grace or accident, arrange themselves into a memory. As if the city itself might whisper back the name of the one who gave him his.

  "I remember no mother. Not father. No tribe, clan, or other word for home. But I know that is where we—you—found us."

  There was no accusation in the words. Only the kind of aching neutrality that grows where memory has failed but pain has not.

  "The missionaries and discoverers tell of tribes found by the plains and the rivers," I said softly. “And of even more of you in the east, by the great forest.”

  "I remember forests," he said. The concession was heavy, as if it carried not just uncertainty, but guilt.

  His breath lingered after the words, thickening the air between us.

  "Adalbert," he said, “there are many gaps. I do not know what you will get from this.”

  “Lotte, we have unearthed a name! A name who binds you to a time, and place! It is a great start, and a discovery most of the Studium would walk through broken glass to acquire!”

  I let the words hang, sweet with the kind of triumph scholars rarely taste outside of lost texts and misfiled wills. Then, with theatrical gravity, I slumped into my chair—the good one, worn smooth at the elbows and seat, with stuffing that had surrendered long ago to the shape of my ambition.

  If we were to dig deeper into the depths of his memory, I would need comfort. And he—he would need time.

  Lotte—Wigburg—the friendly giant, though no name was wholly right anymore, looked again out to the darkened sky, and the darker roofs.

  The rain had not returned, but the clouds clung low and close, thick as wool, smothering the last of the dusk in a grim, weightless hush. Below, the tiled city sprawled like a spilled archive—shadows gathering in the alleys, chimneys yawning smoke like old men in argument.

  A heavy sigh left him. It passed through the room like weather, shifting nothing, but felt all the same. I waited. For revelation—or for the bottle to be sealed again, waxed shut behind a sigh and a stare.

  But nothing in him changed.

  His gaze did not soften. His form, nor posture, did not shift. Only those great, far-seeing eyes—wide and glassed like the lamps of a ship’s prow—remained locked outward. Watching. Waiting. Unblinking.

  “Lotte?” I asked, softly. I did not mean to sound meek, but reverence had crept in. I clutched the graphite tighter, as if pressure might coax words from him the way ink draws from stone.

  His brow darkened—I did not think anger, but maybe the weight of distant recognition.

  “Something is returning,” he said.

  His voice was low. Dry earth shifting. It scraped the quiet clean.

  A rolling thunder answered him. A low-bellied groan that moved through the floorboards like a tremor, as if the very bones of the city had stirred to punctuate his thought. A consonance too perfect to be mere weather.

  I rose halfway from my seat, spine braced, fingers still clenched around the quill. My gaze followed his out the window, searching—for shape, for movement, for omen—but saw only the shroud of night. That thick, gnarled sky. The roofs crouched like beasts in hiding.

  "You have spotted something?" I asked, voice lowered. "Or is a thought returning?"

  Lotte turned from the window.

  He met my gaze fully this time, and something new lived behind his expression. Not the calm gravity I’d come to know, nor the gentle melancholy that clung to him like mist.

  His brow had curled inward, shadows knitting across his wide chest-face like stormfronts. His lips—oddly subtle things beneath the stone-map of his countenance—tensed with purpose.

  There was a taste of bitterness in the shift. As if something had moved within him, and not by invitation.

  “Something is arriving. Something is changing. A drift. A drift.”

  He repeated the phrase like a litany—or a warning—each utterance slower, dragged from someplace deep behind the eyes. His whole form had drawn taut, as if stretched by the weight of those words. And those eyes—those enormous, unsleeping watchers in the centre of him—bored into me now with the focus of a creature cornered.

  His eyes were accusing.

  As if I had summoned this shift in him. As if I had tampered, prodded, asked one question too many and in doing so cracked open a vault best left sealed.

  Another thunder rolled in. Closer this time. No longer the slow breath of a storm, but the sound of something deliberate. Like a cannonade on Saint’s Day—if the celebration had been stripped of joy, stripped of pageantry, and left only the percussion of ritual violence behind.

  His eyes widened. An uninvited gesture. One that made my skin crawl and my thoughts scatter.

  That motion—it was wrong. Too human, or not human enough.

  Was Lotte still there?

  Or was Wigburg arriving?

  What door had I nudged open that now swung freely in the dark?

  What, in the name of all the Saints, had changed his tone so swiftly?

  A scream.

  It pierced with a jagged clarity no ink could ever capture. No word, no note of language in it—just raw, lacerating pain. A wail dragged from the vaults of the soul and through the meat of the body, stretched far past what any breath should hold. It did not end. It simply continued—a sound too long for lungs, too steady for any living throat.

  It shattered something in me. Snapped the grip I had on poise, on protocol.

  Snapped Lotte too.

  He turned, sharp as breaking bone, and threw his mass toward the window with sudden, terrifying speed. No hesitation. No warning.

  The table quaked. A crystal decanter shattered on impact—my old gin set, sacrificed to his motion. Pages fluttered, inkpots toppled. A stack of aging theatre notes scattered like frightened pigeons.

  Still that scream rose, unwavering.

  I stood. No—leapt. First, to see. To understand what horror had found its voice in my city. And second—perhaps more truthfully—to be ready.

  Ready to flee if Lotte soured further.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  For something was rising in him. And if it was Wigburg, then God help us both.

  Oh well, God help me then.

  Contact would have to be made before he engaged me in some unwholesome encounter—whatever shape that might now take.

  “Lotte!” I shouted, my faltering courage protesting.

  He turned at once, his form still looming against the window’s frame, every angle braced and strained like a great mechanism under pressure. His eyes—those wide, gleaming sentinels—fixed on me with something deeper than urgency.

  “What has befallen you? Befallen us?” I pleaded, voice cracking. “Why have you turned so, and what is screaming out there?”

  He said nothing.

  I looked past him. Smoke. Black at its root, purple at its fringe—dark, unnatural stuff, like rot made air. It rose from three points, three pillars against the dusk:

  The Hall of Records

  The Church of Joseph

  The Festningsanstalt

  Holy places, and unholy. Pillars of order.

  And now they festered.

  “What is this?!” I begged. My voice had lost its polish. It was raw now—unscripted.

  He looked at me again. Something softened behind the gaze—but not enough to offer safety. His stare still cut. Still reached beyond me.

  “A returning,” he said. “Form changing. My mind… altered further. A storm coming.”

  His voice was different now. It had broadened. Deeper in the chest. As if something else had begun to speak with him.

  “I can feel. I can see. I can…”

  He stopped. A beat passed like a held breath.

  “They are changing,” he said at last. “They have been touched.”

  Then he moved.

  Fast. Too fast for anything so large. The door flung open and he was already through it, his footfalls shuddering the stairs like war drums.

  I stared a heartbeat too long.

  Oh, by all that is holy.

  I followed.

  I could hear his thunder barge down the stairs—the kind of footfall that needed no echo to announce it. The streetside door swung open with a force that made the hinges wail like struck bells.

  I gave chase with what speed I could muster, hindered by garments chosen in premature celebration. The coat, newly brushed and tight in the chest, clung like pride turned parasite. A button shot off—pinging somewhere behind me. A seam at the thigh gave way with a rip that sounded almost obscene.

  Losses for another time. Another year. A season where splendour could be worn again without consequence.

  Not today.

  Today, only fear and necessity drew breath in me.

  I lunged out into the street. The air struck me like a verdict—wet, warm, fouled by distant smoke. Ash clung to the back of the tongue. Hasholm’s cobbles, once as familiar to me as my own signature, now seemed foreign—too loud, too wide, too watchful.

  The street was mostly empty. A few scattered figures—cloaked travellers, clutching at their hoods. A patrol of guards mid-turn, stalled by sound alone, like statues waiting for the next strike of lightning to grant them reason again.

  And then I saw him.

  Lotte. In motion.

  God, he moved fast. Like a siege engine let off leash. Like something between a galloping charger and the recoil of cannon, hammering toward the Hall of Records with an urgency that mocked gravity.

  My lungs seized. My jaw trembled.

  "Touched..."

  The word had left me before I realized it had formed.

  Heat flooded my face. My thoughts scraped against themselves, breaking rhythm, scrambling for cause and meaning.

  "He cannot mean the Touched."

  Please.

  Please, no.

  The scream had never stopped.

  But it had changed.

  I had followed him down the stairs—my breath held hostage, my thoughts outpaced—and still the sound poured on. A continuous discharge of terror, now deepening. Thickening.

  The cry that had begun in pain had become something worse.

  Lotte was already at the end of the street, where the air bent strangely and a drift of violet fog seeped around the corner like oil bleeding through cloth. It gathered where the Hall of Records loomed, swallowing its shape in layers of moving bruise-colour.

  And that scream—

  It was no longer human.

  It had curdled. Hardened. There was a weight in it now, a grinding violence that rose not from lungs but from elsewhere.

  It was turning into a roar.

  Beastly, ungodly—full of force, of malice. A raw signal from something newly arrived, or something long buried and now shaking off the dust of centuries.

  I stood at the edge of the street. My feet ached to follow. My heart, too.

  For all his strangeness, I knew Lotte.

  We had shared the dignity of silence, the intimacy of questions.

  There was a bond there. A fellowship born not of blood, but of burden.

  But I could not—

  I could not rightly follow him here.

  Not where that sound was coming from.

  Not into that fog.

  Not toward whatever had the power to twist a scream into that.

  I froze.

  And in that pause, I felt the city itself begin to lean.

  The bells.

  The church.

  The university.

  The fortress.

  The guild bells, the gate bells, the saintly bells stationed at every vital crossing—some bronze, some iron, some so old they rang with the voice of rust.

  They rang.

  In unison.

  As if woken from sleep by the same dream.

  As if some unseen conductor had raised a baton to summon the city's reckoning.

  Hasholm stirred like a beast in a coffin—too cramped to rise, too restless to stay buried.

  The city was awakening.

  To something folding down upon it—not mist, not stormcloud, but something decisive.

  A turning.

  A swallowing.

  More bells than I had ever heard.

  Their tones collided. The high chimes of the Saint Joseph tower met the iron bray of the Festningsanstalt’s thunderous war bell. Beneath them, the cracked university carillon tried to hold tune and failed, its dissonance giving the whole chorus a teeth-grinding wobble.

  I heard screams. Layered beneath the bells, threaded like blood through lace. And not just one voice now. Dozens. Scores.

  More wailings.

  Then—shots.

  A musket. Then another. Sharp cracks like punctuation in a poem of panic. Somewhere, someone had found their mark. Or had simply fired into fear.

  My knees buckled inward slightly, a betrayal too small to collapse me, but enough to make my bones shiver. My hands felt like paper—brittle, soaked. I tasted copper at the back of my throat, though I had not bitten my tongue.

  It was as if the city itself had opened its mouth to scream.

  And God help us, it wasn’t finished.

  A musket rang out in the purple haze around the Hall of Records. A sharp crack—brief light and spark swallowed almost at once by the fog.

  The scream had ended. But something remained.

  Movement, low and erratic—scraping, flapping, the sounds of things with form, but no name. Sounds I refused to imagine.

  Then—speech. Or something like it.

  A babble, wet and rapid. A tongue I had never heard, never should have heard.

  And then blue fire.

  It burst through the haze, roaring down the far street—toward mine. Toward what had once been peace.

  And then, Lotte emerged.

  With something else.

  It is unbelievable. Maybe blasphemous.

  But Lotte was gripping a Devil.

  It stood taller than him by half. One foot hoofed, the other crooked with too many joints. Its body was long, haired, streaked with black tar. The face was horned—contorted in pain, in contempt—and bubbling with flame.

  And Lotte… Lotte held it.

  Both clawed arms pulled inward in his restraint. Almost gentle. I can’t describe it any other way.

  He looked like he was trying to calm it.

  It twisted. Turned. Screamed—in that same warped tongue I dared not recognize. Each syllable clawed at my hearing, as if just listening might doom me. Curse me.

  Lotte’s face came into view—tight with pressure. His arms trembled now, straining. I no longer knew if he was calming the thing or trying to break it.

  Then the beast leaned forward, obscene in its length. It bent like a thing without bones and bit.

  Its jaw clamped onto Lotte’s arm—deep, with malice and certainty.

  Lotte roared.

  A Blemmye’s scream is no common sound.

  It is thunder from the gut.

  A war-drum of pain.

  He let go. He had to.

  The devil dropped.

  Landed.

  Stood.

  I threw myself down without thinking—coat tearing again, a sleeve popping loose from its stitch. I did not regret it. I barely felt it.

  The creature spoke now.

  Not the babble from before—this was language. Or something like it. Twisted mimicry. Mockery. A sneering, fractured echo of how men speak.

  Shrill. Spiteful. Laughable in its shape—but it hurt to hear. Like being mocked by a mirror with too many mouths.

  Then it struck.

  Fast.

  Its limbs moved with sick precision—limber, sudden, wrong. It slammed into Lotte’s frame, once, then again, then a third time—sharp bursts of violence.

  Lotte tried to block the blows. One arm bleeding, the other pushing back with what strength remained.

  He did not fall.

  But I did not know how long he could stand.

  And still it spoke.

  Like a priest reciting the Good Book—rhythmic, certain, unrelenting. But every breath came with fire. Every word belched smoke. It smiled now, wide and cruel, its long frame coiling around Lotte like a cloak of muscle and malice.

  Lotte lunged.

  His arms, strong and furled like the trunks of old trees, found the devil’s hoofed leg and gripped.

  Then—he snapped it.

  The sound rang out through the street—bone giving way with a sharp, brittle crack. The leg folded inward, a sack of hair and shattered structure.

  It screamed.

  But this time, there was something in it.

  A note.

  A trace.

  The faint ting of a human voice—thin and buried, but there.

  Lotte was not done.

  He moved again, relentless, jaw clenched so tight I thought his own teeth might crack. He was set on it—intent on breaking every rigid line in the devil’s body, reducing it to ruin by sheer will.

  This wasn’t defense.

  It was fury.

  A fight pulled from some place older than memory.

  The devil glowed from within.

  Its belly pulsed blue—slow, sick light, like something fermenting in a gut too old for flesh. The throat lit red, seething with heat and hate. Then, with no warning, it spat.

  A jet of blue fire—liquid, arcing—pure death.

  Lotte saw it coming. Already, he was on it.

  He grabbed the thing by the throat just as the bile erupted. Wrenched its aim downward, choking it mid-spit. The stream struck the cobblestones instead, where it splattered and hissed, curling smoke like a forge gone bad.

  The stones glowed where it touched. Ran down the street like a molten vein, hunting.

  Lotte’s rags smoked. I saw it—where the spatter hit him. His skin blistered, bubbling, peeling raw in patches.

  And still he held on.

  Footfall and thunder behind me.

  I turned—half-flinched—ready for doom or salvation. It was both.

  Riders. The city's defense mustered. Cuirassed, lobstered-helmed, their silhouettes gleamed with old polish and fresh panic. They charged down the lane, guns raised, horses steaming at the flanks. Behind them, thunder broke again—louder this time—and a purple sheen cracked the horizon like judgment. It lit the eaves and tiled roofs with ghostlight. It reflected off steel. It swallowed the sky.

  I dropped low. Covered my head. Found what shelter I could beside a rain-worn wall—more plaster than stone, but enough to keep me from being trampled or struck down by holy wrath or devil’s hand alike.

  It was all too much.

  A parody of hell.

  A war.

  Here—on my very street.

  Their guns roared—and hit.

  One shot tore open the beast’s belly. A gaping wound, wet and red, spilling fire. Flaming bile poured out in a steady stream, hissing where it struck stone.

  Another volley struck the Hall of Records. Dust and mortar blasted into the air—whole sections of the wall reduced to lime and memory.

  But one shot found Lotte.

  His wounded arm—the one already torn by teeth—took the lead. It caught him high, near the shoulder. Blood ran freely now, a dark, steady line down his side.

  Still, he did not let go.

  His good arm held fast to the devil’s throat. Unrelenting. As if pain were beneath him—or beside him. As if breaking was not an option.

  The horses trampled on—iron hooves striking sparks, swords now drawn. Four riders surged forward, blades raised high, ready to cleave down whatever stood in their path.

  Did they know what Lotte was doing?

  Did they see him as yet another beast?

  Could they not see the grip, the restraint, the battle he was fighting?

  Any such hope died in fire.

  The street-side blaze rose up in a fresh arc—blue bile flame licking across the path. It caught the horses mid-charge.

  They screamed.

  Screams—long, drawn, ragged—pain so pure it stripped away species, made all flesh equal. I heard bones beneath muscle, skin tearing in wet sheets.

  They fell.

  One by one.

  Flayed down to the bone in moments.

  Lotte screamed with them.

  A scream of utter effort.

  He twisted his broken arm—forced it—used it like a lever, like a tool, to shove the devil’s head to the cobble. He braced with his legs, locking the creature in place by its ruined limb.

  Then he bit.

  A Blemmye’s mouth is not a man’s.

  It is wide. Lined with dense, layered teeth—meant for grinding, tearing, breaking. And Lotte used them.

  He bit down over the devil’s left arm—bit through skin, through heat, through fire. The limb gave way with a sick, wet pop.

  He bit it clean off.

  Shots and screams echoed through the city.

  The devil’s cries mingled with the many—the children, the common, the soldiers, the unseen. Others like it—unseen devils locked in battles elsewhere—howled behind walls and alleys. The whole city screamed.

  But this one screamed loudest.

  It clawed at Lotte with its one remaining arm—wild, desperate swipes. Nails raked across his back, tearing skin in jagged trails, searching for escape, for air, for anything but this.

  Lotte didn’t flinch.

  He moved forward, into the devil’s form, and hugged it—fully, completely. One arm around the remaining limb. The other around the ruined belly. Blood and bile soaked into him.

  He gripped tight. Unyielding.

  A hug of death.

  Then he squeezed.

  Slow. Deliberate. No scream—just pressure. Bone by bone. Rib by rib. Until the body gave.

  A chorus of rupture. Flesh tearing, joints bursting, wet sacks of heat and ruin collapsing inside the frame.

  The devil let out one final breath. Blue flame flickered from its lips.

  Then silence.

  It slumped forward.

  Dead.

  And Lotte held it still.

  Another volley behind me.

  Another crack, another cloud of dust and debris—the Hall of Records peppered again, stone split and timber shredded.

  The remaining riders had gotten wise. They circled now, forming a ring down the street, firing from a distance. No more charges. No more blind heroics.

  Another shot struck Lotte.

  His leg jerked—a tremble, then a stumble. Flesh tore. Blood sprayed in arcs across the cobbles.

  Lotte grunted.

  No scream. He had no more to give. His skin peeled, darkened, bled. He was bruised. Shot. But not fallen.

  The rest was instinct.

  Had I thought, I’d have collapsed right there. Curled into dust. Waited for death or rain—whichever came first.

  But Lotte needed me.

  I scrambled up. Legs unsure.

  I ran.

  Arms raised, coat flailing behind me like torn sailcloth, I sprinted toward the nearest gunner. My voice cracked under the weight of everything:

  “Stop! Stop! Halt your fire! Please!”

  One rider turned—his horse snorting steam, musket halfway raised. His aim was uncertain, hesitating.

  His eyes scanned me, confusion in every blink. What fool dared to block his hunt?

  I shouted again, raw:

  “You are shooting our saviour!”