Halfwits. Unfit, rusted officers. Loose, untrained—hardly fit for anything or anyone.

  I had them ordered before me on the parapet; none would be spared from my ire now. They knew it as soon as I set the command. The air tasted of coal and old fear. Wind took the breath from their mouths and left them small.

  Kristoff’s forehead slicked with sweat, a thin line that caught the light and slid like shame. Vollmer and Riedel pressed their faces into their best stoic masks; the muscles around their mouths trembled despite the effort. Brandt carried his sour mug like a weapon: scowl bent inward, fire gathering behind tired eyes. It had been a long time since I’d taken the measure of him properly. He had been overdue.

  “Officers of the Line!” I roared—hoarse with anger and cold. The shout ripped the courtyard raw.

  “PRESENT!”

  The reply rose like a wounded thing. Knees went up and down in a practiced stamp, boots answering the stone with a flat, military thud. They locked their spines, set their chins, offered me the fa?ade of order because that was what they had left to offer: posture and breath. I gave them the shape of time to think. There was nothing else to do when a man is forced to stand steady; discipline is a slow, aching exercise in pretending.

  “WHAT ORDER had I given that allowed our hunters to leave our premises?” I did not wait for the plea of answer. My voice made the air small.

  “By what intention did we keep those sorry misfits? Those sorry fucks?!”

  “TO KEEP CONTROL! To gain valuable information from their rotted and drunken minds! To tally numbers and time! That tool has now LEFT!”

  I stepped in front of them, closed the distance until their sour mugs filled my sight, and let the heat of my face press at theirs like a bellows. Up close the breath in their nostrils smelled of smoke and stale ale; an honest thing to know about a man who claims steadiness. I held them with that heat before I spoke again.

  “How? Were you drunk on your posts? Sucking your thumbs and staring at the dirt?” Each phrase landed like leather on bone.

  “Did the Gustavians frighten you so much you went to hide, and so you neglected your duty?”

  “No, sir.” Kristoff’s voice slid out as though he’d been scraped free from shame. Thin. Trembling. Not a man’s answer.

  “NO, SIR!” The roar broke from me raw and worse than my first. It drove the cold deeper into the stone. “Do you hold the answer, Kristoff? Do you have a single thing that will spare you a flogging?” My tone was not a question; it was a measuring line—one the body would be fit to answer or break under.

  Kristoff swallowed as if the words were rocks. “They roamed about, Captain Edelmer. We had kept them in the war room for safekeeping, and when it was rendered for other uses, we had few places to put them.”

  The fort around us fell quieter. The hammering on wood slackened to hollow taps, men moving with the caution of those who have heard a rope snap. I could feel their heads tilt toward us—an awareness like a pressure across the ridge—and my officers felt it too. Their eyes lifted, uselessly, to the pale sky as if seeking mercy there; I would not give it.

  “Do we lack men to hold them? Have we not an army of men and giants alike? Could none be spared to keep our guests under watch?” My voice cut the yard; the question landed like an edict.

  “Captain, it was not made clear they were still under guard.” Vollmer took up the thread before Kristoff broke under the weight. His tone was steadier now, the kind of practical flatness that can swallow blame if it must. “The meeting suggested they were free to move, to plan.” He shrugged the excuse like a poor coat. Better he speak than watch a younger man collapse.

  “Have I not made you officers in my line because I trust you to think? To act on your own accord and see reason where reason is needed? Must I calculate every folly for a thousand men?” My hands were on the balustrade; my palms burned from the chill. Discipline is not convenience—it is a constant, a duty worn into bone.

  “Had we squeezed all information from them?” I asked, slow, counting the sins.

  “No!” I answered for them, they would have no respite.

  “Were they suspected in dealing and hunting anomalous materials? Yes!”

  “Are they a tool, and a danger we should keep in check? YES!”

  “Captain!” rasped Brandt, his voice as rough as gravel, his crooked eye turned on me full, daring as ever.

  “Months of inactivity have been replaced with imminent action, and with events unheard of. We have borne the duty of our calling, with the best of our ability.”

  “Our slippage is a failing, yes. But together we held back the beastly horde, and together we made accord.”

  I stepped into him, closing the breath between us. Brandt was almost a head shorter, bowed not in will but in the ruin of age and his crippled gait.

  “You stay in line until told otherwise, officer.”

  He drew back with the sigh that always accompanied the shift of his ruined leg, the sound of old bone and old pain. His gaze slid skyward again, as if the pale heavens might dull the sting of discipline.

  “Officers,” I said, and my voice fell low, for them alone. The roar was gone; what remained was weight, lead settling in their ears.

  “You have endured much, in short order. We have faced trials unheard of, yes.” I let the pause sit until the air itself seemed to bow under it.

  “But you cannot fail. There is no room for error anymore. Our burden is too high for that.”

  I could see Vollmer and Riedel bend beneath these words—their shoulders slacken, the steel of their stance thinned. They, too, had carried the weight of the reckoning.

  Gotthard’s warning echoed back to me, its ash-stained syllables still etched in marrow: “I hath worse tidings to offer still.”

  “We will fail, Captain.” Riedel’s voice broke the air—low, gritted, pitched somewhere between confession and curse. He spoke it to himself, to us, to whatever tribunal might linger in the storm and judge our line.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “How can we bear such a burden, and prevail?”

  I stepped in close, before my officers, before the men who had followed me through dust and fire, my companions in duty and in damnation alike. Their faces held the exhaustion of soldiers long tested, the brittle courage of men who know what weight they shoulder.

  “We might not, Riedel,” I answered, letting each word fall plain, without polish. “But we will try. By God, we will try.”

  “The bastards are gone. We remain. It will have to do. We are together tripled in strength, and we should heed this. Men, united—and Blemmyes to bear with us.”

  I swung an arm eastward, toward the way of doom. The horizon smudged there, restless with haze.

  “Behold,” I said, voice carrying against the stone, “men are coming still.”

  And they came. One, two, three at first. Then in pairs, then in ragged knots—alone, together, stumbling but unbroken. Gustavians. Their steps were weary, yet the dust on their boots told of miles pressed hard. Word had traveled still; Grenzland still bore weight in tired minds. Where else would they go, when the command of their lord was carved to the bone: Join, or die.

  I saw them clearly as they climbed into sight. Bakers with flour-stained packs, clutching the last of their tools like relics. Mothers, tugging children who had already learned silence. Fathers with their arms tight across small shoulders, whispering steadiness into ears that had no place for fear.

  And beyond them—lines. Rifles slung, pikes glinting, banners held aloft by hands that shook more from exhaustion than zeal. Their colors meant little to me, their painted saints unrecognized, their sigils indecipherable. But it mattered not. They were men. Men who would brace beside us against the storm that gathered. Men, and enough of them to matter.

  “A people is depending on us. ALL people are depending on us. Will we falter, gentlemen?”

  Every man’s face was a map of the last months—lines carved by cold, by hunger, by the small betrayals of exhaustion. I let them sit with that weight until it settled like frost on their shoulders.

  “NO, CAPTAIN!” They answered as one, raw and true, the first honest clang of steel I’d heard in days.

  It struck the parapet and made the ropes vibrate like singing wire. This was the bastion’s voice; this would be the bastion’s memory. I had driven them, stripped them down to what was usable, and they had taken the blows. They were sharper for it, and glad, as men are glad to be given work when the world wants to drown them in uncertainty.

  “Remember this,” I said, my words slow and cold as packed snow. “Remember the weight upon you, and bear it.” My hand moved—they followed that movement with the same quickness with which men follow a rope in a storm. Faces hardened. Jaws set. Breath drew tighter in chests.

  “No soul, no life, shall be ended without a fight under my command.”

  A thunder rolled. As good an ending as any. Time to form the new reality.

  “You heard the heavens. All powder and cannon will be covered. Get all new arrivals sheltered, soldiers in the fort, common folk in the village. All will find room.”

  I moved up and down in front of them, boots ringing on the stone, letting the gears in my form turn with my words.

  “You will coordinate with the Gustavians. No, I will not hear it, you will find concord. Shared defences will rely on your animosity and grace. I expect you all to be proud, handsome and tall—that includes you, Brandt. It matters not that your natural state is sand and brimstone.”

  That earned a chuckle, dry and light. Good. We were back in tune.

  “Set to the task. Merge bonds, set a course. Dismissed.”

  They saluted like recruits earning their colours for the first time—awkward, stiff, yet lit with a hunger that almost did not suit them. I treasured it nonetheless.

  They filed down the parapet stairs toward the fortress square. And there, apart from the churn of bodies and the clang of boots, stood a figure cut from another order of time.

  Gotthard.

  He had been watching. I knew it. His eyes—two lanterns sunk deep in weathered sockets—found mine without strain. The sort of gaze that stripped pomp and revealed only measure.

  Well enough. The Gustavians were set, my men steered. Why not wrangle with the giants as well?

  Each step down the stair pressed heavier than the last. It was not the stone that weighed me—it was him. Gotthard carried a gravity of his own, a reverse magnetism that made approach a labour.

  He had said too much already. Shown us too much. Damn him.

  “Thine men seem readied. Thou hast moulded them well; thy men leave the crucible of thy words hardened.”

  "Aye, Gotthard. Brotherhood can be a stern affair."

  "We live in stern times, Edelmer."

  “Yes.” The word left me almost as a whisper, dry as ash. “Sterner than I had ever dreamed, or feared. You made this very clear.”

  “Ah, but one doth need clear sight to see whither one goeth.” He lifted his gaze then, as he always did—never really looking at me or any man. His eyes were fixed beyond, drawn to some horizon we could not see, could not feel.

  “And we go to doom. Harken unto me…” His voice deepened, the timbre of stone splitting under frost. “I see the dark. I see mine end.”

  Thunder rolled again—the sky’s iron tongue, leaving that metallic aftertaste of forces beyond all reckoning. Gotthard closed his eyes, drew a long, burdened breath.

  “Thunder. The sign of God. Each peal of the heavenly percussion bringeth me nigher unto mine end.”

  He opened his eyes once more, and a smile shaped itself upon that broad, time-scored face.

  “Wouldst thou believe me, if I said I had met Him?”

  “Who?”

  “God.”

  A stone dropped within me. Of course he had. Was it any surprise?

  “I know not how long ago. I know not who I then was. But I beheld Him. He guided us unto glory. Where we lay dying, starving, sick and turmoiled—He led us.”

  The smile dimmed, turning grave.

  “I remember mine own mother, mine own father. They sang His praise. I knew the words, yet I sang not. We build as one.”

  His visage darkened, shadowed by the weight of old remembrance—unbidden images no doubt soaring through his mind, fierce as carrion birds.

  “Aye. I remember the fall. Our reckoning in blood. The thunder did roar, and the sky did darken apace. Yet it was not God’s thunder then.”

  At last his eyes turned unto me.

  “And thus mine own memory waneth. Until I awoke with new purpose, with my kin beside me, and set our course toward salvation.”

  “And what was that, Gotthard?”

  He furrowed his brow, puzzled, as though I had asked a child’s riddle. His posture shifted—broad shoulders straightening, voice rolling forth with the patience of one explaining to a dullard.

  “To save thee, of course. Danger draweth nigh, and mankind strayeth. As mine own mind returneth, I was given a simple charge from above: Unite. Defend. Save them.”

  The wind caught his ragged loincloth, tugging it like a banner loosed in storm.

  “And lo,” he said, voice steady as stone, “we shall.”

  “Tell me then. If you promise doom and death, how then may we be saved?” I asked.

  A simple question, yet a keystone. My own companions had been sunk in gloom and dread since Gotthard’s pronouncements, and I was clawing for any straw of hope that might kindle them yet again.

  He looked beyond me once more—whether in thought, or to glimpse where his purpose would next lead him, I could not tell.

  He shook that massive frame, the gesture slow as shifting rock.

  “Death cometh for all. It may draw nigh, it may tarry long. Yet is every battle where men fall counted as defeat? Is not death itself a portion of the order of things?”

  Then he turned from me, his gaze already fixed upon some other plain. The humongous form moved through the bastion, greeting child and Blemmye alike as he passed. He reveled in it—it was plain to see—this doomsayer and prophet both.

  He had his purpose laid out for him. Mine… was not as certain.