The tingling hum in Nicasia’s fingertips turned sour, prickling beneath her nails like cold grease. The flock scrambled upright, awe curdling into panic across their dust-streaked cheeks. An open yard meant an abattoir once provincial steel breached the perimeter.
“To arms!” Damario’s voice, sharp and commanding, cut through the rising panic. He was on his feet, no longer kneeling, his attention already snapped to the monastery’s heavy timber gates. “Form defensive lines! Archers to the walls! Brother Silvanus, prepare the infirmary for casualties!”
The courtyard erupted into organized chaos. Monks, no longer cloistered scholars, moved with surprising speed, hefting worn pikes and pulling crossbows from hidden alcoves. Crimson Dawn fighters, many wrapped in bloodied linen, shuffled into a ragged line before the portals. A scrawny boy of twelve clutched a whittled pine bird in one fist and an unpointed boar pike in the other. He darted past Nicasia, heading for a gap in the defenses.
Nicasia recognized the trinket. She had shaved it from scrap cedar yesterday, shaping a crane while Damario droned on about heavenly purpose. She’d given it to the boy, Elian, to keep him quiet.
From the parapet, a scout screamed, “Crown banners! At least two companies! With an iron ram!”
Maella’s hounds. They were not merely sweeping for insurgent cells; they were hunting *her*.
Damario turned to Nicasia, jaw set like quarried granite. “Your Holiness, with your blessing, we hold this threshold.” He truly believed a blessing, a word, would change the odds against a siege engine. The absurdity of it made Nicasia want to laugh, or perhaps scream.
The gates groaned under the first collision, a cracking thud vibrating up through flagstones and mortar. Masonry powder drifted down from the archway. The boy stood at the center, knees knocking together, small palms sweating along the haft of his unsharpened pike.
“We can’t hold them,” Brother Silvanus muttered, emerging from the infirmary, his face pale. “Not against a ram. We’re outmanned, out-equipped.” He looked at Nicasia, his gaze lingering on her hands, then on the blighted vine, now vibrant and laden with fruit. “The Divine Mother has shown her favor, Saintess. We need another sign.”
“A sign?” Nicasia’s voice was sharp, a desperate edge to it. “What good is a blooming vine against a battering ram, Silvanus? I can’t conjure a legion of angels!”
Another crash, louder, closer. Planks fractured under pressure, seams buckling inward. Bellows from the legion outside, timed to iron-shod drums, heralded a collapse.
“You brought this upon us, Damario!” Nicasia spat, rounding on him. “Your prophecy, your rescue! Folk are about to be butchered because you worship a street fraud!”
Damario met her glare without blinking. “The Mother’s grace knows no deception, Nicasia. Trust the working she offers through your hands.”
“Trust? I trusted the market guard not to snitch, and look where that got me!” She gestured wildly towards the groaning gate. “These people, *your* people, are about to be slaughtered! And you want me to ‘trust’?”
A particularly violent crash shook the entire courtyard. A jagged rupture opened across the portal, crossbeams giving way to show a helmeted visor and flashing pike tips.
“Holy Mother, please!” an archer cried, dropping his bow into the dirt. “Intercede!”
Elian pivoted toward her, knuckles white around his wooden crane, mouth trembling in wordless terror. She saw no pious devotee in him, only a trapped street rat waiting for the cudgel to land. Herself, ten years back.
Her rage, a cold, bitter ember, flared into an inferno. Not against Damario, not against the empire, but against the sheer, infuriating unfairness of it all. Her life, stolen by scripture, thrust into a lethal farce where children brandished dull stakes against armor. She would not scurry away into the brush; she would scorch the earth bare.
She flung her chin skyward, shutting out the shattering beams and panicked clamor, tearing a roar from her lungs. It wasn't a prayer of supplication, but a scream of pure, incandescent fury aimed at the indifferent heavens.
“If you want a conduit,” she screamed above the battering timber, “then *burn* them! Burn them all!”
The sky, which had been a clear, relentless azure moments before, suddenly roiled. Dark, bruised clouds gathered with impossible speed, boiling into existence directly above the monastery. A low, guttural rumble vibrated through the ground, not distant thunder, but something far more primal. The besiegers paused their battering cadence, bewildered eyes darting up toward the churn.
A blast sheared down from the vortex, blinding and deafening. White arc-fire hit the battering rig squarely atop its iron snout. Beams shattered into flying embers; banded braces tore apart like parched wicker. Men were hurled backward through burning debris, ozone and singed wool stinging the nostrils.
The enemy line broke apart in screeching confusion. Militiamen stood slack-jawed, staring into the smoking wreckage where the assault engine had rested. Nicasia remained upright, throat stinging, an unfamiliar surge crackling along her skin.
“Push them back!” Damario roared, his voice laced with awe, but his tactical mind already seizing the advantage. “Now! Before they regroup!”
Rallied, the defenders charged through the smoking gap, driving pikes into the disoriented ranks outside. Nicasia watched through glazed vision. The sky had yielded to her temper, yet the smoke carried bile.
She saw him near the wall base. Elian lay twisted beneath a collapsed lintel, his dull weapon knocked sideways into gravel. Glazed eyes stared into the thinning storm. His small fingers remained clamped around the pine bird, wet with crimson runoff. A charred stake of ash wood, blown inward by her bolt, protruded from his ribs.
Nicasia sank down, cheers beyond the arch dulling to a muffled roar. Her fingers brushed his cheek. The pine crane was still lukewarm from his palm. This was no tavern sleight, no trick deck or colored smoke. Her anger had killed him.
Her escape. Her cheese and wine. It was all a hollow, selfish dream. There was no escaping this. Not anymore. The empire had taken her family, forced this lie upon her, and now, it had taken Elian. She would not run. She would make them pay.
Damario stepped through the haze, soot coating his tunic, and rested an arm near her shoulder. “Nicasia… a divine wonder. You held the line.”
Nicasia looked up, her eyes blazing with a cold, terrifying resolve that wiped away every trace of her cynical grifter’s mask. “Fine. You want a Saintess? Show me how to burn an empire to the ground.”