CRIMSON HARVEST FIELD

Bluuuurgh.

Commander Luvo glanced first at the young soldier on his knees, hands braced on his thighs as he emptied his stomach into the lake of mud and blood, then up at the grey sky. The rain, far from washing away the heavy, rusted-iron stench hanging over the valley, seemed only to be churning the blood in the soil up into the air.

After twenty-six years in the army, Luvo had thought he'd seen everything. He'd crushed uprisings, buried his own men in plague pits, managed famines in the barren lands cut off from Qysdes's light. But this... The wet, red mud beneath his boots was something else entirely.

The valley floor was not a battlefield. It was a one-sided slaughterhouse.

"Hold the lines!" Luvo shouted, his voice echoing off the valley walls. His hand went to the hilt of his sword on reflex. His thumb traced its familiar path along the worn metal of the old blade's guard, and for a moment, amid this senseless lake of blood, he let himself sink into the feel of that cold steel's weight.

He dropped from his horse and his boots sank into the mud. The thick leather weave beneath his armor, the fabric hanging from his leg guards — each piece bore the royal gold embroidery worked into it with care. He took pains to keep them from the mud. He could see his soldiers' hands trembling around the shafts of their spears. "Garrick, secure the perimeter. Birek, with me!"

Old Birek came shuffling up to the Commander's side, struggling to keep the gold-threaded hem of his black robes out of the muck. The Mage Guild's silver insignia, instead of gleaming proudly on his chest the way it did on his colleagues back in the Capital, hung from the worn leather belt at his waist like a dull, forgotten weight. The fine, ornate engraving on its surface had long since dulled with years of grime, all but lost in the folds of Birek's robes.

A Channeler of Consciousness's power did not lie outward, but within. In the mind's own darkness, in that unextinguished ember called will. In recent years, Birek's ember had not burned the way it once had.

Luvo walked with the old man toward the center of the valley, to the part where the dead lay thickest. The only sound to break the silence of death was the patter of rain on shattered armor and the brazen flap of carrion crows' wings as they crowded onto fresh meat.

Luvo clenched his jaw. The men lying in the mud were no ordinary border infantry. The colorful stained-glass panels set with such craftsmanship into their breastplates — bearing the holy image of the Holy Qysdes — were shattered, washed in blood.

The Inquisition's fanatics... the Sanctified Bloodlines. Their primary weapons — massive shields and long partisans — lay scattered around like so many broken matchsticks. Even on the insides of the shattered shields, that same flawless stained-glass work still gleamed, etched there to remind a soldier of his faith at every moment.

Whatever had torn them apart at the bottom of this valley like meat through a grinder, it had feared neither the Empire itself nor the image upon the glass.

If Luvo could have found one true word to describe the scene before him, it would only have been this:

A field of crimson harvest.

"Can you start here, Seer?" Luvo whispered. He took care that his voice not waver, that it keep the cold, unshakable authority his rank demanded. As an army commander, he had to mind how he appeared to his soldiers.

Birek didn't answer. The rain found its way through the deep creases of the old man's face. He sank to his knees with trembling hands. He pressed his fingers to the bloody temple of a soldier whose stained-glass breastplate had been caved entirely inward by a single, massive blow. Dead minds were always like this. You had to be close, you had to touch, you had to feel. Otherwise the Essence of Consciousness hardened like a wall, sealed shut.

"Last echoes..." Birek murmured, his voice faint enough to be lost in the wind. "Whatever happened here... the echoes in his mind are still fresh."

Birek began the spell Consciousness Projection. The old man shut his eyes tight and forced his own will, like a hook, into that fading consciousness about to slip free of its body and dissolve into the Plane of Essence. Luvo watched the veins at the old man's temples darken and throb. Even the air around them seemed to thicken, to press in, as if the valley itself were holding its breath, aware of what the mage was doing. Birek's eyes clouded over.

Beyond the mist, the first thing to greet Birek was not a sight but pure, undiluted terror. Quick, ragged breaths... the heartbeat inside the armor was loud enough to deafen. Two brothers-in-arms ran on either side, partisans thrust forward, shields raised. Their fear showed in the stained-glass set into those shields. Then came that terrible whistling sound, splitting the air, splitting even the wind itself.

A single blow. With just one sweep, the two fully armored men to his left were cut clean in two, shields and all, as if they'd been made of paper. Glass rained down around them, soaked in blood. Birek's head — the soldier's head — turned toward where the attack had come from, toward that massive shadow. A silhouette faster than the eye could follow. Then...

Birek gasped back into reality, nearly toppling onto the corpse as he lost his balance. He coughed, lungs grasping for air. He wiped away the single trickle of blood from his nose with the back of his hand. He knew the price. Forcing his own will into another man's dead mind and pulling it back out always tore something loose inside him. This time it had gone deeper.

"They couldn't even fight back," he said, shaking. There was raw horror in his old eyes. "Whatever slaughtered this unit... Luvo, that thing was wearing one of the very uniforms it tore to pieces."

Luvo's jaw twitched. His black-gloved hand tightened around his sword's hilt. "A traitor within the Inquisition," he said, not believing his own words even as he spoke them. For years he'd tried to plant men inside the Inquisition and failed every time. They were too fanatical for that. But could someone have infiltrated them?

Rather than answer, Birek forced himself to his feet again and made his way to another pile of corpses a few steps off. The state of these bodies was even more horrifying. Scattered among the soldiers were the carcasses of massive hounds, far larger than any natural dog, their muscles having torn straight through their own hides, twisted into something else entirely.

Birek dropped to his knees and pressed his trembling fingers to the cooling face of a man whose uniform marked him as a mage.

His mind was already exhausted, but he had to know. This is the last one, he told himself. Once more he drove his will like a spear into that fading, darkened mind. His eyes clouded over.

Beyond the crossing, that same mist again, and behind it this time the sounds around him were sharper. He was in the middle of a massacre. An officer's panicked voice rang out: "Release the hounds!" Birek was inside the body of a Channeler of Being, that is, a Beastbinder. There was no room left for caution in the mind he'd entered. The man seized four full Putridglass crystals from his belt. He lashed Cyrstal's Essence of Being out like a whip toward the war hounds freshly loosed from their cages.

Yelp! Sharp, pain-soaked shrieks tore from the hounds. Essence Augmentation twisted flesh and bone without mercy. Claws the length of daggers burst from between the animals' paws. Their fur sloughed off and fused into hard, black scales. Their spines cracked and split, jutting outward into lethal spines.

The Beastbinder raised his head and looked at his enemy. The thing standing before him wore scraps of an Inquisition uniform, but... it was not human. Its hands held no weapon. From its fingertips grew thick, crusted claws capable of tearing armor like paper. Pure, black violence seemed to steam off its body.

"ATTACK!"

The mutated hounds lunged forward. One leapt onto the monster's massive back and sank its teeth straight into its neck; another tore a great chunk of flesh from its shoulder. The monster didn't even stumble. With one massive hand it seized the hound clinging to its shoulder. As it hung suspended in the air, the hound withered within seconds like a fruit squeezed of its juice, its skin shrinking tight to its bones, drying out. As the hound died, the monster's torn shoulder visibly healed at a nauseating speed, knitting flesh and muscle back together.

The shock rippling through the Beastbinder's mind hit Birek too. 'What kind of magic is this?! Essence of Being could never heal a man like this!'

The monster turned to the other hounds around it. It spoke no word, made no gesture. It didn't even touch the Essence of Being. It simply... looked. And suddenly, every hound turned as if rabid. The Beastbinder's eyes widened in horror as the very animals he had created threw themselves at him to tear him apart.

The darkness swallowed the screams. As the Beastbinder choked on his own blood from the fatal wound at his throat, the last thing he saw was that massive monster raising its hand into the air. All the blood-soaked hounds collapsed at once, howling in agony. Their flesh rotted away and fell from their bones within seconds.

But the true horror came after. From within the Beastbinder's fading consciousness, Birek watched in shock as that seemingly invincible monster, the moment the hounds died, suddenly dropped to its knees. The creature's jet-black hair turned to ash-white in an instant, its swollen muscles wasted away, its skin cracked and shriveled like parched earth. In a matter of seconds, that towering monster, in the midst of its own horror, became a centuries-old, withered old man, and collapsed lifeless to the ground.

"Aaaah!" Birek screamed and snapped his eyes open, flinging himself backward off the corpse.

"There must be some mistake..." Birek muttered, out of breath. Blood trickled from the old man's nose down to his chin, mixing with the rain. His will was in shreds. "A man cannot draw another being's Essence of Being into his own body. Not even Qysdes himself! And that man... he didn't use a crystal to control the hounds. He whispered into their minds! And then, the moment the spell ended, he rotted into an old man within seconds. As if something had eaten him alive from the inside!"

"Something is wrong here. Nothing you're describing makes any sense, Seer." Luvo cast a hard look across the slaughter around them. "A traitor within the Inquisition. A man who works magic of Being without touching the Essence itself, and that same man suddenly ages decades and dies in an instant."

"The rules of magic are absolute. They cannot be bent."

"Could the vision have been tampered with, Commander?" the young adjutant behind them asked at once.

"No," Luvo said calmly. His voice was ice. "No man can touch the Plane of Essence and alter a memory." Luvo was not a devout man, but he knew the rules. Magic was the one fair thing left in this rotten world. It always demanded its price in kind. So what was it that had broken these rules?

Just then, a messenger came running from the far end of the valley, where the medical tents had been set up, soaked through with blood and sweat. His face was bone-white despite the mud and the rain. His footing tangled beneath him on the slaughterhouse ground.

"Commander!" the messenger called, gasping as he came to a stop before them. "We found survivors!"

Luvo's brow furrowed. "Survivors? There are soldiers still alive?"

The messenger swallowed. His throat was dry. "In the medical tent, Commander. A soldier... and... and a child."

Luvo's heart began to pound heavily in his chest. In the middle of this slaughter that had turned an elite battalion of the Sanctified Bloodlines into mincemeat... a surviving child?

Why a child?