The group had been travelling for almost a month, getting supplies from the villages they passed as they headed ever eastwards. As the days passed, the weather grew steadily warmer and sunnier as spring slowly, gradually gave way to summer. The woods were growing thin and sparse around them, shifting ever more into dry scrubland as they approached the arid canyon that housed the entrance to Stone’s Cradle. The bleak, parched landscape was practically deserted, uninhabited save for occasional lonely cabins. They had rationed their supplies to last them to the cradle and back, but it was a close thing, and the glaring sun and relative lack of shade made the journey nigh unbearable compared to the pleasant stroll through the woods. Unfortunately, the travelling conditions soon became the least of the group’s worries. “There, by that copse of trees.” Sven pointed out as the group peered out around a clump of dense bushes. “Five men wearing armour.” “Friends or enemies?” Lily asked. Adam peered at the group ahead of them, trying hard to make out the details of their equipment. “Enemies.” He declared at last. “Their armour is made of thick quilted cloth with simple metal plates fastened on top of it, and their helmets are all exactly the same size, probably stuffed with thick padding to fit them to the heads of the individual wearers. It’s all equipment designed for large-scale mass production.” “That can’t be comfortable in this heat.” Sven remarked. “No, probably not. But they don’t need to be comfortable to shoot at us.” “Why are they here? Did they discover the decoy plan already?” “Maybe. Or maybe they just sent out forces to guard all the Cradles. It’s not like the enemy was ever lacking for troops.” “So, what do we do?” “We avoid contact. We’re still technically inside the borders of the kingdom, even if we’re at the very outskirts of it, and there’s no way they would send a force this small into enemy territory alone. That means they’re just a scouting party, and if they go missing there will be a swarm of troops looking for them within days. We should try to go undetected for as long as possible.” The rest of the group nodded their understanding, and the four of them set off as stealthily as they could manage. The enemy patrols were few and far between, but they still got progressively harder to avoid as the landscape grew rockier and the vegetation ever more sparse. Adam knew it was only a matter of time until they were discovered by one of the wandering bands of soldiers. But knowing it was inevitable didn’t stop him from swearing under his breath when an unfamiliar voice called out to them. “You four! Halt! Identify yourselves!” A group of five soldiers emerged from behind a stone ridge, all of them red-faced from sunburn and sweating in the warm summer sun. Four of them were young, somewhere between fifteen and twenty. The bulky armour and helmets concealed most of their features, making it impossible to tell their gender. The leader of the group was a woman of about thirty-five, her face rough and scarred and her voice harsh from shouting. She was dressed and equipped exactly like the other four, save for a small copper badge in the shape of a sun pinned to her shoulder. “I said identify yourselves!” She bellowed with a frown. “We’re just simple travellers, on a pilgrimage to Stone’s Cradle.” Adam lied smoothly. The woman narrowed her eyes. “Hmm, well, maybe you are just a bunch of ignorant heathen star-kissers, but then again, maybe you’re not. We have orders to be on the lookout for a group of four travellers. You will follow us back to camp, the Captain will know what do with…” “Now!” Adam called, drawing his sword and striking in a single motion. Knowing the battle to come was inevitable had helped focus his mind, pushing his doubts and worries away for the moment as he focused on keeping himself and his friends alive. But even the rush of combat could only bury and push away those doubts, not dispel them entirely, and to his dismay the blade couldn’t cut through the steel plates covering the woman’s armour. First River could cut through anything that was less pure than the heart of its wielder, but Adam’s clouded, doubting heart simply didn’t measure up to the pure steel of the woman’s armour. The woman narrowed her eyes and drew the short sword that hung from her waist, and Adam fell back into a defensive stance with a curse. The soldier closest to Adam was quick to draw his rifle when battle was joined, but before he could take aim Lily set upon him with the sudden, unexpected speed of a woman carried by her own personal blast of hurricane-strength wind. Rifles are powerful weapons, but they were never designed for use in close combat, and before long Lily had wrenched the weapon from his grip and thrown it into the bushes. Leaping back in alarm, the soldier drew his sword and brought it up to guard. The remaining three soldiers had their hands full dealing with Sven. One of them had managed to get a shot off, but Sven had raised his defences in time and the supersonic projectile bounced harmlessly off his rocky skin. Now, the three soldiers were doing all they could to hold the man off while he alternated between activating his ultimate defence and lowering it to get a hit in on his attackers. Adam looked over the battle as he traded blows and parries with the leader of the group. He probably had the upper hand, but if he allowed the battle to run long the risk that one of his group would be injured was unacceptably high. Narrowing his eyes, he called out an order. “Amber!” He didn’t need to say anything more than that. Amber knew exactly what he was ordering her to do. The whole group knew what he was ordering amber to do. With a cheerful smile, the burned girl raised her hands and called upon her magic. In an instant, brilliant flames erupted all over the soldiers, burning through their padded armour with ease. The soldiers screamed, but only briefly, as the flickering flames charred their skin and cooked their flesh. They fell dead to the ground, the air filling with the stench of burning flesh as their charred hide cracked open and released bursts of burning fat. “That’s enough, Amber! Sven, put out the fire.” Amber lowered her hands as Sven raised his, calling on his magic to draw up the gravel and dry soil beneath their feet. With a simple hand motion the dirt moved to cover the burning corpses and smother the flames. The stink of burning hair and meat still hung heavy in the air, but at least the disfigured corpses were now out of sight. Adam sighed and looked around at his team. Sven looked somewhat disturbed but nevertheless resolute, while Lily looked like she was close to throwing up. Only amber seemed unaffected, looking at the faintly steaming mounds of dirt with a perfectly relaxed smile. Shaking his head, Adam went up to Lily, placing a hand on her shoulder. “Are you all right?” “I… I’ll be fine. It’s just… The screams. Oh god, I’d forgotten the screams.” “I’m not happy about this either, but it was them or us, and we can’t afford to fail here.” “I know, I know. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.” Adam nodded and went to retrieve the rifle Lily had thrown into the bushes. “Anyone here know how to fire a rifle?” “I do.” Sven replied. “I learned to use a tranquilizer dart rifle when I was helping with a wildlife survey. It can’t be that different.” “Good.” Adam tossed him the weapon. “Once the enemy realizes this patrol has gone missing, they’ll be sending enough people to comb this entire area. We can’t afford to take it easy anymore. That means if the choice is between killing a patrol or risking detection, we have to do the former. Now, let’s get moving. We need to find a concealed, defensible spot to camp before nightfall.” Adam’s assumptions were soon proven correct, and the patrols became both denser and larger as they kept on moving. Despite this, the open landscape actually turned out to work in their favour. Adam’s group were dressed in grey and brown travelling gear, making them harder to spot and allowing them to take cover even in fairly sparse patches of vegetation. The enemy’s shining metal armour, however, gleamed in the sunlight and was easily visible even at extreme distance. It wasn’t doing them much good either, since the mass-produced armour was mainly intended to protect from swords and crossbow bolts, and only the very thickest armour plates over the chest stood a chance at stopping a rifle bullet. Sven was able to take down the entire first patrol they encountered with his rifle before the enemy figured out where the shots were coming from, and thanks to looted supplies and weapons the next patrol proved even less of a challenge. While not as good a shot as Sven, Lily turned out to have excellent aim, her only problem being that she had trouble keeping her calm while lining up her shots. Amber, by comparison, lacked Lily’s precision, but her sheer ruthless efficiency let her fire almost three times as fast as Lily, allowing her to essentially walk her shots until they hit their target. Between the three of them and their concealment advantage, they made short work of almost all the patrols they encountered. Adam, who turned out to be an absolutely lousy shot, only really had to enter the battle once, when a second group of soldiers had snuck up on them from behind while they were firing at a different group. Adam had taken a fairly deep slash to the arm during that encounter, but it healed well enough after they disinfected it and bound it with a medicated bandage. When they finally made it to the lip of the canyon, the group was flush with ammunition and supplies, but exhausted from the constant fighting. The full moon shone down on Adam as he crawled up along the rocky ground and carefully peeked over the edge of the ridge, hoping his hooded head wouldn’t be too obvious silhouetted against the starry sky. He swore silently under his breath when he realized the enemy had set up their main camp right in front of the cave entrance to Stone’s Cradle. The sprawling camp, brightly lit by oil lamps and campfires, covered a large patch of the long-since dried riverbed that made up the canyon floor some five hundred feet below him. The others joined him, peering cautiously out over the lip of the canyon with their hoods up to conceal the shape of their heads. “We can’t fight our way past.” Lily whispered. “There has to be two hundred soldiers down there.” “We can’t exactly sneak past it either.” Sven added. “The cave opening is behind the densest portion of the camp.” “We have to get in there. Amber, how far can you extend your magic?” The girl frowned thoughtfully. “It’s far to the camp, but my passion is my magic, and it is strong. I can reach it.” “Do it.” Sven and Lily looked decidedly uneasy when they realized what Adam was asking, and as Amber started gathering her magic the two of them retreated from the edge of the canyon and looked away. Adam didn’t look away, though. He didn’t allow himself to look away. If he couldn’t stand to face the results of the orders he gave, then he wasn’t fit to give orders in the first place. And so he watched as every single lamp and campfire suddenly flared up like fireballs, the flames reaching out and greedily consuming everything they touched. He listened as the soldiers cried out, first in alarm, but soon in terror and agony. He listened as Amber, lost to the wonder of the powerful magic flowing through her, started laughing until she cried. And he watched as the raging inferno below him slowly faded away, leaving nothing but steaming ash and glowing metal in its wake. As Amber collapsed into unconsciousness, completely spent from the terrifying feat of magic she had performed, Adam stood up with a stone-faced expression. “It is done.” Adam said. ‘What have I done?’ Adam thought.