The Everburning City

Act 1, Part 4, Chapter 5

Emily

She nearly died, twenty feet in front of the cannon.

A pallid grey monster burst out of the mist in a full sprint, growling with a strange sort of moan. Dead, glassy eyes were fixed on her, hands outstretched, and the Gloam tricked out of its mouth as it ran.

Emily had her gun on it, had skipped aiming in favour of firing from the hip, but the impotent clang of the hammer tapping against a spent round was all she managed to accomplish. And spectacular embarrassment didn't slow the creature down.

It tackled her in a rush, punching the wind out of her lungs and the gun out of her hand. The ground was soft, so she skidded along the soil, her hands on the thing's head trying to twist herself off it.

It snapped its dessicated jaws at her neck, her arms, her hands, anything it thought it could reach, even as it tried to push her head into the dirt. Emily hit it, hard enough that her knuckles started screaming in pain, and bled down her wrist. But it wasn't until she managed to roll it off her, and she rolled on top of it, that she could start to hear her own thoughts.

As it bit at the sleeve of her arm, trying to tear through the padded coat with its teeth, Emily finally reached for her knife, holding it backwards, and punched down hard. She pulled it out, and stabbed again.

And again.

Emily might have kept going, except she managed to slice her finger open as she pulled it out for the third time. "Burn you, you ash-bitten corpse," she said, as much to herself as to the dead thing that had finally stopped moving. "Have the burning decency to stay dead."

She looked up, to see one of the farmers was standing near her, long knife in hand. She opened her mouth to say something, to chew the woman out for not helping, until she saw another one of the creatures in front of her. "Glad you managed it better than I did," Emily said. "Rasa, wasn't it?"

"Rasa Volay," the woman said, still staring out at the Gloam. "And burning hell, those things can move quickly."

"Yeah," Emily reflected. She glanced back behind her, at the Valkyrie just two dozen feet away. "I didn't think they could do that."

"You've fought these things before?"

"Before last night? No," Emily said, and she pointed towards the breach in the wall. "My first experience with these things was when my sergeant became one. Burn me, I thought my part in this whole simmering pot of madness was over when the Golem fell."

"You think the other Crafter teams had as much luck?" Rasa asked.

"Somehow I doubt it. I saw some of it from the watchtower, and it looked like a close-cut fight. Not the kind of thing you can count on winning seven other times in a row," Emily said.

"Seven? There were seven Golems?"

As badly as Emily had been kept out of the loop, as the invasion progressed, she suddenly realized she knew quite a bit more than the civilians in the fields. Many of whom needed to know as much, or even more, than she did. "Eight in total. Hitting like the points on a compass."

"Burn me. There were only three during the Fourth." Rasa looked like someone had suddenly snuffed the fire out of her. Her shoulders sagged, and the grip on her knife was loose enough a child could have snatched it from her.

That thought was an easy slide into crippling despair. Emily had skirted around it several times in the last few hours. "Well, this is the first one that dropped dead in the fields, rather than in the City proper," Emily said. "And during the Fourth, the City didn't have the kind of strength is does now."