He had imagined the front as a wall.

  Not a metaphorical one—Dregonnia did not train its sons and daughters on metaphors—but a literal thing. A rampart of iron and oaths, a line of spearpoints and banners, a place where a soldier stood shoulder to shoulder with other soldiers and proved, cleanly, that he deserved to exist. He had imagined that if he were strong enough, the world would acknowledge it.

  The Abyssal Wastes did not acknowledge anything.

  The air itself tasted off, permeating an alien bitterness that stuck on the tongue like rotten meat. Every breath carried three different weathers that refused to agree. Heat rolled off a cracked ridge in shimmering waves, the kind that rose from a forge-mouth. Cold lay in drifts just beyond it, white frost crawling up black rock like mold. Between them, the ground was dark and… thin.

  That was the only way he could describe it. Thin, like a story told too many times until the words wore down. A veteran beside him spat into the dust. The spit hit the ground and simply vanished, as if the act of landing had been revoked.

  The fresh-faced soldier swallowed. He tried not to show it.

  A Dregonnian did not flinch. That was what they taught in the Academy—first with words, then with blows. The Empire didn't care about fear. It only asked whether you could move despite that fear.

  He could move.

  He had no choice but to move.

  He had marched here with countless others under a legate whose voice could cut stone. He had listened to the sermons about dominance and duty, about the High Imperator’s will, about the alliance of Prathus that stood together because even pride had a limit when the world itself was being eaten.

  He had believed every word.

  He had been proud to be assigned to the line.

  Now he stood in a shallow trench carved into soil that was more ash than earth, looking out over a landscape that refused to settle into a single reality. At the horizon, a black seam split the sky like a wound that wouldn’t close. Below it, the Abyssal Rift breathed, like a furnace door opening and closing in the dark.

  Along the trench, Veilheim engineers—pale-faced, ink-stained, too clean for this place—moved among rune-pillars hammered into the ground at measured intervals. Each pillar was wrapped in bands of engraved metal, sigaldric geometry compiled into rigid, repeatable patterns. The runes glowed faintly, an arcane radiance pushing back against an atmosphere that actively tried to snuff it out.

  Between pillars, Shu-Lan martialists stood in calm clusters, eyes half-lidded, breathing in unison. Their stillness was that of a blade pointed at the enemy and ready to strike at any moment.

  Farther down the line, Helmarion’s druids had pushed roots into the ground that shouldn’t have accepted them. Pale vines threaded through rubble, lacing the trench walls, refusing collapse. They’d planted saplings that looked too young to survive here, and yet they held. They held because Helmarion did not ask permission from dying ground; it simply pulled the requisite authority from elsewhere.

  And among all of it—among the delicate structure and quiet discipline and arboreal rebellion—Draguignan infantry stood like iron nails driven into a rotten board.

  He tightened his grip on his weapon. A short spear, the shaft wrapped with leather, the head etched with infusion channels. He could feel the quiet burn of aether behind his sternum like a second heartbeat. The instructors had called it a gift. They had called it a pressure chamber. They had said: You do not generate power, you route it. You do not make fire, you feed it shape.

  His shape was simple.

  Strength. Momentum. Impact.

  He’d practiced aether infusion until his arms shook. He’d run forms until his vision blurred and his lungs burned. He’d been told, again and again, that a Dregonnian soldier was a thing the world could rely on: the fist that kept the line honest.

  He looked down the trench and saw Sarrolian hydromancers crouched beside shallow basins of water that did not freeze, even as frost crawled nearby. They murmured over it like merchants counting coins, and the water responded—shivering, shifting, ready to become wall or blade or mire.

  Eirelyan summoners moved like wolves through the crowd, their hands marked with ash and blood, talismans clinking at their belts. One of them had a spirit perched on his shoulder—an avian shape made of stark white feathers and pale blue fire. It blinked at the soldier with eyes that shone like intelligent burning coals.

  Sha’Moren sandspeakers stood apart, hooded and still, their rune-etched palms holding sand that flowed upward in slow spirals. The sand moved more like water than anything else—eddying, pooling, and lifting as if caught in a reversed current, waiting to drown the enemy beneath the siltsea.

  So many answers to the questions "What is power? What is it for?" all pressed together in a single trench. The soldier told himself it meant they would win. How could they not, with so many Mages and Warriors from so many walks of life? So many culturally unique disciplines coming together, united in one singular purpose?

  A horn sounded.

  Veilheim's signal tone, produced by a sigaldric array—clean, precise, impossible to mistake. The rune-pillars along the trench brightened as the compiled geometry engaged, overlapping fields knitting into a forward barrier that made the air in front of the line shimmer like glass.

  The veterans shifted.

  The fresh-faced soldier felt his pulse spike, and with it, the simmering flame of aether behind his sternum blazed to life, eager and hungry to be used.

  “Brace!” someone barked.

  He braced.

  The Wastes answered.

  First came the silence.

  A quiet that defied what quiet was supposed to sound like. A silence that didn't quite understand the meaning of the word. The wind still moved. The frost still crackled restlessly. The distant Rift still breathed. But the soldier's brain could not put those noises into the category of weather. The wind brought unnatural corruption. The frost brought unnameable dread.

  The Rift brought death.

  It flared in the distance, pitch-black light somehow bright enough to blind. In its wake, the ground in front of the barrier—an expanse of broken black stone and ash—lost its stability. It didn’t crumble so much as it simply sank inward, upward, through. Horrific shapes erupted from that twisting, folding earth like hatchlings from their eggs.

  Voidspawn.

  He had heard the term. Everyone had. The mindless things of Nihilus. Countless, fragile, draining cohesion and meaning and aether alike, like insects made of hunger and absence. He had expected them to look like monsters, but to be so utterly abominable...

  How could creation allow such things to exist?

  Some were thin-limbed and too tall, their joints bending at angles that suggested anatomy had been negotiated poorly. Some were low and skittering, their bodies a blur of limbs that couldn’t decide whether they were legs or hands. Some were barely shapes at all—shadows pretending to be solid because they’d seen solidity once and wanted it.

  They made no battle cry.

  They simply advanced, and the very act of watching them made the soldier’s thoughts feel slippery, stuttering. The more he observed, the harder his head began to pound. A veteran near him shuddered and leaned close enough to mutter in his ear.

  “Don’t look too hard. Focus on what you can hit.”

  The soldier nodded, grateful for instruction even as shame prickled at him. He was Dregonnian. He shouldn't need to be told how to look at an enemy, but then, it wasn't so simple a thing. These abominations were absence given writhing black flesh.

  A call rang out somewhere down the Veilheim line, and a translucent white barrier almost a kilometer wide and half as tall went up. It was just in time as the first wave hit not even a few seconds later. It was a vicious blow, but the barrier held; the charge halted in its tracks.

  More sigaldric arrays flared, lines of light threading through the air in crisp angles. Voidspawn struck it and came apart, unraveling into a pitch black mist that further tainted the already rancid aether in the air.

  The soldier exhaled.

  He grinned, sharp and hungry. Good. Let the Veilheim scholars work their fancy magicks. Let the Shu-Lan monks meditate and break their fists upon the enemy. Let Helmarion plant their stubborn trees. When the barrier thinned under pressure, Dregonnia would do what it was born to do.

  Minutes of resistance passed and, eventually, the barrier did thin.

  The air around the barrier began to frost even as heat shimmered beneath it. Veilheim runes sputtered in places, not quite breaking down just yet, but losing enough referents to allow Nihilus to seep through like ink in water. Where a rune meant hold, the void quietly asked, hold what? and for a heartbeat, the rune hesitated.

  That heartbeat was enough.

  A cluster of voidspawn slipped through a thin spot and surged toward the trench.

  “Infantry!” the legate roared, voice iron. “Forward! Crush them!”

  The soldier’s body moved before his mind finished catching up.

  He vaulted the trench lip with the others, boots crunching on frost that crackled like glass. He felt his aethercore flare as he shoved infusion into his arms, into the spear channels, into the metal head. The weapon hummed in his grip, brimming with dense aether and the brutal efficiency of force given structure.

  A voidspawn lunged at him—too fast, too light.

  He thrust.

  The spearhead entered something that tried to be a torso and met no resistance, as if he had stabbed smoke. For an instant, panic flared. His body did not understand the feedback. A weapon was supposed to hit.

  Then the infusion bit.

  Aether, shaped through his weapon into its own lethal blade, asserted structure onto the thing. It flared, shuddered, and collapsed into nothing. The soldier laughed. It came out as a bark, half relief, half exhilaration. He killed another. Then another. His spear moved like he’d practiced—forward, precise, driven by legs and hips and the pressure burning behind his sternum. Voidspawn fell apart under his thrusts, unraveling like bad stitches.

  He felt strong.

  He felt right.

  Around him, Dregonnian infantry pushed, a wedge of iron forcing itself into the oncoming absence. The legate’s voice cut through the chaos, commands clean and merciless. Behind them, Sarrolian water surged forward in a low wave, washing over voidspawn and pinning them in place long enough for spears and blades to finish the work. An Eirelyan spirit—something like a bear made of bark-like fur and cutting wind—charged into the mass and tore through shapes that didn’t bleed.

  For a moment, it looked like the alliance’s answers were enough.

  Then Tartarus arrived.

  The ground ahead of them split with a noise like a chain snapping. Heat punched up through the crack, and with it came the smell of burned metal and something sickly sweet and rotten, like flesh cauterized too many times. A behemoth rose from the fissure, hauling itself into the world as if the world itself were a casting bed and it was being torn free.

  It was a moving fortress fueled by unearthly flame and radiating predatory intelligence.

  Its body was a mass of grotesque plates and tendons. The plates themselves looked like armor that had grown from inside out, each one etched with scars that might have been deliberate. Its limbs were thick, jointed like a siege engine, and between the plates, glowing seams pulsed with red light—structured pain given form.

  Its head turned toward the Dregonnian wedge.

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  And it smiled, shifting facial plating into a horrific suggestion of a feral grin.

  The soldier’s laughter died in his throat.

  Someone screamed, “Behemoth!”

  The word hit the line like a rock, the horror enough to make the wedge of soldiers faltered in their tracks.

  The behemoth shifted, then stepped forward.

  The single step crossed an impossible distance and crushed three soldiers into the ground so completely that their screams cut off mid-breath. The earth didn’t even accept their bodies properly. It just… swallowed the shapes they had been, leaving bootprints filled with dark slurry that steamed.

  A Shu-Lan martialist flashed forward, her body a blur of disciplined motion. She struck the behemoth’s leg with a palm that carried internalized aether patterns—an attempt to disrupt, to redirect, to find the creature’s flow continuity and break it.

  The behemoth glanced down as if mildly curious.

  Then it too blurred.

  The kick sent the Shu-Lan warrior flying in a perfect arc through several frosted spires. She hit the ground a short distance away, her body catching fire immediately as it struck a shallow pit of Abyssal slag, courtesy of Tartarus' arrival. The soldier tried his best to ignore the woman's ragged screams of agony, how those screams cut out as her lungs and throat melted shut along with the rest of her body.

  It had only taken seconds.

  Helmarion roots surged, thickening into a barrier around the behemoth’s feet. The roots wrapped, tightened, tried to pin.

  The behemoth flexed.

  The roots tore, shredded like fabric. Veilheim runes flared from behind, a compiled array aimed like a net. Lines of geometry lanced out, angles sharp enough to cut certainty into the air. The net struck the behemoth and held for a heartbeat. The soldier saw it—saw the creature’s body halt, plates vibrating under restraint.

  Hope, small and stupid, flared in him.

  Then the behemoth laughed.

  The sound was like a hammer striking an anvil, repeated too fast. It drew its arms back and pulled. The runic net stretched and, for a terrified breath, the soldier thought it might break. Instead, the behemoth dragged the net toward itself, hauling the sigaldric structure like a fish pulling a line. The array screamed with strain. The rune-pillars behind the trench flared brighter, trying to compensate.

  Then, like brittle bone, one pillar cracked and the net collapsed. The behemoth surged forward, and in its wake, the air boiled. Dregonnian soldiers met it because Dregonnian soldiers did not retreat. They slammed infused spears into plated flesh, drove aether into seams, hacked at joints.

  Some strikes bit. Infusion could force structure even into Tartarean design, if you were strong enough and clever enough.

  But the behemoth was stronger, and it was hungry.

  It seized a stumbling private by the waist and lifted him screaming into its open, blazing maw. It bit down, chewing into flesh, muscle, bone, and the true prize, the sweet ambrosia that was the man's aethercore. The behemoth sucked down the man's internal aether with obvious relish, shuddering at the taste. The sensation.

  It didn't stop there.

  Reeling from shock and horror, the rest of the nearby soldiers were unprepared when the massive Abyssal beast reached back down and grabbed another victim by the leg, swung him like a flail, and smashed two others with his body. It grabbed another by the torso and pulled until the man’s spine made a noise that the soldier watching on would hear in his nightmares... if he survived.

  Survival was looking more unlikely by the second.

  Pain flashed through the line like a signal. The behemoth continued to kill and eat practically unhindered. The fresh-faced soldier found himself backing up without meaning to. His breath came fast. His arms were still infused, but the blazing core in his chest flickered and sputtered with terror, suddenly feeling too small.

  A veteran grabbed his shoulder, hard. “Hold, you idiot! Hold!”

  The soldier tried.

  He thrust at a voidspawn that had slipped past, and his spear passed through it like smoke again, but this time the satisfaction didn’t come. His eyes kept snapping back to the behemoth, to the way it moved with deliberate cruelty—choosing targets, savoring reactions. Feasting like a starving child given free rein in a candy shop.

  It wasn’t just killing and eating.

  It was relishing in the slaughter.

  Then Stygia touched them.

  Unlike the arrival of Tartarus, there was no fiery fissure, no heat punch.

  It was an icy drop.

  The temperature withdrew. Warmth slipped away without wind or weather, drained by a failure of exchange, as though the air no longer passed heat from one particle to the next. Frost blossomed across weapons. Breath hung where it was exhaled, slow to thin. A hush settled over the battlefield, sound moving poorly through the cold, as if the space itself resisted being crossed.

  Wraiths melted into existence in the silence.

  They moved like shadows with intent, their bodies thin and pale, edges blurred, faces hidden behind masks of pale white ice. They drifted around the line, behind it, through gaps the barrier had never been meant to address—spaces where partial substance passed without resistance.

  A soldier near the fresh-faced recruit turned, saw a wraith behind him, and froze as despair struck with enough force to fold his posture inward. His weapon slipped from his hands. His shoulders slumped as if someone had told him, quietly, that nothing he had ever done mattered. The wraith leaned close and breathed into his ear.

  The soldier dropped to his knees.

  Then the wraith’s hand entered his chest like water entering a placid lake. The soldier jerked once, eyes wide, and then his gaze went empty, severed from intention, like someone who had stepped out of his own story and left the body behind. The wraith pulled its bony fingers free as he toppled, the man's aetheric ember clutched in its icy claws.

  Its eyes flashed with primal delight as it brought the stolen core to its jaws and inhaled. The ember was devoured without even a whisper. The far-too-green soldier’s throat tightened. He forced himself to look away.

  “Don’t listen!” came a desperate woman's voice from somewhere nearby. The recruit couldn't pinpoint the voice in the chaos, but he heard her, clear as day. “Keep your ears closed! Don't let them in! Don't—”

  The voice trailed off into a groan of despair, and silence following soon after.

  A Veilheim Mage shouted something—an incantation that filtered aether into a useable shape, old words turned into runic power. Ancient runic scripture flared on the ground in a complex lattice, attempting to bind the wraiths, to give them referents: hēr, nū, healde. Every rune a variation of the same three commands in an attempt to stack the strength of the array.

  A second passed, then two.

  The trap snapped shut.

  For a heartbeat, the wraiths hesitated.

  Then Nihilus reminded the battlefield that it was still present and not to be ignored. The void seeped across the lattice like oil, and the binding’s certainty thinned. The wraiths slid free, patient, moving with the confidence of entities unbound by urgency.

  It wasn't long after that the line began to fray—fibers slipping, tension redistributing unevenly, cohesion thinning by degrees.

  A few steps back here. A soldier too quiet there. A trench section where the Veilheim pillar had cracked, the barrier flickering. An Eirelyan spirit summoner on his knees, hands shaking as his bonded entity flickered under Stygian despair. A Sarrolian spellblade struggling to keep his own water-blessed blade from freezing into uselessness.

  The soldier felt every inch the knobbly-kneed conscript he was. He wasn't a would-be hero. He wasn't even a proud man of Dregonnia. He was fodder. He was meat. Another body to throw at an enemy he thought he understood. He'd been a fool. Hope waning, pride shattered, his mind latched onto one thought, sharp and desperate.

  This isn’t a wall. This is a rope.

  And they were all pulling, and the rope was fraying in a thousand tiny ways.

  Then the mindless spawn came again.

  Not just voidspawn this time—Tartarean lesser constructs, things like dogs made of hot iron and teeth. They bounded through ash and frost, jaws unhinging, saliva hissing as it hit cold air and turned to steam. They hit the line where it was weakest, drawn to the opening by wit or by instinct, no one knew. No one cared to know.

  The soldier kept fighting.

  He fought because he didn’t have another option.

  He stabbed one of the iron-hounds, infusion biting into its throat seam, forcing structure into something that was already too structured. It shrieked, a sound like metal being twisted, and collapsed.

  Another leapt.

  He barely got the spear up in time. The impact drove him backward. The creature’s weight was wrong—too heavy for its size. Its jaws snapped inches from his face, heat washing over his skin. He shoved infusion harder, felt his aethercore strain, felt the living circuitry in his arms threaten to tear under load.

  The hound shattered.

  His vision blurred with the aftershock.

  He heard more cries from generals he couldn't see, shouting commands he could no longer parse.

  He saw the behemoth still rampaging, still uncontained. He saw wraiths drifting through the chaos like mourners at a funeral still in progress. He saw voidspawn crawling over fallen soldiers, tearing through flesh, drawn to the glow beneath the sternum. Bodies slumped as their cores were leeched dry, structure unraveling once the aether was gone, skin and bone collapsing into shapes that no longer knew how to hold themselves together.

  He fought.

  He kept moving.

  He told himself that this was what strength looked like: enduring anyway.

  Then he felt something behind his eyes fade. His eyes were still sharp with adrenaline, but his resolve was quickly becoming a dull blade, the cracks growing wider as he tried to press on. A thought he had held all his life—that the Empire was iron, that Dregonnia’s dominance was the only honest answer to power—slipped, just slightly, like a stone loosened from a wall.

  He staggered.

  His spear dipped.

  A voidspawn hacked at his shoulder, rending worn armor and spraying blood. His vision doubled with pain and confusion. For one brief, hazy moment, he couldn’t remember why he was here. And then someone slammed into him, shoulder-first, knocking him back into motion. A fellow Dregonnian by the armor and a higher rank by the insignia on his pauldron.

  “Focus! Name your body parts if you have to! Left hand! Right hand! Spear!”

  The soldier obeyed, gasping. “Left—right—spear.”

  His mind grabbed the words like handholds. He killed the voidspawn that had spilled his blood. Tit for tat. A debt owed and paid in crimson and Abyssal ichor. The satisfaction didn't last long under the lingering sensation of the voidspawn's touch.

  The battle degraded, momentum breaking down into stress, error, and cumulative failure. Aether saturated the air, corrupted, contradictory. The ground pulsed with stress points, gradients, currents. Every spell cast, every infusion pushed, every summoning attempted fed data into something that watched from behind the Rift like a patient god.

  The soldier didn’t know that.

  He only knew the line was failing in slow motion.

  Then it arrived.

  The creature stepped out of smaller rift too dark to be called a shadow, without violence or ceremony. At first glance, it looked almost human. The sight only fooled the green soldier for a heartbeat.

  Its body was wrapped in layered plating that looked accreted rather than built, matte-black surfaces drinking in light and depth. The plates fit with the inevitability of collapsed mass, overlapping where pressure had forced structure into existence. Its head was bare. Where a face should have been, space bent inward into a smooth, featureless void, broken only by a narrow vertical seam where a dim, colorless glow leaked out, like radiation escaping a sealed core.

  It carried no weapon.

  It needed none.

  It walked toward the fractured section of the trench with the calm of someone arriving to inspect a workshop. A Dregonnian sergeant spotted it and shouted, “Target! Cut it down!”

  Three spears flew.

  The Abyssal spawn lifted one hand.

  The spears stopped midair, forward motion rejected at the level of intent. The soldier’s stomach dropped. The spawn tilted its head, as if considering the weapons, then it flicked its fingers.

  The spears reversed direction.

  They shot back through the air and impaled the men who had thrown them. No flourish. No roar. Just a viciously efficient adjustment of direction. The recruit’s knees went weak. One of the Veilheim Mages who'd somehow wound up beside him during the battle made a sound—half curse, half prayer.

  The spawn stepped forward again, unhurried.

  The surrounding wraiths let out silent screams and charged at the creature, but it paid them no mind. The soldier looked on in terrified confusion as the icy Stygian monsters warped and dispersed before they could so much as touch the humanoid voidspawn's form.

  Smaller voidspawn parted instinctively, as if their mindless absence recognized a greater absence wearing intelligence. The Tartarean iron-hounds felt no such reverence and mindlessly charged the thing, only to meet the same fate as the wraiths. The battlefield had paused in its wake, the Prathus alliance realizing, with nauseous clarity that this thing was not just a simple spawn of Nihilus.

  It was an officer—or as close to one as the Three Abysses had.

  The behemoth's roar echoed across the Wastes, and all eyes briefly turned to the hulking monstrosity tearing through the lines—through its own Tartarean spawn, to get to the humanoid voidspawn. The creature simply looked in its direction.

  That was enough to halt its advance.

  The brute slowed, then stopped. It growled and huffed, steam spilling from its mouth and joints as it hesitated. After a long, agonizing moment, it took a step back and with one last roar of fury and frustration, it continued its wanton rampage, tearing into the stunned alliance army with renewed fervor.

  The voidspawn merely turned away, as though it expected as much. Instead, it took in the rest of the battlefield. Its gaze swept over the trench, the rune-pillars, the Helmarion roots, the Shu-Lan martialists shifting to intercept, and the Dregonnian infantry massing. Seemingly done with its observations, it took another step forward, but stopped.

  A Shu-Lan warrior stepped forward, fists raised, stance perfect. “You will not pass.”

  The spawn’s head tilted again, as if amused by the concept of permission. It raised its chin as if about to speak, but the sound that emerged was not speech. It wasn'tt a battle cry or anything of the sort. The soldier didn't know what it was, but it hurt.

  He nearly dropped his spear to clamp his gauntleted hands over his ears, but held on, gritting his teeth as the "sound" ripped itself from the creature in one long, continuous stream of mental assault. Eventually, it ended, and the soldier looked around to see several other soldiers stumble back to their positions.

  The Shu-Lan warrior, evidently unphased by whatever that had been, took the opportunity to strike—fast, precise, internalized aether pattern aiming for disruption. His palm hit the spawn’s chest.

  For an instant, the soldier saw the spawn’s armor ripple, the pattern attempting to impose flow continuity rules on something that had no interest in being continuous.

  Then the spawn’s hand touched the Shu-Lan warrior’s wrist.

  The warrior froze in posture and intent, locked mid-action as reality stalled around him. His posture held, his muscles locked, his breath stopped mid-inhale. The spawn leaned close to him and to the recruit, it looked like it was whispering something he couldn’t hear. The Shu-Lan warrior’s eyes widened, his face growing pale as snow. There was recognition, horror, despair.

  Then his body collapsed in on itself in a gruesome display, the sound and sight like crumpled parchment oozing bloody pulp.

  The spawn looked at its outstretched, bloodstained claw for a moment, then let it drop to its side before looking around. Its glowing slit-face swept across the Dregonnian soldiers, and the fresh-faced conscript felt the gaze land on him like a weight.

  He tried to stand taller.

  He tried to summon the Academy’s mantras: dominance, force, forward.

  The words felt thin.

  The spawn took a step toward him.

  The soldier’s hands tightened on his spear until his knuckles ached. He forced infusion into the weapon, felt the channels hum, felt the aethercore in his upper chest flare with a last desperate insistence.

  He charged.

  He screamed—a raw, ugly sound, stripped of ceremony or heroism, like the noise a creature makes when cornered. No thoughts remained, only primal fear clashing with instinct and muscle memory beaten into him month after month.

  The spear stopped dead a handspan from the spawn’s chest, arrested by nothing he could see and everything he could feel—a hard, invisible veto. His momentum carried him into it anyway. Bone popped in his shoulder; pain white-flared down his arm. The spawn didn’t flinch. It simply reached out, two fingers pressing forward, effortlessly piercing through his armor, and touching his sternum as lightly as a man checking fabric for a stain.

  For a heartbeat, the recruit felt his sputtering core blaze and kick like a second heart trying to save him. Then it answered—not to him, but to the thing in front of him. The spawn turned something inside him with an absent, practiced motion. A cold, horrible absence spread through his breastbone.

  Something snapped.

  His chest caved inward with a wet, brittle crunch, ribs folding like kindling. His mouth opened to scream and only a wretched croak of agony came out. A dim glow leaked through the torn meat for an instant—his core, exposed—and the spawn leaned in and inhaled like tasting a scent.

  The light went out.

  It stepped over what was left of him without looking back, already walking toward the next weak point in the line. Around his body the battle resumed with the desperate, flailing struggle of a fish torn from water. Careless boots ran through his blood, frost formed on his spilled warmth, and the Wastes kept breathing—heat, cold, emptiness—practicing as the trench failed a little more, one clean mechanical break at a time.