The one-eyed lady moved through the Elderhush Forest with steam smoking around her boots.

  Three giant bilefrost centipedes lay behind her. Their segmented armor had cooled into a sickly, crystalline sheer, and their mouths gaped with the last, useless spasms of bile. She hadn’t bothered fighting them directly. Where she’d passed, the ground had done the rest: giant spikes of hardened soil had risen behind her and shredded their undersides, spearing through them.

  Two more carcasses of a different beast—thick, furred things the hunters in Obric called grove-hollow apes—were buried by giant earth walls that’d risen and swallowed them like tidal waves. She wasn’t going to harvest their parts either. There were still a few more hours until midnight, so she wanted to walk as much as she could before she had to stop for her own good.

  Past midnight was when the strongest magic beasts in these lands came out to hunt. Even she’d be a little hard-pressed to fend them all off.

  She was just about to wave a hand and close the wounds she’d opened in the earth—completely burying the magic beasts she’d killed to hide her trail—when a strange sound lanced out behind her.

  A mechanical roar in the west—an unnatural crack like thunder arranged by a smith.

  She whirled to see, in the far distance, a dozen giant smokestacks rising into the night sky.

  … Fuck.

  Her world inverted.

  She dropped to both knees. The ground leapt beneath her like a horse with panic in its ribs. The past bled into the present in a rush of noise and heat and light: aboard a caravan transport, boots slamming, the Obric army’s standard half-mast, the smell of seared flesh and sulphur and the taste of a comrade’s blood on a collar.

  She saw the fortress that wasn’t quite a fortress, but a rolling war machine given to lightning, glass and gilded banners cooking in blue flame. She felt the heat of an arc that hit an allied line and kept striking until bones were incandescent and faces were turned to coal. Images spilled through her: faces with skin peeled back to reveal the jawbones still clenching, and the flash that’d taken her left cheek in three places so the scarred map there could read ‘Obric soldier’ like a brand.

  A child's hand tugged at her sleeve in the trenches. A soldier clawed at her ankles, begging for death. A general yelled at her in a language that was equal parts prayer and command, and… for a moment, her mind was a mortar with too many shots.

  She retched.

  It was clumsy—off-beat—and it shook her. She’d been given pills and potions to keep that sort of thing away, tucking memories beneath layers of discipline, but her captain had always said a tree’s root cannot be denied.

  As she convulsed, the rune-threaded anklets around her feet pulsed and stretched their will into the ground. Mana poured into the anklets on instinct. Giant stone shards immediately sprang up in an angry circle around her, forming a spiky corral that threw up dirt and smaller trees and sent up a cloud of uprooted earth.

  No!

  Stop!

  She gagged. Stone spikes hissed and settled around her, but she pressed her forehead to the ground and breathed. Breathe. She breathed, inhaling the cold, loamy scent of the forest, and murmured an old Obric hymn under her breath:

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “Obric, keep me, kingdom of stone.

  “Your veins remember, though I stand alone.

  “Obric, Obric… still my hand.

  “Make me… as steadfast… as your land.”

  And when she could speak without rasping—when her relics stopped glowing and spikes stopped erupting around her—she exhaled slowly, threading her breaths back into their proper rhythm.

  … Still here.

  Still alive.

  When she could stand without swaying, she tested the world again. She lifted her forehead off the ground and knelt there, wiping dirt off the single lens on her mask.

  The smokestacks in the south weren’t bright, ceremonial burns armies lit to mark a victory. She knew what those looked like. Those smokestacks were destruction smoke: burning chimney-splinters and thatch and… somewhere among them, smoke from the core of a golem.

  Her jaw clenched.

  Someone defeated the gargoyle-type golem?

  She’d awakened the golems on her way to the capital for the very purpose of destroying Granamere. After all, they needed to fan the flames of war even further, making Obric believe Auraline was behind the golems in retaliation for the destruction of Corvalenne. They needed duplicity layered upon duplicity until the entire continent—the entire world—felt the pull towards a new war.

  But when she’d passed through Granamere a few days ago, she hadn’t noticed any adventurers or warriors strong enough to take down the gargoyle-type golem. At least, she hadn’t felt any around. Last she checked after news of Corvalenne’s destruction spread around, there were only two non-local adventurers left in the Guild, and those two didn’t even look like they knew how to take a request, let alone defeat a golem.

  She’d been told it was inevitable that the gargoyle-type would eventually be taken down by the automaton in the Guild—curse Orland and his constant interference in their plans—but this early?

  So soon?

  By the looks of it, not even thirty percent of Granamere was destroyed. The damage dealt by the gargoyle-type golem should’ve been much more. It could’ve been much more.

  Was I given false information?

  Maybe the Obric Border Army sent a few strong soldiers to garrison in the town right after I left?

  … No.

  She scanned the dark undergrowth with the rest of her senses—mana drift, scent in the battered wind, the residual heat signatures of steel. Ironshade Corps training had made her a specialist in tasting the earth and reading stories from them. Wet sap in one trench meant a hunter had passed two hours prior. Scuffed loam that faced west meant the pursuer had fled that direction. If the Obric Border Army had sent anyone over to Granamere, she would’ve known.. If there was a wanderer in the area strong enough to defeat that gargoyle-type golem, she would’ve sensed it.

  So no.

  The person who defeated the golem was someone who wasn’t supposed to be in Granamere—a Third Defiler—and that meant she had to change her plan.

  First Orland, then the Witch, and now…

  She tightened her jaw as she pulled herself onto her feet, patting dirt off her cloak and hood. She couldn’t afford to be tailed now. If another Defiler had truly appeared, then they were sure to be a thorn in their side—a thorn in her side. She had to assume she was being tracked somehow, so she’d be a fool if she kept on going straight to the capital.

  First, she had to reroute to the nearest large mining town where she could hide herself easily. Braskir was the closest. Orelnik and Grastel were close as well, but they were less populous and not worth as much destroying. Braskir had to be her destination.

  And then she’d have to set up a trap.

  After all, if there was a chance to kill a Defiler before they proved too powerful to be defeated—like the other two before them—she had to take it.

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