- TMK -

Locke cradled her rifle as she looked north. Amidst the whack of axes, Imperial legionaries toiled in the arctic summer. Blond grasses blanketed the Lyth, each tuft pining for the endless light before the arrival of winter. Wildflowers blotched the yellow with ivory and magenta. Rhododendron graced the soldiers with caramel perfume. For the black-haired southerners, the wildflowers were a welcome break from the ruin before them.

​

There, mixed with ash and half-burned peat, one of Lysander’s colonies sat–a blemish among the Lyth. Eventually, Locke would return to that ruin. Bodies still lay ransacked in hovels, a rotting reminder of how the Northern War earned its name. Such horrors were meant to enshrine their invasion as a war for liberation.

​

That’s what the Empress wanted them to believe.

​

 Locke was never keen on the quasi-worship of the sovereign like other Saironians. The Empress was barely Saironian at all. Her line was the product of eight hundred years of Nassian and Pejan eugenics. A stolen legacy.

​

Not like Locke.

​

The Tuttons were of old blood. Blood far older than that of the Empress. Their line ruled Gwenryth and the lands west of the Oth long before Taul Rend and Marhia Lorylyn ended Vampiric dominion over Saironia. Before the Vampires left Odova, long before the Gepids across the Dadac found their God, there were the Tuttons of Gwenryth.

​

Their house was ancient enough to recall a time the rulers of the Sair basin were called by divine mandate, not by flawed pedigree. Rule based in service to the Gods, not on their enslavement. But the old, pious order had long since passed. Even the Tuttons had to bow before the might of Taul Rend and his alchemy. And, in wicked irony, the alchemy Taul Rend brought to the Sair basin saved Locke’s life the night before.

​

While the Skald and Arrcosi had butchered the Salamander colonists, the Saironian garrison held firm. For the Empress’ alchemists had been in the north far longer than the legionaries. In that time, they built self-heating greenhouses, icemelt forges, and steam-powered incubators.

​

Everything the Salamander colonists needed to thrive in a land made to destroy them.

​

More so, those same alchemists dug. They dug trenches, store houses, gun emplacements–an entire fortress beneath the ill-fated colony. There, the legionaries held their own against the Skald tribes. When the war riders arose from the tundra, mounted on woolly rhinos, the legionaries waited. They poured from the north, hundreds of grey-skinned devils howling and screeching as an artic gale. The crack of rifles and trampling beasts descended over the colony. Huts were smashed, colonists butchered, and fire engulfed the land.

​

Then the legionaries sprung their trap. Mines, cannons, rotary guns, and teal fire erupted from beneath the invader’s feet. Shredder guns rained flechettes into the sky, bringing Arrcosi skyskiffs crashing to the earth. In that midnight carnage, the truth emerged.

​

A truth most of the legionaries refused to believe. They were here for the same reason Tasiana’s mother had tried and failed to invade the steppe decades before.

​

Conquest.

​

The same mandate Taul Rend and Marhia Lorylyn enshrined at the Empire’s inception. Ubyd danun Sair. One world under a crimson star. The culmination of millennia-long eugenic doctrine to show that Emperors were greater than Gods. The Salamanders here, Lysander’s colonists, were the bait to make that dream a reality.

​

“Locke,” Sergeant Calafolis called. “Going to use that hatchet or stare at the grass?”

​

“Why would she?” Serham quipped as his hatchet bit into sap-heavy pine. “She’ll be cozied up with the captain next time those rhino fuckers come screechin’.”

​

“Polishing knobs is better than polishing guns,” Locke replied. “Not that you could tell a knob if it plopped in your lap.”

​

“I should hope not,” Captain Edwyn interrupted, his long shadow falling over the trio as he stood at the parapet of a trench.

​

“Captain,” Serham stood at attention, hazel eyes betraying his embarrassment. “We–”

​

“Keep chopping and keep quiet,” Edwyn said with an uninterested sigh. “You, too, Sergeant.”

​

“Sir,” Calafolis said with a salute.

​

“Locke.” Edwyn waved for her to follow. “Let’s go.”