The departure was quiet. No trumpets, no banners, no rousing speech. Logos had simply given his command, sealed the message with wax, and placed it into Desax's hands.
Ten Armors stood ready, towering metal frames armed with axes, glaives, and rifles. They gleamed not with polish but with battle scars—scratches, dents, and dark stains that no scrubbing could fully erase. Their pilots climbed into their harnesses wordlessly, sealing themselves inside like monks entering cloisters.
Five refugees waited nearby, faces hollow, eyes sunken. They were not warriors, nor scouts. They were survivors—the only sort who knew the secret paths through the wasteland. They bowed low to Desax, though their spines bent more from exhaustion than reverence.
"Let's move," Desax said simply.
The gates of the Laos fortress opened with a groan of iron, and the small column marched out into the gray.
The road stretched endless.
If it could even be called a road anymore.
Fields that once grew wheat and barley were burned down to black husks. Wind carried the stink of rot across plains littered with carcasses—livestock torn apart, men left where they fell, Crawlers split open by cannon fire. The soil was scorched, gouged, scarred by the clashes of hundreds of battles.
Even the trees were gone, ripped apart for timber, stripped to skeletal stumps.
The world looked less like a kingdom and more like a graveyard.
The Armors trudged on without hesitation, their footsteps pounding steady beats into the earth. The refugees led in silence, pointing wordlessly when paths split or terrain grew treacherous.
Only Desax seemed restless.
He rode in one of the lighter Armors, though he kept its hatch open to feel the wind. His hands clenched the railing, eyes fixed on the horizon. He had known the Crawlers were a threat—every strategist had—but he had not expected the devastation to be this complete.
On the second day, they passed through a village.
Or rather, what remained of one.
The houses were hollow shells. Roofs caved in. Walls blackened by fire. The central square was nothing but a pit of bones—villagers dragged together by mandibles, feasted upon, discarded in heaps.
A child's doll lay in the mud, its face melted half away.
One of the refugee guides stopped walking. He bent down, scooped up the doll, and held it to his chest. His shoulders shook, but he made no sound.
The column did not stop. They walked past him, and eventually, he staggered forward again, clutching the ruined toy like a relic.
Desax's jaw tightened. Logos had spoken of order, of discipline, of building walls where others had only run. Desax had believed it, followed it. But now, seeing what lay outside those walls, he realized something sharper: Logos had been right to terrify the people into working.
Without the fortress, without the rifles and cannons, this was what awaited them.
By the fourth day, the air grew heavier.
They found corpses everywhere. Sometimes single bodies slumped against trees. Sometimes whole companies of soldiers, crushed into the mud where Crawlers had swarmed them. Armor was torn open like paper. Weapons lay rusted, broken, abandoned.
Desax's mind, normally sharp and calculating, began to blur. He imagined the same fate for himself, for Kleber, for Masen, for Logos. He imagined the fortress falling, all their work undone in an instant.
He shook the thought away, but it kept returning.
Even the soldiers piloting the Armors grew quieter with each passing hour. Men who normally cursed, sang, or barked jokes over the amplifiers now spoke only when absolutely necessary. Their heavy machines moved like funeral bearers, escorting not a living commander but a coffin.
The refugees fared worse. Their eyes darted at every shadow. One woman began to mutter prayers under her breath, over and over again, lips cracked and bleeding but never still.
Desax tried to ignore it. But as night fell and they made camp beside a shattered windmill, he found himself listening for her voice, waiting for it, fearing its silence.
On the seventh day, they met the Crawlers.
It was not a horde, not even a swarm. Just a small band of stragglers—perhaps twenty, drawn by scent or sound. Their bodies were half-starved, shells dulled, movements sluggish.
But when they struck, they struck with hunger.
Mandibles clashed against armor plating. Claws ripped at steel joints.
"Form circle!" Desax barked, his voice cracking with more fear than authority.
The Armors obeyed instantly, lumbering into a ring around the refugees. Rifles flared. Blades cleaved. The clash was short, brutal, efficient.
When it was over, ichor steamed across the grass. The air stank of burned chitin.
Desax climbed down from his machine and stared at the corpses. He thought he should feel triumph, relief, something. Instead, he felt only emptiness.
Twenty Crawlers, weak and scattered—and still they had struck terror into his chest.
How many more? How many thousands waited beyond the hills? How vast was the shadow of the Sire itself?
The journey wore on.
Every day was the same rhythm: march, discover ruins, smell death, fight, march again. Food grew scarce. Even the Crawlers' meat—so widely used in Laos—was shunned here. The refugees refused to touch it. The soldiers chewed in silence, eyes down.
At night, Desax could not sleep. He sketched maps by firelight, calculating supply lines, predicting where hordes might move, imagining what fortifications could have saved each village they passed. His papers filled with notes and diagrams, but every solution felt too small, too late.
By the twelfth day, he realized something painful.
He had always prided himself on being the cautious one, the strategist among his friends. Logos the visionary, Kleber the blunt blade, Masen the firebrand—and Desax, the careful planner.
But none of his plans had prepared him for this.
The Crawlers weren't simply a force to be countered. They were erasing the map itself.
Every ruin they passed hammered the truth deeper into his skull: Logos had seen this coming. Logos had built walls not because it was clever, but because it was the only choice left.
For the first time, Desax felt afraid not of the Crawlers, but of what Logos would become if left unchecked.
A boy who could force order upon chaos—at any cost.
On the fifteenth day, the spires of Angelus banners appeared on the horizon. The camp was vast, stretching across hills like a city of steel. Knights drilled in perfect ranks. Pennants snapped in the wind. Unlike the ruined villages, this place still pulsed with life.
The refugees wept openly at the sight.
Desax only stared, tightening his grip on the sealed message.
He had crossed a road of ash to deliver it. He had seen the price of hesitation, the cost of weakness, the fragility of hope.
And as he marched toward the golden prodigy of the Angelus name, he wondered if even Sous understood what kind of world they were standing in.
Or if Logos was the only one truly willing to shape it.