The sound was unlike anything else in the world.
Ten thousand Armors — Cardinals — moved as one organism. Their footfalls layered upon one another, a slow, tectonic thunder that rattled the dust from ruined stones and sent birds scattering from withered hedgerows. Plate clattered, banners snapped, runes along limb-joints hummed like the breath of a temple. The whole host advanced with the measured dignity of a liturgy; the earth itself kept time with their march.
At its fore rode Sous Angelus. Penelope walked like a predator that had learned the manners of a court: deliberate, elegant, every motion designed to be seen. Crimson plating flickered with gold veins. The harness's gait was uncanny — almost human in its rhythm — and through the open hatch Sous held a map in his hands, eyes darting across inked paths as if searching for a seam in the world to slip through.
"My lord," the captain beside him repeated, voice strained against the wind. "Please — let someone else read that map. Exposing yourself like this is… dangerous."
Sous did not look to the man. He listened to the cadence of the thousands behind him, felt it in the flex of the control rods beneath his palms. "We have twenty scout units ahead," he said, spare and decisive. "If the plain gives us warning we will know it in time." Still, his fingers did not stop tracing the lines on the parchment.
The closer they came to the heartlands, the more the world seemed to fall away. Birdsong thinned to an occasional, frightened chirr; insects fell silent. Limestone pillars thrust from the ground like broken teeth; the soil was riddled with old burrows and fresh rents, as if something enormous had chewed its path through the land and not bothered to swallow the bones. The air tasted of iron and old rot.
Hushed prayers rose from a thousand throats. Not the loud litany of triumph, but the small, intimate chants of men who have chosen to walk into a maw. Sous heard them like a tide under the drums. He did not mistake their fear for weakness; he knew fear sharpened men as nothing else could.
He looked at his troops: young nobles with varnished visages, grizzled veterans in gilded frames, squires who had learned to think in the language of armor. In Penelope's periscope he could see faces reflected in a thousand crimson visors — knotted with concentration, pale at the lips, each one a story. He saw the way they double-checked lance locks, adjusted rune feeds, exchanged curt nods. They trusted him to make the choice, and he would not fail them.
Pens and doctrine had taught him many things. War, he had been told, was a theater where the commander shaped perception as surely as trajectories. The spectacle of ten thousand Cardinals – regal, rhythmic, untouchable-looking — was not merely for the enemy; it was for every human eye that could be bent to the cause. A host so perfect compelled belief. It drew attention. It demanded to be faced.
That was the point.
Sous had read the reports. He had read Desax's cautious notes. He had seen Logos' map; he had stared at the neat markings until the ink blurred. He had felt the prickling of a target traced across a page. If Logos had placed the army where the Crawlers could not ignore them, then the Sire — whatever monstrous womb of command it dwelt in — would bloom from the soil like a nightmare answering a summons.
But Sous was not a child staring at a map as scripture. He was a blade honed in trials. If a trap could be set, it could be remade. If the Crawlers converged on them as bait, he would turn the bait into a blade.
He turned the map inside Penelope's compartment with a detached hand and closed his fingers on it. Every contingency he had rehearsed across sleepless nights flashed through him: staggered formation shifts, overlapping arcs of fire, mobile reserves prepared to harry the flanks while the main body fixed the enemy's gaze. He considered angles, distances, the lag of supply wagons, the rhythm of the Ferous and Cardinal cannons. He thought of the men who trusted him with their lives, and he would not give them to fate as a lesson for someone else's theory.
"Hold formation," he said, though the words were mostly to steady himself. "Scouts extend left. Two units take the southern gully and fan wide. Keep the lances low; the Crawlers are quick to grab exposed limbs."
The captain barked the orders, and men moved like a living mechanism — a dozen subtle adjustments rippling through ranks. Sous felt the pleasing click of order responding to command; it steadied the small, angrier thing in his chest that called itself rivalry.
Logos' name threaded through his thoughts and refused to be cut away. There was not just rivalry in it. There was a bitter, personal calculus — envy braided with respect. Logos had the advantage of quiet observation; he had the advantage of seeing seams others missed. But Sous had steel and men who could change direction in a heartbeat. He had the courage to put himself in the line of fire and to take the hit if it came. He would not be a pawn in anyone's ledger, not Logos', not fate's.
He thought of strategy like a duel. If fate played chess, then Sous would not simply be a piece; he would study the board and uproot it, if need be.
The wind tore across the plain and brought a hollow, distant sound — a keening that did not come from horn or throat. The scouts' horns answered, shorter and sharper. A rider fell into formation, dust streaking his face, and brought word whispered against the metal bones of their harness.
"Advance warning," the rider said, breathless. "Movement ahead. Something the size of a ridge—no, larger—stirs. The ground… it shifts. Multiple emanations. The scouts report a great convergence on the western furrow. It's heading this way."
Sous did not start. He had expected the confirmation. He had expected the Sire to answer the torch held up by ten thousand hearts.
He folded the map and tightened a leather strap around the harness as if girding himself. A flash of cold humor crossed his face — the kind one has before battle when the absurdity of destiny reveals itself: two young men, both prodigies, each shaping war in opposite languages. One wrote his will in ink and gears; the other carved his in steel and the sermon of blades.
"Signal the reserves," Sous ordered quietly. "Do not let the formation choke. Keep the center tight and the flanks mobile. If they come as a wave, we will make a reef of men and steel to break it. If the Sire shows its head, we take note of its direction and do not commit the whole line at once. Guard the cavalry; they will be needed for counterplay."
He felt the old animal hunger rise then — not for glory, not for proof, but for the clarity of action. In the moment when pillars of chitin and mandible poured from the earth and screamed into the light, there would be only two things to do: see and strike. Order, under stress, was what won fights.
"Prepare the pelters," he called to a nearby officer. "Coordinate with the arc-lancers. If their focus narrows, we will widen the net."
Around him men nodded. In Penelope's interior, the harness hummed, ready.
Sous had thought once that honor and spectacle were ends in themselves. Tonight he understood they could be tools. He would not be used. If Logos had designed the bait, Sous would not walk into the killing ground blind. He would make the bait a blade — not merely to punish the Crawlers, but to show Logos, and the world, that the hand that wielded steel could match the hand that saw the future.
The horizon darkened. From the ridgelines something vast rose: not a hill, not a beast in any honest sense, but a shifting wall of motion — the scent of rot and old hunger pushed forward in slow, terrible waves. The scouts' shouts turned into a raw, panicked cry that pricked the air.
"Hold steady," Sous breathed. He thought, for a fraction of a heartbeat, of the boy in Laos and the cold efficiency that boy represented. He thought, too, of the men fastened into Penelope and the Cardinals — a cathedral that could become an anvil.
He leaned forward and spoke into the frame's comm-channel where his voice would travel, crisp and clear. "When they reach the line, do not collapse. Stand where you are. Make them come. Mark where the Sire moves, and we will cut the head free."
Behind the visor, crimson reflected a thousand tiny lights. Beneath the field, the heartbeat of ten thousand frames beat like thunder. The ground answered them — not with surrender, but with the slow, rising roar of something older than war itself.
They were in motion now, all of them. War as ritual, war as calculus. Two youths had set the stage — each in his own idiom. The plain around them held its breath, and in the distance the earth began to tear.