The spy and the leader

The makeshift infirmary's reek of despair vanished as violently as a snuffed candle. Agony was the first coherent thought. A white-hot brand seared across my nerves, radiating from my right hand. My vision swam, blurred by tears not my own, stinging in thick, acrid air that reeked of spoiled meat, chemical rot, and something metallic and sharp – blood. My blood.

I tried to move. But couldn't. Cold, slick stone pressed against my bare back, my legs. Thick, fibrous bonds – like wet sinew – bit deep into my wrists and ankles, anchoring me spread-eagled on a rough slab. The chill leached into my bones, a counterpoint to the fire in my hand.

A figure stood before me.

My heart hammered against ribs that felt too thin, too brittle. My vision swam, blurred by tears welling from sheer, helpless terror. But I saw him clearly enough.

He looked… human. Utterly, terrifyingly human. Tall, lean, dressed in dark, finely tailored wool and leather that seemed to drink the torchlight. His hair, the colour of tarnished silver, was swept back from a high, pale forehead. His features were sharp, aristocratic – a blade of a nose, high cheekbones, a thin, unsmiling mouth. He could have been a nobleman, a scholar, a judge.

Except for the eyes.

They were pools of absolute, lightless black. No white, no iris, no pupil. Just endless, depthless voids where eyes should be. They didn't reflect the torchlight; they consumed it. Staring into them felt like staring into the abyss at the heart of a dead star. Cold. Ancient. Utterly devoid of anything recognizable as human emotion.

And in that borrowed skull, the spy's recognition slammed into me like a physical blow: Lord. High Command. This was no mindless drone. This was the enemy's sharpened intellect.

He hadn't moved. He simply observed, one pale, elegant hand resting lightly on the pommel of a slender, dark-hilted dagger at his belt. The other hand held a small, cruel-looking instrument – like a glass vial fused to a thin, needle-sharp probe. It glowed with a faint, sickly purple light from within.

"You were observed near the Silverspring Conduit," the Lord said. His voice was soft, cultured, devoid of inflection. It wasn't loud, yet it filled the small cell, resonating in the bones of the skull I inhabited. It was the sound of a tomb sealing shut. "Three days prior to the… incident. A regrettable loss of resources."

He took a single, silent step closer. The black voids of his eyes fixed on mine. The pressure wasn't psychic; it was the sheer, crushing weight of his presence, his absolute certainty of control. It pressed down, making it hard to breathe in this borrowed body.

"You will tell me," he continued, the words precise, chilling, "who you signaled. The location of the drop point. The cipher key used."

He raised the glowing instrument. The purple light pulsed faintly. "This," he murmured, almost conversationally, "extracts memories. Crudely. Painfully. It shatters the mind as it retrieves the data. A waste. A mind, even a fragile human one, is a resource. Yours could still serve… if you cooperate."

The spy's terror was a living thing inside me, coiling around my spine. He tried to speak, to deny, but his throat was locked tight, producing only a dry click. He knew. He knew everything. The conduit, the timing… they'd been watching. His mistake hadn't just been getting caught; it had been walking into a trap laid with cold, calculating precision.

The Lord tilted his head slightly, a gesture that might have been curious on a human face. On his, with those eyes, it was obscene. "Silence is defiance. Admirable, in its primitive way." He took another step. Now he was within arm's reach. The faint scent of ozone and something cold, like frozen stone, emanated from him. "Futile, but admirable. The pain will be exquisite. And when the shattering is complete, the data will be mine regardless. Your choice is merely one of… efficiency. And dignity. Such as it is."

He reached out. Not roughly. With the terrifying, deliberate grace of a surgeon. The glowing tip of the probe touched the spy's temple.

Agony.

It wasn't fire. It was ice. A lance of pure, soul-deep cold that burrowed into the skull, freezing thought, freezing breath. It felt like my mind was being cracked open, like glaciers grinding against the inside of my bones. A silent, breathless scream locked in the spy's throat. Our shared body arched against the manacles, muscles straining, tendons standing out like cords. Tears, hot and shameful, streamed down our face. I wanted to scream, maybe I was screaming, who knew, I only wanted this pain to end. 

Images exploded behind our eyes – not summoned, but ripped free: the damp stones of the conduit; the quick flash of the signal mirror; the face of his contact, Elara, her eyes wide with urgency as she snatched the coded message… Secrets spilling like blood from a fatal wound.

NO! The denial was a desperate howl within the prison of his skull. Not defiance now, but pure, animal terror. He couldn't hold it. The cold was devouring him, freezing his thoughts, his will. Elara! The cipher! They'll find her! They'll kill her! The knowledge of what his yielding meant – not just his death, but hers, the compromise of the entire network – was a fresh wave of horror atop the agony.

The Lord watched, his expression unchanged, those black voids absorbing the spy's silent torment. The probe pulsed brighter, the purple light flaring. The cold intensified, seeking deeper, probing for the core, for the cipher key, for the location of the safe house…

Then, through the rending cold and the terror for Elara, another image surfaced. Not a secret. A memory. Sitting on a sun-warmed rock by a stream, before the darkness fell. Elara, younger, laughing, throwing a pebble into the water. Not the contact but the friend. The spark of life in her eyes, the sound of her laugh – utterly human, utterly alive. A reason to endure, even here, even now, facing the void in human form.

The cold probe dug deeper. The Lord leaned in slightly, his void eyes inches from the spy's streaming ones. He could feel the icy breath on his face. The pressure to break, to scream the secrets, was overwhelming.

But the spy locked his gaze – our gaze – onto the fathomless black pits before him. He poured every shattered remnant of his will into that stare. Not defiance they could use, but the absolute, final silence of the grave. He offered them the agony, the terror, the ruined body. But he clamped down on the secrets, burying them under the memory of sunlight on water and a friend's laughter. He would shatter. But he wouldn't yield that.

The probe remained. The agony didn't cease. It was a stalemate written in ice and torment. The spy held the Lord's gaze, his borrowed body trembling violently, tears still flowing, but his inner silence, built on the memory of light and laughter, remained unbroken. He had denied the void its final prize. For now.

I couldn't do this anymore.

The visions were a flood, a torrent of other lives, other agonies, crashing against the crumbling walls of my mind. Each one left a fresh wound, a raw nerve exposed to horrors not my own. Time dissolved – minutes, hours, days? Meaningless. My own body felt like a distant, ill-fitting shell, numb and alien. Somewhere in the echoing cavern of my fractured consciousness, I sensed Kaelum. I knew he was there. But reaching out? The effort felt like trying to lift a mountain with broken fingers. My mind wasn't just tired; it was scoured, hollowed out by a thousand screams that weren't mine. How did they endure it? How did any of them— 

Heat slammed into me. Not the damp cold of the tunnel, but a dry, searing furnace-blast that scorched my borrowed lungs. The air wasn't mineral tang and ozone; it was thick with choking smoke, the greasy stench of burning pitch, and the raw, metallic reek of fresh blood. Light wasn't a guttering torch, but the furious, dancing orange glare of flames consuming wooden palisades, reflecting off splintered shields and terrified eyes.

I stood on a raised wooden platform, rough planks trembling underfoot. Below, chaos reigned in my outpost.

Lightsbridge. A name surfaced in the borrowed mind, bitter as ashes. A frontier watchtower, a cluster of log buildings clinging to a rocky spur overlooking a desolate valley. Now, it was a pyre.

The suckers here were a tide. A churning, shrieking mass of slick, grey-black flesh pouring over the shattered remnants of the outer wall. Torchlight glinted on hooked talons tearing into fleeing defenders, on rotating teeth crunching bone. Defenders – my people – fought with desperate, doomed ferocity. Farmers with spears, miners swinging picks, a few scattered soldiers in battered leather trying to form a buckling line near the central storehouse. Screams, human and monstrous, fused into a single, hellish shriek.

"They're through the East Barricade!" a voice roared beside me, raw with panic. A broad-shouldered man, face blackened by soot, blood streaming from a gash on his temple, clutched a warhammer slick with ichor. Garvin. My sergeant. "We can't hold the inner yard! They're flanking the granary!"

"Then we don't hold it," the Leader's voice— my voice rasped from my borrowed throat. It wasn't the glacier-calm of the Keep commander. This voice was younger, frayed at the edges by terror and exhaustion, yet vibrating with a terrible, focused intensity. My eyes, wide and bloodshot, scanned the inferno below, not with despair, but with frantic calculation. I wore simple, scorched leathers, no grand armor. My weapon was a notched axe, its haft sticky with gore.

Garvin whirled on him. "Don't hold it? The grain! The wounded are sheltering there! If they take it–"

"They will take it," I cut in, pointing not at the granary, but beyond the burning palisades, towards the dark mouth of a narrow ravine snaking up the mountain behind the outpost. "Look! The retreat path. They're already trying to cut it off!"

Through the smoke, figures were visible – civilians, mostly women, children, the old – a terrified river flowing towards the ravine's dubious safety. And skirting the flames, moving with terrifying speed, a pack of smaller, faster Suckers were scrambling over rocks, aiming to intercept that flow before it reached the narrow pass.

Absolute horror washed over my senses. The granary was lost. Lightsbridge was lost. The only thing left was the speed of the retreat.

"We need minutes," the Leader breathed, his gaze snapping back to the seething mass in the courtyard. His focus landed on the central watchtower – a sturdy timber structure near the main gate, now half-consumed by fire, but its base still relatively intact. A structure packed with pitch barrels, oil stores… and the main support beams for the gatehouse arch above it. "Just minutes."

Garvin followed his gaze. Understanding dawned, then horror. "No. Rylan, no. That tower… it's the only thing slowing their main push! If it goes…"

"...it takes the gatehouse arch with it," the Leader – Rylan – finished, his voice flat, final. "It collapses onto the main breach. Blocks it. Bottlenecks them. Gives the retreat time to reach the ravine." I turned to Garvin, his young face suddenly ancient in the firelight. "It's the only card left, Garv."

"It's suicide!" Garvin roared, grabbing my arm. "The blast… the collapse… you'll be buried! We all will!"

I didn't pull away, meeting the sergeant's desperate gaze. "I know." The words were simple, heavy stones dropped into the roaring chaos. "My duty isn't to die with the outpost. It's to die for the retreat. To buy those minutes with everything that's left here." He gestured towards the doomed defenders below, towards the flickering figures fleeing towards the ravine. "Every soul that gets into that pass lives because we held here. That is the victory."

I pulled my arm free. "I don't order you to follow me into that tower. I order you to go. Now. Take anyone still mobile. Get to the ravine. Help shepherd them. That's your duty." I hefted my axe, knuckles white. "My duty…" I looked towards the burning watchtower, its timbers groaning ominously. "...is down there. In the fire."

I didn't wait for argument, only turned and started down the rough steps from the platform, heading not towards the retreat, but straight into the heart of the overrun yard, towards the blazing tower.

"Rylan!" Garvin shouted after me, anguish tearing his voice. 

The Leader paused at the base of the steps, silhouetted against the raging fire. Suckers shrieked nearby. A defender went down screaming ten paces away. 

I didn't flinch.

"Join me, if you will. ," I called back, it wasn't a command, but a raw, desperate invitation. "To buy the dawn for them." I nodded towards the ravine. "But go. Save who you can. That's the order."

And then I turned from him, from the rising panic, and stepped toward the flames, axe gripped tight in my hands.

Then, a hand gripped my arm and a figure emerged beside me. It was a woman, her face streaked with soot and tears, a kitchen knife in her hand. Her eyes weren't on me. They were fixed on the burning tower, on the figure vanishing into the inferno. Her voice, when it came, was a broken whisper, yet it cut through the roar.

"I will follow you," she said. And she did. Without hesitation.

I looked back, to see it all one last time and my eyes found Garvin. He slammed his warhammer against a burning post, sending sparks flying. "Someone get to the granary! Tell them to run! Now!" He bellowed the order at a group of stunned defenders nearby. Then, without looking back, he roared, "To the tower! For LIGHTSBRIDGE!" He charged down the steps after the woman, after his leader, towards the collapsing heart of the outpost.