They came from the tree line—shadows in the dark.
There was no warning sound. No footfall, no branch-crack, nothing that the sentries could have recognized before the wrongness fell on Faerlong Dell. One moment the dark between the trees was empty. The next it wasn’t.
The firelight had seemed warm a moment before. Now it only made the dark between the trees darker, and the shapes moving out of it reflected the orange fires like a mockery of warmth. People ran into each other. Someone’s torch went over and the grass caught for a moment before someone stamped it out. The camp had been a home for twelve hours and now it was a corridor for panic. Shapes, moving with the gait of things that had once been people and no longer were, drifting into the firelight from three directions at once.
A man screamed.
Scarlet’s army had encountered Urukesh. They had faced bandits and hard roads and the ordinary terrors of a long march. They had not faced this. The scream broke the camp open and people ran and the shapes moved through the panic without hurrying, without sound, reaching.
The first touch took a young man from Psalter’s Point off his feet. He didn’t fall so much as crumple, his color changing in the firelight, his face suddenly that of someone much older. The woman beside him screamed his name and grabbed his arm and the Unfinished moved on, unhurried, reaching for the next.
Chenguer saw them all at once.
It wasn’t like vision—not exactly. It was a web laid flat over the world, a map drawn in nodes and pulsing connections over everything real. He could see the camp, the fires, the running people, and overlaid on top of it: sixty-three points of sickly light moving through the tree line and between the tents, each one a marker on a surface he’d never been taught to read but somehow knew how to use.
Philip was already moving toward the nearest cluster when Chenguer caught his arm.
“Seven o’clock,” Chenguer said. “Twelve of them, coming around the eastern fire line.”
Philip checked his stride, adjusted. Scarlet was already looking at him.
“Three o’clock,” Chenguer said. “That’s where the families are.”
Scarlet went.
“Straight on, six o’clock.” He paused. “That’s the main push. Eighteen.”
Philip looked at him once, then drew Lightbringer.
The night changed.
Philip moved into the center of the camp with eighteen creatures coming at him from the southern dark and Chenguer at his side. Lightbringer came out of its scabbard and what the light did was both illuminate and accuse. The nearest Unfinished turned toward it the way moths turn toward a lantern. That was the mistake. The first swing took two at once where they had crowded together, and what Philip felt was not the resistance of a body but the absence of one—a vapor releasing, a borrowed thing given back.
“Two breaking left,” Chenguer said, and was already moving before Philip turned.
He took the first one with a direct cut that finished cleanly, and the second was on him before he cleared the stroke—hands reaching for his head, the killing touch. He dropped his weight and drove his shoulder into it, breaking its reach, and took it across the back as it stumbled forward. He was back at Philip’s left before the body dropped.
“Gap forming, nine o’clock,” he said. “Three are trying to go around.”
Philip pivoted without stopping, cutting back across his own arc, and Chenguer went the other way on a parallel path, but from a wider angle, cutting off the flankers before they reached the tentline. He killed one on the approach and the other two turned toward him, which was when Philip’s light found them from behind.
The overlay was not a distraction. It ran underneath everything else, the map updating constantly, the cold points winking out as the Unfinished fell and new ones registering as they pushed out from the trees.
“Behind you,” Chenguer said, “closing fast.”
Philip dropped without breaking stride. The reaching hands passed over him. He came up inside the creature’s reach and drove Lightbringer upward through it. The light went through it like dawn through a window.
They moved through the southern push together, Chenguer calling the positions as he took them, the overlay burning clear as each marker winked out. Eighteen became twelve became seven. Philip was breathing hard, the blade using him as much as he used it, the fire burning through him. Chenguer stayed at his shoulder and kept him from having to turn around.
“Three left,” Chenguer said. “Then a gap.”
Philip heard gap and pushed harder. Chenguer went wide on the last cluster, driving two of the three toward Philip’s light from the side, and Philip burned through all three in a span of seconds neither of them would afterward be able to recount clearly.
When it was done Philip was still upright, barely.
“Report,” he said.
“Seventeen down in this group. One broke north.” Chenguer checked the overlay. “Scarlet has it.”
She did.
The creature had been reaching for a child—a girl of maybe six who had run the wrong direction and ended up alone behind a supply cart—when Scarlet arrived. The Unfinished turned from the child toward Scarlet with whatever instinct governed it, both hands reaching for her forehead. She felt nothing. Not resistance. The absence of something to grip. The creature’s hands were on her face and she looked at it and it looked at her and there was a long moment where neither of them understood what was happening.
Then she drew Lifegiver and cut through it, and the body that fell was just a body. The life from the blade encountering the death from the creature. Whatever had animated it was gone.
The girl was unhurt, but frozen with fear, eyes wide, unable to cry.
“Hide under the cart,” Scarlet said, shooing her.
“Twelve o’clock,” Chenguer’s voice carried across the chaos. “Eight of them, moving in a line.”
Scarlet ran toward them.
She understood the gift differently now, four creatures deep into this fight. Lifegiver was a blade that balanced. It was a response to what should not exist, the life it carried meeting the stolen life in the Unfinished and coming out even, a zero where there had been something. Each creature she took apart felt less like a kill and more like a correction. The eighth one she never broke stride for, stepping into its reach and through it in one motion, and when she looked back there were eight still shapes on the ground and the people who had been their intended victims were still standing.
One of them—an older woman, a Wentworth cousin no one had thought to ask the name of—had not run at all. A creature had touched her, turned away, moved to the next person. She watched Scarlet come past with an expression more offended than frightened.
“Where are they coming from?” the woman asked.
“The trees. Stay low.”
“I was staying low.”
Scarlet was already past her.
“Ten o’clock,” Chenguer called. “Seven, clustered. Philip can’t reach them.”
She adjusted her angle without slowing.
The eastern fire line was where Aldric and Senna had ended up, which was where they needed to be.
Aldric had found Senna in the first thirty seconds. He’d pulled her sideways out of the path of an Unfinished and she’d turned to look at him with the look she had that meant she’d already known he was there, and then they’d stopped talking and started working.
The first creature had reached for a woman near the fire before either of them could get to it. Senna felt energy pass through her—her will to stop the creature taking shape—and it did stop. Its hands fell away from the woman and the draining reversed. Not fully, but enough. The woman the creature had been draining blinked and gasped and scrambled away, and the creature turned from its interrupted work toward Senna with the first thing like attention any of them had shown. Senna met it with her blade and the flare that ran from her into the creature was like a breaking storm, a crack almost like thunder. The creature came apart.
Aldric was already on the next one.
He’d understood his gift by then. He’d not done this before, but there was an ancient memory he hadn’t known he had, muscle and instinct and two thousand years of knowledge arriving in real time. He moved through the edge of the fighting with a calmness that should not have been possible in that chaos, each strike timed to land when the creature was already turning to look at something else. He didn’t fight the way Philip fought—with the light of judgement. The things Aldric killed did not see him coming.
What the two of them made together was something neither made alone.
Senna pulled the creatures’ attention. The disruption she carried was to the Unfinished like an itch, like a sound just at the wrong frequency. They turned toward her. She let them come, reading the timing, holding until Aldric had his angle and then letting the storm crack loose, which completed whatever the creature had been reaching for and left it open for the half-second it took Aldric to finish it. It wasn’t a system they had discussed, but it arrived naturally to them.
They moved through twelve of the Unfinished this way along the eastern fire line. Methodically—together. Aldric took the last one by himself because Senna was still managing the disruption on the second-to-last, and when it was done he came back to her without thinking and found she had already taken his hand, which neither of them remarked on.
The people behind them were alive.
That was enough.
On the western edge of camp, Drogoth, Amira, and Yselle arrived into the worst of it.
Fourteen creatures in a rough mass, moving in loose formation toward a section of camp that had tried to barricade itself behind overturned wagons and a prayer.
Yselle went in first, which was not anyone’s plan. Eclipse hit the group like a cloud crossing the sun, somewhere between light and darkness, though not either. It was more like a dimming that left the Unfinished disoriented. Three of them turned in place, reaching for something they could no longer locate. Another two simply stopped, caught in whatever Eclipse made of attention and will. Yselle moved through the gaps they left, unhurt, untouched, moving on feathered wings, her sword flashing in the firelight. Her blade caught one that had staggered sideways and she was airborne again before it fell.
“Seven still moving,” Drogoth said. He was already in them.
What happened when Drogoth’s blade found the first creature was light, but not Philip’s light. Philip’s light was dawn, clean and purposeful. This was a forge at full heat, orange-white and furious, and it did not illuminate so much as consume. The creature it touched did not come apart cleanly. It burned. Whatever cold stolen life the thing had carried went out like dry wood catching—ugly, total, final.
Drogoth did not notice.
He was already on the next one, and the next, the rage finding the shape Epherion had always meant for it, the blade swinging in arcs that had nothing to do with training and everything to do with the fire moving through him. The light was getting brighter. He could feel it the way you feel a fever. The heat kept climbing and didn’t stop.
Amira worked behind him.
She moved through the aftermath of the staggered and disoriented creatures still reeling from Eclipse, looking for the ones still draining, still crouched over settlers who were breathing but barely, faces aging by the second.
She held Sunrise over the first one, and what the blade did was not complicated. It was a sunrise. Another day. With it came hope, and the will it restored went directly into the person being drained, returned to them. The woman on the ground opened her eyes with an expression of total fury and hit the creature in the face with a closed fist. The creature reeled. Amira finished it.
The second was already releasing its victim when it sensed her, turning with both hands, the killing reach. She stepped inside it, the blade between them, and held her ground. Sunrise burned through whatever connection the creature had made and the victim—an older man who had the good sense to roll clear—scrambled toward the wagons while Drogoth put the thing down from behind without breaking stride.
He did not break stride because he could not. The fire had him fully now.
The last creature fell and Drogoth kept moving, blade up, the orange-white light throwing wild shadows through the tents. His breathing had gone ragged and loud. He was making sounds, but not words, and the people nearest him were backing away. He was moving toward the tentline because the fire did not know the difference between an enemy and a canvas wall and neither, in this moment, did he.
Amira stepped into his path and put Sunrise flat across his blade.
The collision of the two lights was not loud. It was almost quiet. Warmth meeting heat. Drogoth’s arm drove forward against the block and she held it, both hands on the hilt, and looked at him across the crossed blades.
“Drogoth.”
He looked through her with wild eyes. And then he paused and looked at her.
The fire didn’t leave him all at once. The fever broke with a shudder, the heat dropping by degrees until he was standing in the middle of the camp with his sword arm trembling and his lungs burning and nothing left to fight.
He lowered the blade.
For a moment neither of them spoke.
“I lost it,” he said.
“I know.”
“I would have gone until—”
“I know,” she said again.
Something moved across his face that was a mix of shame and gratitude, but not quite either. He stepped back. She let him.
“Thank you,” he said.
She nodded once.
Into the quiet that followed, Yselle’s voice came from somewhere in the dark beyond the firelight.
“Two more.”
“I don’t see them,” Drogoth said.
“You don’t need to.”
There were two sounds in quick succession—blade passing through flesh, and then the flap of wings as she swooped over their heads and landed silently beside them.
Drogoth shivered. Amira took his hand, then drew him down gently until his forehead rested on her shoulder, and held him there while the aftershocks moved through him.
“It’s okay,” she said.
When Philip cut down the last creature, he found Chenguer at his side, already facing the tree line.
“That’s all of them,” Chenguer said.
The overlay in his vision—the sixty-three cold points, one by one extinguished across the last few minutes—showed nothing. The forest was empty. Whatever had sent them had not come itself.
By the time the last of the Unfinished had been unmade, the camp was very still. Sixty-one creatures gone. Seven people injured in ways that were not physical, with Scarlet attending each. Two dead, both drained of life before anyone could reach them.
Travis was found with one hand on his own forehead, alive and unaged, looking at the space where one of the creatures had touched him and passed on. He didn’t offer an explanation. Didn’t seem to have one.
The unnamed Wentworth cousin was sitting on an overturned crate, watching the cleanup with the expression of a woman who intended to speak to someone in charge about this later. She had been touched once, full on the forehead. She had not fallen. The creature had stepped back and walked away from her as though she were furniture.
Moses was found near his own doorway.
He had made it that far. Out of the house and almost to the street. One of the Unfinished had found him at the threshold. He was on his back with his face turned toward the door he hadn’t quite reached, looking very old and very still, and he had been dead for some minutes before anyone reached him.
Scarlet stood over him for a moment with Lifegiver in her hand and could not make herself kneel. She already knew. She had known from ten feet away, from the stillness. She knelt anyway, and held the blade over him, and felt nothing move through her. Lifegiver had nothing to say to the already-gone. She put her hand on his chest once, briefly, for reasons she couldn’t have explained. He had been alive three hours ago and had shown her his house and said the thatch wasn’t pretty. But there was no coming back from the end.
Philip found her standing at the edge of the firelight, looking at the tree line.
He didn’t say anything. Neither did she.
After a moment he stood beside her, which was enough.
Yselle joined them, landing lightly on her feet. “Eclipse blinds them,” she said. “Its power puts them in disarray around me. Thankfully, I was able to stay mostly out of their reach.”
Drogoth joined them. “Everyone okay?”
“We’ve lost two people that I know of,” Philip said.
“Moses Miller,” Scarlet said quietly. “The first person we met here. And then Armand Linker, a young man from Psalter’s Point, whose mother was with him.”
“There’s nothing to be done for it,” Philip said.
Chenguer looked at Drogoth. “You okay?”
“I did not feel like myself,” Drogoth said.
Yselle glanced at him. “Maybe that’s how Epherion wants to use you.”
Drogoth considered. “Perhaps.”
Senna and Aldric arrived together.
They were holding hands.
That was new.
No one said anything. Also, no one was surprised.
“I am able to disrupt their draining,” Senna said.
“I just destroy them,” Aldric replied.
“You make a great team,” Yselle said, which was the closest anyone came to commenting on the other thing. Her comment settled over the group. No one added to it.
Senna looked down at their joined hands as though noticing them for the first time. He didn’t let go. In the middle of two dead, seven drained, and a camp that would not sleep again tonight, something had apparently also begun. The world was like that sometimes.
“My observation,” Amira said. “When an Unfinished attempts to drain you, they suppress the victim’s will. Sunrise restores it—gives it back directly, the way a real sunrise does. Another day. Another chance to push back.”
“My observation,” Philip said, “is that anyone named Wentworth seems immune to their power.”
Everyone looked at Scarlet.
She nodded. “It’s like they can’t find purchase on whatever it is they pull away from other people. This is the second time they’ve failed to touch me. I saw it happen to others too—once they can’t grip, they move on. They don’t waste effort.”
“A bloodline thing?” Drogoth asked.
No one had an answer for that.
“I saw them mapped,” Chenguer said. “All of them, moving together. I saw their source.”
“Source?” Philip asked.
“The Usurper is in Stormrest,” Chenguer said.
Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible.