The plan settled into the room like sediment.
Mila stood. He didn’t say “we’re done”, he just gathered his hands behind his back in a way that meant the meeting was over, and the rest of us understood.
“I’ll have the formal orders drafted by evening,” he said. “Wolf Doan mobilizes at dawn. The Broken Chain begins its staging within the hour. Boarding tomorrow evening, sail with the river current overnight, deployment at first light the day after.”
“Understood,” Lola said.
“Your Majesty.” He inclined his head. “If there’s nothing else.”
“There isn’t.”
“Then I’ll see you at a later date.” He left. The door shut behind him with the same quiet stone-on-stone weight it had opened with, and the command room exhaled.
I looked at Lola.
Lola was making one last note on her clipboard. The twist in her hair had survived the meeting better than I’d expected.
“Walk with me?” I said.
She nodded, capped her pen, and stood.
—
The street outside the compound was quieter than the rest of the city.
The compound’s outer wall created a kind of acoustic shadow on the road just beyond it, the noise of the main avenues muted to a distant murmur. Late afternoon light angled across the rose stones at a low slant that, for the first time, made me think they might not be entirely the worst color in the world.
A low stone bench sat against the wall a hundred meters from the gate, half-shaded by a tree I didn’t recognize. We sat.
Lola crossed her legs at the ankle. Set the clipboard on her lap. Did not open it. I let the quiet sit for a moment before I spoke. “I want to ask you things.”
She glanced into my eyes. “Mm.”
“Lots of things.”
She let a small smile escape her mouth. “Mm.”
“So, come to my room.”
She blinked thrice in rapid succession. “Charlie. You only want me there so we can kiss in private.”
I considered it for a second, then nodded with a grin. “Yup,” I said. “So what?”
She closed her eyes.
The blush climbed her cheeks slowly this time, and when she opened her eyes again, there was the most beautiful smile in the world. She picked up her clipboard. She stood. “I’ll meet you there,” she said.
“Lola—“
She logged out.
The space beside me went still. The bench was warm where she’d been sitting. I sat there for another second, watching the light move on the stones, and then I moved to Earth.
—
My ceiling on Earth was the same as it had always been, but the door opened sooner than I expected.
Lola had taken the time to change; the suit was gone, replaced with something softer, dark and well-fitted but not work clothes. Her hair was loose, down past her shoulders. She came in without knocking, because she lived here too, and crossed to the bed, and sat on the edge of it.
She did not lie down.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi.”
“Come here,” I said as I opened my arms. “I miss you in my hug.”
“In a minute.” I made a face. She ignored it. “You wanted to ask me things,” she said.
I shifted up onto my elbows. “When can we set sail for the capital?”
Her face didn’t change, but something stiffened in her shoulders. The administrator came back online. “Not now.”
“Lola — “
“We don’t have the supplies, Charlie. We’re stretched thin already. The Wolf Doan is the most prepared formation we have, and even they’re going into this tower operation with one rotation of potions and a four-hour window. A capital expedition is a different scale of problem. Different distance. Different terrain. Different political environment. We’d be moving the army through territory we haven’t surveyed, against an empire that’s actively reinforcing the front.”
“I know.”
“We don’t have the logistical chain to support that yet.”
“I know.” She watched me. “I’m antsy,” I said to the ceiling. “About the world fragment. The empire’s pushing, and we aren’t securing. Every day we don’t move is a day they consolidate. It’s eating me.”
“I know.”
I dropped my head back against the pillow. “Then what?” I said.
“After the tower.” She set her hand on my knee through the comforter. “We take the tower. We bring the Wolf Doan home. We use the operation to test our deployment procedures at scale—what works, what doesn’t, what breaks. Then we spend the next two to four weeks practicing army movement at expedition distance, and we sail when we can sail at full strength. After we have enough supplies, mainly food to feed the army.”
“Two to four weeks.”
She squeezed my knee. “There’s also,” she said, “good news on the front.”
“Hm?” I glanced at her and let the annoyed face drop. It wasn’t her fault.
“Scouts are in place. The empire is having difficulty pushing.” I lifted my head. “There are tribes resisting them,” she continued. “Settlements in the buffer zone between our claimed territory and the empire’s advance. The empire’s columns are getting harassed. They’ve slowed.”
I blinked.
“...They’re in our kingdom, aren’t they.”
Lola hesitated. “Technically, yes.”
“So we’ll also fight them?”
She bit her lip. I watched her do it, and registered, with the part of my brain that should have been thinking about geopolitics, that it was approximately the most adorable thing she had ever done in front of me. I kept that observation to myself, briefly, and then decided not to. “You’re cute when you bite your lip.”
“Charlie.”
I turned to the side. “I’m just saying.”
“We might need to fight them,” she said, ignoring this with administrative discipline. “We’ve identified about twenty so far, scattered across the territory. Most of them aren’t sapient. Not in a way we can negotiate with, anyway. Goblins. Orcs. A few worse. They’re aggressive, and they’ll attack our columns the same way they’re attacking the empire’s.”
I thought about the simulation.
In the future there was a big city, run by players, and somewhere in the middle of all of that, they had villages. They functioned as optional starting points. New players could pick one, take a few quests, and integrate gradually. Trade routes opened. Some players spent hundreds of hours in those villages before they ever saw a city.
“What if we offer villages that they could be absorbed into the kingdom-run economy? Fairly. With money. With trade. A lot of the tribes may take the offer. They can become part of the kingdom without losing their structure.”
Lola tilted her head and thought about it. I watched her think about it. The small, careful way her eyes moved when she was running a model, perhaps checking it against logistics, or maybe against precedent, or against the fifteen different reasons it might not work.
“It could work,” she said. “For some of them. The ones with enough cohesion to negotiate as a polity. Not all of them will agree. Some of them will see it as encroachment.”
I let out a breath. “We’re the bad guys,” I said. She didn’t answer. “First the tower,” I said. “Now we want to kill natives.”
She winced. Her hand left my knee, found mine hand on top of the comforter, threaded fingers in. I shook my head against the pillow. “We’ll go around them,” I said. “If they refuse to integrate, and they don’t attack, we leave them be. We don’t go in. Trade?”
“Yes. They remain neutral within our borders. We acknowledge them. We don’t tax them, we don’t recruit them, we don’t conscript them. But we do limit them, like no harboring imperial forces. The standard buffer-treaty terms.”
“Twenty tribes,” I said. “How many do you actually think will take the offer?”
She looked at me. “Charlie.”
“Yes?” I tried to act innocent.
“This is too much for tonight.”
I laughed. Quiet, half into the pillow. “You’re right.”
“I’m always right.”
“I’m going to remember you said that.”
“I’m not going to deny saying it.”
I reached up. Caught her wrist with my free hand. Pulled, gently, and she let me, the resistance she’d been holding all afternoon finally giving up. She came down onto the bed slowly, one knee, then the other, settling against my side with the careful logistics of a woman who was still half on duty and half not.
I kissed her.
She made a small, surprised sound against my mouth, then a less surprised one, and her hand came up to my jaw, and we were done with the day for a moment, the whole long thing of it folded down.
When I pulled back, her eyes stayed closed for an extra second. I watched them open. “I can’t wait for tomorrow,” I said.
“Mm?”
“To watch Lunaris lead an army.”
Lola opened both eyes properly. She looked at me. “You’re going to spy,” she said matter-of-factly.
“I will watch, not spy on her… again.”
“You absolutely are.”
“I’ll spy a little.”
“Mhm.”
“In a regal way.”
She laughed against my shoulder.
—
Lunaris back in Rimelion…
Lunaris opened her eyes to the same dead-edge sky she’d run from, and her stomach did something small and unhappy before she could tell it not to.
She stood on the gravel.
Three figures waited up the bank.
Lisa, sitting on a rock with her staff across her knees, hair already pulled back. Ian, pacing the shore in that slightly too-fast stride he got when he didn’t know what to do with his hands. Fty read a book. Of course.
Three.
Not four.
Lunaris’s chin dropped before she could stop it. The mantle moved with her, silver pooling, and she stared at her boots on the gravel and made herself breathe through it. Pancake. The oven is cold.
A hand settled on her shoulder.
“Hey,” Ian said. Quiet. His ears weren’t red for once. “Charlie sent reinforcements.” Luna looked up. He squeezed her shoulder once and let go, and she felt the place where his palm had been like a small warm spot left behind.
“Yeah, she didn’t tell us who,” she echoed. “She said—”
“She said,” Lisa cut in, hopping off her rock, “that we are going to crush the Necromancers.” Her grin was the bubbly one. “Crush them, Lunaris. Stamp them. Korven doesn’t even know what’s coming.”
Luna’s mouth twitched up despite itself.
The tempo wanted to come back. Yesterday’s tempo, the leader-tempo, the one where her hips had started swaying in time with her thoughts and the mantle had felt like it belonged on her shoulders.
She rolled her wrist once. The rapier hand sketched a small ghost-line through the air without her permission. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, then—our job is the boss. While the reinforcements handle the wall. We find Korven. We finish what we started.” She nodded once. “Right?”
“Right,” Lisa said, beaming. “And Charlie added Katherine to our team, so we are fine.”
Luna’s grin widened. Katherine. Greatsword Katherine. Glory Seeker Katherine. Katherine, who would charge a Death Knight purely because it had the audacity to exist in front of her.
“Katherine is capable,” Fty said and searched for more words. “Also reckless.”
Lisa snorted. Ian made a noise that was almost a laugh. Luna felt her shoulders drop a quarter-inch she hadn’t known they were holding, and the relief was so clean and so silly she almost said we’re going to be fine out loud, just to hear the words.
She didn’t, unlike the protagonist in a book she had read earlier. She turned toward the river instead and stared upstream into the gray.
The first ship came around the bend.
It slid out of the river-haze with its sails half-furled, and Luna’s chest lifted before her brain caught up. They’re here. Lucy’s flagship, probably, the same little three-master that had brought them down the day before. Maybe transport behind it, for Katherine and whoever else Charlie had picked. Two ships, maybe three, sliding through the gray water like a small bright gift.
She straightened. The mantle settled. She smiled.
“They’re here!”
The second ship came around the bend.
Luna’s smile held.
The third ship came around the bend.
Luna’s smile held, but it had developed a slight question mark at the edges.
The fourth ship came around the bend.
The fifth.
The sixth.
The…
Luna blinked.
“They...”
The ships kept coming. Long, lean hulls riding low under the weight of what they were carrying, and above each one, snapping in the wind, the white snowflake of Rimebreak crowned over a shield-and-arrows, a sunburst, a wolf’s head, a—
A broken chain.
Luna’s eyes traveled along the line of banners and her brain refused, gently, to do the math.
“They...”
She lost count somewhere past the eighth ship. Or maybe the ninth. The river was full of them, a slow procession of dark hulls and snowflake banners stretching back into the haze, and Lunaris stood very still on the gravel with one hand half-lifted toward something she couldn’t quite name.
“...they sent an entire army,” she finished.
Beside her, Lisa let out a low, delighted whistle. “I knew it,” Lisa said. “I knew Charlie was smiling too much when she talked about reinforcements.” She shaded her eyes with one hand and watched the lead ship begin its slow turn toward the bank. “Is it that bad, Luna?”
Lunaris did not answer.
Lunaris stared at the incoming ships. The mantle was on her shoulders. The rapier was at her hip. The longsword was on her back. Her hands had stopped sketching ghost-lines. Her hands had, in fact, stopped doing anything.
“I...”
The lead ship’s banners were close enough now to read clearly. The wolf’s head. The Wolf Doan. Yuki told her about them last week, thousand soldiers, and behind them another, and behind them—
“...I will be in charge of an Army?”