She fought at their left flank, hacking at advancing Noreelans with her heavy sword. She had run out of stars and discs and arrows long ago, and she had lost her slingshot when it became embedded in a Noreelan’s spine. That had torn a swath of skin from her right forearm, and now sand was stinging the wound. The agony kept her awake and alive, maintained the rage that had driven her for days, ever since they had burst from the Mages’ keep and forced the Noreelan army back into Lake Denyah.

Then something had happened. Her memory of it was vague, its taste rank in her mouth, but it had been bad; a change in the air, a shiver through the ground as the land took a breath. At the height of battle, victory had been snatched from them. The Mages’ grasp on defiled magic had held for a dozen more days, but a purer magic had seemed to present a final defense, empowering the Noreelans to launch a counterattack in such huge numbers that the Krote army had been overwhelmed. For every ten thousand Noreelans they killed, twenty thousand took their place. Zombies of Krote dead waded into the throng, taking twenty with them before they were hacked to pieces. Wraiths spun and thrashed, whipping at the flesh of the enemy and opening them to steam into the night, before Noreelan priests managed to put them down. The untrained Noreelan army had gathered momentum, sucking power from the land and launching it at the Krote army with wave after wave of machine attacks. Surprised, overwhelmed, the flight north had begun.

It had been one long fight until they reached the sea. Days without rest. Nights lit by the flaming fat of burning bodies. Those who tired fell behind and were slaughtered. Those who fought gained wounds as their badges of honor, and a creeping madness borne of exhaustion and the inevitability of what was to come. Lenora—a simple warrior then—had looked again and again to the Mages, expecting them to throw down some mighty defense. Their magic simmered darkly around their forms, heaving as they danced across and above the battlefields. But if they did try to fight back, the effects were so small as to go unnoticed. Dead Krotes shivered on the ground instead of rising to their calling. Shadows flitted from the corner of her eye, but these wraiths were all but gone.

The Noreelans drove on, pecking at the tail of the fleeing Krote army with their loping machines, and a thick line of blood was painted across Noreela.

And then they reached The Spine, hopping from island to island in stolen boats, until they ended up at this place. At least before now they were on the move, and even falling to the enemy had felt positive because it gave fellow Krotes a chance to move on. Here, on this golden beach turned red, the battle was simply an ongoing slaughter.