Chapter 1

“Ma’Stald, you’re late!”

“I know!” I yelled back at Miki as he threw my boots at me. I was in our shared dormitory room, which was split between him, me, Nurid, and Tami. The room was exactly wide enough for two narrow cots to be jammed against the wall with an equally narrow walkway between them. Another two cots folded down from the ceiling, providing enough beds for four occupants. All the rooms in the garrison’s dorms were arranged as such. And although the garrison was less than half full, we all shared a room because we didn’t trust anybody else at the garrison.

Well, I say we and what I really mean is I. I didn’t trust anybody else at the garrison. After what happened in Findias I thought we couldn’t afford to be careless. What if another of the Legion was masquerading as our nonexistent commander in Esras? I wouldn’t be taken by surprise again. My friends and fellow survivors of the garrison’s fall humored me and filled the beds around me but I think that secretly, they also enjoyed the comfort our company provided. Or maybe I’m projecting again.

“Stald! Will you stop spacing and get ready? The commander’s supposed to be here in an hour. You wanted this promotion to stick, didn’t you?” I turned to answer Tami and got a pair of pants flung in my face for my troubles. I grabbed the fabric around my face and threw it on the bed.

“I know. I know, but look.” I pointed out the window where I’d been watching the procession go by. Miki raised a brow. Tami frowned. Nurid wasn’t there but I could imagine his calm, bland look of equanimity. He was older than the three of us combined and had long ago mastered the art of polite-yet-neutral expressions.

The procession was just coming out of the Gate that dominated part of the garrison grounds. It was for official use only, requiring authorization from the garrison commander before it could be used. As the Esran garrison had only a de facto commander, use of the Gate was fairly laissez faire. Better to ask forgiveness than permission and all that.

At any rate, the procession was only about twenty elves long. They carried shields emblazoned with the symbol of the Ifrit and wore armor that was battered from use. Another fifty knights awaited them on the other side. I didn’t care about the knights or the pleased yet vaguely bemused guardian roped into activating the Gate for the party’s use.

No, all my attention was on the head of the procession. There were two elves, one adult, one child. They both wore gowns and rode horses but it was there that the similarities ended. The elder had short, spiky red hair covered by a veil studded with opals and rubies. Her gown was long, the color of russet with orange and brown embroidery along the edges of the sleeves and down the bodice. She held the reins of a large black warhorse in heavily bandaged hands.

Next to her, the younger elf was no elf at all. At this distance you couldn’t tell what she was, but I knew that fiery gaze, that dandelion puff of black hair shot with blue, orange, and red. It was hair that looked more like feathers, something I wasn’t supposed to notice since it was under a veil similar to the one her mother wore. But even at a distance that hair glowed as if on fire. She rocked back and forth on her horse’s back, looking around with unrestrained curiosity at the dull parade ground and walls of the Grey’s Esran garrison. Just seeing her enthusiasm brought a smile to my lips.

“Yeah yeah yeah. Your family is home, hooray.” Tami pulled me away from the window and pointed. “Change. Now.”

“Does she look younger than before?” Miki asked, taking up my position by the window as I changed under Tami’s critical eye. She wasn’t about to let me squander my chance at an officer’s rank, not after everything that happened. Maybe that was because Tami wanted a rank of her own. Or because she wanted to make sure they’d stay in my unit, I’m not sure. Either way, she wanted me in my best uniform ten minutes ago so I obliged her. Starched grey trousers, so stiff they could hold you up in the middle of a war. Undershirt, soft and so white it glowed against my tan. Then the gambeson, purely ceremonial and unnecessary but a part of the uniform nonetheless. A grey tunic to match the grey trousers. It was nondescript except for the circle of ivy over my heart. If my rank was confirmed, a double-barred insignia would be placed within that circle. Until then it was empty except for more grey fabric.

Usually I’d put on another layer of armor, a leather cuirass, over the tunic. Leather greaves would cover my legs, and I would have leather pauldrons and bracers as well. But since this was purely ceremonial, the only piece of armor was the gambeson and it felt deceptively light against my skin. I was safe here, safer than I’d been in my life but the lack of armor left me feeling…uneasy.

“She looks the same to me,” Tami was saying to Miki. She had joined the other at the window now that I was getting dressed. They were both watching the last of the procession go by. “Then again, I don’t remember much about the war. We weren’t there when Ifrit’s Pass fell.”

“She looked older,” Miki insisted as I sat on one of the beds to pull on my boots and lace them up. “Stald, T’s only what? A decade younger than you? She’s practically the same age but she looks pubescent!”

Elves, as you imagine, are quite long-lived. Though I’d achieved adulthood some years ago, I was still considered to be an immature adult. No, not like that. It meant that despite being at the age of majority, I was not expected to marry or raise children. Instead, I was expected to join a guild and learn a trade, go adventuring, or embark on studies at the university. Or join the army, I guess.

I’d done none of those things, instead forfeiting my right to the Esran throne in favor of joining the Grey guard. “T’s about the same age Myr was when he died,” I agreed. “I think he’s a year or two older, depending on how you count pre-Assiahan time.”

“How about we don’t?” Miki suggested while Tami frowned.

“Your hair is a mess, Stald. What do you do when we’re not around, smear mud in it and let it dry?” She snatched up a brush and came to sit on the bed behind me. Soon there were tugs on my scalp. Deceptively gentle tugs, I might add. Tami could be vicious when she needed to be.

“If we don’t, then she’s about a year younger than Myr.” I tilted my head back and let Tami do as she wished. Once she had my curls brushed out, she braided my hair so that it wouldn’t hang in my face. Though Tami’s own hair was a smooth cap of shiny brown that only came to her jaw, she’d spent enough time doing either my or Miki’s hair that she knew what she was doing.

“Then she should look older,” Miki said firmly but was interrupted by a small cough. All three of us turned to the door to greet the fourth inhabitant of our cramped little room. “Hey, Nurid. Doesn’t T look too young to you, too?”

Nurid didn’t ask who Miki was referring to. He knew. “Maybe you remember her as being bigger than she actually is.”

“No, I’m fairly certain she was…older, at least in the end.” Miki frowned at him. “Could the angels have done something to her?”

Nurid shrugged and on anybody else I’d have said it was with indifference. But no, Nurid was never indifferent about anything. He was, however, excellent at keeping his opinions to himself. “How would I know? I’ve been stuck in this garrison the same as the rest of you.”

“Yeah, we’ve been busy recovering, Miki,” I added and he threw a pillow at me.

“Recovering, my ass. I think the commander stashes guardians here when he doesn’t know what to do with them.” Esran garrison was by far the least popular post in all of the Grey. It was closest to the central anchoring point of the elven fields, meaning it was the most stable and least likely to be invaded by chaos monsters. As such, the Grey used it as both a training ground and recovery ward for badly injured Grey. Ship them off to Esras garrison for a span, get them healed up, then send them back into the fray. That’s the Grey motto.

In the parts of the garrison where the dying and the dead didn’t reside lived those on the opposite side of the spectrum. These were our recruits, often too young to really understand the life they were consigned to or too eager to prove their worth to wait for their final tests and graduation They fairly thrummed with life and optimism. Watching them made me feel old and I was barely into my second century.

(No, this isn’t old at all. It’s like being nineteen in human years. Will you just listen and stop asking questions?)

Miki, Tami, and I recently spent most of our time in the so-called recovery unit, where the Grey still lived like sardines packed in a can. Being a guardian of the Grey is not an easy life. Nor was it a popular one, as evidenced by the empty halls around us. “Do you think I’ll get to see T and Myssy after the commander confirms my rank?” I asked Nurid. He was the oldest out of the four of us and I considered him to be both my mentor and teacher. He was the one that had given me my field promotion, using his rank as lieutenant-commander to prematurely end my imprisonment in the brig after some…bad decisions on my part.

(I didn’t consider them bad decisions, but the Grey did. How could they be bad, when they saved T and Myssy’s lives?)

“There will certainly be time for that after we meet with Bran,” Nurid agreed, although I noticed he didn’t say that the Grey’s commander would actually confirm my rank. He gave my uniform a critical once over. “Are you ready to meet him? I suppose you’ll do.”

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” I said eagerly. I hated pomp and circumstance even back then and just wanted this to be over with. Tami tied off my braid and pushed my shoulder.

“Stop using mud as a conditioning treatment on your hair. One of these days it’s gonna start falling out and then where will your good looks be?” she asked. I grinned and kissed her on the cheek. Before she could react, I sprang off the low bed and toward the door, narrowly dodging the brush she threw. “Asshole!”

“Sweet talker,” I retorted but I was smiling. There were many things to be happy about, after all. The wars were all over, even the ones that were so far removed I couldn’t believe they had an impact on the fields. T and Myssy were home. I was going to be a captain in the Grey. The past six years had been difficult at best, downright miserable at worst. There were moments when I thought I wouldn’t survive or that if I did, I’d lose some part of myself I couldn’t afford to lose. And I had lost…a lot. I won’t lie. My brother’s absence was like an empty hole in my heart that I grieved with every waking breath.

The thing is, you grieve enough and you stop counting the griefs. They all blur together into one big hurt. I’d taken that hurt, wrapped it in layer upon layer of steel and silk, and tossed it into the bottom of what I imagined an ocean must be. I banished my grief into a cold, lightless oblivion where it would remain. All my failures, all my disappointments and regrets were wrapped up in that grief and honestly I was at the point where I couldn’t count them any more. I would protect the ones I could, let go of the ones I couldn’t, and serve the Grey for the rest of my days.

That was the plan, at any rate. But you see, plans change and sometimes not even fate itself quite understands why. And my plans were about to take a turn that not even fate could predict, even if every step leading up to that moment was a logical culmination of the step that came before.

But that comes later. This is what came next.