I whirled, saw Cassa burning brightly, a red-hot beacon in the veils of white. But she wasn’t looking for me. Her eyes were on the smoldering heap of a minion on the floor, his attempts to extinguish himself ending as his limbs stopped flailing and his body stopped twitching and he lay still and let himself be swallowed by fire.
“NO!”
Cassa’s shriek cut through the steam as surely as any flame. She collapsed to her knees, eyes wide as she stared at the fallen man with the same horror with which she might have watched a lover fall. Maybe she just had.
In which case, she probably shouldn’t have killed him.
“I’m sorry!” she shrieked to a man who couldn’t hear her. “I’m sorry! I just had to… I couldn’t… I…”
She reached out to touch him, then pulled away, as if afraid he might crumble to ash. Her fire ebbed, guttering out to smoke.
I admit, the sight made me pause. Just as there are legends about every Vagrant, there are legends about Cassa the Sorrow. Serving the Imperium, she was dutiful, thoughtful, and careful. Serving herself, she demanded the highest honor from her boys and gave it in return.
Throwing off the Imperium and going Vagrant does things to you, sure, but seeing her so reckless, so emotional, wasn’t something I had expected. What did that name on my list mean to her that she’d fight like this? Why did she abandon reason and logic for it?
And why, even as her fires went quiet, did I hear the Lady’s song growing louder?
“If any of you are left alive,” she called out into the steam, “run. If any of you can’t, I’m sorry.”
Something sparked through the veils of steam. A fire grew bright.
“But I can’t let her leave.”
And hot.
“Forgive me.”
And huge.
It rose in one great, discordant roar: the angry howl tearing out of her throat, the fires roaring to burning life, the Lady’s song wild and vicious. It filled my ears. And the fire filled everything else.
I raised the Cacophony to fire, but it was too late. A great wave of flame burst from her body, cutting through the steam and banishing the white mist in a great eruption of light and heat. I collapsed to the floor, scrambled to get away—blind from brightness, choked by burning air, biting back pain as cinders and ash fell upon my skin.
The fire rose around me like a living thing, tongues of flame licking out to taste any flesh it could, dead or otherwise. It chased me across the floor as I crawled on all fours, everything forgotten except escape. But through the burning and the smoke and the endless heat, I had no idea where I was going.
Not until I came across a charred corpse and a piece of steel.
“Sal.”
Her voice was soft as it came from behind me, her footsteps unhurried. There was no escape—from her or her flame—and she knew it. And though I didn’t turn around to see her, I could feel the remorse in her eyes as she stared at my back, as she raised her hand.
As her fire burned.
“It didn’t have to be this way,” she whispered.
“Yeah,” I replied.
I reached out, wrapped my hand around a hilt.
“It did.”
The heated metal burned through the leather of my glove, but that was fine. It wasn’t the worst pain I’d ever felt. Nor even the worst burn. I held the sound of her voice in my head, the direction it had come from, as I jerked my sword free from the corpse’s hand and whirled about, the red-hot blade screaming as it arced through the air.
There was a meaty smack.
There was the sound of something wet sizzling as it spattered across the floorboards.
There was the disappointed sigh of a thousand magical flames as, one by one, they dissipated into smoke and dying embers.
And in the center of the blackened ruin, Cassa the Sorrow stood, bleeding from a bright red line across her throat.
She slumped to her knees as I rose to my feet. Her magic no longer feeding them, the flames went quiet and the Lady’s song was just one more smoky silence among them. She reached for her throat, maybe to sear shut the wound or something. But she knew as well as I did that this was over.
Maybe it was her hesitation that had cost her the battle. Or my resourcefulness. Or maybe it was just dumb luck.
I wasn’t going to waste words speculating on that. Neither of us had that many left.
“I won’t tell you that you can fix this by telling me what I want to know,” I said to her. “All I want to know is whether it was worth it.” I stared down at her, the Embermage who had won a hundred victories for the Imperium, now dying on her knees as she tried to keep her blood in her neck. “Was it worth it to save Darrish the Flint?”
Cassa looked up at me, the last violet light dying in her eyes.
“Yes,” she rasped through a voice thick with liquid.
“If you knew why I hunted her,” I said, “you’d know it was stupid to try to save her.”
“I know why,” she gurgled. “I know… the stories. You hunt… because you’re a monster… You kill… because you’re a killer. I tried… to save…”
She narrowed her eyes at me.
“Because soldiers… kill… monsters.”
I wish I could have told you that hurt me. I wish I could have said that her last words struck a part of me and carved open a wound that bled regret and remorse into my heart. Maybe, in a fairer world and a gentler life, I would have.
But this was the Scar.
I was Sal the Cacophony.
And no one stood in my way.
“You’re wrong.”
I squatted down beside her, met her gaze.
“I hunt her,” I whispered, “because when I needed her, all I could do was stare, begging, pleading, trying to understand why she wouldn’t save me.”
Cassa’s mouth hung open. Her eyes widened. A rim of moisture appeared at their edges.
Her body jerked suddenly.
“Yeah.”
She slumped to the floor. I rose to my feet. And I stared at the red life weeping from her throat as she bled out onto the ashes.
“Like that.”
THREE
THE VALLEY
When you get down to it, people aren’t too different from scars.
You go through life collecting them. And when you get a new one, you feel it. The pain, at first, is so raw and vibrant that you feel it with every step you take beside them. But then, things are said and apologies aren’t, and over the course of years, that pain fades to a slow ache.
Then one day, before you even know it, you wake up and just feel a numbness where something else used to be.
But you never forget it’s there. Not once.
I awoke from dreamless sleep. Pain sang through me. My body ached. The scent of stale blood and ashes filled my nose.
A woman was on top of me.
Her hair dangled down in messy black strands brushing across my face. I stared up into a pair of keen brown eyes, thick with disgust. Her voice escaped on a rasping hiss through an ugly, angry sneer.
“You left me.”
She raised her hands and pressed them against my throat. I felt my breath go short as her fingers dug into the flesh of my neck.
“You betrayed me.”
Something hot and wet struck my cheek, slid down the trail of my scar. Tears fell from her face. Or maybe mine. I couldn’t tell.