Father. Adamus holds the body of Gelmidas.

  Mother. Adamus holds the body of Nadeden.

  Both of the corpses fall from his hands.

  Davon reaches out toward him. His hand cws into Adamus’s skin. Seno reaches for him. Her hand cws into him as well. The men and women he just killed grab him. A thousand hands cw into him, and a thousand more follow. He gasps for air as they drag him down.

  The bodies of his Father and Mother stand, rising back to life to stare at him with their piercing gaze.

  The dead weigh Adamus down. The dark eyes of the living watch over him as he’s pushed further down. Pale dark eyes that weep machine tears onto violin strings.

  A crown is on the horizon, waiting for him beyond the sea of bodies. Adamus swims away from it, but the dead toss him against its radiant glow.

  His Mother and Father lift him up and tear him apart.

  The glow puts him back together.

  The glow breaks the crown and the sea of dead.

  Adamus walks toward it, engulfed in fire.

  He’s a boy again. A child reaching out through the fmes.

  Steel beams cut at him, metal kingdoms fight him, but the glow turns them all to dust.

  The blue glow holds him, enraptures him, comforts him.

  Adamus smiles and cries and does everything else he needs to in order to drive out all these horrible feelings.

  The blue glow says to him, “One,” and he awakes in a carriage.

  The cold night wind drifts in through the curtains with the snow as the Grogrung marches forward.

  Adamus studies his hands. The blood has been washed from them, but it has also dried and seeped into the cracks of his fingernails. He knows what he has done, but he doesn’t know how many he did it to and for how long. His eyes move up his forearms.

  His bracers!

  He isn’t wearing any bracers. He isn’t even wearing any strings to seal the slits on his arms shut, and yet, both scars are gone. His skin is sealed shut. Something twists inside him, but it does not fight him. It does not beg to be let out. It simply twists and goes silent as if to say, “I will be quiet for now.”

  Adamus shudders and pulls a nearby bnket over himself. Jasper snatches it away, “What was that?”

  Adamus bnkly stares at him despite being fully aware of what he’s referring to. “What was what?”

  “Something came out of you.”

  “Really? Did I soil myself in my sleep?” Adamus’s deflection has little effect on Jasper.

  “No. That…” He isn’t sure what to call it. He has no idea what it was. He hardly even saw it.

  It crawled out of Adamus and then crawled back in after everyone was dead. Everything else was a blur. Jasper could only see the blurs. It wasn’t until Leo snatched his gsses and wiped the blood from the lenses that Jasper’s sight grew clear once more.

  By then, Adamus was asleep in the field of crimson snow. Republic officers and townsfolk alike all id dead in that bloodied snow with him. Everyone Jasper knew was gone in an instant. All that remains is the caravan he travels with now. Marqus had insisted on bringing Adamus along. Jasper had helped carry him into the carriage and id him inside. He spent the whole time hoping that thing wouldn’t burst back out of Adamus; he’s still worried that it might do just that.

  “What was the thing that killed those people. The thing that was inside you.”

  Adamus clenches a fist. The beast really is quiet for now.

  “I don’t completely know,” He states before asking, “How about you tell me where I am first and where we’re going?”

  Jasper leans back against a small pile of provisions within the carriage. He isn’t completely sure where he’s going either.

  Marqus had only found three Grogrungs along with the carriage. Jasper was tired and still shocked from the vilge, so he volunteered to watch over Adamus even though he’s terrified of that thing inside him.

  Still, Jasper can’t help but feel like he shouldn’t even be here. Helga, Uncle Robert, Aunt Cire, He recalls them with a heavy heart and cold tears building in his eyes.

  They’re all gone now, and I couldn’t do anything about it. I froze at the sight of blood. I panicked while everyone else acted under pressure. Leonidas is better at that stuff than me. I shouldn’t have been so rude to him. Even Kiren has nerves as cold as her Father’s. She’s out there riding a Grogrung while I’m wasting away in here with Adamus, and she’s just a child. Jasper wants to crawl within himself and disappear. He can’t stand this.

  I am surrounded by people better than I could ever hope to be. I can’t even shoot a straight arrow.

  “He’s awake?” Marqus asks, taking his hands off the reins for a moment to peel back the curtain behind him. His eyes narrow on Adamus as a cough comes from the small man sitting next to him. Tarlen raises his head over the carriage seat to look back at Adamus. He smiles as he coughs again, “The Emperor’s awake.”

  Tarlen’s spit nds on Adamus’s face. “I’m not Emperor,” he states as Tarlen slumps back down.

  The Grogrung’s hoof strikes a mound of snow. The sudden crash drives Tarlen’s slumped body off the carriage.

  Marqus tosses down the reins and hurries to help the man. Adamus and Jasper remain in the carriage as Kiren and Leo both leap from their saddles to Tarlen’s aid.

  “His wound’s gotten worse.” Adamus hears Marqus mutter. He hears Kiren and Leo speaking as well, but their voices are low, and what few sounds aren’t hidden by the carriage’s curtains are lost in the howling wind.

  Adamus crawls to the back of the carriage to better listen in on the conversation. Jasper shakes his head in disapproval. An Emperor shouldn’t be eavesdropping on their subjects' private conversations. Especially when they are responsible for the misery that said subjects now find themselves in.

  Leo lifts the curtain and comes face-to-face with Adamus. “I was just about to say that you should join our conversation,” Leo smirks and helps Adamus out of the carriage. His smirk begs to widen as he catches Jasper’s eye. “You should too.” He says.

  Jasper stands with a sigh, “Alright.” Leo fully smiles as Jasper makes his way to the back of the carriage. Once he is on the snow, Jasper notices that Leo is the only one whose mood hasn’t completely soured.

  “He doesn’t have much time left.” Marqus tells Adamus before asking, “What shall we do, my lord?” Adamus nearly ughs at the question’s dramatically high expectations but stumbles out a “What do you mean?” instead.

  “We’ve done all we can to help him for now.” Leo kneels beside Tarlen, pressing a gentle hand on the bandage still leaking blood. “But the bleeding hasn’t stopped, and we don’t have any sanitization fluids or medicinal potions to give him.”

  Leo gazes up at Adamus. “His life is in your hands now.”

  Adamus stares helplessly at the dying man beneath his feet. Tarlen grinds his teeth and pushes his knees and arms into his freezing, bleeding shoulder. The snow is red all around him. The blood is staining Adamus’s boots. It has already stained Leo and Marqus. Kiren silently watches the scene attempt to unfold with a bnk face.

  She’s just a kid. Adamus thinks after glimpsing at her while looking around for an answer. Jasper is just as unsure as him, and Leo and Marqus are both looking to him for guidance. And who do I have to look to? Adamus wonders.

  He gulps down the lump that has built up in his throat. “Where were we pnning to go? When we left your vilge, I mean.”

  “The Spaceport, my lord.” Adamus nods at Marqus, but the nod of his head quickly becomes a shake. “Wait. Didn’t you say that the spaceport is crawling with Republic officers?”

  Leo rises, “It is, but those officers are no doubt on their way to our vilge, where that thing inside you killed dozens of their comrades.”

  “That or security has tightened around the spaceport,” Kiren speaks up. “That may be the case, but we have nowhere else to go except to the next vilge and the next and the next until we’re all dead.”

  Jasper snorts. Leo gives him a disapproving look while Kiren gives him a mean scowl.

  “You all seem to be forgetting that the decision isn’t up to us,” Marqus states amid the howling wind that screams into Adamus’s ears and breathes down his neck. He rubs his cold palms against his brow. “I…” He begins but fails to finish, “I don’t…”

  All eyes are on him.

  His cold breath becomes a white cloud before him as he sighs, “I don’t know what to do.”

  All eyes fall to the snow.

  “I say we push on to the spaceport then.” Leo says, “Even if security is tight, Adamus can just use that same trick he pulled back in the vilge again.”

  I wouldn’t exactly call it a trick. Didn’t you just call it the thing inside me? Go back to calling it that, please. Adamus keeps the thought to himself as Leo and Marqus kneel back down to help Tarlen.

  Their arms freeze at his chest. Marqus’s face goes dark.

  Leo lets go of Tarlen’s corpse and steps into the carriage to fetch a shovel.

  Burying Tarlen takes longer than it should.

  The snow hasn’t let up since the group left the vilge. It shields the dirt below and fills the hole left behind before the body can be id within it. And once the body is set down, the snow covers it before the dirt can. By the end of the ordeal, a ruined hill is the only evidence of Tarlen Sapori’s life.

  It’s more than Helga got. Jasper tells himself, It’s more than my aunt and uncle got, and it’s more than Valerie got. He mindlessly accepts Kiren’s offer to take her Grogrung so that she can sit beside her Father in the carriage. He hadn’t stopped to think how cold tonight is, his thoughts are full of the dead. He’s weighed down by them. Weighed down by everything. All that is before him now is the dark of night and the fall of snow.

  Leo changes that.

  “How are you holding up?” His Grogrung trots beside Jasper’s as he asks the question. Jasper takes a moment to consider how to respond. “I’m holding.” He heaves out the breath.

  “You’re a terrible liar, Jasper Sullivan.”

  Jasper almost smiles. Almost. Leo has always been able to see right through him. Even now, when he’s doing his best to hide it all away, Leo can still spot the cracks forming in Jasper.

  “I am terrible.” Jasper decres. “Terrible for standing by and doing nothing while everyone died, terrible for not going to see Helga or talk to my aunt and uncle one st time before they died… I…” Jasper’s hands loosen on the reins of his steed. The lenses of his gsses are filled with frost. “They really are all dead, aren’t they?” Jasper’s voice is faint. Leo hangs his head as Jasper cries, finally feeling what has just happened. “Why, Why… does, everyone I…” He chokes, “Why do I never get to say goodbye?”

  Leo shifts the reins of his Grogrung and moves over to Jasper.

  He lifts a hand up and holds it silently over Jasper’s back. He’s a sobbing mess now. The wind and snow beat into him as Leo pats his back. His soothing palm rubs the frigid and stained bck cloth of mourning.

  Jasper wipes the frost and frozen tears from his gsses to meet Leo’s calm brown eyes. He gazes into those eyes and softly pushes aside a strand of Leo’s blond hair to peer deeper into them. Jasper’s hand shivers and trembles in the cold as it moves onto Leo’s warm neck, and his mouth makes its way onto his warm lips.

  Leo’s eyes go wide.

  His palm slides off Jasper’s back. He leans back in his saddle, but Jasper leans into him, nearly falling off his own mount as Leo moves away.

  The Grogrungs stumble into each other, huffing as they collide before correcting themselves and parting from each other.

  Jasper straightens himself back in his saddle, pushing his gsses up his nose before dropping his head into his arms and groaning, “I’m sorry…”

  Leo presses a hand to his red face, doing his best not to look at Jasper.

  His face grows redder once he catches a glimpse of Adamus watching them from the carriage. “What are you looking at? You don’t even like men!”

  “I like drama.” Adamus shrugs, “And you two seem to have a lot of it.”

  “No thanks to you.” Leo wraps both hands around the reins of his Grogrung once more. Jasper gnces back at the carriage, still red with embarrassment and wet with tears as Adamus whispers to himself, “It’s not like I asked to ruin your lives.” He ducks his head back inside the carriage, but doesn’t have much time to get comfortable.

  The carriage stops dead in its tracks as the sound of a Symbotic Ship joins the howl of the wind.

  Adamus wraps the bnket around himself and hops out of the carriage. Marqus and Kiren rush over to him. “We’re here, my lord,” Marqus informs him as Leo and Jasper both dismount their Grogrungs.

  The shadow of the ship looms over the group. Jasper looks up, expecting it to descend on the spaceport beside them. The ship’s pitch-bck skin blots out the snowfall.

  Adamus is the first to realize what’s happening. “How fast does news travel on this pnet?”

  Marqus unsheathes his sword. “Fast enough.”

  Kiren steps behind her Father, “Kiren,” He orders, “Find a ship.”

  “What do we do?” Jasper asks as Leo follows Kiren into the spaceport. The snow above them vanishes completely. The ship’s skin expands. Its soldiers drop out of it and nd in the snow below. They all draw their swords.

  Adamus smirks, “You all never learn...”

  He holds out his arms. He twists and stretches them. He flexes the skin and muscle. He cracks his knuckles.

  But nothing happens.

  The scars on his arms are gone.

  Adamus stares at his empty, cold human palms in terror as the soldiers call out, “Advance!”