The earl did not respond. He leaned his head against one hand: a balled fist pressed against his temple. His eyes, glazed over and staring, were fixated towards the window where the scene was unfolding.

Seán looked back outside again. Aislinn still pointed her lance high and forward; a signal for cavalry to charge. But no charge came. More undead nearby began to take notice, plodding and stumbling towards her.

Aislinn lowered her lance and rode into the burning city. And the drawbridge began to rise behind her.

“No!” cried Seán. He turned towards the earl. “She’s out there alone! Send out the foreriders, the infantry, whatever you have!”

“A noble death she chose herself,” said the earl, shaking his head. “Her father shall die a coward tonight, but she shall do so a hero. A fool, of course, but a hero nonetheless.”

“What is wrong with you?” said Seán. “It’s a siege we’re unlikely to survive, but you insist on giving up without a fight!”

“I thought the king would save us….” muttered the earl. “Dromán and Cruachan still stand, with forces enough to throw the enemy back. I wanted to spare my life, my men… my family.”

Tears welled in the earl’s eyes. Seán swore under his breath, then looked to the battle outside. The undead were crowding into the North Ward now, with Lady Carríga nowhere to be seen beneath the broken, decaying bodies that filled the streets.

Such a waste. Unbridled bravery makes many a martyr.

He looked on as more undead swarmed the area, crawling over the rubble of broken buildings and shattered cobblestones.

To go out without a plan, dying for nothing more than an empty statement. His mind went back to the ridiculous idea he had earlier, of using Nicole’s weapon to blow Keep Carríga to the Holy Hell, taking half the horde with it. That, at least, would be a sacrifice worth a damn.

But the weapon was hidden away in a cache, in a safe house in the South Ward; an old store house, derelict and bordered up.

The horde continued to surge in the streets; possibly the bulk of them had come here now, drawn by Aislinn’s act of defiance. The would-be-knight was still nowhere to be seen.

Then, the most peculiarly thought crossed Seán’s mind. He glanced behind him, past the sobbing earl in his throne, towards the stained-glass effigy of the false god-king.

Southwards.

She’s drawn their attention, he realised. I may not have another chance.

He broke into a sprint across the throne room.

I’ll make her sacrifice count.

He raised both hands as he passed the bewildered earl, pointing towards the window.

Sand cast in flames. He forced his power into the glass. Ancient stone, crushed to dust and forged anew.

With a screech, the stained-glass window shattered. And amidst the broken fragments of azure and gold that burst forth, Earthmaster Seán leapt into the night.

Everything slowed as he fell through the air, four stories separating him from the black waters of the moat. Ignoring the gasps and shouts from those back up in the throne room, Seán focused his attention on the shards of glass, pulling on their elementary components. Silicon and iron of rocks and stone, shattered to sand, then boiled to glass. But there was more. Other minerals that gave it colour. As Seán plummeted to the ground, studies once long forgotten began to return to the surface of his mind.

Metal oxides… one for each colour.

The power of his soul reached for cobalt oxide, comprising the blue fragments that had formed the sky of the image before he shattered it. Copper oxide had given the hills of the northern reach their vibrant greens. The golden skin, hair, and wings of Móráin had come from gold itself.

Enough gold used here to house a family, thought Seán, focusing on each element within the shards that surrounded him as he fell.

Once he had a grasp on each, a slight tug on the power of his soul pulled each piece of glass beneath him. There, he shaped them under his feet, rounding their edges like a bowl. As the moat rushed up to meet him, Seán pulled on the cobblestones of a street across the water. These were much easier to grasp, far closer to their fundamental form than the stained glass. Abruptly, dozens of individual cobblestones flew up towards him, forming a crooked slope from the bank of the moat to an empty space just beneath his feet.

Seán narrowed his eyes, bracing himself for impact. The glass platform beneath his feet shrieked as it struck the stone, but Seán’s Geomancy held it together. He held both hands out wide to help keep balance, though most of his balance came too from his magic, adding and subtracting weight from either side of the flat glass slab as it skidded along the cobblestone slope.

Of course, the fundamental laws of force prevented a Geomancer from outright levitating or flying upon a platform of stone or metal or glass beneath their feet. An exertion of force in one direction required that same exertion in the opposite direction, which Geomancy was unable to provide.

But Geomancy could be used to decelerate a descent, as Earthmaster Seán did here. He pulled the glass platform upwards, adding to its friction against the cobblestone slope, all while maintaining perfect balance. Deftly, he slid to the edge of the moat, jumping from the glass platform before it shattered against the ground.

He hit the ground in a roll, his old muscles and bones aching with the impact.

Been a while since I tried that, he thought, standing through a dull throb in his legs. He turned and let the stones of the platform fall into the water.

As predicted, there were no undead here. Without wasting more time, Seán gathered himself, and ran southwards, through the broken streets of Rosca Umhír.

Heart pounding and lungs heaving, Seán sprinted past crumbling remnants of what once was a quiet, residential part of the city. He made his way through Blide Street with little hassle. Here, a long, winding back-road took him past dozens of two-up-two-down terraced houses, many of which were shattered and crumbling. And all of which were vacant.

Far too late, thought Seán, as he ran. Fool, I am. I should have done something sooner than this.

He turned a corner to see a group of figures standing in the middle of Bracken Street. Skeletons, clutching spears and rounded shields. Even without eyes, one turned and seemed to see Seán. The figures shrieked with unholy voices. Together, they charged.

The Earthmaster planted a foot into the ground and focused his power into the cobblestones around him. With gritted teeth and a strong tug, a dozen came free. They floated before him, silently, as the undead came running.

Then Seán dashed forward, pushing the wall of stones with him. He forced his soul into them, then thrust one towards the wight that came at him first, striking its head and knocking it prone. He extended both hands outwards, causing the stones to twist around him. He roared with effort as he met the other undead, forcing each stone towards any that came near. Projectiles met undead faces and bony necks, cracking them with each collision.

When each stone was spent, he reached out and found them again, pulling them back towards him, spinning them around his body. The undead themselves gave no indication that they were put off by this, unrelenting in their efforts to continue their attack.

And Seán was unrelenting in his response.

Gradually, he made his way through the street, his senses sharpened on his surroundings. The stone buildings here had been ruined recently, though not by these wights. When a small handful of the undead remained standing before him, Seán quickened his pace. But somewhere behind him, towards the centre of the city, more guttural cries rang out. He glanced over his shoulder to see a stream of wights pour out from an adjacent alley; hundreds of dead eyes locked on his own.

Seán took a deep breath and focused on the shambling remnants of a nearby tenement building.

Granite, he thought, letting his soul grope along every inch of the building. Born from the molten fires that rage beneath the earth. The stone here one once formed a massive batholith, far into the Northern Reach. Its surface was laced with tiny specks of feldspar and quartz. Each sung a different note as Seán’s soul poured over them.

Once he had a firm grip on the entire structure, and once the advancing horde were positioned perfectly adjacent to it, Seán surged his power and pulled the building into the street, crushing the advancing bodies with a loud rumble and a burst of dust.

The undead answered this with silence, and no more followed.

Exhausted, Seán ran onwards, trying to reconstruct the broken buildings with his memories. There once was a cobbler store here, run by an elderly gentleman who moonlighted as a locksmith. Further on, a smouldering mass of stone marked where a healer’s clinic once stood.

Finally, around a slight right bend, past a row of hedges miraculously still intact after all that they had seen, Seán found himself standing before the dissident safehouse. It was a squat, single-story building with a single window and a single door boarded up.

All that marked this building as out of the ordinary was a very faint etching above the door, visible only to those who were looking for it. One circle within another circle, with two lines forming a V underneath.

Seán never knew what the symbol actually meant. It was some rune of some Simian or criminal language he knew little about. All he knew was that this shape marked where the cache was hidden. And that was all he needed to know.

I’ll take it back to the keep, he thought. I’ll take it back and kill every last one of them.

He reached out to touch the wooden boards across the door, then looked around to see if he was still alone.