The air hung thick with the metallic tang of spent gunpowder and the ozone crackle of dying ley-line energy. Captain Alastair Reid stood amidst the rubble of the Gate's collapse, his boots crunching on shards of obsidian that glittered like broken promises. The battlefield stretched before him—a graveyard of shattered armor, smoldering earth, and the faint, keening wail of a world untethered.
"Well," Williams said, plucking a charmed arrow from his sleeve like a magician producing a wilting flower, "that was fun. Anyone else craving a pint and a nap?"
Reid didn't answer. His gaze lingered on the spot where Maeve had stood moments before the final strike—where she'd dissolved into a cascade of blue-white light, her body unraveling into the ley-lines she'd fought so hard to protect. The druidess's absence was a raw, open wound, throbbing in time with the faint pulse of Excalibur's remnants at his feet.
Dr. Eleanor Whitaker knelt nearby, her fingers skimming the fractured blade. "Stabilization at 78%," she muttered, her voice hoarse from shouting over the Weaver's dying screams. "The ley-lines are… knitting. Slowly. Like scar tissue over a bullet hole."
"Poetic," Williams remarked, kicking a dented helmet. "Also terrifying."
Reid crouched, the weight of his armor suddenly unbearable. "Can it hold?"
Whitaker adjusted her cracked glasses, squinting at the holographic data shimmering above her wristpad. "If we're lucky? Long enough for the druids to reinforce the nodes. If we're unlucky? The Weaver's prison might develop a revolving door policy."
A gust of wind carried the stench of burnt ozone and ash. Somewhere in the distance, a crow cawed—a mundane sound that felt obscenely out of place.
---
Lance Corporal Parvati Singh moved through the ruins like a wraith, her medic's kit slung over one shoulder and a plasma scalpel glowing faintly in her other hand. She stepped over the body of an Eternal Court knight, its armor still smoldering with necrotic runes, and knelt beside a young Aeltherian soldier clutching a shattered femur.
"Easy," she murmured, pressing a hypospray to the soldier's neck. "You'll live to limp another day."
The soldier—a fire giant barely out of adolescence—grunted. "Your bedside manner needs work, human."
"So I've been told." Singh's hands moved with mechanical precision, stabilizing the bone with a biogel cast. "But my patients survive. Usually."
A shadow fell across them. Reid stood at her shoulder, his face a mask of soot and exhaustion. "Status?"
"Twelve critical, forty-three mobile," she said, rising. "The druids are setting up triage at the northern ridge. Crowe's people?"
"Five klicks east. Breathing down my neck."
Singh arched an eyebrow. "Breathing or bleeding?"
Reid's lips twitched. "Both, after Williams 'misplaced' a grenade near their command vehicle."
---
The confrontation, when it came, was as inevitable as a tax audit. Crowe's reinforcements arrived in a convoy of armored transports, their hulls gleaming with the Union Jack and the smug sheen of bureaucrats who'd missed the actual war.
Prime Minister Sebastian Crowe emerged like a stage actor savoring his entrance, his tailored suit immaculate despite the ash staining everything else. "Captain Reid. How… rustic."
Reid crossed his arms, blocking the man's path to Excalibur's remnants. "You're late."
"Fashionably so." Crowe's smile was a razor slit. "I'll take custody of the artifacts now. And the druid's… remains."
"Maeve isn't a bargaining chip." Reid's hand drifted toward Gareth's dagger, still strapped to his thigh.
Crowe sighed, the sound of a parent disappointed by a child's tantrum. "You've played soldier long enough. Hand over the sword, and perhaps the inquiry will be lenient."
"Inquiry?" Whitaker stepped forward, her hair crackling with static from the residual ley-energy. "You sent us here to die, then swoop in to claim the spoils. How very colonial of you."
Crowe's smile didn't reach his eyes. "Science and sentimentality, Doctor? How pedestrian."
Reid moved before his brain registered the decision—a half-step forward, his body angled between Crowe and the sword. "Valkyrie's mission was to protect both worlds. Not loot them."
"And yet here you stand," Crowe purred, "hoarding power you don't understand."
A metallic click broke the stalemate. Singh stood at the periphery, her sidearm leveled at Crowe's knee. "Medic's advice, sir? Leave before someone needs a tourniquet."
---
The retreat was a ragged, exhausted affair. Valkyrie's survivors limped westward, their ranks swollen with Aeltherian refugees and druids who eyed the dormant Excalibur with a mix of reverence and dread.
Whitaker walked beside Reid, her fingers dancing across her wristpad. "The ley-lines are stable. For now. But there's a… residue."
"Residue?"
"Like a fingerprint." She rotated a hologram—a serpentine swirl of corrupted energy. "Seraphine's signature."
Reid froze. "She's alive."
"Alive, pissed, and likely halfway to the next apocalyptic artifact." Whitaker's grin was feral. "Same old, same old."
Somewhere ahead, Williams regaled a group of elf children with a wildly exaggerated account of his duel with a lava wyrm. "—and then I said, 'Mate, your breath smells like a pub carpet!'"
Reid watched the children laugh, their faces lit by the setting sun. For a moment, the weight lifted.
Then the crow cawed again—closer now.
And the ground trembled, ever so slightly, beneath their feet.