Wolves of Empire [EPIC DARK FANTASY] [Book One Complete]

Twenty-Four

Estrid

Central Kalduran

5th of Tantus

Estrid had been camped half a day east of Dykumas when she received word of its razing.

She, her three fellow kandras, and the Baltanos met in the guarded seclusion of the rolling valleys that dominated the wilderness in this untamed part of the province. An opulent pavilion, Aladar's own, sheltered them from the harsh sun, and padded chairs provided them with the sort of comfort they, as campaigning generals, had forgone since Dujaro. Their armies she'd ordered concentrated north, between the Imperial forces and Varanos.

That the Imperium continued towards the capital unmolested angered the other kandras and left them feeling understandably vulnerable and useless. Estrid empathised, but she needed the Imperium over-confident. More importantly, she needed them as distant from their Castrian allies, back in Aukruna, as possible. She only hoped she could enact her gambit before the three kandras lost their already paltry faith in her.

The messenger carrying the grave news of a city's murder, a scout plucked from her own light cavalry, interrupted their meeting, looking first to Aladar for permission to speak. The Baltanos, at ease at the head of the table they'd gathered around, nodded his consent.

"Dykumas has been sacked, sir."

No one responded for a painful moment. Aladar pushed back into his seat, his expression neutral, and clasped his hands together. The others watched and waited.

Estrid cleared her throat. "Elaborate," she said.

The messenger gave a shallow bow. "From a distance I saw the city on fire. When I got closer, the gates were open, and an Imperial force was gathered about it. There were soldiers in the city. This was about three hours ago."

"The soldiers," Estrid said, "did you see whose colours they wore?"

The man nodded. "Arch-General Tyrannus was there, but he wasn't directly involved. The soldiers sacking the city were Denjini."

She hissed out a breath. Of course it was Endarion. Whether by his own volition, or because he'd been threatened into doing so, it hardly mattered.

"They'll be long gone by the time we can muster a defence," Elek spat into Estrid's prolonged pause. "You ordered them to leave their gates open. You let the Imperium in."

She couldn't deny the accusation. Instead, she waved a hand to capture the messenger's attention again. "Pick out your best scouts. Send them to Vadonis, as fast as they're able. I want to know what's happened there."

Elek followed her train of thought and slapped the table. "You think Vadonis has fallen as well?"

"I don't know," Estrid replied through gritted teeth. "Hence the sending of scouts."

"We need to do something about this," Laszlo Lakatos said, rising to his feet. He kicked his chair back and hovered over the table. "Those cities surrendered in good faith. To raze them after occupation goes against everything we stand for."

"It's too late," Ilona Redik replied. She raised a calming hand to Laszlo, but the younger kandras ignored her.

"We can't just let this happen," Laszlo said firmly. "This wasn't supposed to happen."

"No," Elek agreed. "It wasn't." He fixed Estrid with what he probably thought was his most intimidating stare. She'd spent decades in the company of the Iron Wolf and his intense glares, though, so it fell far short.

Ilona, the calmest of them, looked to Aladar. "We need to retaliate," she said. "This strategy of Estrid's has backfired spectacularly."

Though she listened to the exchange, she didn't absorb the words. Her mind became a dull and thudding void in her skull. The messenger's revelation echoed infinitely in her ears, until she'd entrapped herself in an unbreakable circle of her own ill-judgement. How could this have happened? She'd placed her trust in Endarion, in the honour she knew he still clung to. However suspicious he might've found her willing surrender of Kalduran's largest cities, he never should've reacted like this, not even if he'd been coerced.

Not even if he still believed she'd tried to have him assassinated.

She'd lose her position as Aladar's successor, at the very least. Her title of kandras, the income and estate that came with it. Would she be forced to flee another nation, pursued again by those she'd once considered allies?

Only Ilona's more fervent questioning of Aladar tore her back into the room. She looked over to see the Baltanos with that same eerily blank face he wore when one of his episodes loomed. Ilona moved to his side, reached out a hand to steady him.

"Don't," Estrid snapped. She still remembered what had happened when she'd touched Aladar during one of his fits. The older woman recoiled and fixed her with a frown equal parts confusion and anger.

Aladar's teeth chattered as his jaw flexed, and Estrid could see the veins in his hands and neck bulging where his muscles tensed. "It wasn't my fault this happened," he hissed.

"No one's blaming you," Ilona said.

"I didn't do it. I didn't kill Incáraï. I didn't even help." He looked through Ilona as if she didn't exist, towards the pavilion's entrance. His next words were delivered in a guttural voice, raw and feral and so unlike his own. "You didn't stop them, though. It amounts to the same thing."

The three kandras pushed away from the table, distancing themselves from the Baltanos. Though they all knew he suffered from fits, they'd never witnessed them; Aladar had felt it important his subordinates didn't think him compromised.

"Leave," Estrid said, addressing no one in particular.

Elek scowled at her. "Why would we do that? He clearly needs help." He turned to Laszlo. "Go and get a medic."

"Don't," Estrid said, halting Laszlo in his tracks. "I know how to deal with this. Leave the pavilion, and don't come back until I tell you."

Aladar interrupted her instructions only long enough to raise a defensive arm over his face and cringe away, as if from an unseen attacker.

"One of you find a worldstrider, tell them to get Tanas," she continued. At their hesitation, she adopted her best voice of command and barked at them. "Just do it."

When they'd left, she turned back to Aladar, then paced around the table until it was between them. He lowered his arm and shook his head hard enough to jar. "I won't help them. They can stay where they're trapped."

He slammed his fists onto the table with a suddenness that frightened her, and it fell apart beneath him.

No, not fell apart. When she looked down from his empty, dead-eyed expression, she saw the table, a hefty piece of furniture not easily unsettled, disintegrate. It seemed to drift away, as if the most minuscule components of it unravelled and vanished entirely.

A foreboding sense of malice overcame her as she watched the last flakes of what had just been the table fade from reality, as if she could easily imagine herself being torn asunder in such a complete manner. Aladar seemed to regain some slim semblance of sanity with that unholy destruction swayed on his feet like a drunkard.

"What was that?" she said dumbly, more to herself than to her insensate superior.

Like the visions he'd forced on her, it was unlike any form of aasiurmancy she knew of. If anything, it was the opposite; the destruction of matter rather than the manifestation of it.

Aladar started to topple forward, reached out as if to hold himself against a table that no longer existed. She rushed forward, arresting his fall, careful not to touch her bare skin to his, and lowered him to the floor. Her hands latched around his sleeved forearms to steady him as she knelt at his side.

"Are you back?" she whispered.

He stuttered, shifting in her grip. He spoke a few mangled words, sighed his annoyance, then seemed to regain himself. "Was…was it…a bad one?"

"You've had worse," she replied.

He propped himself up on one elbow and glanced around the pavilion. "What happened to the table?" he asked.

She considered a lie, then the truth. Disregarded both. "I don't know."

She'd hoped he might offer an explanation, but he accepted her confusion with a nod. "Did the others see?"

"Some of it," she admitted.

"Hardly ideal," he said. She helped him to his feet, and he brushed himself down as if he'd experienced a simple fall. Again she was struck by the juxtaposition between the dangerous creature he'd just been with the calm and collected commander she saw before her now. How easily he seemed to shrug off his madness. "I'll need to return to the capital for a while. These fits are getting worse, and I risk endangering and alienating my officers." He set a firm hand on her shoulder. "You'll be okay, in my absence?"

"Baltanos, sir, don't you remember what happened before you fitted? Dykumas has fallen and it's my fault. Vadonis too, most likely."

Aladar shook his head, the smile he wore not quite reaching his eyes. "You think I'd remove you from your position because you made a simple mistake?"

She almost scoffed at his wording. "Not a simple mistake. Two of the biggest cities in Kalduran, gone because I placed my trust in a dishonourable man."

"You did what you thought was right," Aladar said. "Your strategy was sound, and its failure rests not on you, but on those who razed the cities. I would only remove you if you failed to learn from this, if you retaliated foolishly, or took this failure and let it crush you." He raised an eyebrow at her. "Are you going to do any of those things?"

"No," she replied at once. She opened her mouth say more but he stalled her with a raised hand.

"I can't stay out in the field where I might hurt myself or others. The only alternative is to place Elek in charge of the campaign if you no longer believe in yourself. Should I do this?"

She sighed. "No."

"Then prove I was right to name you my successor."

The heaviness in her chest lightened at his words. Though a part of her knew he spoke only to distract her from what she'd just seen—like how Tanas had downplayed Aladar's earlier fit, when he'd dragged Estrid into that vision—the larger part of her, the veteran general, knew she needed to focus on the campaign. Six enemy armies ransacked her country, killing its citizens and toppling its settlements. The matter of her superior's fits seemed irrelevant in the face of that.

She glanced at where the table had been and amended herself. They seem irrelevant… for now.

―

Ten days after the fall of Dykumas found her at the small stronghold of Allodek, a neat structure, military in its orderliness. Nothing spilled beyond its walls, and a steep range of hills fanning out into open grassland guarded its back. Its walls were tall, its gates few and thick, and little of its interior could be discerned from without. A forest sprawled a short distance south, too small to conceal an enemy force. Estrid doubted she'd ever fortified an easier position, and she needed only a tenth of her ten thousand soldiers to do it. The rest she'd left out in the wilderness, awaiting her signal.

She'd instructed the other three Kaldurani armies to maintain a northwards march, to begin the process of defending Varanos against the Imperium. Now that Aladar had left the field and returned to the capital, they obeyed her commands uneasily, as if they thought the Baltanos planned to imminently strip her of her position, and they only waited for it to become official.

Allodek lay too far out of the Imperium's way to be worth the effort of claiming it. Not unless the Imperials planned to sweep the entire province, which, given the reports of villages and farmland being put to the sword around Dykumas, Estrid couldn't entirely discount. But she needed to be certain Endarion and Dobran, currently marching together according to her scouts, would have cause to venture here. So, after a brief discussion with her senior officers, she'd sent a scout out to Kavan Aza, whose location she knew by virtue of the updates they'd traded with one another following their conversation in Vadonis.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

She'd instructed Kavan to join Endarion and Dobran and convince them a large enemy force aimed for them, and that his presence alongside them was required to even the numbers. She'd then sent a couple of companies of light cavalry towards the three Imperial armies and stolen as much of their shared supply train as they could. Kavan had managed to place himself in charge of guarding it and aided her sabotage, allowing her cavalry to escape with minimal injury and no deaths.

A force as large as Endarion's and Dobran's combined would need to resupply, and Allodek was the only settlement bigger than a village between them and Varanos, at least in western Kalduran.

She felt a sense of ominous finality when she spied the first rippling waves of the sea of Imperial soldiers approaching Allodek. Blue Boratorren and purple Tyrannus and, to the rear of the long procession, where she'd asked him to position himself, green Aza.

Estrid stood on the walls with Borso at her side, watching the enemy armies pool around the walls and give every sign of preparing for a siege.

"You're sure about this?" her second-in-command asked.

She shook her head and supressed the urge to chuckle darkly. "I was sure about Vadonis and Dykumas."

"It wasn't your fault," Borso said, but his words rang empty. He looked down at the massing enemy and spat over the wall at them. "You believed they'd honour a surrender, and they didn't. Just makes you optimistic."

"I honestly thought he'd not harm those cities," Estrid said, more to herself. She passed her gaze across the ocean of bodies below and spied the stonehound crest and dark blue colours of the Denjin army. Where are you, you bastard? She tried to imagine she could see him among his cohorts. Would his head be hung in shame at what he'd done and what he'd come here to do? Or would he face Allodek with his back straight and his purpose sure? Would Dykumas have driven him back to madness?

"We can repay every death in kind," Borso muttered. When she looked across at him, she saw his hands shimmered with untethered aasiurmantic energy. A single, powerful strike into the soldiers below would fell a dozen but leave Borso weakened afterwards. She might be able to burn half a dozen to char, but that would cost her greatly too, and would take her at least two minutes to conjure.

It was why the Kaldurani armies never heavily relied on combat-mages; they were good for one or two attacks before they needed to be removed and replaced, almost like ranks of archers taking it in turns to launch volleys. Ilona's army, with its higher density of combat-mages, was used as an offensive battering ram for this reason, her mages often pulled back and supported by the mundane infantry after the opening salvos. Only aasiurmancers like the Arisen, or the Varkommer back in Drasken, would make any worthwhile difference on the field, and they were too busy with their politics.

"We've discussed this," she replied. "The Denjini aren't to be touched."

Borso huffed. "People will think you're still trying to protect him or avoiding fighting him."

She offered a half-hearted shrug. "This will hurt him the most," she said. "If he's left untouched, the Imperium will think he colluded with us."

"And if they kill him for it? Would that satisfy you?"

She chewed on the words for a moment, considering. Endarion had been largely absent from her life for so long she'd almost convinced herself she preferred it. Seeing him on Shaeviren, then again at Dujaro, had made her realise that wasn't strictly true. It would've been easier if she could excise from herself that stubborn part that remained connected to Endarion.

"No, but if it protects Drasken and Kalduran, then it needs doing," she said. "Besides, Endarion's too fucking hard to kill. I doubt this will be the end of him." And he already thinks I tried to kill him, she thought but didn't say.

A messenger's arrival interrupted them. She scoffed as she took the slip of paper and studied the single sentence written there, penned in a blunt hand she knew too well.

Surrender and I'll ensure you're unharmed.

She wondered how hard it had been for Endarion to write those words. Harder than penning her hastily scrawled reply, no doubt.

Like you ensured Dykumas and Vadonis were unharmed? Don't forget I tried to have you assassinated. Would you truly spare your would-be-killer?

She and Borso watched as the Imperials stripped the nearby forest, to turn it into ladders and siege engines. As Endarion and Dobran faced their men towards Allodek, Kavan positioned himself against their rear, facing outwards in anticipation of the Kaldurani force he'd convinced Endarion was waiting to smash them against Allodek's walls. A force that didn't exist. Or that didn't exist beyond nine thousand of her men stationed out there in the wilderness, waiting for her signal.

Unbeknownst to the Iron Wolf, he'd just placed an undercover enemy behind him, with his attention dedicated ahead, towards her.

"Prepare the soldiers," she said to Borso. "We'll let them settle for the night, and then we'll strike."

Endarion

He violently awoke amidst a dream about the doomed campaign on Shaeviren, emerging into a battlefield of a different kind.

Strong hands clamped down on his shoulders and prevented him from grabbing, by half-awake instinct, for the dagger under his pillow. The steely visage of Cavalry-General Palla Hasund broke his sleepy stupor.

"We're being attacked," she said.

He climbed to his feet, swaying slightly, knee groaning. "Now?"

She nodded. "I've organised a defence, but there's confusion now we're lacking a first-general."

That was the extent of the consequences of Cato's death. There'd been questions asked about who would succeed him, as Cato had never favoured any of his colonels as potential successors, but no one had cast any suspicion upon his fate. No one had mourned Cato either, his body having been left in Dykumas as it went down in flames. Endarion hadn't even considered extracting Cato's corpse as he'd pulled his forces from the foundering city, thinking it macabre poetic justice that the cruel bastard should decay beside his final victims.

Perhaps Endarion should've elevated someone the moment his army had reconvened outside of Dykumas's sundered corpse, but he'd not been in his right mind. He hadn't trusted himself to make decisions in the aftermath of what he'd done in the city.

"Tell the officers you're their first-general until further notice," Endarion said, despite his paranoia concerning the woman and her aasiurmancy and her supposed mission to protect him. "Where are we being attacked from?"

"Soldiers in Allodek burst through the main gate about ten minutes ago and cleaved straight into Tyrannus. There seems to be some disruption behind us, too, where Aza is."

Endarion cursed and dismissed the cavalry-general with a nod. In her absence, he slumped, already defeated. His heart hammered, not just from the remnants of a fitful sleep; he hadn't been expecting an attack tonight. When Kavan had come to him earlier that day with word of a large Kaldurani force massing with the intent of running him and Dobran down, he'd almost been excited at the prospect of a fight. Though losing half their supply train to raiders when Kavan should've been guarding it had pummelled morale, and being pressed up against Allodek's wall with the desperate need to resupply had left them all fearing ambush.

He slipped his leg brace on over his trousers and fastened its buckles with trembling fingers. At such short notice there wasn't time to properly outfit himself for battle, so he settled for a boiled leather vest over the shirt he'd slept in, and a combat-coat, padded with thin metal plates and much shorter than the greatcoat he often wore. He snatched his plain arming sword, edge dulled with use, and sheathed it at his hip.

When he burst into the mild Kaldurani night, he found far less chaos than he'd expected. From Palla's brief report, he'd concluded the camp had already been sacked and their ranks sundered. He'd been ready to find the smouldering ruins of his army, to be faced with unsalvageable devastation, but instead the sea of Denjini tents remained intact and his soldiers moved in an orderly fashion.

Basirius, standing silent guard over his tent's entrance, greeted Endarion with a quick sniff.

Daria emerged from the crowd and raced to his side.

"What's going on?" he asked.

She gestured wildly west, towards where Dobran, and behind him Kavan, were camped.

Dobran had buckled, that much was clear. Tents had been set alight, and in the fiery illumination Endarion witnessed the desperate clash of his cousin's forces against their advantaged attackers.

He squinted, focusing on the attackers' uniform.

Deep green, a crest depicting a silver fox flashing over a black background: the Aza family.

"What the fuck is Kavan doing?" Endarion demanded as clarity slowly dawned.

"Estrid's forces stormed through Allodek's gate at the same time as Kavan turned," Daria said.

"Turned?"

Daria grasped her blade in a white-knuckled grip. "He's defected, Father. That's what this is."

Endarion looked towards Allodek's walls. "They planned it together."

He realised then that the recent disappearance of their supply train, supposedly under Kavan's guard, had been orchestrated. They'd been lured to this stronghold by the need to replenish, and to find somewhere defensible to fight the enemy force Kavan claimed aimed for them. Endarion now doubted such a force existed, that it had been an excuse for Kavan to join them.

How had he missed this?

Because I trusted an ally.

His daughter nodded. "What should we do?"

He glanced towards Allodek's walls, to where he knew Estrid had likely posted herself to watch her gambit unfold. How easy it would be, just then, to turn his forces in her favour and grind Dobran's army down to dust. But a part of him held back, knowing such a reckless act would be the ruin of his family back in Empyria. Although only a stubborn fragment of him still believed Estrid responsible for the attempt on his life in Dujaro, he couldn't quite convince that ruthless streak in him—the strategist, the Iron Wolf—that Estrid didn't want him dead. To turn to her now, the Iron Wolf told him, would be folly. She was the enemy; show his throat to her and she'd tear it out without hesitation.

But then he looked to his daughter and knew she'd follow him no matter the idiocy of his chosen course. He also knew what decision she wanted him to make.

Before he could answer, a messenger bolted his way and halted before him. "Paramount-General, sir, Cavalry-General Hasund sends me to recommend retreat," the soldier huffed. "The bulk of the Dasjuran army has arrived and is already supporting Arch-General Aza, and Arch-General Tyrannus is scattering."

Endarion scanned his surroundings, mind a whirlwind, trying to separate the different strands of his predicament. The deathly orchestra of battle played around him; the war cries issued by Dobran's soldiers grew louder as their fight became desperate.

He addressed the messenger. "Tell Hasund to support Tyrannus with an infantry battalion. Give the order for retreat." After the man had sprinted away, he turned to Daria. "We need to get out of this melee. Find the first cavalry officer you can, tell them to send the heavy cavalry out first. Light cavalry after to escort what remains of our supplies, our infantry to bring up the rear."

"And you?"

"I'll find the doglords, assess the situation."

Daria saluted smartly and dashed away. His heart lurched as she flew westwards, towards the fighting, but he waved the worry aside; war was no time for paternal fears.

He looked down to hulking Basirius and whistled four times, short and sharp. Find pack. Not two minutes later Basirius led him right to a company of doglords, already donned in their armour and prepared for battle. Avelyn stood at their centre, stringing off commands but not yet calling for the attack.

"Why aren't we fighting back?" Endarion said.

Avelyn favoured him with a tired grimace, the ebbs of sleep evident in her unsteady stature. "Because we're not being attacked."

Endarion looked once again to Dobran's camp, now bolstered by Palla's reinforcements. He didn't know why he'd missed if before, but the Denjini camp hadn't been touched.

"They were ordered to leave us alone," Endarion concluded.

"Seems so," Avelyn replied. "Very fucking courteous of Estrid, but it makes us look a bit suspect, doesn't it?"

"That's probably the point." He skimmed his gaze over Avelyn's assembled doglords. "We should support Dobran's retreat. It'll make us look less suspicious."

"Or we could leave him to the wolves," she suggested. By the grim set of her mouth, he knew she wasn't joking.

Endarion gestured to his war hound. "We are the wolves."

He raised his voice to issue his commands to the doglords and, as one ferocious pack, they surged west, diving headlong into the climaxing conflict playing out in Dobran's camp. Fate had made his decision for him, it seemed, circumstance tugging at the thin cord of his patriotism and steering him in defence of his murderous cousin, rather than to the aid of the woman he'd loved more than half his life. It was too big a decision to turn on his own homeland. The sort of decision that couldn't be reached in the middle of a brutal scuffle. The sort of decision he might've considered had Estrid not forced it upon him like this.

Because she had forced it upon him. He knew her designs because he knew her, despite their years apart. She was leveraging their shared history in an attempt to defend her nation from his invasion. To force him to defect. Or at the very least to fight alongside her for Allodek.

I was about to go to her at Dujaro and look how that turned out.

If she wanted to force his hand, she needed to give him time to protect his family's interests in the capital. Not like this.

Unless she really did want him dead, as that small slither of him insisted. Her assassin had failed at Dujaro, and so she sabotaged him now, Kavan her chosen blade.

Did he really believe that?

Can I afford not to?

The clash was a bloody one, made all the bloodier for how closely pressed circumstance made them. Dobran's roused infantry, in the process of trying to enact a retreat, were cut down on all sides by soldiers in both Estrid and Kavan's colours. The speed of Kavan's betrayal had left Dobran's men confused and unwilling to fight back in earnest against their fellow countrymen in case there had been a horrific misunderstanding.

As he made to engage with his first opponent, Endarion's foot caught on the toppled corpse of one of his cousin's men and he stumbled. He dragged his chosen enemy down and they scrambled in ground already churned to gore-drenched mud. His knee panged as he tried to shift his sword free from where it was pressed beneath him, and in the moment of his fumbling his opponent had already succeeded and was swinging his arm back to drive his blade through Endarion's exposed neck. Before he could make his attack, Basirius snatched at the sword arm, clamping wolven jaws around the soldier's shoulder and tearing him backwards. As the soldier succumbed to the dog's brutal ministrations, Endarion climbed painfully to his feet and searched the writhing sea for his next match.

Like in Dykumas, the Iron Wolf usurped him. He felt as free and feral as his stonehounds in the heat of battle, and the wild dances he exchanged with enemy soldiers exonerated him of his clumsy failure with the first soldier. Blood mixed with the mud already marring his coat and covered his face like a layer of paint, the smell of it thick and heady.

Flashes of magic riddled the battlefield as combat-mages pressed their advantage. He watched one of Estrid's pyromancers shower a Tyrannus soldiers in a wreath of conjured flames, waiting until the display died out before stepping close and slipping his blade down the back of the mage's collar. Bone crunched and flesh squelched as he forced his sword through meat and muscle. When the Kaldurani fell to their knees, spewing ichor in lethal gouts, he bent over them and kept pushing, relishing in the resistance.

He wrenched his sword from the carcass as if it were an axe embedded in a tree trunk, then pivoted in search of fresh prey, his bloodlust yet unsated.

By then the fight flagged. As soon as it became apparent the Imperial lines had successfully mounted a mass retreat, Estrid and Kavan's soldiers peeled away and made to consolidate their claim on Allodek.

Endarion tried to smother his disappointment as the two sides broke apart. His hand flexed against his sword and his vision reddened with battle rage. He harboured inexplicable anger towards Estrid for holding back. Why would she, a veteran commander, turn away from a fleeing enemy and not pursue them, buckle their retreat into a rout? She could've tried to end the war here. Instead, she pulled her forces back into the safe embrace of Allodek's walls, Kavan's army at her heels.

He re-joined the doglords as they shepherded the rear of Dobran's infantry out through the shredded remnants of their own camps, his heartbeat calming, his breathing softening from its heavy pants. By now, the Iron Wolf had faded back to whatever recess of his mind it called home, and the blood colouring his skin and staining his clothes was cold and cloying and unpleasant.

As quick as the fight had been, it had ended now. The beaten Imperials drew themselves up into frayed formations as they skirted around Allodek, their retreat no less desperate for lack of enemy pursuit.

The Imperial armies had suffered their first defeat on this campaign. And therein lay the issue, the lucid part of him insisted: their first defeat with him as Paramount-General. His ally Kavan had betrayed them, and his own army had been pointedly spared. He looked undeniably guilty.

It was all the evidence the Caetoran really needed to be rid of him.

―― End of Part Two ――