Chapter 26: First Blood
The command post wasn’t much more than a deep cavern carved into the living ice of the gorge’s eastern wall, but it was everything we needed. Frost-rimed cables snaked across the floor, powering portable arc-lights that threw stark, jumping shadows. The air tasted of cordite, cold steel, and the weird, ozone-like crackle of the runes etched into the walls, their blue pulse syncing with my own heartbeat. Or maybe that was just the twin kicks inside me, a relentless, internal drumline.
Mary stood across the map table, her palms flat on the cracked parchment. Her parka was unzipped, the swell of her stomach pressing against the wool of her sweater. My own body echoed the ache in my lower back, a constant, dull reminder that we were on a biological clock as tight as any fuze.
“High explosive, time-fuzed, for the howitzers,” she said, her finger tracing the estimated approach vectors in the Gorge’s mouth. “Standard stuff. Airbursts over infantry formations. Maximum fragmentation.”
“White phosphorus for the rear echelons,” I added, leaning in. The baby moved, a slow roll that made me catch my breath for a second. “Cause panic, obscure their view. Smoke the escape routes so they funnel into the kill zone.”
She nodded, her eyes not leaving the map. “The 75s. APDS for anything that looks like a commander, a standard bearer, or anything bigger than a warhorse. HE for everything else. It’s not about piercing armor. It’s about… volume removal.”
The phrase was clinical. Clean. It helped. Thinking of them as problems of mass and velocity, not as men and monsters. The calculations were simple. Their strongest plate armor was maybe a quarter-inch of steel. A .308 round from five hundred meters would punch through it like paper. A 155mm shell would turn the wearer and everyone within twenty meters into pink mist.
“Riflemen at three hundred meters,” I decided. “That’s point-blank for these guns. They’ll be able to see the whites of their eyes, as the cliché goes. Better for morale. For confirming kills.” I straightened, a hand going to the small of my back. “Any closer and we risk a lucky charge, or mage-fire reaching our lines.”
“Mages.” Mary sighed, finally looking up. Her face was pale in the rune-light. “The unknown variable. Shields? Illusions?”
“Shields stop arrows. Maybe slow a crossbow bolt. They don’t stop a thousand foot-pounds of kinetic energy. A .308 goes through magic like it goes through everything else. Physics doesn’t negotiate.” I believed it. I had to.
A young comms runner, breathless, skidded into the cavern, a sealed tube in his hand. “From the Citadel, my lady. Priority.”
Mary took it, broke the wax seal—Ellie’s personal mark, a entwined lily and gear—and unrolled the thick parchment. Her eyes scanned it, and her professional mask, the one she’d worn so firmly since the gates closed behind us, fractured. Just a crack. She handed it to me without a word.
The letter wasn’t written in Ellie’s usual flowing script alone. Paragraphs were in Nancy’s neater hand, sometimes mid-sentence, as if they’d been passing the pen back and forth, talking over each other.
Amy, Mary—
The silence here is wrong. It’s not peaceful. It’s hungry. The palace eats the echoes of your voices. We tried to work in the studio today. Nancy set up a new canvas. I prepared the pigments. We just stared at it for an hour. It’s just a blank, white thing. It feels like the gorge.
The midwife from the village came. She says everything is “progressing normally.” What a useless phrase. There is nothing normal about this. She brought a salve for the ache in our backs. It smells of lavender and mint. It helps a little. We applied it for each other. It’s hard to reach.
Our bodies are traitors. They’re heavy and clumsy and they ache, and then they’ll suddenly… remember you. All of you. It’s inconvenient. And messy. The linen is constantly damp. We have to change clothes twice a day. It’s absurd. We’re like overripe fruit, leaking in this frozen palace.
We sleep in the big bed. All four sides feel empty. We wake up tangled, searching. It’s not enough.
Tell us about the dirt. Tell us about the gun oil and the frozen rations and the smell of the trolls. Tell us anything that isn’t this waiting. Make it real for us. Because from here, you’re just ghosts we dream about, and we’re just two swollen women talking to walls.
Don’t you dare die. Don’t you dare let a single one of those backward, frost-bitten fuckers lay a hand on you. You are carrying our hearts out there. And our futures.
Come home. Win. Then come home.
All our love, all our fury,
Ellie & Nancy
The paper trembled in my hand. It wasn’t just a letter. It was a visceral punch of their reality. The damp linen. The empty bed. The blank canvas. The relentless, physical fact of our shared condition, stretched across miles of frozen waste.
I looked at Mary. She had turned away, one hand resting on her stomach, the other braced against the icy wall. Her shoulders were tight.
“They’re leaking,” I said, my voice rough.
A short, wet sound escaped her. A laugh or a sob. “We all are.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, a soldier’s brusque gesture that failed completely. “Overripe fruit. That’s us. Tactical geniuses, dripping milk in a frozen cave.”
The absurdity of it, the sheer, brutal intimacy of it, hung in the air between us, mixing with the ozone and the cordite. We were here to discuss the optimal range for turning living beings into offal, while our bodies prepared to make new life. The disconnect was so vast it was dizzying.
I carefully re-rolled the letter, the parchment suddenly the most valuable thing in the fortress. “We’ll write back tonight,” I said. “We’ll tell them about the gritty stuff. The troll shit. The frozen latrines.”
“The way Private Herrick sings off-key when he thinks no one can hear,” Mary added, turning back, her eyes red-rimmed but clear.
“The taste of the coffee substitute. Like burnt mud and regret.”
We managed weak smiles. The letter had done its work. It had anchored us. Reminded us what was behind, and what was inside.
Mary placed her hands back on the map. The moment of fracture sealed over, stronger now, reinforced by shared love and shared absurdity. “Riflemen at three hundred. Howitzers commence firing when their vanguard reaches the river marker. 75s engage high-value targets at will.”
“Agreed.” I touched the spot on the map where our world would end and theirs would begin. “We hit them so fast, so hard, they won’t even understand what killed them.”
“And then we go home,” Mary said, not looking up. “To the leaking and the salve and the big, empty bed that won’t be empty anymore.”
Outside the cavern, the wind screamed through the gorge. Somewhere, miles down that glacial throat, an army was moving toward us, dreaming of conquest.
We stood there, planning their annihilation, our bodies humming with the proof of life they sought to extinguish. The last thing they’d ever see would be the flash of cold, uncaring steel, wielded by mothers.