Valen

A man stood watch at the end of the world.

Behind him green shoots sprouted in orderly columns that stretched on for miles. Forests of beige grasses swayed in the gentle breeze, washing over the miles like ripples marring a placid pond. Small trees clutched unripe fruit as the wind teased the branches into motion. Further on, beyond another wall, and others after, crops grew the bounty that now fed millions.

Beyond those fields the City itself glowed. At its heart the Spire shone like a piece of the sun had been taken in hand and stretched into a wire, rising from the ground to some impossible height beyond the sky. Surrounding it, the sprawling city of millions shone with a hundred-thousand tributary lights, and glowed like a distant, immense bonfire.

The firelight extended out from the City, following the walls and causeways in a procession of luminous lights that, with the distance, blended together into lines of orange light that snaked across the land. The light of the Spire cast long shadows on the trees in the field, and on the watchman himself as he stood upon the very edge of his world.

That edge was a stone wall a hundred feet high, and six hundred miles long. At the base of the wall a small army of small bouts of fire, drawn from the Spire, spit out into the lands beyond the Everburning City. Into the world claimed by the Gloam.

The pallid grey mists seethed and churned in the firelight, swirling about like water churning in the river. It clung to the the stone, and only begrudgingly shied away from the pilot lights that blazed at the base of the wall. There was nothing else beyond the Last Wall, no rock or tree or hill. There was nothing beyond, except the Gloam.

A man stood at the end of the world. And listened.

Far beyond his sight, a muffled crash shook the night air. The wall beneath his feet rumbled faintly the way a passing train can rattle the platform. Each distant rumble sounded like an impossibly large hammer striking the dirt, a strange, soft, low, but powerful noise.

In his ignorance, the watchman only remembered that fire, not stone, held back the Gloam. The hundred-foot stone walls were for something else.

"Valen!" a shout echoed in the still night, startling the man on watch and shaking him loose from his trepidatious thoughts. Valen turned to the nearby watchtower, rising up above the wall, in time to see the door open a sliver. "Are you on watch yet?"

"I am," Valen replied, taking a deep breath and forcing his hand off his sword. He hadn't realized he had been gripping it. He turned to the door and spoke through it. "And you're late, Specialist."

"Right, spit and ash," the woman said. She stepped through the door and shut it behind her. She then faced Valen, stood at attention, and set her right fist over her heart. "Ready for the watch, Corporal Redgrave, and apologies for my tardiness."

Valen chuckled, out of relief rather than amusement. He was almost grateful to be distracted from his thoughts. "We're about twelve miles from an officer you actually need to pay homage to, Mildred. No one salutes a lieutenant unless a captain is in view. And I'm quite a few pegs below that."

"Right," Mildred agreed. Valen suspected there was more she wanted to say, but he wasn't willing to pry. He waited silently as she sighed, rolled her shoulders, and took a deep breath to steady herself. "Sorry sir."

"Are Hendricks and Darius on their way up?" Valen asked, enquiring about the rest of the group he lead.

"Yes sir. Just putting their boots on when I left," Mildred confirmed. Valen frowned, and raised an eyebrow at her tone, suspecting something else had been left unsaid.

"Mildred. What is-" Valen began to say, but a blunt, muffled roar rumbled in the distance. It derailed Valen's response and pulled his gaze back out to the Gloam-covered world beyond the wall.

"Sir," Mildred began to say, fear grasping at her and squeezing her speech into a strained squeak. "What the burning hell was that?"

Mildred's fear, and her confusion, struck a hard blow at Valen's nerves. Mildred was a mechanics specialist, and her training had given her a wide breadth of knowledge about a variety of subjects. For her to not have any idea what that sound was...

"I was hoping you could tell me," Valen admitted, resting his hand on the battlements again. He dropped his voice as he asked, "do you know what could make a noise like that?"

"Blasting in the dirt?" Mildred shrugged quickly. "My specialty isn't in munitions, but I remember hearing sounds like that when they started the causeway expansion during basic training. The first blast was always at 06:00, every day of the week. The explosions sounded similar to that."

"What makes you think of that?" Valen asked.

"It's that dull thud sound. Like wrapping a hammer in linens so it doesn't crack paving stones. It sounds a little like that, but it's way too loud. I figure someone's blasting to move dirt around, preparing to expand the walls," Mildred speculated.

Valen nodded, trying to appear clam even as his hand fidgeted on the hilt of his sword. "It sounds plausible. Better than any idea I've come up with."

The dull roar howled again, shaking the night air.

"They must be blasting in a hurry," Mildred mused, her already limited confidence evaporating.

"Yeah, we can only hope," Valen said. He shifted the hand he had rested on the battlements, and pointed down towards the bottom of the wall. "Let's talk about something in your specialty. Are the pilot lights dimmer than usual?"

"Why do you ask?" Mildred said.

"The Gloam seems to be closer than usual. It's practically clinging to the walls," Valen said. He pointed down the battlements. Mildred stepped up to the battlements, and leaned over to stare down. Whatever she saw made her gasp as she slid back and nearly fell down.

"Burn me!" she cursed as she caught her footing, and leaned forward to look again. Her head whirled from left to right, and she was sputtering as she stared down at the wall. "What happened to the ash-choked pilot lights?"

Valen looked over the wall again. The pilot lights at the bottom of the wall were set at forty-yard increments, pouring fire pumped from the Spire to keep the Gloam out. Normally, the lights formed a long train of candles that followed the wall for miles, and illumined a few dozen feet of barren ground that the Gloam begrudgingly gave.

But right now, Valen couldn't see the pilot lights at all.

"Embers of the abyss," Valen cursed. As he spoke, Mildred stumbled backwards, her hands shaking. He turned to see her pointing to the door of the watchtower, ready to run.

"The pilot lights are out, it's going to come over the wall," Mildred whispered. She beckoned for him to follow, seemingly waiting for him to give her permission to flee.

Valen snapped his finger to shake Mildred out of her thoughts. "Specialist Mildred Crispin! If the lights went out, the Gloam would be sweeping over the wall already. Now stop and think, consider your specialty, and tell me what's most likely going wrong."

"It could mean the outflow pipes aren't set properly. We're not pushing enough fire to the pilot lights," Mildred said, calming as she thought through the technical puzzle. "Outflow should be checked, but even if it is, we can increase it to compensate for the blockage."

Valen nodded. "And Specialist, regulating the flow of those pipes are the reason you have a wrench over the pip on your arm," Valen pointed to the insignia of a wrench stitched with yellow thread on a badge, that sat on her right arm just below her shoulder. "Your calling is calling. Hop to it."

"Yes sir," Mildred saluted again, turning away and jogging back towards the watchtower. Valen moved to follow, but stopped as the distant, muffled thunder roared into the night again.

"Spit and ash," Valen cursed, looking out at the Gloam-covered world. He marched back to the tower, just in time to see a pair of young men stop at the entrance as Mildred opened the door.

"Corporal Redgrave," one of the young men, Private Hendricks Lamar said. The inflections in his somewhat unusual accent were more pronounced when he was excited, a fact on clear display right now. "Sorry sir, we didn't notice the hour."

"We forgot to set an hourglass after sunset," the other, Darius Tulwan added. He spoke quietly, and was poking at a deep-red bruise on the side of his face. "And with all this ash-stained cloud, we can't see the moon."

"Never mind it," Valen said. The pair straightened, and looked at each other nervously. Valen kept going to answer the question they were likely to ask. "We might be having some trouble with the flow to the pilot lights. Mildred and I are going to adjust the controls and see what's wrong. Wait near the door, leave it open, and keep a torch handy. Let us know if anything changes."

"Yes sir," they both said, as Darius took the unlit torch off the nearby sconce.

Valen stepped aside to let them out. Just as they reached the door, the now somewhat familiar roar sounded again, and Valen's hand found itself on his sword handle again. Both the young soldiers jumped at the sound, and turned to Valen for an explanation.

"Mildred suspects someone's blasting dirt for a wall expansion," Valen said, hoping his explanation sounded more confident to them than it did to his own ears. "But keep your eyes open."

Valen left them and followed Mildred down one flight of stairs, through a heavy steel door, and into a room filled with pipes and machines. Dials lined the walls in long rows, control wheels protruded from the maze of tubes like excessive punctuation in a crowded sentence, and several sets of massive gears turned slowly, attached to devices Valen only barely understood.

The room was also oppressively hot, enough that Valen's first breath felt like he was drawing air from an oven door. He pulled at the collar of his padded coat, and took a deep breath. "Feels like a sauna in here," he said.

"Yeah," Mildred agreed idly, only barely diverting her attention as she scanned the rows of dials. "No pressure variations bad enough to trip the warning gauges, current outflow pressure matches the pressure four hours, eight hours, and twenty-four hours ago with a point-four percent variance..."

"Summarize that, would you?" Valen asked. "For people who don't speak clockwork."

"Right, sir. The pipes are working normally. No pressure loss or spikes, and the outflow pressure is the same as it was yesterday," Mildred said, smiling as she worked.

"Which means what's happening out there isn't a problem on our end," Valen concluded, suddenly feeling cold despite the heat of the room.

"Simmering bile," Mildred whispered.

"Can you increase the flow? Make the pilot lights bigger?" Valen asked.

"Yes, just give me a..." Mildred trailed off as turned to one of the massive cogs and pulling a switch. The machines started to grind, rumble and hiss. Valen might have been unnerved, but Mildred smiled as she watched the gears begin to pick up speed. Mildred then pulled on another switch, and grabbed a small lever near the largest dial.

Just as she pulled the lever, Mildred cursed as her sleeve caught one of the gears. She stumbled and started to swear as it pulled her jacket, and her arm, towards where the wheel ground against another.

"Mildred!" Valen called out, dashing forward.

But Mildred, still cursing, straightened her arm and pushed her body away from the gear. With a rapid series of short crackling sounds the sleeve popped off her jacket at the shoulder, freeing her arm and letting her stumble away from danger.

Valen watched with somewhat morbid curiosity as the gears pulled the sleeve of Mildred's coat in, and shredded it. "And that's why mechanics are issued coats with detachable sleeves," Mildred said as bits of white linen fluff, the under padding of her coat sleeve, was tossed into the air.

"You should be more careful, Specialist," Valen said tersely. "Sergeant Ewanmourn hasn't tested his medical specialist status in almost a year. Not sure I'd trust him with a sewing needle, let alone a bone saw."

"Right sir," Mildred said, in a distracted whisper. Her eyes were fixed on the dials again, watching one as the needle slowly climbed. "Good, good. Keep climbing, nice and slowly. Thirty four, at nineteen hundred degrees, keep that up. Just like that..."

A muffled shout came from somewhere beyond the door. "We can see the pilot lights again! Whatever you did, it worked!"

Mildred pulled one more lever and brushed her hands together. "Just letting the outflow level-off, sir. We can head back up now."

Valen nodded. "Nicely done."

"But the problem wasn't with the pilot lights. The Gloam is still rising, and we still don't know what that sound is," Mildred reminded him.

"One fire at a time," Valen said, heading back up the stairs.

Valen started up the watchtower stairs, terrified that he might drown in the terror of his own thoughts.

Mildred was the ranking specialist in First Platoon, and had been for a little over a year. If there was something wrong with the outflow pipes, even if she couldn't fix it, she would be comfortably able to identify a problem. There was no possibility that the outflow was a problem with the fires.

It meant somethings had changed with the Gloam. And the implications of that set a tremor in his legs and had him clenching his jaw so much it was beginning to give him a headache.

Valen finished climbing and reached the door to the wall, to find Private Hendricks Lamar waiting for them at the doorway. His smile had the hard, rigid look of a mask, rather than a facial expression, and his hands fidgeted nervously at his sides. The young man glanced back from the wall, and gestured towards the Gloam. "Damn stuff is still clinging to the walls, sir. But at least we can see the lights again. Are we having trouble with the pipes?"

"Outflow's unimpeded, current pressure's at the limit of what the network can handle without an additional exhaust system," Mildred said.

Hendricks looked to Valen, his eyes wide. He pointed towards Mildred and shrugged.

Valen shook his head. "That's Mildred for no, nothing's wrong. The pipes are working normally. Mildred just increased the outflow. Whatever is happening, it isn't something on our end."

The muffled roar thundered again. To Valen's now irritatingly active imagination, the noise seemed louder than it had before he went with Mildred to check on the pipes.

"And that?" Hendricks asked, referring to the noise.

"I'm still hoping it's a work crew blasting in the dirt," Valen said.

"It's not," Darius insisted.

Valen's heart sank, when he heard the confidence in Darius' voice. "What makes you say that?" he asked.

"It's too regular. The interval is roughly forty seconds. It varies a little each time, but not by much. Only a couple of seconds. There's no way a construction crew is blasting that frequently, that regularly, with that much explosive," Darius explained.

Despite his gnawing fear, Valen nodded in appreciation. "Well said. Sound reasoning."

"Okay, so, what else could it be?" Hendricks asked.

At that question, Valen turned to stare out at the distant, black horizon. There was a possible explanation that had been whispering in the back of Valen's mind for the last half-hour, and each new piece of information only made that whisper louder. The possibility for which the walls had been built. Well beyond the reach of the Spire's light, somewhere out in the world the Gloam still claimed, there was one explanation for the thundering nose they heard.

Just one explanation.

"Mildred," Valen said. He spoke without turning his eyes away from the horizon. "Do we still have that search light, or did the engineers from Civil Development remember to take it with them?

"We have it still," Mildred said. There was a note of mischievous self-satisfaction in her tone, which made Valen suspect the Engineers' forgetfulness wasn't entirely their fault. "I left it behind the arms racks, it's camouflaged by our squad's Salamanders."

"Go get it. Darius, get a reservoir from the control room and bring it up," Valen ordered.

"Aye sir," both soldiers said as they marched off on their assigned tasks.

Valen watched them leave, and turned back to his only current companion on the wall. "Hendricks, were you practicing with Darius before you came up? I'm hoping that explains the bruise on the side of his face."

Private Hendricks nodded, pulling at the well pressed collar on his shirt. "We were, sir. He asked for some pointers, and uh, he asked to see how much your training could possibly matter. I got a little angry, hearing that."

Valen nodded, but the anger began to push away the gnawing fear of the last half-hour. "Judging by the shape of his bruise, I imagine you slapped his training sword into the side of his head. Saw he was only guarding with one hand and wanted him to eat those words?"

"Yes sir," Hendricks admitted.

"I told you I didn't want you sparring unless you were supervised," Valen growled angrily. "A training sword in your hands could be lethal, and you haven't grown up enough to know how to restrain yourself."

"But he-" Hendricks began to say, holding out his hands placatingly.

"Sure as burning hell didn't give you an excuse that justifies trying to break his jaw and give him a concussion," Valen barked, not letting Hendricks finish his attempt o justify his actions. "You're lucky Darius isn't seriously hurt. As it is, I expect he's too prideful to file a complaint. But the next time you spar with anyone unsupervised, the time after that is going to be with me."

"We spar plenty of-" Hendricks began to say.

Valen's hand had already started to move while he had given his speech, resting on the knife on his belt. When Hendricks began to speak, he drew it and set it under the boy's chin. And Valen could see that Hendricks hadn't noticed Valen move.

Out of reflex, Hendricks' hand was on his sword and trying to draw it, only to find Valen's other hand resting in the pommel.

"And on that day, you'll find out how many of your bones I can break before you hit the ground," Valen finished. He shoved Hendricks back a step and sheathed his knife.

Valen took a slow breath, and set his hand on Hendricks' shoulder. "You've learned a lot over the last few months. No one else in the company could match you. Which is why you need to learn some burning restraint."

"I..." Hendricks began to say, but whatever rebuttal he might have come up with was interrupted by the roar of the mysterious, blunted thunder.

"Yes sir," Hendricks said, letting the subject drop.

Mildred came through he door a moment after, carrying a bulky looking contraption attached to a tripod. She approached Valen and Hendricks, and began to unfold the stand's long metal legs.

Valen moved to help her, and they managed to get the lantern set up by the time Darius returned with a metal cylinder half as tall as he was, with a rounded bottom and a narrow spout on top.

"Is that reservoir topped up?" Valen asked. Reservoirs were metal tubes used to store the fires pumped across the City, somehow able to store the fire pumped from the Spire for weeks. They were used to run nearly every moving machine in existence, including trains, cable cars, and even devices like their search lantern.

"Yes sir," Darius said. "It should give a lantern like this about seven hours.

"We shouldn't need that long. Mildred, go ahead and set it up."

Mildred attached the reservoir to the bottom of the lantern, snapping the connector on top and slowly feeding the machine more fire until it began to shine a tight beam of orange light into the air.

Valen stepped up to the lantern's controls just as the blunted thunder sounded again. He clenched his teeth and aimed the beam as far to his left as he could, just before where the Watchtower would block the beam. Slowly and carefully, he swept the beam to his right, tracing the horizon.

"You don't think this is a..." Darius began to say, but he stammered and swallowed hard, unwilling to finish speaking.

"Strange thunder in the distance, and the Gloam is clinging to the walls?" Mildred asked in response. She scoffed, but her words didn't have any bite, as she pulled her coat tighter over her shoulders. "You better bet Redgrave is thinking that."

Valen stopped turning the lantern as the beam of light fell on something. A distant shape, well beyond the reach of the torches along the wall and the light of the Spire, and only faintly illumined by the lantern. The beam fell on a man-shaped figure, standing in the Gloam like someone standing in a pool of shallow water.

"What? What is..." Hendricks asked. His hand fell to his sword, and he took a step backwards as if he were about to run.

"Is that?" Mildred asked, her voice quiet and hoarse as she voiced her fear. "Oh burn me, Redgrave, please tell me that isn't..."

The distant figure had begun to take a long, slow step. The others followed suit, watching anxiously. Valen stopped breathing, listening as closely as he could as the monstrous figure pushed its leg through the air, and stepped back onto the ground.

There was a long, silent moment just after the creature in the distance took that step. Just long enough for Valen to wonder if he was going to hear anything. But a heartbeat later blunted thunder shook the air, and hammered at Valen's heart.

"That's a Golem," Valen whispered. Even to his own ears, his voice quivered. "That's a Golem, and we are being invaded."