The Strength of the Few

The Forum is packed as Vis¹ places his hand on the Aurora Columnae's warm stone and whispers the words of ceding. Nothing happens. The magistrate frowns. Behind Vis,¹ Lanistia⁸ — his blind former tutor, the woman who trained him to fight — begins to mutter. Her glasses fall.

Her eyeless face locks onto him with desperate focus, and she draws a dagger. She moves through the guards like water through sand, killing with terrifying precision while repeating a single phrase that freezes Vis's¹ blood: the same words the dead bodies chanted as they chased him from the Labyrinth.

Ulciscor⁹ wraps her in the massive chains encircling the obelisk. She weeps the phrase one final time before losing consciousness. Caten erupts with accusations. Military blames Governance. Governance blames Military. The fractures in the Republic deepen into chasms.

In Obiteum's subterranean crypts of Qabr, Caeror² teaches Vis¹ how Will works differently here — not to strengthen and manipulate, but to restore and sustain. A dead man can be brought back as a iunctus, aware and functional so long as the imbuer's Will compensates for whatever killed them.

An Instruction Blade through the heart forces absolute obedience. Vis¹ practices daily on Tash, a volunteer iunctus, straining to establish empathic Harmonic connections that let him see through Tash's eyes and issue commands. When the link finally takes, Vis¹ doesn't experience triumph.

He experiences Tash's terror — a man paralyzed, unable to scream, utterly helpless beneath someone else's will. Vis¹ retches and nearly refuses to continue. But Caeror² is patient and honest: this ability is their only weapon against the thousands of iunctii Ka controls.

In Luceum, the farmer's widow Gráinne²² hauls Vis¹ to her father Onchú's farm and nurses him back to health. He takes the name Deaglán — close enough to Diago that it feels honest, foreign enough to be safe. Weeks stretch into months of physical labor and simple meals. He feeds animals, scares crows, learns the language from Gráinne's²² children Róisín and Tadhg.

His body adapts to its missing arm. The constant terror that has stalked him since Suus loosens its grip for the first time in years. Evenings around the rushlight, eating broth and teasing one another, become something sacred. No Hierarchy. No ceding. No lies. When Onchú gruffly tells him he is welcome as family, the word aches with a truth Vis¹ hasn't felt since his homeland burned.

At his Placement exams, Vis¹ faces a crisis: his missing arm makes competing with other Sextii nearly impossible. A mysterious contact — the scarred man from the Iudicium, who calls himself Ostius¹¹ — reveals an ability called Adoption: Vis¹ can seize control of any Will imbued in an object simply by touching it and holding it in his mind.

During the boulder throw, Vis¹ secretly pushes the stone with Adopted Will, scoring near the top. When Tertius Decimus²⁴ — Iro's father — challenges his Domitor title with a chariot race, Vis¹ partners with Aequa⁵ and exploits Adoption again, Adopting Will that Iro recklessly imbued into his chariot during the final lap. Aequa⁵ crosses the finish line. Iro crashes and is badly injured. Vis¹ has a devastating new power that no one in the Hierarchy can know about.

Gleaners swarm Qabr in the night, slaughtering the tiny community. Vis¹ imbues one — Duodecim — and commands it to conceal their exchange. Caeror² vanishes with Tash to create a diversion, leaving Vis¹ with no exit except the one entering the city alive would never permit.

So he instructs Duodecim to impale him through the chest with its stone blade, making the wound survivable, and carry him to Duat along with the other corpses. The pain is beyond description. Every shallow breath slices new flesh against the razor edge pinning him.

For hours, he hangs limp among a swarm of body-laden Gleaners, forcing himself to absolute stillness as the massive black pyramid grows larger against the stars. When they finally reach Duat and the blade is pulled free, Vis¹ lies gasping on obsidian, alone inside the enemy's fortress.

At Loch Traenala, the warrior school hidden on a lake crannog, Vis¹ — now Deaglán — trains alongside Tara,⁷ King Rónán's scarred, disinherited daughter, and four other elite students. He deliberately holds back, planning to leave with the druids rather than fight.

But when scouts from the exiled Gallchobhar¹⁶ locate their position, instinct overrides strategy. The group ambushes the raiding party at night. Deaglán¹ drives his spear through a man's stomach and watches the light leave his eyes. Afterward, sitting around a campfire with his bloodied companions, something shifts.

Each of them shares their wounds — Tara's⁷ scar inflicted by assassins, Conor's²¹ father's disappointment, Seanna's rejection. And Deaglán,¹ for the first time since Suus, tells the complete truth of who he is. They do not flinch. They call him brother.

On Solivagus, Vis¹ activates an ancient device in the ruins and collapses, involuntarily speaking in technical Vetusian about gate defenses and a system called the sanguis imperium. When he wakes, Veridius⁶ finally drops his mask.

The Principalis⁶ shouts — truly shouts, for the first time — that every student he sent to die tears him apart, that the Cataclysm is real, and that Vis¹ is their only hope. Over hours, he lays out the full picture: the Concurrence, the Rending, three mirror worlds, and a man called Ka who triggers the culls.

Caeror² ran the Labyrinth seven years ago to fight this battle. Lanistia⁸ tried to save him and lost her eyes. Marcus sacrificed himself so Vis¹ could survive. The weight of the revelation is crushing — and Veridius's⁶ final advice even more so. Stay hidden. Do nothing. Wait.

For months in Duat's western quarter, Vis¹ and Ahmose¹⁴ — a nervous, irritable iunctus who becomes a true friend — survive by hiding in tunnels and using Vis's¹ ability to commandeer Overseers.

They ally with Netiqret,¹³ a coolly lethal assassin who knows the city's every secret passage, hoping she can get them across the poisonous Infernis to the living eastern side. When Netiqret¹³ demands Ahmose's¹⁴ death as a security risk, Vis¹ refuses. But Ahmose¹⁴ makes his own choice.

Spotted by former acquaintances, he climbs a wall near the river and delivers a furious denunciation of Ka to the gathering crowd — calling him a liar, exposing the Gleaners' existence, proclaiming the afterlife a fabrication. Then, smiling at Vis¹ in the crowd, he falls backward into the acid-green water. His body dissolves. The crowd cheers Ka's justice.

Deaglán¹ follows a strange pulse in his mind across moonlit hills and finds a lone figure warming his hands at a fire. The man speaks Common. He turns. Smiles. It is King Cristoval¹⁵ — Vis's¹ father, hanged by the Hierarchy five years ago.

He is dead: no heartbeat, sustained only by a powerful Vitaerium medallion. Military woke him for interrogation after his execution. Later, the mysterious Ostius¹¹ freed him and brought him to Luceum to watch over his son.

Through a night of tears and laughter and reunion, Cristoval¹⁵ explains everything — why Suus was invaded, the weapon Estevan used at the naumachia, the Cataclysms his scholars discovered. Then he begs Deaglán¹ not to march to war with his friends. His son refuses. There are some arguments a father must lose.

At the Festival of Pletuna, Ostius¹¹ transports Vis¹ between worlds — through Luceum and into the Basilica, Military's innermost sanctum in Caten. Vis¹ Adopts the Will from the massive stone voting circle on the floor, becoming temporarily stronger than a Princeps.

Ostius¹¹ forces the assembled senators to sign a confession of their involvement in the Iudicium and naumachia attacks. When Vis¹ refuses to execute them — choosing to take them prisoner instead — Ostius¹¹ reveals his true name to the room and then Diago, Vis's¹ alupi companion, leaps.

The wolf tears through the leadership of Military in under a minute. Ostius¹¹ vanishes the bodies between worlds, leaving only the Princeps's severed head centered on the voting circle with a Vetusian inscription: death conquers all. The civil war Vis¹ never wanted has arrived.

Returning to Qabr through Duat's toxic drainage system, Vis¹ opens the mutalis door with his blood and discovers the crook and flail — golden instruments that destroy any substance on contact when activated. He fights his way back into Duat through an outer entrance, killing Overseers as their bodies burst apart in crimson mist.

Standing on the great obsidian bridge spanning the poisoned Infernis — the only connection between Duat's living east and its dead west — he hacks downward. Cracks spiderweb. Stone crumbles into the green water far below.

Gleaners swarm from Ka's pyramid toward him, exactly as he planned. The bridge collapses beneath his feet and he plunges into the acid river, using the crook and flail as shields against falling debris. The Gleaners abandon their posts at the pyramid to deal with the catastrophe. The path to Ka opens.

Vis¹ and Aequa⁵ are preparing to free Lanistia⁸ from prison when Tertius Decimus²⁴ appears on the rooftop above them. Iro has died from his chariot-race injuries. The Tertius²⁴ holds Aequa⁵ by the head and tells Vis¹ he wants him to understand loss and helplessness.

Then he closes his fist. The sound is something no human should ever have to hear. Aequa's⁵ body drops. Vis¹ charges, breaks his hand on the Tertius's²⁴ imbued body, and is thrown into a wall.

Decimus²⁴ methodically snaps both of Vis's¹ legs above the ankle and walks away, knowing the prison guards will execute the Sapper inmates tonight. Alone with Aequa's⁵ shattered form, Vis¹ weeps — then harnesses his fury. He tears metal triangles from his hidden armor, fashions braces around his broken bones, and stands.

At the druid Lir's²⁰ instruction, Deaglán¹ wades into a lake at dusk as the water begins to froth. Buildings emerge — hundreds of structures rising from the deep, an entire city revealing itself in the twilight. Inside its central temple, an Aurora Columnae pulses gold beside a pool filled with ancient weapons.

When Deaglán¹ touches the obelisk, the system screams a panicked alarm — Synchronous — and two silver sentinels attack. Every weapon he grabs shrieks its rejection through his mind.

Cornered and desperate, he achieves the impossible: a Harmonic connection to one sentinel, commanding it to protect him. It tears the head from its counterpart. When it carries him to the city's edge, a thousand obsidian statues track his passage but dare not close. He escapes clutching a silver arm ripped from the fallen sentinel.

Netiqret's¹³ daughter Kiya — still linked to the Nomarch despite years outside it — sacrifices what remains of her restored mind to blind Duat's surveillance. Vis¹ enters the sealed temple, sprints past empty colonnades, and ascends Ka's pyramid. A thousand golden steps.

The city watches from below. Gleaners converge but Kiya's interference holds. At the summit, behind a door that opens only to blood, Vis¹ finds not a throne room but a cluttered study — scrolls, diagrams, comfortable chairs.

And in its center, a man in his forties lying on a triangular stone table, eyes closed, utterly still. Handsome. Unremarkable. Not a monster, to look at. The crook confirms his identity by passing harmlessly through his chest. Vis¹ draws his knife. The Gleaners are almost at the door. He plunges the blade into Ka's heart.

Gallchobhar¹⁶ has captured Deaglán¹ and killed the druid Lir.²⁰ At Caer Áras, before the besieged walls and both armies, the massive Champion stabs Deaglán,¹ chains the silver arm to him as a drowning weight, and kicks him into the lake. Deaglán¹ sinks.

His father¹⁵ is already there — waiting underwater, knowing exactly what would happen. Cristoval¹⁵ presses his Vitaerium medallion against his son's neck. Life floods Deaglán¹ even as it drains from his father¹⁵ for the final time.

The silver arm, instead of dragging him down, bonds to him — light as a limb, responsive as flesh. He walks from the lake at dawn, dripping and radiant, and challenges Gallchobhar.¹⁶ His silver hand shatters the Champion's blade. His spear finds Gallchobhar's¹⁶ heart. Fiachra's army scatters. The siege breaks.

In Res, Ka's iunctus guides Vis¹ and Eidhin⁴ beneath the Necropolis at Agerus to a tunnel stretching the length of the mountain range, filled with eighty thousand preserved corpses. Ka needs Vis¹ to end the civil war; Vis¹ needs the power to do it.

Eidhin⁴ begs him not to — raising the dead is an abomination. Vis¹ imbues three bodies. A Cascade begins: each iunctus cedes to him, then wakes more. Rippling outward, faster and faster. Will floods into Vis¹ in ever-growing waves. The tunnel fills with confused, murmuring voices.

Then from the crowd, two figures push forward — dark hair, sun-kissed skin, brown eyes that mirror his own. His mother. His sister. Alive, somehow, among the dead the Hierarchy preserved. He runs to them. And behind him, quiet and familiar and impossible: a friend's voice calls his name.