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It was a bright day and the wind was still, quiet, behaving herself for the occasion though she refused to dress for mourning. People had gathered beside a hole in the ground. Tarnished silver and gold, dulled with time, flickered among them, badges worn in remembrance less of battles than of comrades and circumstance. A balding man made a speech and said a prayer.

The bugler stood apart.

He had kept the brass warm by blowing through it, quietly, as the service wore on. Twice he drained water from inside, letting it splash to the ground at his feet: he wondered if he stood on a grave, or to one side, and put that thought out of his mind as he read the program once more. The pastor and speakers were named, each beside their moment at the microphone.

The bugler was not.

He brought the horn to his lips and made to play, his mouth suddenly dry and his heart tracing, his hands shaking as they nearly always did. It was a simple melody, nearly flawed in the ease with which its notes fell, too easy to rush through or to cut short. He had played it a hundred times, perfectly. A thousand, perhaps.

But only in practice.

At the graveside it was different: a mountain, an Everest, an unassailable fortress. No mortal lung could carry such a tune the way it had to be carried. Inevitably, a note cracked. The song, now marred, floated across the grass to the gathered well-wishers and onlookers. Women cried. Men pretended not to or, standing face to face with their own future—or their past—gave in without shame.

The bugler left.

He had to walk a long way to his car, parked apart from the rest so that he could leave without disturbing those in mourning. He put away the horn, wiping its shining silver clean and taking it apart quickly to hide it in the trunk, but not before a man caught sight of him. The funeral director, or an assistant. He came over to say a word.

"That was good."

A once-shining cuirass lay discarded on the floor of the captain’s quarters, now stained with blood and pierced through by shrapnel. The Imperial insignia engraved upon it, only just visible in the room’s dim light, was the only sign that these quarters housed anything more than the ship’s commanding officer. The room’s appointments were limited to a cramped desk, a locker and chest along one wall, and the tousled bed on which Princess Aria Cantion lay, bathed in perspiration as she tried in vain to sleep.

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Once again, by the time I finished writing this scene, I felt I was pretty in touch with Abe’s character. (Ah-bay, I think, would be the proper way to pronounce that.) It was all I could do to keep the insipid grin off my face as I wrote the last paragraph.

Yoshiro Abe sipped water from a tin cup outside the meal tent as the workers and archaeologists there passed around a tattered rag of newsprint. It was their latest edition of the Mail—dated 9^th September, some four days ago—arrived just that morning. Glen Wells, one of the senior archaeologists on the dig, passed it to Abe once he had finished.

“See if you can make heads or tails of it, Sensei,” he said in his amicable colonial drawl. “It’s a nice little story, but it never comes out and says who took command of the fleet.”

Abe nodded, setting his cup aside.

The print was smudged, but clear, and the headline was obnoxiously large: IMPERIAL FLEET WINS BATTLE OF KYOTO ATOLL. In smaller print, at the head of the first column on the left, the story went on to claim that the Mail had an exclusive tale to tell, revealed to one of their foreign correspondents by an officer of the fleet who spoke only on condition of anonymity.

Abe realized only as he put on his glasses that his hands were shaking.

On 6^th September, heavy units of the Empire’s Fast Battle Squadron met and defeated a force of fifteen ships of the Australasian Fleet, including six battleships, in honorable combat over Kyoto Atoll. While both Empires have kept details of the battle largely secret, this reporter was able to get a special scoop at a pub somewhere in South Africa.

For obvious reasons, I cannot say where precisely, but there I spoke with a lovely young lady, a lieutenant serving aboard Kodiak who was injured in the battle. She revealed to me that Kodiak had been the second ship in the battle line that day over Kyoto and that, by some tragic happenstance, the flagship Parapet had been destroyed before the battle began.

She further testified that, following Parapet’s loss, some of Kodiak’s bridge officers had been killed in action and that she was uncertain who took command through the rest of the battle…

The old teacher felt his breath catch in his throat, swallowing painfully at this news. “Wells,” he rasped, turning to his friend for help. “You’re certain it does not give the name of the commander?”

The archaeologist shrugged. “I couldn’t find anything in it. I thought maybe you could do better than me is all.”

Abe tried to wet his lips, finding his mouth again parched. “Yes, I see…” He forced himself to continue.

The entire battle line was forced to turn hard to starboard to avoid Parapet’s careening wreckage—forced to turn directly into oncoming enemy fire. Into this hell-storm they steamed, returning fire as they could. The lieutenant smiled as she told the story, proud of the courage of her fellow fighting men and women. Over the course of the next two hours, she said, the two squadrons exchanged nearly 3,000 heavy caliber shells. In the end, all units of the Australasian squadron were destroyed or forced to retreat…

He steeled himself, setting the paper down in front of him and weighting it with his cup so that he could hide his hands beneath the table. The account of the battle was uninteresting to him, not to mention obviously sanitized; the officer being interviewed knew enough to keep certain facts out of the public eye, and to keep certain questions from being asked.

…Following the battle, the fleet made for friendly skies to refuel and refit, to have their wounds healed and spirits lifted. I asked the lieutenant how she was injured in the action that day. At first, she declined to answer my question, but as she stood to leave she gave me this answer:

“Instead of interviewing me, why don’t you tell the story of the officers and crew of Parapet—of Lord Westland’s final battle and how, even in death, he lead his fleet to victory? This little scratch doesn’t rate a mention in your paper; I had all but forgotten it until you pointed it out again.

“Every person in the battle fleet makes some sacrifice. We set aside our hopes and our fears. We put our lives in the hands of our comrades. When I’m on board that ship, I feel a personal responsibility to each and every person under my command. Next to that, what’s a bit of shrapnel?”

With her words in mind, I have asked the Mail to print this list of the officers and crew lost when Parapet exploded…

All at once, he left the paper there on the table and walked away from the others, gasping in relief. To think of that little girl—his student—his Aria, fighting aboard one of those steel leviathans… He blinked until his eyes were dry again. Could he be sure it was her? But it had to be! That fool of a reporter had interviewed the Imperial Princess and not known it.

But then, what man would dare reveal a secret Aria Cantion had charged him to keep?

He felt Wells’ hand on his shoulder. “So it was her after all, then? She’s blooded now. A real admiral.”

Abe nodded.

“Stop worrying about it. She’s invincible. It’s that Cantion mystique.”

The old teacher sighed, looking out over the dig as the rising sun repainted shadows and holes with a brighter brush. “She would have been a great scholar,” he muttered, leaving all else unsaid.

“Forget about that. We’ve made a discovery at grid number 20, and I’d like you to take a look this morning, before the workers get in the way.”

Surprised, Abe peered into his friend’s eyes for a moment. “What kind of discovery?”

Wells gave his eyebrows a quick lift. The kind that meant a big one—in the softest, quietest way possible.

Abe took his canteen as they passed by the meal tent before heading down into the dig, passing through the outer gate and into the site proper. He kept his head down as they walked between the Teeth—the jagged, obsidian towers that marked the entryway to the site. Months of working in their shadow had not inured him to the feeling of dread that gripped him when he caught sight of them, silhouetted against the red desert sky.

Stepping carefully over the twine grid squares staked out everywhere over the dig, he and Wells made their way to the far end of the structure, a place they had come to call the South Wall. It seemed that the entire structure, sometimes jokingly called the Temple, was surrounded by giant walls of the same black stone that formed the teeth; they were only just uncovering what seemed to be the base of the outer walls.

What kind of god could they have worshipped in a temple like this? Abe felt a chill at the thought, even in the desert heat, as he imagined what the entire Temple complex must have looked like when it was first constructed thousands of years ago: walls of gleaming black glass, towers like jagged knives stabbing into the sky. There was even evidence of a ditch and moat structure, surrounding the outer wall. Preliminary evidence suggested that it had been filled with human skulls.

“Can you imagine the people who built this place?” asked Wells. Whenever he felt awed by something, his voice took on a breathless, childlike quality. Abe would normally have found that endearing.

Abe pushed away the bloody screams that entered his imagination and shook his head.

“They cut and worked with stones we can’t even identify—stones that our most powerful tools can hardly scratch. They built this place more than five millennia ago, at a time when a campfire must have seemed like magic. How many hundreds of years must it have taken? To think that ancient man could have accomplished anything like this…”

At last, they reached grid 20. A sheet of dirty canvas covered a small section of wall there. Wells jerked it aside and, his voice a scraping whisper, asked, “Can you translate it?”

There, chiseled into the blank wall by some impossible force, was a message. Writing like this had been found throughout the dig site, in dozens of nameless, forgotten languages, none of which had any meaning at all. Abe’s heart thundered as he realized this language was not yet completely forgotten. Hands trembling, he reached out toward the wall. His fingers traced the dusty characters, cut millennia ago by some ancient craftsman.

He swallowed, his tongue feeling swollen in his dry mouth. “Yes,” he rasped. “You brought rubbing paper?”

Wells passed him a large sheet of fine paper and a grubby hunk of charcoal, beaming a smile from ear to ear. “We’re going to change the world with this, you know!”

A hot, dry wind swept across the landing platform at Bonner’s Point, a minor port of call in the Caucasus Mountains and the easternmost of the Iron Duke’s holdings. That Duke Reginald Caffrey frequented this place in the summertime was no real secret, despite his habit of keeping his mistresses there. What he was doing there on the platform, however, in the darkest watch of night, was anyone’s guess—and no one’s. To be seen meeting with a man declared null would be unthinkable.

Arax Thorne held onto one small bit of hope, though, as the duke approached: He’s the Iron Duke. He’s made a career of the unthinkable.

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This is not some short half-assed scene. This is 1500 words long, and I think it works well from start to finish. I hope it does. Sometimes I think I can tell how well I’m doing by how acutely I feel what my characters feel. By the time I finished writing this, I was nauseous. Hopefully that’s a good sign.

Bridge of Kodiak – 1425 hours – Kyoto Atoll – 12000 feet

In line battle, each ship shall engage its opposite number and press the engagement to its conclusion, whatever the outcome.

Aria Cantion, Imperial heir and an admiral of the fleet, scowled as a junior officer relayed Admiral Lord Westland’s final instructions for the coming battle: “Hold the line.” He gave her a weak smile and hurried through a salute before disappearing, abandoning the bridge for the armored citadel beneath to escape her inevitable wrath. The Cantion line had a famous temper.

“It’s his last battle, Aria,” said the tall, thin figure beside her on the bridge—Master Sergeant David Cross, her mentor and guardian. “Tomorrow he’ll be just another flag officer who retired too old to see his grandchildren grow up. Today, because of you, he has one last chance at glory.”

“And I have one less,” she muttered. She sighed, gazing wistfully at Parapet, steaming at the head of the battle line under Lord Westland’s command. She shook her head, looking away toward the horizon—toward the enemy force. Yes, the old man deserves one last chance to hear the cannon thunder his name. And yet…

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Unfortunately, this version is only partly complete.

Bridge of Kodiak – 1425 hours – Kyoto Atoll – 12000 feet

In line battle, each ship shall engage its opposite number and press the engagement to its conclusion, whatever the circumstances.

Admiral Lord Westland had sent one more message – probably his last before action would be joined that day. It had arrived over the wireless only moments ago and read simply, “Hold the line.”

Aria, an admiral in her own right, an Imperial heir, and the official commander of this force, bristled. Already, she found herself regretting her decision to allow the venerable Lord Westland to command in this, his final battle as a flag officer of the fleet. It was simply a gesture of respect and, certainly, he had earned this honor by his long years of service. But to push aside her plans for the battle for this?

The enemy force, comprised of ten cruisers and a handful of outmoded battleships laid down in the last century, was hopelessly outclassed. Her squadron was comprised of five modern battleships and four heavy cruisers, with a screen of lighter ships constantly on patrol ahead and above to watch for any secret assault that could threaten her heavy units. The mere fact that the enemy had come up to fight at all made her doubtful—made some small voice inside her cry out a warning.

For all the honor of the Australasian Fleet, I would never have expected them to stand and fight… Why?

But to dissent would do her no great honor, and would be a severe insult Lord Westland. She busied herself with details she should probably have left to junior officers.

“Range?” she called out her eyes fixed squarely on the second ship in the enemy line as it soared lazily above the island mountain range below. The enemy approached from the starboard, steaming a near parallel course at a slightly lower altitude: an inferior position, but not so much so as to make a difference. By the time they were within gunnery range, the two lines would be at the same altitude.

“Closing to 26000 now, Admiral,” came the quick reply. “Looks like 264 clicks.”

Hypothetically, each click of the rangefinder’s dial represented ten yards. Realistically, the battle-worn rangefinders on board Kodiak would require several salvos of bracketing gunfire before they found the target’s true range, but an estimate of 26000 was close enough. At the very outside, Kodiak’s 380mm, 45 caliber main battery could not reach a target beyond 18,000 yards. Aria always found herself most unnerved by this. Too poetically, it was the calm before the storm…

She was breathless, forced to wait too long for the inevitable.

This is the descendant of the last Eos scene I posted. It refers to some of the events in the previous scene. Makes a good deal more sense and, I think, is more interesting, too.

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This scene has already been discarded and doesn’t merit a lot of comment. I’ll be posting its descendant later, for comparison.

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Fell upon my brow the cold breath of the Sea, and close about my legs she held
When cried my kinsmen and crashed ashore did they.

Far from the shore the enemy was arrayed, standing shield to shield across the beach, spears clasped in cold, fingers. Parulf, the old waysmith’s youngest son, went forth with a shout and flung his javelin against their line. Its flight true, the fine, slender shaft shivered against a strong shield and, raising his buckler high, the stripling warrior shouted his challenge to all.

Boar-helmed, a worn, crag of a man threw his head back and laughed at the assault, and Parulf became enraged at the insult. “Your spear was too weak!” the man cried, his smile flashing like all the blades of a shield wall, and out from the wall he came, his ash haft held high. “Try a better!”

Parulf was struck in the throat, silenced and slain. He fell there where he was struck, and the thirsty shore swallowed up his blood.

Eagerly the boar-helmed man went forth to gather up Parulf’s father’s old armor, and his old axe, and the shield that had failed his son. The men near him pressed forward, and the line moved closer to the sea. They let their spears rap against their shields, clamoring for blood now that they had its scent.

“Saxon!” one cried to his fellow: “Who these do not cut down will drown in the sea, if we are not quick with our work.”

That fellow strode ashore, shrugging off the black maiden’s chill grasp. “I’ll not be chosen today,” he promised, and went to his ring-giver’s side to form the line.

Then did the ring-giver charge that one with making good the attack, and with breaking and routing the enemy, and revealing them for the cowards they were. He took up his slender spear and, forsaking the strong shields of his fellows, he went forward. Ten steps he charged, and then flew his bright spear with a cry to send the point deep into its mark. Its haft was strong, seasoned and well-kept from his father’s time, and its point split the shield of one man, breaking through and drinking his blood to slake its thirst.

“I have brought a better!” he cried, and when a man with his javelin replied that javelin fell short, thrust into the ground at his feet. “Farmers, all of you—not warriors. See how your tools seek the earth? Go back to the earth and leave war for men! This spear is not worthy of war. I will send all of you back to the earth!” With his boast he grasped the javelin and, driving his foot down against its haft, shivered it there and cast its splinters aside.

“Now,” he called, taking his heavy axe from his belt. “Which of you would stand between me and my father’s spear?”

Now both sides, thirsty, pushed closer and men on each side let javelins fly and the one called Saxon returned to his ring-breaker’s side. The wizened king nodded to his thane and swore, “We’ll feed the blood-swan soon enough.” But the old man gave no hint of his meaning.

Battle was joined.

Don’t ask. Don’t tell.

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