Snow pressed in thin sheets against the tall windows, blurring the fortress yard beyond.
Kaelis was sitting toward the rear, his hands tucked into his lap to conceal their shaking.
The black cadet's coat swung loose over his thin shoulders, red piping standing out in strong contrast to skin which looked almost transparent in the cold sunlight.
Sixteen, and already hollowed by an illness no doctor could name.
Each breath grated the interior of his ribs. He pulled them cautiously, as if any of them might be the one which wouldn't come at all.
Recruit rows occupied the benches in front—backs ramrod straight, boots stood in spotless ranks. They seemed cut from steel, while he was cut from something less tough.
Or something the cold might melt if it lingered long enough.
The building once constituted a fortress before its use as a lecture venue. Small lancet windows let in pewter light which gathered over polished flagstones.
Against the walls, antique rifles lay in tidy rows, their stocks polished smooth by long-dead hands. Between them, the standard of the North Military Empire was displayed: a field of red behind the fractured black crown.
Kaelis did not want to glance at that crown. It caused his chest to become too hollow.
The silence in the room was disturbed when the side door opened heavily on its iron hinges.
Commander Halvar stepped through, boots striking the stone with deliberate weight.
He wore the greatcoat of a Legionary, the color of a tempest, the high collar held in place by twin silver stars.
Even sans insignia, nobody might confuse him as anything aside from a veteran.
His shoulders filled the doorway.
A steel gray streaked beard encircled a mouth which never had learned to smooth itself into a gentle line.
His face was bronzed and lined, each scar earned under heavens most rookies never beheld.
The scar—white and frayed, cutting across his right brow—appeared almost to reflect the sunlight as his head turned.
It was said to burn when a Gate was close by.
He tilted his cap low, shadow accumulating in the pits of his eyes.
But Kaelis still felt that stare moving over them all. Measuring. Judging.
The recruits stood en masse, boots scraping on stone.
Kaelis got up slowly, keeping one hand on the desk to support himself.
Halvar did not speak. Not yet.
He glanced over them in silence, as though already tallying who of them was going to make it, and who was not.
Halvar looked from one cadet to the next.
Not skimming. Not casual.
As if he already knew which of them would die in uniform—and which would rise, bloodied but unbroken, when the world demanded it.
When he did speak, his tone was husky and low, a voice that seemed hewn from an interminable winter's night.
"Three hundred and thirty-nine years."
He let the number hang there, his gaze passing over the rows.
"That's how long the Gates have been dividing the sky. No warning. No prophecy. Just… one day, the laws we trusted tore themselves apart."
Halvar shifted, the greatcoat billowing about his massive form. He took a few steps to the right, boots ringing on the flagstones.
"They didn't open like doors."
He lifted his hand, tracing an invisible line in the air.
"They broke the world. Cracked it open like brittle stone—and through those fractures came something that had been waiting longer than any of us can measure."
He stopped next to a boy in the second row. The cadet glanced down to the desk as Halvar's shadow formed upon it.
"A realm of drifting stone," Halvar said quietly, "and a darkness so deep you start to believe light was only a dream.
Where time does not flow—it cracks.
Where the divine did not disappear.
But was rent asunder."
Nobody stirred. The frost on the panes of glass even seemed to suspend its breathing.
"They say it's the God Realm," Halvar continued, his voice lighter now. "Not because the gods reside there.
But since something capable of killing them may still."
Kaelis felt his heartbeat stutter. His fingers flexed against the edge of the desk, searching for any steadiness at all.
"First through the gates…" Halvar's jaw clamped, as if the recall was his own. "Did not return. Entire battalions—vanished.
Cities lifted into the air, creased into nothingness.
And what crawled through the fissures… seemed familiar."
His voice lowered, almost a rasp.
"But their shadows bent sideways. Rivers flowed backward in their wake. Moonlight turned red."
And there were areas—"
He looked up toward the high windows.
"—where people forgot their own names when the monsters passed."
Someone near the front swallowed, the sound too loud in the silence.
"The world didn't end in fire," Halvar stated. "It forgot itself."
He shifted, moving to the opposite side of the hall. Snow drew thin lines down the glass behind him.
"And then… one returned."
He raised his hand, two fingers forming a height in the air.
He staggered out of a Gate, drenched in ash. Veins lit up. Eyes like sores that refused to close.
He was shattered. But alive."
Halvar looked the aisle over, noticing every face.
"And when he spoke, his voice cracked glass.
He battled one of the creatures that came after—and slew it."
No one dared to breathe.
Even the cadets, who had been told this tale a dozen times, sat up straight. For it never sounded quite the same twice.
It was never safe enough to become legend.
"That day, humanity saw fire again," Halvar murmured.
"Then others followed him. Some returned. Most did not. But those who survived returned with Aether from the realm upon their breath."
They were our shields. Our swords."
He stopped beside a cropped-haired girl with a jaw set too hard.
"No one understands what the power truly is. Only that it works."
Bootsteps, slow and deliberate, he retreated toward the middle of the hall.
"And when survival became war… that was enough."
His gaze scanned toward Kaelis, held a fraction of a second too long.
"So the world adapted," he said quietly.
"Children no longer learned to run. They learned to walk into the Gates."
Eyes open. Mind steady. Heart willing."
Outside, the wind blew snow against the tall windows.
"Not for glory," Halvar said. His voice dropped lower still, ragged as old iron. "Not even for hope. But because if no one came between the realms. then nothing would."
He looked around, gazing into the high rafters as if the sky lay beyond them.
"Now—three centuries later—we can anticipate the ruptures."
Mark the fractures.
Observe the satellites when the pressure increases."
His eyes lowered to meet the recruits.
"We know when," he said. "We know where."
A silence fell.
"But we still don't know what lies beyond the other side."
Halvar's voice became softer, as if speaking the truth aloud would bring the thing nearer.
A small spasm tugged the scar under his right eye. The old injury appeared to whiten even more, the scar closing up as if it recalled an agony the man long ago repressed.
His gloved hand rose, slow and deliberate, to stroke it—fingertips resting along the scarred line which divided his cheek.
"Some of you think you're ready." His gaze scanned them once more, cold as winter steel.
"That you know what you'll face."
He allowed his thumb to drop to the hollow of his throat, into the space encircled by the collar of his greatcoat, which outlined his throat. He rapped the area once, firmly enough the report travelled.
"You don't."
The room had gone still.
Even the snow outside the windows appeared to hesitate.
Kaelis felt it—the hall seemed narrower now, as if the walls had closed in to hear better.
His own breath, shallow and harsh.
"IT WON'T BE THE CREATURES THAT KILL YOU QUICK YOU'LL HAVE MOST CAUSE TO FEAR," Halvar grated, his voice roughened to a rasp.
"It's the ones which are able to look at you. Smile at you."
The ones who'll bear your name. and wear it."
He stepped forward, boots-heavy on the stone, and in the briefest instant, Kaelis saw something empty in the man's eyes. An image too clear to fade.
"When you see one," Halvar said softly, fingers brushing the scar again, "you'll understand why this never healed."
The frost of the glass shivered as if something from outside breathed upon it.
Halvar did not break his gaze.
"Tomorrow," he announced, his voice low but riding to the furthest reaches of the hall, "on the fourteenth of June, Year Three Hundred and Thirty-Nine, you shall enter the God Realm to face your trial."
A ripple went through the cadets—not a protest, not an outcry, but a stiffening of shoulders, a quiet catch of breathing.
Every one of them already knew the date. Already knew the odds.
But the words when spoken grated something pointed between the ribs.
"Countless will die upon that altar," Halvar continued. "A select few will crawl back changed."
Fewer even will return unbroken."
Silence gathered in the interstices between benches.
Kaelis felt it fill him too, heavy as iron.
A drop of sweat drew a slow, cold line along his spine.
As he swallowed, he got the flavor of iron where he'd nipped the inside of his mouth.
"But who are we?" Halvar exclaimed, spinning around to confront them.
A beat—then the first cadet regained his voice.
"We are the soldiers of the Northern Military Empire," he shouted.
Echo, louder:
"Who are we?"
Voices came forth in unison, raw and defiant:
"We are the soldiers of the Empire!"
A girl with short black hair beside Kaelis tightened her fists so much her knuckles turned white.
A thin line of blood formed where the nail cut into the heel of her hand.
Halvar's hand tightened into a fist in his chest.
His scar was prominent in the chilly light, a white stitch that did not want to go away.
"And even if we're dead," he said, his words chopped and deliberate, "we'll be the Empire's memory."
The hope of humanity.
The spark of the next awakening."
The cadets shouted the reply, boots pounding the ground as they came to attention:
"Man's salvation lies here."
Kaelis tried to swallow, but his throat was closed off.
The voices of all these people—they were so confident, so eager to be brave—twisted something inside his chest.
He breathed thin and halting, as if he had ventured farther than his frame was able to endure.
Will I survive it?
The idea took hold in the cavity beside his ribs and refused to go away.
Halvar allowed the last of the echoes to fade before speaking once again, his eyes scanning them once last time.
"Good," he said, and for the first time, his voice softened by a fraction.
"Remember this feeling."
When you stand in front of the Gate tomorrow—when you step through the door to the Bastion—take this confidence along."
He released his hand, fingers relaxing once.
"Do not be afraid."
And in the silence thereafter, Kaelis thought he saw it: the scar under Halvar's eye, throb once—like a pulse that did not assent.
Halvar halted, the scar disappearing once again.
"become the next human hero."