Arman died on a field of iron and ash.
The sky above him had been a hard, capitalist gray that morning — the kind of color a government paints when it wants to look eternal. He remembered the smell first: burnt oil, copper, the sweet tang of too much blood. Then the sound: metal singing as it was bent into new shapes, a shriek he'd thought was a shell until it became a body. He remembered reaching for the rifle that had kept him warm, and how the weight of it had become a useless memory as something larger and angrier pressed through his ribs. The last thing he'd seen was the face of the man who ended him, an officer in white armor with a crack like a halo across the cheek — pure, precise, unimpressed.
When he woke, the world had become a confession.
Light was wrong: not the morning light of homes and markets, but a green that seeped rather than shone, as if the sun had learned a secret and refused to tell. He opened his eyes and found himself staring at the inside of a living cave. Wood and bone and a thousand thin legs brushed his face like the soft edge of a nightmare. He turned his head and his wounds did not ache the way they used to. They sang.
Something had grown within him where the bullet had lodged. Beneath the skin of his forearm, a pattern crawled and rearranged itself — like a map being drawn from the inside. When he flexed his fingers, the lines pulsed, and the pain that followed was not pain so much as recognition: the recognition of joining.
He sat up. The world smelled like rot and sugar, and the air tasted of iron and rain. Around him, the battlefield he'd known had become a husk. Charred banners hung from broken poles, their sigils eaten away by a black frost. Bodies lay where they had fallen, but some did not look like bodies at all: they were bellies turned inside out into nests, their mouths stitched with silk, fingers gone soft with compost. And over it all — a movement, a shiver — the first stirrings of a swarm.
Arman found his hands moving before he had thought to command them. He cupped one palm and watched as something climbed from his arm: a tiny beetle, glossy and black as a coin. Its shell reflected the green light into a single, terrible star. He should have flinched. He did not. The beetle paused, hovered, and then crawled to the edge of his hand, testing, registering. It raised its little mandibles and clicked.
The sound was not insect to him now. It was speech.
A voice, small and layered, braided into one: hungry, curious, and old. The beetle did not speak in words, but Arman heard the shape: we remember. We are many. We can bite the sky.
He laughed then, a thin, ragged thing that might once have been courage. The laugh surprised him more than anything. It came out of a throat that no longer belonged solely to him.
He remembered the officer's face, the white armor cleaved like a promise. Vengeance is a practical thing. He tasted it like bile and iron. He felt the new hunger — not just for payback but for comprehension. The swarm within him was not merely carnivorous. It catalogued possibilities: how a city's water ran, what the bones of a wall felt like, the quiet rhythm of a town's sleep. It suggested names. It suggested maps. It whispered of doors hidden under chapel steps and of the soft places inside armored men.
Arman rose to his feet. Movement was a negotiation; his limbs were both his and not. His left eye focused and then unfocused, and where his vision blurred the world sharpened into a pattern: threads of life traced in faint green luminescence — the vascular lines of cities, the pulse of trade routes, the slow, steady throb where armies slept. The pattern spooled outward from him like a web, and at its center something small and terrible clicked its mandibles in delight.
He tasted a will. A single insect bumped against his palm and he felt the accumulation of its memory: a thousand flights, a thousand narrow escapes from swatting hands. He felt the history of nests and consumption, of seeds carried to soil that had never seen sun. He felt an intelligence that had never known it could be deliberate. He felt the idea of becoming more than the sum of hunger.
Outside of the ruined line where he had been found, the world had already decided what he was called. Rumors, always the quickest thing to breed, had begun to spread like mold through the ranks that scavenged the battlefield. They called him abomination and god in the same breath: Plagueborn. A monstrosity born of rot. A savior sent to punish the arrogant. Names meant little to someone whose skin now hummed with otherness, but names had a way of shaping the nets people threw.
Arman thought of his mother, of the market stalls that sold stitched shoes and sweet breads, of the way her hands smelled like dough and faintly of cinnamon. He thought of what she would have said to see him now. He thought, too, of the officer with the halo and the clean blade, and the thin fraction of joy that widened into a plan.
If the swarm could be a weapon, it would be precise. If it could be a map, it would be a master key. If it could be a song, it would be one to call down the old, quiet powers that hid beneath marble law.
He tested his reach. Concentration was a muscle — at first clumsy, then more sure. He pictured a fly hovering near his cheek and willed it with the same small, arrogant violence that used to pull a trigger. The beetle on his hand rose as if obliged, folded its wings, and slipped into his sleeve. He felt its absence like an echo, and in the echo, a second voice: not the swarm inside him, but an answering chorus outside — other insects, drawn like iron to a lodestone.
They came in a wavering cloud at the edge of the ruins: moths with eyes like burnt coins, gnats that moved in mechanical hexes, wasps that hummed with a hatred for the sanctity of flesh. They clustered and hesitated at the boundary, as if considering whether the man who smelled of death yet moved like a king could be trusted.
Three children from the scavenger gang found him next. They were a cruel sort of brave, the kind bred by hunger rather than courage; their leader — a girl no older than seventeen with a braid like a whip — stepped forward and laughed. Her laugh was the small, sharp sound of canaries in a coal shaft.
"So he's the plague," she said. "They say he eats men and wakes graves."
Arman held her gaze. Her pupils tightened and her lips went thin. She smelled of charcoal and lemon. The swarm touched the edges of her shape, tasting. Instead of fear, a peculiar quiet passed between them, like the hush that falls when the tide decides which things to swallow first.
"You want something?" Arman asked. His voice was dust on a windowpane but it carried. Somewhere in the swarm, thousands of mandibles tapped in cadence.
She spat at the ground. "We want coin. We want proof. We want to know if you're worth more dead or alive."
Proof. Proof meant test, and tests had rules.
Arman thought of the officer and the clean lines of his death. He thought of the way the white armor might look if it were perforated like a nest. He saw, with a sudden clarity that tasted like flame and green rain, the officer's name in a ledger: Commander Helion — a figure of the Purists, the saints who had preached for decades that rot was sin and order was life. He had been responsible for the assault that took Arman's unit. He had stood at the center of that field with the halo face — and if memory could be trusted, he had walked away.
"Bring me his insignia," Arman said. "Bring me the white feathers they hang on their banners. Bring me a thread from his uniform, and I will show you what I can do."
The girl's eyes flared. The swarm felt the promise and multiplied its pulse a thousandfold against his skin. It was not just a promise of violence; it was the promise of change — the sort that ripples through a town and rearranges loyalties like the teeth of a comb. The children scattered with thumps and curses.
They returned at dusk with a scrap: a piece of silk, embroidered with a silver bird that had lost its head. Arman placed it against his chest and closed his eyes. The threads tasted of perfume and the steel scent of coin. He let the swarm read them the way a scholar reads a forbidden book.
When he opened his eyes, his left iris had narrowed into a slit. The green in it no longer pulsed; it commanded. He felt the swarm like a crown settling at the base of his skull. He heard the insects' voices converge into something that could be almost called a name.
"Monarch," they said, and the word tasted like ash and beginnings.
He could have chosen many things in that hour. He could have chosen anonymity and slow, steady survival on the edges of ruin. He could have chosen to slit their throats and bury their flags with careful hands. Instead, he smiled — not the grin of a madman but the small, mathematical curve of someone who has discovered a game no one else knows how to win.
"Tomorrow," he said softly to the children, to the beetles in his sleeve, to the ruins around him. "We take the road to the city. We hunt the white armor."
A thousand wings beat like a second heart behind him, and in the night that followed, the green fog swallowed the horizon like ink. Somewhere beyond the ruined line, the Purists drank their wine and polished their medals. They had not yet learned fear. They had not yet met song.
Arman stood in the center of the field and listened to the new chorus in his mind. They were calculating, patient, hungry. They were many. They were his.
He closed his eyes and let the first wound teach him how to rule.