Above him splinters fell and blood trickled through gaps in the wood. The Kyselica hadn’t been built for this kind of carnage. For months he had been trying to salvage something of this situation, but little inspiration had come. He had been, for the first time, thankful the Inquisitors were on board: the presence of Varya’s clenched fist instilled the men and women under his command with a sense of righteous zeal. The wind didn’t cut as deep, the clouded darkness didn’t seem so oppressive. Not only that, but had the Inquisitors not been on the ark when the fury from the ice fell upon them, it would have been a massacre the like of which was only recorded in song. Instead, here he was, working frantically to do three months work in a matter of minutes. Gone were his team of engineers, either cowering on the lower decks, or dead on the top. The damage from the collision had been catastrophic. It would have sunk a lesser ship, but his Kyselica, a vessel he had come to grow very fond of, stayed afloat, crippled and lame, a home for some, and a tomb for many.

“Captain! They’re breaking through!” came the call from behind him. The group had barred the doors down to the maintenance hold after them. They needed every second; he was sure it had cost the lives of a dozen men, but the sacrifice had to be made. He would mourn each man, as he mourned the Kyselica, but the time for sadness would come later. Their death was nigh if they failed here. Without looking back he called:
“Then arm yourself and prepare to meet thy god, Isidor!” he turned to the man to his right, also working on the husk of the ether cannon, and with a steely look, said:
“Work fast, Vadim, unless you want my mangled corpse to be the last thing you remember.”
He picked up the weapon leaning against the wall and gripped it tightly. The gunlance was a brutal, yet elegant weapon, and it looked ungainly in his hand, and to say he had mastered it would be a grave falsehood, but once you had served for long enough, you learned the basic rule that covered all weapons: ‘stick ‘em with the hot end’. He pulled a shortened shotgun out of its holster on his left side and advanced to the door.

The wood buckled quickly. The living wall of ice on the other side wanted his blood, but he would not give it willingly.
“Soldier,” he barked at the private as he strode into rank beside him. “It’s just you, me, and them. Aim true.”
As the glacial beast broke through, its head and shoulders came into view first. Fyodor pulled the trigger of his shotgun and the world went quiet. The splintering wood struck him about the head and chest and he fired again, blindly. As the muzzle flare abated, his vision was filled with the icy figure, ghostly white except for two large dark spots where the buckshot had struck. He felt the ground fall away from him as the icekin struck him, and then meet him again sharply as he fell flat, about eight feet from where he had originally stood. Instinctively, he brandished the blade of the gunlance in front of him, and felt it connect. It squeaked and scraped against the monster’s icy flesh. He pulled the trigger, and a crackle of ether engulfed the creature, blowing its torso into pieces. Still deafened, and reeling from the impact, he stumbled to regain his footing, surveying the scene for anything else that wanted to meet its maker today. To his right, the young private, Isidor, at the end of an icy spear, blood drenching him, and the tall figure of his killer.
He may have let out a bestial war-cry as he charged toward the second icekin, he wasn’t sure of himself in the moment. Impaling the creature through the side, he fired with both weapons, blowing the brute off its feet and into the wooden wall behind it. He took a moment to regard the young man, who’s blood formed a river at his feet, and remember his name. Isidor. He would need to write to the boy’s family; he would need to write more letters than ever before.

[hr][indent][i][right][color=6ecff6]Lanostre - The Southern Warfront — 205AV[/color][/right]
All around him his men fell, their blood painting a crimson canvas on the pale ground. Before him, the whirling figure of the Lanostran Inquisitor spiralled around what was now a brutal battlefield. They made war look like a beautiful dance, even in the face of the monstrosities that had climbed from the ice. Moments before, they had been enemies, but now the colours they wore meant nothing, Varyan and Lanostran fought together against their frigid grave.
The enemy were countless, a wall of unfeeling hate descending upon them as they fought for their lives.
A sharp shot of pain hit him from the side, and he was on his back, slavering jaws doing everything they could to end him. It must only have been an instant that he wrestled with the glassy-eyed beast, but when one’s life is in one’s hands, time seems to slow down. A blast of ether washed over him, burning across his face. His eye went dark, and he felt the warmth of his own blood run into his nose and mouth, but the fiend on top of him was washed away by the brunt of the blast. He coughed and choked, before he was pulled to his feet. The face of the Lanostran Inquisitor was at last visible to him. A woman. From afar, beneath the helmet and the intricate plate, he couldn’t tell, but now there was no mistaking it. In any other situation, he would have noticed her beauty, but now as she held his life in her hands, he couldn’t even begin to think about such things.
“If anyone is killing you today, it’s me.” she said sharply. In her other hand, she had his rifle, and she pushed it into his hands, and he fought the urge to wince as the wood and metal jutted into his now broken ribs. “Now fight.”[/i][/indent][hr]
A hand on his shoulder roused him from his momentary lapse. He turned to see Vadim, mouth flapping wide, fire in his eyes. The ringing in his ears had not let up yet, if Vadim was saying something, he didn’t know what. The world around him was in slow-motion at the moment. Vadim threw a hand out towards the ether cannon that stuck out through the floor and onto the main deck. It was whirring, gears turning for the first time in months, a gentle glow of ether emanating from the engine powering it. Fyodor’s eyes grew wide, not in panic, but in glorious anticipation. He patted the engineer on the shoulder and ran to the steps up to the main deck.

All at once, his hearing returned, and above deck the din of battle was all too loud. Fierce struggles raged all around him. Inquisitors dove and tumbled, ether coursing through the air in their wake, and the crackle of rifles and shotguns filled his ears. The icekins’ roars completed the chaotic symphony. The battle, miraculously it seemed, was going well —or as well as it could— for the most part. He made out a few Inquisitors, cutting bloody swathes through the monstrous glacier-spawn. 
As a soldier ran past him, rifle in hand, Fyodor caught him by the arm. The soldier, wide-eyed and pale-faced, regarded him for a moment, before remembering himself.
“Captain?”
“Aye, get your wits together man!” Fyodor barked. “That cannon!” He said, gesturing with the gunlance. “Aim it at something!” and he threw the soldier in its direction, following after him.
“But Sir, the cannons are out of action…” the soldier called over the din.
“By Varya, soldier, do as I command and [b]aim the fucking thing![/b]”
“At what?” Fyodor looked around him. Lighting up the sky, a monstrous, flying, glassy terror, hurtling towards the earth. In its talons, he could just make out a figure clutched in the icy grip, cape billowing as they plummeted with their windborne foe. It must have been an Inquisitor, it wouldn’t have targeted a regular soldier. These creatures were slavering, monstrous beasts, but they weren’t without strategy. Fyodor pointed the gunlance skyward, at the murderous dance happening above them.
“That!” he cried. Together, he and the soldier manoeuvred the hulking cannon into position. This was a job for four men, but the pair was all that could be mustered. Fyodor leaned a shoulder into the warm metalwork and shoved all his weight into it, and with a satisfying grinding of metal against metal, the cannon lurched around. With his one good eye, he peered through the eyeglass.
“Steady soldier, keep it on him.” it must have been only a few seconds, but it felt like an eternity that they trained the cannon on the flying aberration, waiting until it held a steady course.

“Fire.” he said. It was quiet, but the authority of the command carried it over the drone of the battle. The soldier wrenched back the metal lever and the ground shook around them. The ringing in his ears returned. It was luck, really, that fired the cannon. They hadn’t been inspected since the crash; the shells had remained loaded and dormant, and the cold had wormed its way into the barrels, but the power of these weapons was undeniable. If there had been three yards of ice plugging the barrel, it would have been fired out along the ether-powered shell. The moment hung for a second, as the two soldiers peered out towards their target, not knowing whether or not the shell had been fired true until the last moment.
The aberration lit up with white light, as the ether-powered shell connected squarely into the creatures underside. It careened away towards the glacier, as now the Inquisitor that had been gripped in its talons started to fall straight down. Fyodor only hoped that he hit water; there would be no saving the boy if he was dashed against the ice or the hull of a ship. The freezing water would be difficult to survive, but possible at least.
“Get another shell in there! This isn’t over!” he called to the soldier, as he took a few quick steps towards the bow of the ark. The battle still raged, but they had struck a crucial blow to their enemy.
He had fought enemies like this before, probably more than any man in the SA, but these creatures were different. These huge, hulking leviathans carrying even more wicked-looking weapons were a far cry from the almost vestigial creatures he had fought during the war, but they numbered just as many. If these were the same beasts he had fought in Lanostre, then they were evolving, learning, somehow.

[hr][indent][i][right][color=6ecff6]Annexed Lanostre - near the Black Glacier — some years ago[/color][/right]
”Your Reverence, please. I know what lurks beneath the Black Glacier, if something were to be awakened, my men…”
“Your men can serve Varya in death as well, Captain, as can you.” the look in the old Inquisitor's eyes was one of dark madness as the threat was shot across the room. Father Konstantin was beyond saving. Fyodor knew this would end one of two ways, with the old Inquisitor’s death, or with his. His fingers gripped the holster of his pistol, and the Inquisitor’s eyes darted to his hip, and then back up to meet his gaze.
“Do it, Captain. See what hell you unleash upon yourself.” Konstantin warned, his own hand reaching down to the hilt of his sword. Fyodor did nothing. His hand fell to his side and he took a step back. The Inquisitor did not break his gaze, and his grip lingered at his hip for a few seconds, before he turned back to his work. Fyodor’s mouth was dry. How many shots could he get off before the Inquisitor was on him? Two? Three? He had seen their kind survive worse than a bullet in the back. This wasn’t the way. He turned on his heel and left the room. It was a few minutes before he emerged from the connecting corridor, his young Sergeant waiting for him.
“Sir?” the pause lingered in the air.
“Be watchful, Andrei, this isn’t over.” he didn’t stop or regard the soldier in any other way. When he needed to stress the seriousness of a situation, he remained quiet. The soldiers in his command had learned to read the grizzled veteran’s mood.
By Varya, the men! They would all die if he didn’t act. He couldn’t bury any more. He had written so many letters, knowing that his words would cut like a knife into the heart of any mother who looked upon them.
He would write one more letter. If help didn’t come, then he would die here with his men, and his letter-writing days would be over. He swore it to himself. Before he knew it, he was alone at his bureau, a pen held shakily in his hands as he stared into the blank parchment. He steeled himself for a moment before touching the point to the paper.
“To His Grand Reverence, Father Creid, I beseech you in my hour of need…”[/i][/indent][hr]
The sound of the limp body hitting the water cut through the sounds of battle. From the height the young Inquisitor had fallen, the surface was like steel. Still, Inquisitors were hardier by far than your average soldier. Even so, the frigid water would steal the life from him if he were left in there long enough. He wouldn’t leave a man or woman under his command to die, no matter what his thoughts about the Seminary. He laughed under his breath. [i]Under his command?[/i] The Inquisitors outranked him in almost every way, and yet he still couldn’t think of them as his superiors. Perhaps it was their age. He had seen so many fresh-faced men and women come through the ranks of the Imperial Secular Army, that any time he saw a new Inquisitor, with nary a scar on them, he couldn’t help but think of them as anything but children, and yet he had to call them [i]Father?[/i] 
He looked to his right, then to his left. There were no men left at his disposal. Every soldier was either locked in a deathly battle with the enemy, or they were already dead. It was down to him then.
From the bow of the ark, he took hold of a length of chain, wound around a spool, and with everything he could, hurled it into the water, as close to the submerged body as he could.
Now, he could only hope the young man would have enough strength to save himself before the glacial water squeezed the last drops of life from him.