[center][u][b][h2]The Jade Citadel of Hongol[/h2][/b][/u][/center]

The siege had been too quick to escape. City-wide broadcasts had declared all entry and exit prohibited, and a curfew had been put in place. Any and all non-military, militia, or enforcers found roaming the streets after dark were to be declared a saboteur and summarily executed. Even now, dozens hung from street posts and rooftops, their bodies swaying gently in the wind.

The unlucky traders and travelers that had been in the city as the Imperial’s had closed the noose around it had gathered in the basements and shelters of the great entertainment district. It had been tense at first, thousands of merchants and nomads, their families and the unlucky Pacifican civilians too far from their homes all crammed into shelters too small and basements too tight. But they persisted. 

There was food enough in the beginning, bands of men had gone out into the entertainment district, collecting anything edible from storefronts, food stalls, and restaurants all the same. Some had even grabbed board games, books and toys. Things to keep the children and adults alike focused on anything but the ever growing sounds of explosions creeping closer by the hour. Then the power went out.

The tense atmosphere shifted almost instantly. Where before there was tentative trust between the people of the shelters and the basements, in the darkness there was only fear. Food stores were picked at silently in the darkness, the quantities of food collected in cooperation slowly dwindling as opportunists took items from the shadows whenever the chance arose. Then the fighting had begun. The distrust boiled over into heated arguments as families accused families of stealing their food, their water. The arguments turned into physical altercations, and desperate people brooked no quarter.

The dead began to pile up under the entertainment center. Families that had traveled caravan routes for decades spilled one another's blood over accusations of thievery. Lone traders were set upon in the darkness by bands of the desperate, those refugees nearby hiding in fear as the scared and the hungry tore the innocent to shreds to keep their bellies meagerly filled. 

The woman known to the citizens of the Jade Citadel only as ‘the Lady of Rings’ sat in the darkness. She glittered in what little light pierced the darkness, the veil that gave her her title reflecting all of it back into the dark. It was made of rings. Tarnished, old, lost things. Wedding rings from widows, children’s rings dropped in the water to wash up on a different shore. It covered her black hair in stark contrast. She had taken it off to get into the city, a week and a half before.

She had put it back on, when the power went out. Any guard of the Citadel, who would kill her just for being here, would be busy now with… whatever was happening. Now, her Magpie appearance marked her as someone who was always willing to trade. Someone who was more useful alive than dead.

She and her husband sat, using tiny knives to rip the seams from her brother’s clothes. His clothes had been traded to her last night by a child who had stumbled on his body in the dark. She had given the boy a bit of her dinner for it. He had hovered nearby after, hoping for more, until a man he called ‘Uncle’ dragged him away.

She knew the stories they told of the Magpies. ‘Magpies’ they said ‘will sell anything, and buy anything. From a child, to a life, to a broken dish.’

She finished on her seam. Began carefully unthreading the golden thread that had embroidered the fabric. She could reuse it, or sell it.

A small voice interrupted her. The boy was back. “Lady Magpie? Do you have any more food?”

She opened her mouth to speak. Considered her words, then sighed. “Did you eat all of what I traded you already, child?”

He looked away, then nodded. Her husband sighed, taking the fabric from her hands. 

She locked a sharp gaze on the boy, and asked a question she knew the answer to. “What do you have to trade, child?” She felt the gazes of others in the darkness. The price, she thought, would have to be low enough that they felt it obtainable, or they would just kill her. But… not so low she ran out of food for herself.

The boy stuttered. “I-I was h-hoping…”

She stopped him. “I am a Magpie. We trade. If you have jewelry, I would take that, it could be useful to me.”

She watched his face began to fall. Her children had been that small once. They, too, were somewhere in the Citadel, who knew where, now. She began to turn away.

“Wait!”

She turned back. “Suddenly remembered your great-grandmother’s earrings, little one?”

He shook his head, then said, voice shaking, “I could run errands? My Mama says kids are better at seeing in the dark than grown ups. If I… if I go find people who will trade with you, and things that are lost.. can I have some food for that?”

She considered the boy. Reached out to pinch his cheek. He flinched slightly, away from her hand, but not enough to escape her. “Hmm,” she said, “Deal. On one condition.”

He stared at her with wide eyes.

“Do not tell me your name, child.”

Around the Lady of Rings the world shook. Rockcrete dust trinkled from newly formed cracks in the ceiling above and pebbles skittered along the ground with each successive blow. The detonations ceased, far from where they sat, but close enough that many in the dark began to whisper frantically. The war was inching closer every minute, and soon, it would be in the dark pump rooms and basement shelters they had found as refuge.

A loud bang at the far side of the room signalled a new problem as the door, pitifully barricaded with the meager furniture of the store room, slammed open. Voices called out as the silhouettes of men streamed into the room. 

“Listen listen, you wretched stains, give us your water and your food and we’ll be gone before you know it!” a voice from one of the shadows began as the silhouettes began to fan out in the darkness, groping hesitantly as they searched for sustenance and survivors.

“Try and fight back…?” the man's voice trailed off and a blade glinted dangerously in the meager light of the room. The other silhouettes continued their search, and some of the refugees began to offer up what little they had in exchange for their snivelling lives.

The Lady grabbed her new assistant by the wrist and yanked him behind her. In her softest voice, she began to whisper to him the instructions that Magpies had been giving their children as long as Magpies had existed.

“If things go wrong,” she whispered, “you run.”

Running was certainly not an option for her.

“If you cannot run, hide.”

She couldn’t do that either.

“If you are found or caught, bargain.”

She smiled at the intruders, knowing one of them would notice her soon enough.

“And if bargaining fails… beg for your life.”

She didn't say the last part. [i]Die before betraying your family.[/i]  He wasn't a Magpie. Yet. 

Done warning him, she gave one final instruction, “Now be quiet and still,” and called out to the men searching the storeroom, “Just supplies you’re after then, or could I interest you in something else?” She grinned. “I’d love to make a deal.”

The shadow with the knife seemed to direct his attention toward the voice of the old Magpie, and there was the quiet scuffing of shoes against the bare rockcrete suggesting one or two of the brigands were groping their way through the darkness toward her, too.

“No deals,” the man hissed as he took a noisy step toward the Lady of Rings, “you give us what you have and we leave you be.” he finished with another noisy step.

The room, still hushed in fear, grew in volume as a refugee began to beg to keep some of their meager supply of water. A third voice joined the discord as a woman begged for the first man to let the brigand take the water. The voices rose in volume for another few moments, the brigand yelling as the sounds of a scuffle could be heard in the dark.

Seconds passed as the sound of two men fighting over something filled the space. Something shattered, a sound of running water filled the silence that followed.

“You frakking wretch!” the brigand exclaimed. There was a surprised yelp, a heavy clunk as a pipe met skull, the thud of a person hitting the ground without attempting to catch themself. A woman began to scream.

“Anyone else? Anyone else want to try m---” a las bolt lit the space in blinding neon red radiance, the brigand crumpled in the incandescence, the afterimage of the las bolt imprinted upon the retinas of everyone in the dingy cellar.

Another las beam reached out across the room. Pandemonium erupted as the refugee with the laspistol began to fire wildly in the confined space. The brigands ran for cover, smashed in the skulls of those closest to them, or ducked out the door back into the hallway. Men yelled and fought back blindly at those nearest to them and their small groups, bodies went limp as laspistol bolts slammed into survivors and brigands indiscriminately. The mass of humanity began to swell, a great wave of sweat and fear pushing for the few exits from the small storage cellar. People floundered, crushed beneath the boots of the desperate and the hungry.

The old Magpie pressed herself against the wall and slid down it until her knees touched her chest. Beside her, her husband did the same, and she pulled the boy down between them. No value gained by joining the stampede. Better to hunker down.

A brigand stumbled, caught in the crowd by where she hid. She reached out to keep him from falling. Her eyes locked with his and narrowed. “Settle down, child. If you’re smart, you’ll get out alive with extra food in the bargain.” 

The pipe-weapon in the thugs hand clattered away as the man hit the ground hard. He scrambled to right himself, the hand at his shoulder only adding to his desperation as words simply slid from his mind in the frantic moment. He scrambled back, his hands scraping against rockrete and metal as he did. A neon red lasbolt cut the air above the Magpies, and the man rose to run as a second neon bolt found purchase in his side. 

The man crumpled like a bag of bricks, the energy of the lasbolt leaving a burning hole in his side and deep into his chest where a heart and lungs should have been. More bolts snapped around the Magpies, questing shots to find the voice that had reached out in kindness to the now dead brigand.

She thought of her brother, dead in the dark. She thought of her children, somewhere in the shadows, possibly dead as well. She thought of her Family. Their ship waited many miles away down the coast. It would not come for them. No Magpie ship would sail into trouble. Magpie ships only sailed away.

Silently, the Lady of Rings tucked the boy behind her. She curled on the floor, as small as she could get. She reached out and held her husband’s hand. She couldn’t stop panicked people. She just had to hope they would calm down before she wound up dead.

Incandescent lasbolts slammed into the walls around the Lady of Rings at random, her luck holding true by the thinnest of threads.

The ground shook, dust fell from unseen cracks and forgotten duct work above them. The ground shook, shelves toppled over and contents spilled across the room.
The ground shook, pipes burst and cables frayed, spraying water and arcing electricity.
The ground shook, and the bandit disappeared beneath a monumental amount of rockrete, earth, and steel.

The sound was immeasurably loud, the growl of an engine of unknown origin filled the air. The whine of pneumatics overtook the engine’s bass tone as the massive steel object before the Lady of Rings began to rise out of the hole it had created with its sudden appearance. A warhorn blared, and a sound like cracking lightning followed as the sky above was lit with intermittent flashes of light. 

The boy crawled into her arms, but the Lady of Rings did not react, staring at what looked like certain death, the ice of dissociative fear stealing across her thoughts and freezing them to nothing. The only sign that she saw the disaster about her was her death grip on her husband’s hand.

The macromachine righted itself, a hulking titan on two legs, a bulbous body bristling with weapons and a command bridge attached at its core in the shape of an oni of ancient myth. Warhorns brayed in anger at its attacker as weapons of exotic and esoteric origin lashed out in radiant beams of color, whips of lightning, and more conventional weapons fire to no doubt smite the Imperial fool enough to attract the titan’s ire.

Colors inverted, lightning dissipated, and shells fell from the air as the oni’s wrath was thwarted. The warmachine’s foe was neither a competing relic of ancient war, nor the massed battalions which even now assaulted the Citadel. Instead, it was a lone man, hanging serenely above Hongol, both hands clasped around a staff.

For those huddling for safety in the shadow of the steel monstrosity, its opponent was no more than a speck - until he spake his retort. A wave of nuclear fire erupted from the eagle head of his staff, a coruscating line of light and fury that glistened with motes of  stardust that was stymied by a wall of nothingness as the oni’s void shields held firm against it.

It seemed at first that the attack would be redoubled, the distant speck attempting to overwhelm the macromachine, until it paused in its assault - the man finally noticing whom his fight involved. Cursing quietly, he pulled back his staff and made to retreat back towards Imperial lines, taunting his foe into following.

The Oni followed, its mortal crew hellbent and unable to ignore the opportunity before them to crush the right hand of the Emperor. It smashed through habblocks, leveled Pacifican strongpoint bunkers, brushed aside Imperial armored formations, and crushed the already broken Harmony Gate to dust as it pursued the insolent old man and left the Lady of Rings far behind.

The boy began to move, but she grabbed him and held him tight. She watched the sky, a rabbit that has watched the hawk fly away- and is waiting to see if it will return.

As Malcador feinted, he weaved trickery in his wake, for the aggrieved were the easiest to fool. The lumbering beast proved more bane than boon to the Pacificans then, the Sigilite hiding its friends from view while warding its foes from it. From ruin to ruin he sprang, like a furtive bird, letting frustration and dreams of glory cloud the judgement of its crew, until at last he was left with nowhere to run, floating amid the massive space that had once been one of the city’s great gates.

But he did not flee before it. Instead, he approached the monstrosity of metal, his staff pressed forward head blazing with atomic flame that grew and grew in barely restrained fury before at last with a groan of barely restrained fury it was channeled and released. Nuclear fire chained to the hand of Man, the furnace of creation itself opened and turned to the task of pitiless war.

No one, be it flesh or machine, could gaze long upon what the Sigilite had just unleashed in the skies about Hongol. It was an act known by its shadows, the fate of the oni seen only by those staring at its flickering shade on the distant streets far below. Malcador’s flame was far too hot to merely burn or melt the titan, instead [i]fusing[/i] its very matter together. Exotic elements seen only in the deaths of stars were born then, before being forcibly combined in turn in cascading pulses of energy which threatened to rip the warmachine apart.

Yet Malcador bid it hold fast, for now, binding the great energies and hard radiation that he had unleashed to boil away the flesh and steel of operator and machine both until they had sublimated into something [i]beyond[/i] - something flung far into the skies, where with a shuddering crack it seemed a new sun was briefly born until the flare died. Of the oni, there stood now two vast and trunkless legs of steel, boundless and bare.

“I am growing far too sentimental for my own good,” the old man whispered, haggard and tired, glancing down to confirm with a smile that those who had sought shelter from the war had survived this latest skirmish.

Far below, the Lady of Rings was emerging from her frozen fear. All around her, the refugees looked around themselves, the building they had been hidden in no longer safe. Some blinked, eyes scalded by the sunlight, after so long, and the battle above them- particularly the last, unfathomable fire. Others wept, ran, trembled, stared at nothing in unbreaking shock at the sudden violences of the day- the transformation of dark, everpresent fear to immediate danger from many fronts. And many, many more lay dead and unmoving. 

She climbed to her feet, lifting the boy that sheltered in her arms with her. She stared up at the figure in the sky. Resentment burned in her. Her brother, the Golden Emissary, was dead, because of these foolish men attacking a city they happened to be in. Her children were missing. She curled her lip, sending a look of disgust to the figure in the sky, although she was sure he couldn't see.

She set the boy on the ground and took his hand. She walked towards the exit, her husband following unquestioning behind her. A new hiding place would have to be found. But she stopped when she felt the boy tug free from her grip. She turned.

The boy knelt sobbing beside a woman, her belly slightly rounded. A little sibling for the boy, the Lady supposed, or could have been. The woman’s legs lay crushed beneath rubble, caught in the crashing of the metal monster through the ceiling. Her face was pale. Even from here, it could be seen that no breath stirred in her.

The Lady of Rings sighed. She went to the boy, knelt beside him, and took him into her arms. “Grieve, child, as you must, but it cannot be here. Will you walk or shall I carry you?”

The boy made no response besides to sob and cling tighter to her. She took a deep breath and lifted him once more, standing.

As she walked away, she whispered to him, that which had been whispered to her, once, long ago, among the ashes of a fire that had killed everyone she had ever known. “They are dead, child, and cannot be returned to you, but you will not be alone. Stay with me, and I will love you as my own. I will make of you a Magpie. And since you will be a Magpie, you will know my name.”

And she whispered to him her name, as his sobs dwindled to whimpers, and she, and the boy, and her husband, vanished into the dark.

High, high above them a man bore witness to a thousand tragedies, and hardened his heart as he set out to commit a thousand more.

Unity demanded no less.