“Alright you miserable bastards,” Cecilia growled, “Up and moving.” Despite the dark situation, she took a moment to be proud of herself. Cecilia wasn’t a born growler, but there was a certain expectation that sergeants would growl at their subordinates. The fact that her recruits, despite their fatigue, moved meant that she had finally gotten the timber right. Sure, there were a few grumbles and far fewer “Yes, Sergeant”’s than there should’ve been, but they moved.

  It was a breach of decorum, one that should have had her yelling, but she knew it wasn’t their fault. She wasn’t like Deden to yell at every breach. Cecilia’d yell at them to keep them motivated, keep them moving, but not for things genuinely outside of their control.

  Any trek across the Penumbra drained will and induced a state of lethargy, and these were fresh recruits, barely two weeks into the three year path towards becoming Knights and short of even being called squire. Combined with the fact that they had already marching for at least an hour, it was no surprise they needed the time to breathe.

  But given how dangerous the Penumbra was, resting too long would be even riskier. Not only was the desolate and grayscale landscape full of shadespawn, animated shards of the realm itself, but the Penumbra fed from anything from the physical world, drawing life essence every moment. While you moved, the effect was minimized, but once you stopped to rest, the drain started increasing with intensity. Resting could be beneficial as long as you kept it relatively short, but there was always the risk of missing that break point. Of staying still too long.

  Rare was the traveler that fell asleep here who ever woke up again.

  Which is why they had to get moving again. Cecilia helped pull one of the scrawnier knights, a recruit by the name of Anvars, to their feet while she watched the other squads. All around, the training squads were staggering to their feet, some more ungainly than others. Cecilia, watched careful to keep the worry from her face.

  This entire action felt like a mistake. A necessary one, with orders straight from Marshal Sid himself, but it still felt too risky. Like there was a better option they just hadn’t seen.

  Unfortunately, they didn't have the time to find that option. The golden elves had started a surprise offensive and were marching towards North. The remnants of Ixatrin’s guerrilla forces were fighting the advance, but they could only fight stalling actions and even those could only be done for so long. Fighting was out as well. Each Shadow Knight might be worth twenty linemen on their own, but the burgeoning Runnan Empire had more footmen in their pinky than all the knights in the order. And the army marching towards the former research outpost turned training camp outnumber the camp thirty to one before the fact that a hundred of their number were recruits.

  Retreat had been the only option and Freeport was the only strategically viable retreat point for them to go to. Every other location would have just been delaying their capture. But Freeport was across either land that was held by the Runnan armies or would be by the time the Shadow Knights tried to march through it. Moving through the Penumbra had been the only option.

  But without learning how to internalize the energy of the Penumbra, the first step into becoming a true Shadow Knight, this journey was wearing heavier on the recruits than was comfortable. Her squad, which could normally march for two hours in armor without rest, had to stop every forty-five minutes. And hers were some of the fortunate ones, which helped keep them towards the front. Behind Captain Neilberg’s group, who had gone ahead to secure the exit point to Freeport, but not by much. Most of the other knights were and trainees were behind her group. And somewhere far behind Vills and Sabor were dragging the recruits who couldn’t walk on their own.

  That had been an argument, one Cecila had almost drawn steel over. Cecilia had argued that they owed to these recruits, their wards, to take every chance they could to keep them alive. An unconscious body pulled from the Penumbra still had the chance to wake up and make a full recovery. Anyone left behind would just be dead. Veris had argued that dragging them along was only changing where they died. And at least back in the physical world there was a chance of them having remains to recover.

  There were other, less tactful, arguments as well.

  In the end Captain Neilberg had made the point that just leaving people behind would be terrible for morale, which would just burn the recruits harder reducing the number of recruits who would make it through. Reluctantly, the rest of the Sergeants had agreed.

  So, here they were, less than a half-hour walk from the thinning in the Penumbra they would break through back into physical world, just outside Freeport. The Knights didn’t have a citadel in Freeport, but there were enough boats to get them across the ocean and back to home base. But that, as much as she hoped otherwise, was probably another break away, waiting for the rest of the recruits to catch up.

  A recruit collapsing at her side shook her from her reverie. Reaching down, she put a hand under the recruit’s arm.

  “On your feet, almost there.” Cecilia said in her best growl. They always jumped a little when she growled, even before she got the motivation part down. It made her feel a little guilty, but if their nerves couldn’t handle a growling Sergeant, they probably wouldn’t last in the Knights.

  “Sorry, Sergeant,” the recruit squeaked.

  Cecilia suppressed a smile as she looked at the embarrassed recruit. Atonia was thin for a desert elf. Not quite gold elf thin, but close. She had been one of pick ups from outside the fortress, one of the desert elf recruits who had joined more so for the stable meal than any family pride.

  “No problem, Atonia” Cecilia said, patting the recruit on the shoulder, “Just don’t want you to get left behind.”

  She wasn’t even in Cecila’s training squad, but that didn’t matter. Cecilia made a point of learning the name of every new recruit. Partially, so she could effectively yell at them to move faster but mostly because it was the right thing to do. In a few years time, these recruits would be her brothers and sisters in arms, and while some of her comrades might withhold the respect of names until the squires became Knights, in Cecilia’s mind they were the most important part of the Order. While the Knights might hold the line or be an expression of the Order’s current power, without fresh blood the Order would wither and die.

  Or, as Cecilia’s mother had always said, “Good gardeners prune the flowers to make the flower look pretty now. Great gardeners treat the roots so the flower looks pretty in years to come.”

  Atonia’s response was cut off by a tremor in the Penumbra that rocked Cecilia to her core and off her feet, ears ringing so painfully, she thought her head was bound to collapse in. Then it spread, shaking her entire body. Her throat felt like it was screaming, but she couldn’t hear the noise she was making. Her hands went to her ears, looking to block the pain and came away wet. Bloody. She screamed harder but only heard silence. But still, the ringing rattled her body.

  When the reverberations diminished to the point where she could look around, she found Atonia standing over her looking concerned. At first, she was confused why she was incapacitated while a recruit was unaffected, wondering if she had somehow underestimated the girl. But as the ringing continued, she came to realize the truth. It wasn’t that Atonia was hardier, it was that Atonia hadn’t internalized any of the plane. Whatever that impact had been, it had shook, maybe even damaged, the Penumbra itself. The blood had dried and she could hear things that might be sounds coming in, still too muffled to make out. Atonia said something and offered a hand, but what was actually said she couldn’t tell.

  In pain, Cecilia took Atonia’s offered hand and lurched to her feet. Her balance was better than she expected with an ear injury, letting her quickly scramble up the closest hill. She could feel that something was wrong. Hopefully height would let her see it too.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  She didn’t even have to crest the hill to find it. In the distance, towards Freeport, a black obelisk stood tall on the otherwise empty plane. It was alien and completely anathema to everything Cecilia knew of the plane. The tower stretched beyond Cecilia’s height, scraping through the cloudlike sky of the Penumbra. There was no way to concentrate shadow essence well enough to make a tower that tall. Nor was there anyway that anything purely from the physical world would last long enough, the realm would just drain it away over time. Unless it was obsidian, but who had that much obsidian just laying around?

  She lacked scale. Quickly, she looked down, trying to find the base, get some sense of how far it was, a reference point against it. She finished cresting the hill, looking for something to provide prospective in the endless plains and hills of gray.

  What she found was a crater. There was no debris or blasted rock thrown aside like there had been at the Solun Meteor, the Penumbra was too fluid for that. But this pillar, whatever it was, had definitely left a mark on the plane. There was a moment of relief that her group had been too far away from pillar to be caught by the impact, the rest had probably saved their lives.

  It was immediately followed by the panic and worry for the forward groups. They would’ve been in signaling distance, which would mean they would’ve been close, if not under the pillar.

  “Sergeant?” Atonia asked, her voice a murmur. Or at least seemingly like one. Cecilia hadn’t heard her approach, but that wasn’t surprising all things considered. Shaking her head slightly, she could hear the faint noises of her armor moving. Progress. Now, what had Atonia wanted?

  Cecilia turned and saw several recruits had gathered around. Most of their faces were twisted in confusion, without the experience with the Penumbra, they didn’t know how wrong this was. Nodding to acknowledge Atonia and to buy time, she pointed to the tower. “Right,” she started, before mentally stuttering. What the hell was she supposed to do? This was as unexpected as the sun failing to rise and she was expected to make something of this mess? All Cecilia wanted to do was have someone else tell her what to do, but that wasn’t an option. She was a Sergeant and she had a job to do.

  “Right,” Cecilia said again, “Form up, make this the rally point. I don’t know what that tower is, but I don’t like it. Stay awake and when the Rearguard catches up, start moving around the crater. It’ll be easier than going through. I’m going in to scout and will meet you on the far side.”

  ‘And look for other squads,” she silently added to herself.

  The recruits didn’t even hesitate. Orders were relayed, signaling flags were raised and people started moving. As she crested the crater’s lip, she could see squads conglomerating on her recruits. It did her heart good to see them follow orders. WIth a contented sigh, she slid into the crater.

  *************************************************************

  When Cecilia met back up with the massed squad an hour later, the cheer had all but gone. There was no sign of the Captain, his honor guard, or either of the faster recruit squads. Not even a stray shard of armor or sword fragment. It was as if the waves of energy had just obliterated them, though she knew better. The Penumbra would absorb the physical bodies, but at the very least the Captain’s obsidian armor would’ve been untouched. Whatever the tower was, it had obliterated the knights in a way that defied everything she knew.

  Worse, there had been a count and only four Sergeants and forty-eight recruits had survived. Which meant that forty-eight were gone. Thirty of those deaths could be laid directly at the feet of the tower, be that burying them, crushing them, or liquefied by the waves of destruction. That was what supposedly happened to Sergeant Benalia, Neilberg’s second in command, whose squad had been not thirty paces behind Cecilia’s. Her squad had refused to touch the armor while they came to rally up, but their faces showed the truth. The other twenty-two had fallen to the predations of the Penumbra, though how many of those were from before the tower’s appearance and how many came after no one knew.

  Regardless, it was forty-eight souls without even a lock of hair for their families to remember them by.

  But she couldn’t dwell on that. With the Captain and his second in command gone, Cecilia was the ranking Knight. Cecilia would shed her tears later, right now there were fifty-two people depending on her, four of which were on obsidian reinforced sledges. Freeport was, at most, only a half-hour march away. If they could get there, they could get out. The knights and recruits set out, weary and ready to leave.

  But when they got to where the exit to Freeport should have been, a boundary thin enough to walk the recruits through, they found a blank plain. Even the obsidian gate marker was just gone.

  Amid the sea of panic, Cecila gathered the sergeants for an emergency meeting. There wasn’t much privacy without tents or some other structure, just quiet and frantic voices.

  “So, what’s the plan?” Sabor asked, letting his desperation show.

  “Without Neilberg, we can’t make a gate for the squires,” Jeshwin cut in. “Even a temporary one.” He had been one of the proponents for leaving the deceased and dying recruits behind. Cecilia could see where his interruption was going and she didn’t like it.

  “Have we scouted the area, made sure that we just aren’t off location?” Cecilia asked the group, but mostly looking at Vills. “One stretch of the Penumbra looks like the another, even before the landscape got shook up.”

  Vills grunted and shook his head, which was all she was going to get out of him. Shrapnel from a Mine Turtle had destroyed his tongue and throat some years back in a way that never really healed.

  “Well, so much for optimism,” Sabor added. “So, what’s plan B then?”

  Cecilia stared at the gray beneath her for a few seconds, slowly trying to figure out how to get as many people out of here as possible. The expectant stares bearing down on her were stressful, but slowly an idea began to come together. It was desperate, foolish even, but it had the potential to work. Every sergeant was required to be able to transport themselves and nine others into or out of the penumbra to qualify for the rank at minimum. But that was the minimum.

  “Show of fingers, how many people can you take out with you when you leave?” Cecilia asked. “Besides your squad.”

  She looked around the huddle, counting fingers. Zero for Jeshwin, one for Sabor, and an impressive five for Vills. Cecilia could take her squad, plus two more, that still left eight recruits behind. It was a pity that they didn’t have one more Sergeant, otherwise they’d be able to take everyone out. Still, this was better than nothing. Gave her something to work with.

  “Eight isn’t that many left behind,” Jeshwin suggested, “We can leave eight.”

  Vills smacked him upside the head, saving Cecilia the ignominy of doing it herself.

  “No way they’d survive here for the hours it’d take us to get enough power to punch back through,” Cecila reasoned, “We’d be part and party to their death.”

  “No reason for us all to die though,” Jeshwin argued before flinching from another blow preemptively.

  “No, you all take out as many people as you can. I”ll stay behind with the rest and trek for Greasil Citadel.”

  Eyes bulged, jaws dropped.

  “That’s stupid,” Jeshwin exclaimed, forgetting the need for quiet, “Suicide.”

  “It’s not worth the risk,” Sabor said in hushed tones.

  Vills just grunted disapprovingly.

  “Look,” Cecilia said placatingly, “It’s the best chance we have to getting everyone out. We won’t be able to come back in time and there’s no one near Freeport that could come in here and pull the recruits out, which leaves crossing the sea. And while crossing the sea in the Penumbra is dangerous, that’s mostly because when you come out, you’re in the middle of the ocean, not any risk of the Penumbra itself.”

  There were also the risks of shadespawn, but no one wanted to mention that. Speaking of them would only invite their presence.

  Sabor motioned to the recruits, “So, how do we choose who comes with us and who goes with you?”

  “We ask for volunteers and if that doesn’t work, we’ll draw straws.”

  Jeshwin scoffed, “Like anyone would volunteer to stay here.”

  Under different circumstances, Cecilia would’ve asked him to wager gold. Right now she was too sick of his shameless attempts to save his own skin to bother.

  “Right,” she said standing, raising her voice, and turning to the recruits. “Here’s the issue. We’re at Freeport, but we can’t get everyone out. Instead of trying to figure out who gets left behind, I - and anyone who volunteers - will be walking across the ocean to the Greasil Citadel directly instead of trying to catch a boat. It’ll be another four traveling hours in the Penumbra before we reach the Citadel.”

  She paused, breathing deep, “But this is the only way we can attempt to get everyone out of here. Volunteers?”

  They needed twenty hands. Twenty people willing to risk death and the ennui of the Penumbra to have a chance to save everyone. Twenty tired and drained people willing to push their limits and go another at least twice as long as it took them to get to the current spot farther. Twenty brave souls.

  She got twenty-five.