Matiran had never felt so crowded. Shale leaned against a broken fountain at the edge of the market square, standing guard with his company as the tide of soldiers pressed through the narrow streets. Dryads and psyads returning from the front by the tens of millions, stomping back into a city that had no place left for them.

  Their eyes searched every doorway, every window, as if the empire might cough up their old lives and hand them back. But there were no jobs waiting. No fields. No forges. Only the women who had kept Livadia from falling apart while the men bled at the front.

  A psyad soldier jostled past Shale, muttering curses as he shoved toward a bread stand. The price listed was twice what it had been a week ago. Shale watched the man argue with the baker, then storm off empty-handed.

  “Blight me,” Sergeant Hawthorn muttered beside him. “What’s the point of winning if you can’t afford to eat?”

  Shale said nothing, eyes on the fountain’s cracked eagle head. Water trickled from its mouth like a dying breath.

  Hawthorn kicked at a loose stone near the fountain, his scowl deepening. "Can't find work anywhere. Not unless I want to wrestle a baker’s shovel from a woman who’s had it longer than I held a rifle."

  Shale gave him a side glance but stayed silent.

  Hawthorn crossed his arms, lowering his voice. "Maybe the High Judicator will do something about that. Word is, Morgellon’s got men pulling women out of their posts. Giving their spots back to us men."

  Shale grunted, but his gaze stayed on the square, watching the restless flow of people. High Judicator Morgellon, the empire’s chief arbiter, was no ordinary psyad. Tall, gaunt, and swathed in black robes that shimmered faintly with protective runes, Morgellon had always been a zealot cloaked in civility. His mageia was quiet but suffocating—earth and air bent to his will, like a coffin closing slowly. Unlike other psyads who reveled in flame or tempest, Morgellon worked through pressure, through silence. He did not raise his voice. He didn’t need to.

  He’d heard the whispers—Morgellon’s Black Cloaks moving through the city at night, dragging women from workshops and stalls, disappearing them into the dark. He hadn’t seen it, not with his own eyes, but he’d heard the muffled screams once. Just once.

  And he’d kept walking.

  He could taste the rot spreading beneath the empire’s skin.

  The market square had grown deathly still, Shale slumped near the broken fountain, lost in the churn of his own thoughts. Hawthorn muttered curses about the bread prices again, but the words washed over Shale like wind through dead branches. He barely noticed the clatter of hooves until it echoed sharp against the stone.

  A psyad officer rode into the square, his mount kicking up flecks of muck, the crowd parting without needing to be told. The officer dismounted with deliberate grace, black uniform pressed and spotless, lips thin and eyes hollow like something had been scooped out of him.

  “Lieutenant Shale,” the officer called, his voice too sharp for the morning quiet. “Lieutenant Prudentius, Livadian high command.”

  Shale straightened, dragging himself upright as if from a stupor.

  The officer held out a sealed decree, hand stiff as iron. “Orders. Round up the humans.”

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  Shale took the parchment, jaw tight as he read it. “Labor shortages?”

  Prudentius’s gaze barely flickered. “Not your concern, lieutenant.”

  But it was.

  Shale didn’t bother hiding his scowl. “Humans have barely enough for themselves.”

  “Not your concern, lieutenant," the psyad repeated, slower.

  Prudentius swung back into his saddle without another word, his cloak snapping behind him as he rode off, hooves striking sparks against stone. Shale watched him disappear into the crowd before turning to his men.

  “Prepare to move out,” he ordered, voice flat. “We’ve work to do.”

  Grumbling followed. Hawthorn spat into the mud, shouldering his rifle. “Round up humans, is it? Blight me, like they’ve got anything left to give.”

  Another soldier, Prickle, scowled, pulling his coat tighter. “Maybe we should round up that psyad officer instead, make him dig the fields.”

  They shouldered their packs and fell into formation, boots slogging through the muddy cobblestone, their bodies as worn as their gear. Faces hollowed from ration cuts, red uniforms patched with whatever cloth they could scavenge. The last scraps of an army that had bled too long.

  Shale let the complaints wash over him. His men felt the same weight he did. Orders didn’t care about fairness.

  They marched out beyond the city’s gates, into the gray stretches where human settlements clung like moss to stone. Smoke from cookfires drifted sluggishly above crumbling rooftops, the scent of burnt roots and boiled grain barely masking the rot beneath. Shale’s boots sank into soft earth where the road had given up trying to be a road. Cedar Company moved like shadows, their presence drawing the gaze of hollow-cheeked humans who watched from doorways and broken fences. When they arrived, the people emerged slowly, cautious, like animals sniffing the air for predators. Eyes ringed with hunger, shoulders tight with the memory of war, they gathered.

  Wary as hunted things.

  Shale stepped up onto the splintered remains of a gallows, the wooden boards creaking beneath his boots. The hangman's rope still swayed faintly in the breeze, a grim reminder of the empire's justice. He unrolled the sealed decree with stiff fingers, the official script scrawled in looping, arrogant flourishes. The words tasted sour in his mouth.

  “By decree of His Majesty Phiniaster the First, rightful emperor of Livadia and protector of the Isthmus,” he began, his voice cold and distant, “by authority vested through the High Judicator and the Council of Kings, it is hereby ordered that all able-bodied human subjects within imperial dominion shall be conscripted into labor service for the restoration and sustenance of the realm.”

  He swallowed hard, loathing how the words felt like lead in his throat.

  “Failure to comply will be met with penalties as determined by imperial law.”

  Shale lowered the scroll and stared out at the gathered faces—sunken, bitter, defiant.

  “You’re to work the fields,” he finished, flat as frost. “For the empire.”

  A man stepped forward—broad-shouldered once, but worn thin now. His eyes burned with something Shale recognized too well. “Our flocks are gone,” the man growled. “Your dryad kin saw to that. Drove them off. Burned our fields.”

  Shale met the man’s gaze, felt the hollow ache of the land beneath his feet. He could almost hear the soil crying out for the herds that no longer grazed there.

  “I know,” Shale said. “But we all bleed together now.”

  The man spat at the ground. “No, we don’t.”

  By nightfall, Shale was back in Matiran. The streets felt tighter than before, every alley brimming with soldiers, merchants, farmers. Hunger in their eyes. Anger behind it.

  The shouting reached him before he reached the square.

  A crowd had gathered, swelling like a storm. Women—merchants, scribes, farmers—stood shoulder to shoulder with disillusioned soldiers, chanting, fists raised. They called for bread. For fairness. For someone to answer for the empire’s broken promises.

  Shale edged closer, his rifle slung but hand never far from it. The Black Cloaks were there too—Morgellon’s enforcers—hovering at the fringes, silent, watching.

  This was something darker than a mere protest.

  Shale turned away, but the chanting followed him down the street. Like the war itself, it wouldn’t let him go.

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