Free What Was Forgotten by Tim Mathias Page A

setting the outermost gatehouse on fire. And as the Dramandi were alerted, the ghosts killed fifteen more before slipping back over the wall. Sera’s sword-kin had only managed to kill two of the intruders, and only because they stayed behind to fight while their kinsmen escaped. The weapons they used – blades and arrows alike – were coloured black, impossible to see in the cover of night. As black as their eyes. It quickly became obvious to them that they could see in absolute darkness. She regretted having called them whelps. Her people started referring to them as gattra – the Dramandi term for an evil portent.
    She thought of that night many times since, and remembered it as the beginning of their defeat, a fact they would not grasp until the very end. She and her sword-kin had been the ones who fought the two that stayed behind. She had never felt so helpless with a sword in her hand; the intruders emerged and vanished without warning. They killed three of her sword-kin all within a heartbeat of the other, warriors she knew since she first learned to wield a blade. She was the fourth in line, suddenly thrust to the fore. The first kill was luck; Toma Ronai charged at one of them and swung his axe. His enemy sidestepped and buried his blade in Toma’s side. Toma twisted as he fell, taking the blade with him. Sera caught the gattra with an upward swing as he bent down to try to retrieve his weapon. Before he collapsed, she pushed him back into his comrade, knocking him off balance, giving her time to land a lunging strike that pierced his chest.
    She was already weeping for Toma. She did not notice her remaining sword-kin staring at her in the glow of the burning gatehouse, her face and long black hair slick with the blood of friend and foe.
    They had to abandon the outer wall of the city after the burned skeleton of the gatehouse finally collapsed in a smoking heap. The Ryferian army encroached, and every day Yasri’s brave defenders rained missiles upon their camp. Arrows, rocks, pots of boiling oil. Whatever they could find. But every night, the darkness spat black arrows at them, and the morning always revealed the new dead who had been killed in silence. People began to ask her, “What do our ancestors tell us when you speak with them?”
    “They tell us to have hope,” she told them. She had not heard them speak, but she thought their silence in itself was telling her to find the strength in herself, and that each man and woman must do the same. Yet each night, each day, more dead. It went like this for weeks. It seemed as if it would go on forever, and whenever anyone asked her what the spirits of the ancestors advised, she said, “Have hope.”
    Hope began to erode. Many were wondering if Aulvennic had abandoned them. He seemed powerless or unwilling to protect them, even during his holy hour. That was when they were the most afraid of the night. And no matter how many of the nasci they killed on the walls or as they fought their way through the second outer ring of the city, their enemy remained undeterred.
    A realization came to her on their holy day, dram rei , as the entire city celebrated how the Guiding Star had made peace with Ulrodin, the goddess of night, and she became his wife and gave him a throne in the night sky. She slipped into the sleep-like state to speak with the spirits of their ancestors in the evernight and was once again greeted by silence. She called out to them and heard her voice echo through the evernight, but she heard nothing back. She sensed one presence, and it was not one of the ancestors.
    Stay away. You were buried. Stay buried. It was amused. It spoke in some unknown dialect that grated against her senses. She did not understand it at all, but understood its mocking laugh.
    It was then that she knew the spirits were gone. She ought to be able to sense their presence if they were there, even if they remained silent. But she could only sense one entity, the dark being