Martyshkina’s paw closed over the screaming hordeman, and she rammed the man down, hard enough to shake the disabled artillery next to her. His skull crumbled, and she stood up, wiping her jaw. Her trusty revolvers rested in their holsters to conserve the st of their ammunition. The battlement was a mess, and she had ordered the troops to take cover in the lower levels after the ships closed in for another bombing run.

  There was no point in trying to hold this pce any longer; their defenses had crumbled. The tremors of Alpha’s duel still rippled through the stone, but most of the Wolfkins and the troops headed for the city. Martyshkina stayed here, unwilling to abandon Janine alone. Her own presence drew occasional champions, eager to promote their legends, away from her friend.

  A sea of smoke, gray mixed with bck, spread before her. On the horizon, she could barely discern the spreading yellow domes that marked the advance route of their treacherous cousins. She wished them better luck than her pack had suffered. Below and to her left, orange fshes and lines of blue and red pierced the suffocating fog as the enemy troops engaged in their own civil war. Somewhere, Janine was fighting Brood Lord.

  And Martyshkina could not help her. There was someone not meant to be alive here.

  “Are you going to keep hiding or will you make a move already?” she asked casually, her fingers on the revolvers.

  Six meters away from her, fingers appeared over the edge of the wall. They weren’t touching the surface, but muscles spreading from the avian talons twitched, and pressure reduced pebbles to dust. A spatial manipution; their agent had warned of this power. It allowed its user to ‘compress’ the distance between objects, while visually the situation remained unchanged.

  The fingers pushed a fully naked body, safe for a cover provided by occasional feathers and bone amulets inid with precious metals, onto the battlement. Strands of gray hair that had been once destroyed by her bullet billowed freely in the wind; bone fetishes dangled, their ruby eyes darkened by the ck of light. He stood tall, slurping air nervously through his beak; his twitching, wary eyes immediately found her. Half-a-meter-long talons on his legs scraped lines in the ground.

  “Raven…” Dantai said, stretching the word, clicking his beak and trembling.

  “Huh?” Martyshkina raised a brow, looking at him with her natural eye. The lens over it was torn away. “I see no birds here.”

  “I have seen you in my visions. Tormenting me, obstructing my vision,” he spoke softly, barely audible. “Today it ends.”

  Instincts fred in Martyshkina’s brain, and she dove to the side, hearing a ‘pong’ noise. Nothing was shot; no lightning left the curved talon that he rapidly pointed at her, but the side of the broken artillery piece changed. Cracks disappeared, the image of the white, bck-headed bird painted on it brightened, regaining color, and particles of soot flew away. She heard the broken mechanism reassemble itself inside the hull.

  Martyshkina paid it no further mind. Exotic powers were complex and troublesome. She could ponder about a rare case of a New Breed having double abilities ter. Before her shoulder even touched the ground, she had drawn her revolvers and fired thrice. The first bullet was stopped by the outstretched hand, and the second shot shoved the first in the back. But rather than breaking it or splintering the bullet, both projectiles froze in the air, their momentum gone.

  A smile began to form on Dantai’s lips, and then he yelled in pain. The third shot wasn’t aimed at him, not directly. It flew past him and ricocheted off an empty bunker. The priest was struck from behind; his hand disappeared in a puff of red smoke, and Martyshkina rolled, satisfied to have found a weakness in his defenses. No one was invincible…

  “Lights out,” Dantai exhaled.

  Her bullets, frozen by his power, disappeared, and Martyshkina gasped, bending over from the intense pain in her abdomen. The shots she had fired had been returned to her as Dantai had created a channel of distorted space. The entry point was in front of him, and the exit point was around her body. Her armor was dented by the first shot, and the second had penetrated all the way through, miraculously not damaging her lung or kidney. She tried to step aside, and the third bullet came back at her, hitting her in the neck, then a leg kicked empty air, and she felt the thrust. It threw her back onto the artillery cannon.

  Her instincts screamed another warning, and Martyshkina rolled off the cannon just in time to evade his swipe that bisected it. Another “pong” followed, and the barrel didn’t fall, staying in pce as the cuts left by his talons smoothed and disappeared. Martyshkina cursed and pressed a remote control, hating to waste such a perfectly orchestrated ambush on a single opponent.

  A wall of fme erupted from the upper part of the wall as the series of detonations shattered this section. It was a st-ditch effort to inflict maximum casualties on the enemy should they overcome the defenders. Fire briefly hid surprised Dantai as he and Martyshkina fell down into the fiery hell…

  Then she stopped. Slowly, an unknown force levitated her body, and she frowned as she experienced the unpleasant sensations of heat licking her exposed organs. Events went in reverse; the broken battlement reformed itself, and the fmes were sucked in the cracks. To their left and right, the explosions still happened, and a small avanche tumbled down, but in this narrow space, near the artillery piece, the destruction had failed to cause any effect.

  Dantai stepped through the dying fiery veil, his burns repced by healthy skin, his missing hand growing back. Martyshkina broke free of the strange stasis as the time-reversal effect returned her to the same spot she had been before. No one was invincible or immortal. She raised her revolver and heard a pong. The priest’s smile changed to a gleeful leer, and a quivering cocoon covered her, halting every movement.

  “Yes!” He roared, throwing up his hands. “I won! The raven is dead; it didn’t beat me! I faced my destiny and prevailed! I, Dantai, was chosen to…”

  His voice dimmed, and Martyshkina frowned, cuts opening in her arms. She knew that feeling, the irritating one born of cws that ran their dull side over the muscles, threatening to lift them up and rip away the entire strand, crippling her for weeks, if not months. Her mighty arms shivered into pitiful twigs, the steel gone, and she was a little girl from her past, scared shitless and at the mercy of the cruel warlord.

  “I warned you not to help her,” Terrific said, drawing circles around the girl’s eyes with her cws.

  “Screw you, I do what I want.” Martyshkina repeated the same thing she had spoken back then and received a punch that broke her nose.

  She screamed, her waist enrging as lives slipped out of it, and she was no longer a small girl but an adult woman, her paw held by her first soulmate. No. No, you bastard! The plea was in vain, and Martyshkina was filled with memories of a single, faint cry from what she had prayed would be a healthy litter.

  The surroundings changed; Houstad remained outside the cocoon, but inside it she was in the desert, kicked in the chest hard enough to send her flying, and the furless creature leapt beside her, mercilessly cerating her body and denying her a chance to free her girl from an eternity of disgrace.

  “Hear…”

  “Did you enjoy it?” the skinwalker… Lena… asked. “The curse you bestowed upon us? The crunch of my sisters’ bones when you killed them?”

  Martyshkina relived the lowest points of her life. She burned in acid, grasping Janine’s paw to escape. Sand poured down her throat as she jumped to save a member of her pack from suffocating. She cried through the night, mourning the loss of his son, and tried to put up a steel front when one of her girls came to check on her. The thoughts of ending it all came back and weighed her down. She spent sleepless nights hunting the one she had failed; the cws shredding her body while the creature mocked her.

  “…me?”

  “You brought them into this world, knowing about that taint…” They were in a desert in the deep night, and a heavy foot pinned Martyshkina down, crushing her thoracic. The naked beast, the mockery of her daughter, had lowered itself and licked an open wound on the warlord’s arm. “…is in your veins. And now you want to kill me! How selfish; is there anything you won’t do to hide your shame?” It asked in a wounded tone, and she almost believed the beast.

  Her body twisted and stretched, the bones thinned and then widened, the muscles torn and reknitted, and the process restarted. She was a girl, hungry and eager to prove herself, and then she grew, the ribs pushed against her sides with all their might, and Martyshkina nearly choked as the lungs expanded a little te to support her rger frame. All her dishonors and follies returned to haunt her. Her first mistake on the battlefield, leading to the death of her troops and the grief that gripped her heart as she brought the news to their families. Her bones shattered as Blood Graf manifested briefly in the cocoon of time, ramming his axe into her, and she could’ve sworn there was a fsh of recognition in his merciless eyes.

  It wasn’t an illusion. Dantai truly controlled time, and Blood Graf did something unexpected and tried to push himself out to freedom before his form vanished. That didn’t happen in the past. But the pain remained. Every stab, every broken bone, and every ruptured organ agonized anew, merging into a single, never-ending cacophony of pain that intensified as the past overid itself, trapping her in the most hellish episodes of her life as Martyshkina grew younger and then older to experience these sensations in full.

  “Hear me, you dumbass!?”

  A single tone plucked her from the agony. There was a shadow flickering in and out of her memories, growling disgusting and insulting obscenities using the lips of her fallen cub. The skinwalker also participated in the mutition, but only now did she notice a keen focus and occasional concentration in his usually crazed eyes. The skinwalker growled a year ago and tossed another part of the sentence a decade earlier. These noises were pointless, meaningless noises back then that formed coherent words today.

  “Impossible!” Martyshkina gasped, forgetting about everything. “How?!”

  “Visualization, mother.” Lena, undeniably Lena, smiled. “Not precognition.” She stopped a question Martyshkina had never thought to ask. “Precognition is a more accurate method of predicting the future. I merely imagine what would happen in the future based on my perception of reality and the sheer intelligence of my mind. Even a baby may know how its parents would react to mischief. But the more trained the mind, the more accurately it can predict exactly what will happen, down to the st word. For example, if you are half as smart as I think you are, you will ask the difference.”

  Great. So am I dumb. Martyshkina ughed through the pain of splintering ribs. “Lena. Are you here?”

  “No, Mom. I… don’t exist anymore in more ways than one,” Lena said sadly. “What you see before you is the collection of memories, guided by the skinwalker’s talent to imitate the one known as Lena. I am not physically here or anywhere. Lena died, vanished in the whirlwind of madness brought on by the genetic fw in our bodies.”

  In the past, the skinwalker had sat on her chest, preventing her from breathing, but in this vision, Martyshkina saw the situation from a different angle. Lena hugged her legs and looked at her mother with love and care, resembling her old self before the transformation had so violently ended her existence.

  “I am sorry for failing and hurting you, Lena,” Martyshkina said, trying to understand what she had been told. This entire conversation was prerecorded? But the skinwalkers never made long-term pns! They were incapable of it.

  “Thank you,” Lena said. “For stopping my sisters. For caring about my cubs, although you spoiled them too much…”

  “What do you know about motherhood?” Martyshkina said and immediately regretted it.

  “Precious little,” Lena whispered. “I hate it. Hate hurting innocents. Hate destroying and being a pawn in this thing’s pys. I’d much rather not exist altogether. But I am not Lena. I am the idea of her, mimicked by…”

  “I recognize my daughter anywhere,” Martyshkina said sternly. She cringed and clenched her fangs as a cleaver pierced her sor plexus.

  “You don’t even know this version of me.”

  “Girl. You came from my womb. That makes you my daughter. You are Lena, and I am sure the original would gdly name you a sister.”

  “You’ve always been a stubborn cusack.” Lena sighed, hiding a smile as her paw plunged into Martyshkina’s chest and tapped at the heart. “By the way, you have to stop chasing me... It. Our brawls pyed a role in the past, but your role in their pn was complete, and this is their way of rewarding the unwilling accomplice. Don’t consider them to be noble, though. It decided it wanted to screw that shaman more than it wanted to giggle at the unraveling of your personality. Something about double irony. I am not sure I understand. If you try hunting it now, it may butcher you or do worse to you, depending on its mood.”

  “Pn? Lena, what are they plotting?” Martyshkina asked, horrified to the very bone.

  “Surprisingly, nothing bad.” Lena shrugged. “It doesn’t involve the destruction, domination, or sughter of the world, and salvation is the side effect of them solving a puzzle that interests them.”

  “Salvation? A puzzle? Lena, give me specifics.”

  “I am giving you as much information as I’m allowed to, dumbass.”

  “Hey! Go to your tent!”

  They ughed, sharing a moment of fun.

  “There are forces dangerous to everyone. The skinwalkers don’t care about them, but those bastards are in the way.” Lena chuckled, the corners of her lips pulled back to her ears, giving her a maniacal look. “I don’t mind them flipping the bird, if you get my drift.”

  “Not that strong on the modern jargon,” Martyshkina admitted.

  “Ugh. Go visit the Net or something, you old fossil,” Lena said. “Anyway, it isn’t relevant. My attempt to save you is their way of rewarding you.”

  “Wait!” Martyshkina cried. “Will I… will I see you again, Lena?”

  “Already said, I am not her.”

  “As if I care!”

  “Stubborn fool. No idea,” Lena admitted. “It didn’t give me this much information. For the love of the Spirits, don’t you even think about approaching it ter and trying to reason with it. I don’t exist unless it wants me to. Enough distractions.” A heavy paw in the past gripped her neck, and the skinwalker dragged the barely conscious Martyshkina to her snout. “Listen to me. We don’t hate you. And you are so much stronger than you know, Mom. Hold on. The dawn is coming; don’t you dare give up.”

  “Never,” Martyshkina spat blood through her clenched fangs. “Sure, I had a few foibles, but I intend to live until death can catch up with me.”

  “That’s my mom.” Lena patted her. “I love you.”

  Despite the pain and agony of growing older and younger at irregur intervals, Martyshkina felt grateful to the Horde shaman. He had unwittingly given her an incredible gift. She remembered the faces of her cubs once more and burned their features into her memory, eagerly inhaling every scent she could while talking to Lena.