We Can’t Win, We Won’t Lose

As they waited for the crystals to dim, it felt like two thousand people were holding their breath.

Even the children picked up on the eerie atmosphere as their mothers kept them close, and when one of them asked why, the mother only stroked his hair and didn’t answer.

The women took Orin’s body to the washing room. Through the door, Ashen could hear them working: the slow splash of water, low murmuring, and every so often, Nessa’s voice cracking apart and somebody hushing her gently.

The warriors didn’t gather in the training grounds the way they usually did after a death, to drink and tell stories about the man they’d lost.

They sat alone or in pairs in the corridors, sharpening blades that were already sharp, checking straps that were already tight.

Nobody talked much.

Misty walked the length of the ward lines three times that afternoon, her palm brushing the stone walls as she went, her lips moving silently.

Every time she reached the end, she turned around and started over.

Ezra hung fresh charms over every doorway in the settlement. His hands were steady. His face wasn’t.

“This isn’t like the other times.”

Ashen glanced up.

One of the old warriors was sitting on a bench in the corridor outside the farm, an uncle who had been hunting above ground since before Ashen was born.

He was turning a whetstone over and over in his scarred hands without using it.

“We’ve buried a lot of brothers,” the old man went on, more to himself than anyone. “Too many. Every time, it hurts like hell, and every time, we bury them, drink, cry and get up the next morning.” He looked down at the whetstone. “But I’ve never seen the patriarch walk out of a room like that.”

Ashen inwardly agreed, but kept quiet.

Instead, he continued toward the tree, with the old man’s words following him.

He could feel it in his bones.

Something enormous had shifted beneath their feet. And until the patriarch spoke, nobody knew how far they were going to fall.

◉

Lapis found him under the tree an hour later.

She sat down beside him, leaned her shoulder against his, and laid her katana across her knees.

They sat like that for a long time.

“...Orin always called me the ‘little terror’,” she muttered eventually. “Since I was five. Even after I married you, he still called me that.”

This is a pirate copy — the real one is on NovelPhoenix.

“...”

“I hated it.”

“...”

Her shoulder trembled slightly against his.

Ashen didn’t say anything comforting.

He was staring at the farm with an expression Lapis had rarely seen on him, while Tend to My Husband was telling her things she didn’t like.

Beneath his calm face, something was rising. It had been quietly rising for six years, like magma beneath a mountain.

Every time he had put it to sleep, it had woken up a little bigger. And today, it had just been fed a brother’s corpse.

‘Here,’ Ashen thought. ‘It’s been here…’

‘Watching us… watching our kids and women…’

‘And now it has killed Orin.’

This time, he didn’t put it to sleep.

‘Grow… grow… keep growing…’

Ashen let the silent rage accumulate, saving it for the day it would finally find its target.

…and devour it whole.

◉◉◉

The council gathered when the crystals went amber.

It wasn’t like the meeting that afternoon. Nobody reached for the dates or joked about salt.

The decision-makers took their seats around the long table in silence, and every other adult in the tribe crowded into the hall behind them, along the walls, in the doorways, all the way out into the corridor, until there was no space left to stand.

Two thousand people, and you could have heard a pin drop.

Adam sat at the head of the table with Anastasia beside him. He had changed into a clean robe. His white hair was tied back. His face was calm.

He waited until the last of them had squeezed into the hall, then he spoke.

“Two hundred and fifty years ago, your mother and I were coming home from a hunt.”

The hall went utterly still.

“We were young. We’d gone farther than we should have, chasing a beast for its hide. We were on the ridge above the old tribe’s valley when we saw the light.” He paused. “We never saw what made it. We were too far away. All we saw was the light, and all we heard was the laughing. It went on for hours.”

Some of the older women had put their hands over their mouths.

“When it finally stopped, and we came down into the valley, there was no one left. Not one.”

There wasn’t a single tremor in his voice as he spoke of such a tragedy. He said it plainly, not even bothering to embellish it.

“We never told any of you this.” Adam looked out over the hall. “Some of that was so you wouldn’t live with that fear every day. But most of it was because some things are dangerous to know.”

“We didn’t want to give it a thread to follow back to us.” He looked down at his hands on the table.

“Turns out it never needed one.”

“...”

“So what do we do?” someone asked from the back of the hall. Their voice cracked halfway through.

Adam lifted his head.

“We can’t win,” he said simply. “Your mother and I saw what it did to a tribe ten times bigger than ours. If we stand and fight, we all die.”

Faces paled, but hope wasn’t extinguished. As long as their patriarch stood before them like a pillar holding up the heavens, it never would be.

“Since winning is impossible, we aren’t going to fight to win.”

“In the first place, humanity’s struggle has never been about winning.” His eyes moved slowly across the hall. “That’s right. Even if victory is beyond our reach, we still don’t have to lose.”

“And as long as there are survivors, we haven’t lost.”

“So we will fight for survival.”

His gaze swept over all of them.

The warriors standing along the walls. The women holding their children. The elders. Ezra. Bram and Rune. Misty, half hidden behind Vera’s shoulder. Cain, standing alone by the door with his arms wrapped around himself. Lapis.

And finally, Ashen.

“Every warrior at the Second Step will come with me,” Adam said. “We’ll go out to meet it, and we’ll hold it for as long as we can. Every hour we buy is another hour for the rest of you to run.” His voice didn’t waver. “Take whatever you can carry. Head south. And don’t look back.”

The silence in the hall was crushing.

“Husband—”

Anastasia’s voice was barely a whisper.

“I’ve decided, Anastasia.”

She looked at him for a long moment. Then she closed her mouth and slowly lowered her head.

Adam turned to his son.

He stood, walked around the end of the long table, and stopped in front of Ashen, under every pair of eyes in the hall.

“And if I don’t come back,” he said, his voice steady as stone, “then from this day forward…”

He placed his hand on his son’s shoulder.

“…Ashen Hunt will be the head of this tribe.”