text: The Liona Stronghold disintegrated, like a body covered in lye.
  
  Kirana sat at the head of her army, gaze fixed on Navaa, or Isoail, whatever she called herself here. She was not as powerful as Kirana had hoped, but it was enough to turn the tide. The wall fell, a body devoid of bones, skin sloughing away. The plants that held it together sizzled. The stones flowed like water, melting. And then there was the screaming.
  
  Kirana had heard worse screaming. A woman stood on the wall, many women, yes, but Kirana remembered one women, standing firm on the parapet, screaming at their parajistas while Navaa cut through their defenses like some horrifying specter.
  
  All they loved, all they hoped for, all they wanted, dead in a few hours.
  
  The steaming wreck of the wall littered the pass, a great morass of stone and blazing plant matter.
  
  Kirana did not leap across it. She waited for her advance troops to go first, picking their way among the wreckage. Then she patted her bear over. Her weapon unfurled from her wrist. She kept it out as they crept across the stone barrier that had held back the people of Dorinah for five hundred years. Navaa went first, prodded along by Kirana's loyal parajistas. Kirana kept a watch on her, looking for any sign of her turning. But what loyalty did this dajian have, to a country she had never known? None.
  
  They trundled to the other side, passing body after body. Kirana saw mangled limbs. Grasping hands. Tattered clothing. She saw the remains of paintings and rugs and barrels and any number of things, and for a moment she lamented the waste. Surely they could have salvaged something from the destruction?
  
  It was then that she saw the force waiting for them on the other side. At least four hundred militia and several hundred more support staff wielding sticks and stones rushed across the blasted wall to meet her.
  
  Kirana had not expected so many to rally behind the wall, and certainly did not anticipate so many would stay once it was clear there would be no victory for them here.
  
  It took another two hours to crush and scatter that force, which proved remarkably relentless for a bunch of pacifists.
  
  Kirana dispatched a dozen of them herself, splattering more blood across her boots, feeding her hungry armor. When they were dispatched, Madah rode up beside her, so very young and strangely jolly.
  
  "What do you see?" Kirana asked, because sometimes she could not trust her own sense of things.
  
  "I see victory," Madah said, and Kirana looked at the destruction anew, now from Madah's eyes, and she saw a clear way across the rubble. They would move through the towering trees on the other side and make their passage into Dhai, then to Kuallina, and further on, to the temples, their ultimate goal, a goal her people had been struggling to reach for thousands of years, the goal that would be hers, the one all the history books would assign to her. She took a deep breath, pulling in the scent of the stone dust, the pulped plant matter. This was her achievement. This was her legacy.
  
  They broke out across the wreck of Liona and into the clearing beyond. Kirana saw refugees running from the destruction, people caught outside the fall of the wall, or those who were camping outside it. Shrieks. Calls for mercy. Nothing she had not heard before. But as her bear trundled into the clearing, she pulled it to a halt and watched them, really watched them for the first time. She had sent many to kill these people in her stead. She had ships in their harbor, ships that had obliterated their defenses there. But here she saw them. Really saw them.
  
  Her people.
  
  Kirana frowned. Her weapon began to retreat into her wrist, a bonsa branch that had lost its will. She curled her fingers, coaxing it back to life, and it extended. She gripped it tightly. Not her people, no. Pacifists. Cannibals. Fools. Every one of them.
  
  "Pursue them," she barked at Madah.
  
  "Yes, Kai."
  
  Madah called to the squad behind her, and six dozen Tai Mora, weapons raised, galloped after the fleeing Dhai.
  
  Kirana curled a lip in disgust. To come so far and lose her stomach now would be a tragedy. She snarled and raised her own weapon. Slapped her bear forward. She pursued Madah and her squad.
  
  She cut down the fleeing Dhai. Great slashing hacks. A young man with a crooked nose. A grandmother carrying a small child. Three adolescents hardly old enough to fuck. She sliced them down, yanking them from the world like hunks of rice.
  
  Kirana caught up to Madah's forces. Bodies littered the long plain from Liona to the woods. Bunches of floxflass collected around their bears' paws.
  
  "Walking trees out there," Madah said. "Waiting for them to pass."
  
  "How many escaped?"
  
  "We got all we could see."
  
  Kirana stared back at the ruin of the wall. "Hold here in case any more escape the wreckage," she said. "I need to wait on intelligence."
  
  "Yes, Kai," Madah said, and Kirana adored what she saw in her face – the fierceness, the absolute certainty. There was more certainty in that face than Kirana had felt in twenty years. She thought again of Yisaoh, and her heart ached. Would this all be worth it without Yisaoh?
  
  Kirana shook the thought from her head and paced back to the bulk of her force as they streamed over the wall that had once been Liona. They were stabbing at the rubble, dispatching those who had survived the fall.
  
  She called one of her lieutenants, and had him open a wink to Gaiso, at the outskirts of Dorinah.
  
  "We're in Dhai," Kirana said.
  
  "We arrived in Daorian just ahead of those fourth world travelers," Gaiso said. "The Empress is hardened against us. She has some kind of… I don't know what she has up around this wall. It's like nothing I've seen."
  
  "Hold there. We may be able to take the temples soon."
  
  "Timeline?"
  
  "Uncertain. I'm getting reports that Honorin's force at the harbor is pushing the remaining resistance to Kuallina. If we can break them at Kuallina, we have them."
  
  "Without the rice fields in Dorinah–"
  
  "I rely on you for that."
  
  "I can take Dorinah, but without the dajians to farm this land, we've got very little to keep us going past the fall. You know that."
  
  "I rely on your resourcefulness."
  
  "Kai, I–"
  
  "There are a good number of people in Dorinah," Kirana said. "Put them to good use."
  
  Gaiso smacked her lips. "The Dorinahs won't make good slaves."
  
  "When the alternative is death, you'd be surprised at who chooses slavery," Kirana said. "They will submit."
  
  Gaiso pursed her mouth. Kirana didn't like that look. "Kai, the logistics of this–"
  
  "When have the logistics been possible?" Kirana said. "Yet here we are. We are almost there, Gaiso. I close these gates–"
  
  "We're still missing the instructions–"
  
  "The temple will know me. It will speak to me. Have a heart, Gaiso."
  
  Gaiso nodded. Curtly. Kirana flexed her left fist. They were committed. Gaiso would push to the end. They all would, the ones who had come this far. One did not destroy millions only to give up with the final twenty thousand already in the noose.
  
  "Chin up, Gaiso. You'll get your children over. I have them on the list."
  
  "When, Kai?"
  
  "When we have them." She would have found and killed Gaiso's children before she found Yisaoh, she knew. But that was how it went. Gaiso's children would still be in clan Garika, ripe for picking on the way to Kuallina.
  
  Kirana severed the connection and galloped about the ruins with the others, running through any Dhai still living. When it was done, she called back through to Shova on the other side, and told him to try pushing through another wave of their people.
  
  She sat on a giant boulder inside the ruin where she had a clear view of the wink while they tried to send in another wave. Eighteen more of her people were able to get through. Eighteen! How many had they eliminated in this foray, to get that eighteen?
  
  It frustrated her that there was no clear analog between her people and the ones they killed. Sometimes the ones they killed had doubles in her world, and sometimes they did not. That meant some of her people couldn't get through, but many could. It was a stupid cosmic rule. She felt, often, as if Oma were making fun of her and her people, or perhaps making fun of the Dhai here. Who knew? But it was deplorable. Disgusting.
  
  She made camp and settled in, but could not sleep. The killing gave her nightmares. The smell of the stone dust clogged her nostrils. When she closed her eyes, she saw Navaa looking at her with accusing eyes, so black. So cold. She was tired of the cold.
  
  She closed her eyes.
  
  Saw Yisaoh's face.
  
  She woke to a voice at the door to her tent. "Enter," she said, without being absolutely certain who had knocked.
  
  A young woman stood in front of her, a hunched, awkward looking thing, with scars on her face, as if she'd been stabbed with a sharp implement. She listed to one side, as if her left leg could not properly hold her weight.
  
  Kirana feared sounding foolish, so didn't ask her name. "What?"
  
  "You've made a terrible mistake," the girl said.
  
  "Is that so?"
  
  "I will meet you in Kuallina. We must speak. This destruction had gone on long enough."
  
  "The destruction is just starting," Kirana said. "We must burn to start over. I've told all of you this many times. Who are you?"
  
  "You'll know," the girl said. "You'll know in Kuallina."
  
  Kirana felt dizzy. She staggered. When she looked up, the girl was gone. She huffed out a breath. Yelled for the guards. They ran in, oblivious. She asked if anyone had been past them, and they looked at her as if she were mad.
  
  But she knew she wasn't mad. It was the sky that was mad, and it was doing mad things to them. Everything was breaking apart: the worlds, the seams between them, the distances between people and places, even time itself, all muddled and distorted.
  
  I'm dreaming of the Dhai, she thought, and they are dreaming of me. But those dreams will be true, soon. So very soon.
  
  Kuallina. They would smash the Dhai at Kuallina.