Shield and Crocus Read Free

saws, and ecstatic screams. The phantom noises mixed with the real shouts for help, tearful prayers to the gods, and the cracking, shifting, organtwisting sounds of the Spark wreaking havoc on reality.
    First Sentinel had seen hundreds of Spark-storms, but each time they froze him for a moment as a needle of fear stabbed into the back of his neck. The Spark-storms tore away the city bit by bit, replacing his home and neighbors with strangers and unfamiliar landmarks.
    The street was lined with dozens of new Spark-touched. The recently-transformed lay sprawled or run spasmodic in the streets, still in the throes of metamorphosis. An Ikanollo man banged his head against a wall, screaming in pain. With each blow, his head bloated and hardened, shifting into an armored shell with lacerated spikes. He slammed his head through the wall, still screaming. His voice dropped an octave, then another, until it was too low to be heard.
    First Sentinel had seen countless transformations, each stranger than the last, but they never got easier to watch. Each one reminded him of his first Spark-storm, the one that had changed his life and set him on the path of losing aria. But without the Spark, could I have saved her at all, or would I be widowed that much sooner, with no son to keep me from despair?
    The peoples’ threads raged like another storm, colored ties between brothers, lovers, and friends. Each person’s threads stretched from their heart to the emotion’s source. The street was filled with yellow threads of fear connecting citizens and their freshly-changed neighbors.
    He couldn’t see Blurred Fists’ telltale red haze of speed moving amidst the storm.
    The cobblestones of the street had become volcanic rock, uneven mounds of jagged stone with striations in red, grey, and brown.
    First Sentinel landed at the edge of the storm to start pulling people out. The Spark-touched man’s head had grown to three times its normal size, too heavy for First Sentinel to haul over his shoulder. Instead, the Shield held him around the middle and dragged his stone-crushing skull across the rough ground. First Sentinel winced in sympathetic pain as the man’s head skipped across the rocks, but the exoskeleton didn’t yield blood.
    The storm stopped after he’d plucked another dozen victims from the center. First Sentinel didn’t fear the Spark’s effects. He’d been touched once, and the Spark did not touch those it had already twisted.
    The Spark left a mangled neighborhood in its wake, lying dormant until the next storm. It could be that night, the following week, or a year later. Given the recent pattern, it’d be within a month.
    The district of Audec’s Bowels was under the control of the Smiling King, a madman who had appeared after the Senate fire and carved out a kingdom with his Spark-touched thralls.
    There would be no municipal assistance for this disaster or its victims. Instead, the Smiling King would send in his Spark-touched servants to claim their new comrades, cart them off and lock them in dank cages that they would soon call home. Once the Smiling King had his new pets, he let the horror of their change boil over into madness, until only he could soothe their pain, using his power over the Spark. Eventually, they all joined his “family.”
    First Sentinel had seen friends taken by the Spark and then found them across a battlefield, their faces familiar but distant, crazed.
    Once inducted into the Spark-touched family, they could not be deprogrammed. He’d tried everything, even had Ghost Hands bring him into their minds to talk through the pain. He’d spent a year visiting Red Vixen like that, until Ghost Hands forced him to step away and leave the former Shield with her madness.
    But this time, there would be no recruits. He’ll have to come through me to claim them. But he couldn’t shield them all, not from the Smiling King, and not from their neighbors.
    Always too many to save, and too few Shields for the