In the dead of night, Mount Casca was shrouded in darkness. But the Cockatrice couldn’t have made it far. Drawing some more light from Lienna, Ennanis gathered it in her fingers and sent it flying in a single point.

But this time, instead of the pulsing warmth of a communication charm connecting with a fellow angel, Ennanis was struck a wall of coldness.

Eight years of fighting, but the Cockatrice had never quite learnt how to properly deflect a communication charm. Though the charm hadn’t connected, it had given Ennanis a hint on the Beast’s current position. Stretching her mostly-mended wings, Ennanis zipped for where she had felt the cold hit. But as the landscape faded from grassy to barren with the rising altitude, she soon stalled in place, frowning.

Her senses had told her that the Cockatrice should be around here. However, she had combed the area and come up empty. There were no trees or caves where she could have hidden in, not even the barest sedge of grass.

An unpleasant shiver ran down her spine, and not from the temperature. Carefully, she descended upon a slope. She extinguished Lienna. And then—

Cold.

Not like the cold of the undercloud winds, or the bristle she’d felt pinpointing the Cockatrice, but a glacial stab that pierced straight through Ennanis’ bones.

She choked—gasped, for she felt like she was drowning. She had just plunged head-first into an icy river in the dead of winter and she was drowning. Each throb of her heart ached, the breaths siphoned from her lungs, a frigid glove that hugged her skeleton in shattering embrace-

And then the moment lifted, and both sensation and wind slammed into Ennanis so suddenly she didn’t have the strength to counter it—falling in a bruising heap.

Hoisting herself up, the angel stood shakily. She placed her numb hand on the smooth mountainface in front of her. Her thoughts raced: the tunnel. The underground cavern. The wall collapsing to reveal the storm of beetles…

“There’s no way,” she murmured in disbelief.

Just then, her mind exploded with frantic shouts. Ennanis clutched her head. Through the communication charm, several Brigadiers were trying to report at once, their words overlapping:

“Commander, the west squadrons are under attack.”

“A troop of unicorns made it past the first line on the east side, there’s still more-”

“The cadets need Soleki, they aren’t holding up!”

Ennanis gritted her teeth. Spinning about, she launched herself into the air, hurtling for the first peak where she could sense the gold spots flickering, several blinking out of existence. Like a pink-gold missile, the angel blurred up ridges, swooped over cliffs, and dove between valleys.

But it didn’t matter how fast she flew. She was already too late.

She arrived at the third peak of Mount Casca, for a total of six levels of elevation before the summit. It was a disastrous sight. Ennanis took watch of lowest peaks for herself, and she rarely ever let Beasts get up even to the second peak. Yet the platoon here had already been utterly decimated. Everywhere angels curled up in shivering balls, more still who laid crumpled.

How had they gotten past her? She hadn’t seen the Beasts on the way up at all.

One of the reports in her head answered her question:

“Beasts are coming out from within the mountain.”

Indeed, the normally unmarred mountainface now sported two gaping cavities: tunnels that led into the darkness. One lieutenant appeared to be trying to drag bodies into the shelter of one of them, but as they deposited one last corpse, they sank to their knees and moved no more.

Other survivors had likely already retreated to higher peaks. Ennanis rose on her wings, ready to head there, but a tug on her boot stopped her in her tracks. She looked down.

A ghastly face stared back at her. Ashy purple skin was almost see-through, stretched over his cheekbones. His uniform was in tatters, bearing a large rip through his insignia of single-lobed paired wings, his blue ribbon unspooled. Ennanis watched as patches of skin sloughed off from the Brigadier’s hand where he gripped her ankle. She attempted to shake him off, but still he didn’t let go.

“It’s cold… it’s so cold…” his speech was slurred, his pupils no longer slitted but wide and dilated. Wildly, he flailed his other hand up in the direction of Lienna’s glow. “Help me, Commander…”

Ennanis stared him down. “...You’ve withered, from prolonged lack of Soleki. There’s no way you can recover,” she monotoned.

​​Soleki was the sun’s magic, that all angels were intertwined with. When the sun was up, they could draw on it infinitely. However, this vanished together with the setting of the sun at night. If an angel continued to deplete their internal Soleki reserve—most actions did, fighting, flying, walking, even breathing—once it reached zero, an angel would undergo a terrible process called withering. That, more than anything, was what made being in the Graveyard Division so dangerous.

“Help me… help me…” the Brigadier pleaded. Suddenly, he let go on his own. Hunching over, he hacked violently, coughing up a puddle of blood and bile.

Ennanis knelt down and grabbed both his hands. The Brigadier seemed to understand the look in her eyes. He began to shake his head frantically, blubbering as blood continued to drip down his chin.

“No, please, I don’t wanna… Don’t wanna die…”

Ennanis said no words of consolation; she said nothing at all. She just slid her hand around to the back of the angel’s forearms and unclasped the gold armbraces that encircled them. Her fingers tapped where his lifeline beat. Two quick shots of gold to the wrists, and then the dim gold spot in Ennanis’ mind faded to the same blackness of the night sky.

Relinquishing him, she stood up, stepping away from the pool of blood. Her face was eerily calm, betraying no sign of panic or grief. The other angels withering away at the tunnel’s mouth watched her expectantly, waiting their turn.

But the commander simply turned her back on them and took flight.

A single night in the Graveyard Division was enough to break an angel. But perhaps for Ennanis, the angel without a heart, there was no job better suited to her. Thus she had survived this nightmare, night after night, for eight long years.

At the fourth peak, the situation was not much better. But she found and gathered more survivors, who reported things along the same lines: that Beasts had apparently come bursting out from concealed tunnels across the mountainface.

“But that’s impossible.” Tunnel systems were rare, though not unheard of in the softer soil of the foothills. But further up, the inside of the mountain was made of solid rock. Neither shovel nor claw could make a chink in it, and if the moon’s Lunaki had been capable of drilling through rock, the Beasts would’ve done it a long time ago—and the angels would have noticed the sounds. Yet, as impossible as it was in theory, there was no denying what had just happened.

There was no time to ponder the hows. Glancing up at the gold spots in her mind’s eye, Ennanis began to deliver commands through the communication charm, rearranging the troops to tighten their defence. Then, she asked the lieutenant standing by her: “Has the Cockatrice used her Eye yet?”

“Not as of our reports, Commander,” the lieutenant shook his head.

“Alright.”

“What will you do, Commander?” the lieutenant asked, watching curiously as Ennanis spread her wings.

The commander did not reply. She merely turned and went on flying, face hardened.

~~~

Things started to go downhill as soon as Ennanis was a little way from the fifth peak—the last peak before the Angel Kingdom on the sixth. First it was flocks of harpies and griffons, who screeched as she ripped through them with Lienna. The aforementioned troops of unicorns came charging at her, their crooked horns swirling with moon-silver. Worse, as there was a greater number of angels congregated at fourth peak, they were all unconsciously absorbing Soleki from Lienna. Lienna’s glow was diminishing; Ennanis had not much left to use.

And the Cockatrice was still nowhere to be seen.

It was just then that she felt it again: that overwhelming sense of cold she had felt earlier.

She whipped her head around. It seemed to be coming from within the mountain.

If Ennanis focused her senses… she felt as though she could trace the hazy, sinuous outline of a shadow, lurking inside the rock.

Another explosion burst from the mountainface, and a herd of minotaurs came stampeding out in the dust. There was no doubt something in there. But just when Ennanis lifted on her wings to go get a look, the gurgling crow of a rooster reached her ears.

Cockadoodle-doooooo!

She paused, gold eyes snapping from the shadow to glance at the northern face of the peak, where the sound had come from. It was unmistakable, what that sound was. It was a battlecry—the unique battlecry of a specific Beast.

Ennanis was there in a flash.

She was there, as predicted. She rode atop a winged lion—a pixiu—the train of her black dress flapping in the howling winds. The lick of red feathers that stuck out from the top of her mask, mimicking a chicken’s comb, was also rustling wildly along with her tail. The entire ensemble should’ve looked ridiculous, befitting a clown more than a warrior. But the Cockatrice had done far more than enough for the costume to be no longer laughed at.

There was no doubt about who she really was—that, there, was the right-hand woman of the Moon Queen.

The Princess of Beasts herself.

From the air, the Princess gazed contemptuously down upon the crowd of angels that had been cornered here by the Beasts from all around the fifth peak, seeming to revel in their cowering, shivering looks. Lazily, she lifted her gloved hand to her face, her nail catching under the edge of her beaked mask—

“Stop!” Ennanis yelled. Her voice was snatched by the wind, but still the Cockatrice jerked, head turning to look at her. A smile formed under the mask.

“You’re just in time, Commander!” the Beast delighted. “Did you enjoy my surprise?”