"HOLD!" I called, bringing the glaive up like a standard.

The fighting doesn't stop immediately, but there is a noticeable downtick in intensity. I carry on, keeping my voice at a volume that no human could manage without shouting.

"We have you surrounded, outnumbered and at a disadvantage. Surrender."

My voice managed to carry somewhat over the clamour of the battle, and at last the fighting slowed to something like a halt. Both sides took advantage of the pause to draw back and regroup, as much as they could. I carried on, hammering home my point.

"You are surrounded on three sides and face enemies with superhuman abilities. You have no reason to keep fighting. Lay down your arms and you will not come to harm. Continue fighting and I cannot guarantee anything."

I punctuated the last word by slamming the butt of the glaive into the cobbled ground. In the quiet, the cracking of the stone was audible. Shock and awe. An efficient means of demonstrating power.

It certainly seemed to have an effect. What I could see of the faces beneath the enemies' helms was pasty and drawn. Fear responses. De-escalation was necessary before someone did something reckless.

I held out my empty hand, palm up, as though offering a handhold. Some part of me quailed at the arrogance of the thing, standing in front of a force of armed men and behaving like I was some kind of saviour, the part that still felt like one of the nameless billions on earth. That part was kept silent by the weight of necessity that was the Executive.

"Better to live than die on a sword for coin you won't spend," I began. I paused as a man thrust his way out of the crowd with the kite shield on his arm. His sword was still unsheathed, but he held it loosely, pointing down towards the ground. The plume on his helmet announced him as one of the captains on the other side.

With the lack of direct conflict, the Executive began, slowly, to retreat, just a little. I wasn't sure whether to be grateful to to grab for its certainty of purpose and resolve.

Alright, you can stop jamming yer point home with a warhammer," the captain drawled in an accent I'd come to associate with Surdans. It was vaguely American, or perhaps Canadian. I'd never really travelled that much on Earth. Or here, for that matter. "What I wanna know is, what'll happen to us after we down arms? Sure, we fight for coin and so do these buggers," He gestured with his sword towards the people who stood behind me "But you can't say we'll all sit down together and drink to this tomorrow night. How do I know I won't have me throat slit in me bed tomorrow, next week, the week after, by some bugger whose buddy's arm I've broken, or whose head my men have taken?"

He looked up at me, and I could see the curve of his lip.

"I don't know if you're the ghost of the city, the mountain or some wraith the tribes cooked up to scare us, but unless you can assure me that I'll be safe if I put down good old Blooddrinker I might as well go to Angvard with her to keep me company."

"And what would be the point of that?" I rejoined. "Maybe you're happy to go meet your ancestors, but what about the men behind you? Are they willing to die with you? You're a leader. Therefore, your duty is to do your best for your followers. I'll give my word that I'll do my best to keep you safe, but I'm no god." I could be. "I won't haunt myself with impossible promises. I will do my best, though, and my best is quite good." On the last words, I let a trace of amusement slip into my tone in place of a smile that I couldn't form.

It worked, thankfully.

The sword was sheathed, albeit grudgingly, and the nameless captain unbuckled his scabbard to place it on the ground.

XxXxXxXxX

When dawn came, it shone down upon a city that had seen better days.

The fighting was over. After the surrender of the largest group, the few knots of enemies which we had been unable to herd in had given up quickly. Their weapons had been taken, indexed and stored by the Legionnaires and the Ants I had called up out of the catacombs. The secret was well and truly out of the bag, after all. I made sure to make as powerful an impression as I could.

The men - and the occasional women, although they were far scarcer - who had fought against us were marched back to the barracks and dormitories their companies had laid claim to and 'asked' politely to remain there.

There were still scars, though. On the city and on the people. Wounds bled, staunched by the few healers and chirurgeons that could be found on either side where they could be. Herds of terrified cattle had fled the city. It would be the work of days to round them up again. It would be the work of weeks, if not months, to repair the damage of the fires and the looting if I didn't put the Weavers to work helping. Other things will never be fixed or returned to how they were. Singular, prized possessions, meaningless to any but their holders. Innocence. Lives.

Like Heskel.

He wasn't dead. I thanked whatever powers there might be for that, even as I cursed them for what they had done to him. A leg, crushed beyond repair. Burns that I might have called third-degree had I known what the term meant beyond TV shows. He was still alive, though. I had never been a religious person - the closest I'd ever got was agnosticism - but I was thankful for that at least.

The Muninn found him. He was lying half-buried beneath the rubble of a house which had fallen when one of its supporting beams had burnt halfway through. He must have been running in the street, for whatever reason. The only reason he was recognisable from the air was the fact that he had - somehow - managed to fall face-up.

A small swarm of Ants and Weavers had extricated him, and by the time they had finished getting him out and putting together a rudimentary stretcher to lay him on I had bullied one of the couple dozen healers that made the city their home into looking him over. The pronouncement hadn't been good. The burns were isolated to the left arm and side of the torso and apparently were better than I had thought them to be at first. They would scar, the healer said, and would need careful tending, but so long as they didn't get infected they would be fine.

The leg was another matter.

It had been caught under a large block of masonry when the house had collapsed, which had crushed the bone to splinters. The knee was a wrecked knob of flesh, deformed, while the lower leg was disgustingly flattened, as if someone had taken a rolling pin to it. His foot was likewise squashed, unnaturally compressed.

The healer, a grizzled, dour man who looked more my idea of an old soldier than a doctor, had declared that it was beyond help unless I had an elf on call to heal it and recommended that it be amputated just above the knee as soon as possible and the stump cauterized. He had then given me a blunt "Condolences," recommended a half-dozen salves for the burns – all of which I had carefully committed to my memory banks and promptly set an Ant to gather - and stumped off.

That was how Reene and Will found me the next morning, watching as a Weaver carefully applied a generous layer of a yellow-white paste to the bared side of Heskel's torso, his arm already thoroughly slathered in it. I had continued to somewhat absent-mindedly administrate the recovery efforts, but my attention had been focused on my injured... friend? Employee? Exasperating little-brother-substitute? I didn't really know.

He rasped when he breathed. It was a horrible sound. I took comfort in the fact the he was still breathing, though. I thanked my lucky stars that my chemistry teacher had been easily persuaded into tangents and had, on one occasion, given a ten-minute talk on the chemical structure of morphine. I had had a Weaver fabricate a litre or so of it, and was trying to recall if I knew anything about an appropriate dosage. If I couldn't remember anything, I wouldn't use it. I didn't want anything to do with an overdose. Better pain than that.

"Alexander?"

The voice was quiet, devoid of either the natural sensuousness or ironic undercurrent I had come to associate with it, but it was unmistakably Reene's. As I turned, I suddenly realised that I had never told her that I was an automaton as well, had never removed the talisman around her. I regretted that as well.

I shouldn't have gotten so used to lying.

"Yes," I replied. I sounded tired even to myself, despite the fact that I physically couldn't be. She looked as tired ass I sounded, with bruised bags sagging beneath her eyes. Her shoulders were slumped, utterly unlike her usual stance. Will was standing behind her, almost hiding.

He is hiding, I realised, From me.

"I'm still me," I assured the pair, and myself. "I've... been like this for as long as you've known me. All that's changed is how I look." I raised a hand up to the dead talisman and pulled it out to show. "A spirit gave this the power to make me look human." I trailed off pathetically as Reene raised a hand, a hint of her old imperiousness shining through.

"I don't care about that at the moment," she retorted. "You can finish explaining later. What happened to Heskel?"

Haltingly, I explained the story, the diagnosis and the predictions that the healer had made. All the while, I was painfully conscious of Will and how... broken he looked, staring down at the still body of his elder brother – I didn't know whether they were actually brothers or whether they'd adopted each other. It didn't really matter in any case. They were as close as brothers, and so help me I loved them both. Will reminded me of my younger brother from Earth and Heskel was more like an old friend of mine from school, one whom I'd grown up with. It hurt, to be reminded of them.

I reached the end of my explanation. The silence stretched painfully. Finally, Will spoke up.

"You're magic, aren't you? Can't you help him?"

I was about to say no, I can't, that's not how my magic works, the best I can do is to make him a prosthetic for the leg, but then I stopped. An idea had come to me.

Prosthetics would be easy for me, so why couldn't I take it a step further? Cybernetics, of a sort, already existed back on Earth. Pacemakers, experimental limbs that responded to impulses in the brain. There were still large amounts of the archives from the Ambition that had yet to be decoded, but I distinctly remembered the elfin figures in some of the pictures which had been recovered sporting obviously non-biological modifications and augmentations. Granted, I didn't know if those were created through my kind of magic or something more similar to what the elves did to themselves in the books, but why couldn't I do the same?

My mind whirled with thoughts, ideas, plans. It would be hard. It would need time, time to research and time to build. I would need better resources. Magicians in case of rejection and for the sake of healing. This wasn't just whipping up a new automaton by combining preexisting designs. This would be a thousand times more difficult, combining arcanoengineering with biology. It was the kind of thing that scientists on Earth had been trying to accomplish for years.

I looked down at Heskel, pale and broken on his stretcher.

I would succeed. I wasn't human, not any more, and I could do so much more than a human. I had access to magic, real magic. What I was had been revealed to the city, so I had no more reason to hold back for the sake of subtlety.

I looked down at Will.

"I can help. I will."

XxXxXxXxX

And we're done. I sincerely apologize for the wait. I had thought I had posted this chapter ages ago but no, that was just me being stupid. This is the end of this fic, however. I may or may not write a sequel in the future (tentatively entitled The Winter of Our Discontent) but if I do it won't be for a while.

I do have a request to make, however. My wonderful beta reader/idea bouncer/person-who-verbally-slaps-me-around-the-head-when-I'm-being-stupid, Omnimessiah , is no longer really able to serve in that position, as he's a bit snowed in with work at the moment. Accordingly, as I'm entirely unwilling to go into my next major project without someone to help me/stop me from tumbling gown the slope of fanfiction madness, I'm putting out a call for someone to help me in that respect.

It would probably be better if whoever it is lives within a couple timezones of London, for ease of coordination. At least basic knowledge of the RPG Exalted would be good as well. I like to bounce ideas back and forth when possible, so the quicker and easier the form of communication you're willing to use the better. Voice chat of some description would be ideal, but I'm more than happy with instant messaging programs like Messenger or Skype, and PMs would work if that's all you're comfortable with.

If anyone's interested, send me a PM.

It's been a great ride but, in the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, that's all, folks!