Page 195 of Knot Their Soldier: Part Three

A group of Alphas near the gate is cheering loudly, their voices cracked raw, while ten feet away a woman drops to her knees beside a body laid out under one of the many, many bloodstained blankets.

A Beta soldier laughs hysterically, then folds in half and covers their face with a heartbreaking sob.

Medics weave through the crowd with stretchers and somber expressions.

Others clutch one another and stare down the road as if they still expect the army to come pouring back up it at any moment.

Victory, it turns out, is messy.

It feels wrong to call this a celebration, and yet that is what it is. The survivors of Blackgate are mourning their dead and celebrating the fact that they themselves are not among them. That we survived and achieved our objective. We completed our mission, and because of that, our kind gets to survive.

For how long, we don't know. But I have a strong sense that my Command, in its true and full-powered form, will be enough to turn the enemy army around.

It might not keep them away forever, but for now, the war between Demi-humans and Humans that has raged for decades upon decades has ended.

I watch one of the younger soldiers, still bloody from battle, stumble into the arms of an older Beta woman who must be his mother, his aunt, or someone who loves him. She grabs his face with both hands and kisses his forehead like he is still a child.

I blink and stare.

It never occurred to me that there were families here at Blackgate, but of course there are. It makes sense that they followed General Stone here because it meant outlasting not just the enemy, but the torment of Fathim's broken system. It meant they got to keep the people they love close and safe.

I look out over the people of Blackgate, seeing them in a different light, and for the first time I don't see them as part of the rebellion in some abstract sense. They're not just nameless faces filling a fortress, but people with love and lives of their own.

I have never felt so selfish in my life.

For so long, my world narrowed down to the next crisis, the next threat, the next brutal demand of whatever fate had in mind for me. I was always moving toward something, or simply trying to survive life.

Now that I have, I find myself wanting something I haven't had room for since I left the Omega Division.

I want to know these people. I want to learn who belongs to who, who built a life here in the middle of a war, and went to fight for it because it was worth defending. After everything we have endured together, they don't feel distant anymore.

They feel like my people now, and the possibility of making a home right here at Blackgate doesn't seem impossible now that I'm not looking past it toward some larger destiny.

Despite my internal revelation, I don't know what the future holds yet. We're all still in that post-battle, mid-healing, still-shocked phase.

Thankfully, nobody comes up to the steps to ask us questions, because I certainly don't have the ability to provide answers right now.

A few acknowledge us as they pass.

A wounded soldier presses a fist to his chest in salute. One of the medics pauses and dips his head toward us before hurrying on. A woman with dried blood on her pants looks straight at me, then at the men gathered around me, and her expression goes soft with relief instead of wary.

Some of them glance our way with wide, almost reverent expressions before lowering their eyes again.

Others hold those stares longer, as if they are trying to match what they saw on the battlefield to the shattered five-person heap we make now.

I cannot blame them. Pack Scorch does not look especially mythic from where we sit. We look filthy, half-conscious, and one strong breeze away from collapsing.

Yet, we did, in fact, do some mythic-level frackery.

Omega magic happened.

I'm sure Shade and Everlyn will spend many, many hours explaining the scientific reason my Omega Command worked in such a vast and devastating way. But I simply don't care at the moment.

All that matters is that it worked.

That the trust everyone put in me was worth it.

Blackgate is still standing, and Blackreach is safe. Dazz, Ember, and Flicker are safe from the Humans, wherever they are.