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A thousand years ago, when the hosts knew they could no longer remain on the material plane, they forged hundreds of thousands of tokens imbued with angelic power as a gift to humanity.

Some granted the bearer strength, others agility, others great feats of mental acuity.

In this moment, Kat owed the hosts many prayers of thanks that at the Forging, they saw fit to create healing tokens.

What would have been months of recovery time was cut down to the span of an afternoon under a well-cultivated healer, and the Telrusian legions had drafted every single one of them they could muster over the course of the campaign.

But a single Health of Angels token stamped with healing power was one thing.

Deadening the pain that was part of the process was another kind of token entirely—and a Balm of Angels token wasn’t necessary to wear the striped red sash of the legions’ healers.

Some were fortunate enough to have both tokens in their lineage.

Of those, a handful could attune to both at once, their attentions cultivated into a potent mix of relief and restoration.

Kat had not scored one of those lucky few.

The only comfort she had to offset the pain was a strip of leather lodged between her teeth as she sat on a bench in the med tent with a healer running one hand over her back, the other clutching their token.

Kat’s body had racked up its fair share of scarring over her time at the front, and she’d had the misfortune of having her bones reset a few times before, but never so many at once.

She’d asked the healer not to tell her the total. She knew it was worse counting down.

It was also worse when your entire decade was packed in the med tent with you, but that couldn’t be avoided.

It was more efficient—always the bottom line when it came to orders from the high command—to have all non-dire injuries seen to in a batch, and so Kat was seated side by side with the rest of the spear line, gritting through the pain as Sawyer leaned over her to wave his hand and get Brandt’s attention.

“You gonna tell the nice doctor how you hurt your head?” Sawyer simpered.

Brandt huffed. “I’m gonna tell Mira, is who I’m gonna tell. That asshole in the second decade needs to get written up. She’s had it out for me for a year. ”

“He knocked his skull on a spear during a changeover,” Sawyer explained to the healer with a barely restrained grin. On the bench across from them, Carrick snorted.

Kat knew she should probably be trying to keep her spears in line, but then she’d have to roll the bones on whether she could manage spitting out the leather strap, making her point, and getting it back in before she cracked a tooth.

Brandt’s battle partner could have helped, but Javi was pointedly ignoring his spearbearer’s bluster.

As usual, he had his nose buried in a battered book that looked to be held together by nothing but valiant stitching and a whole lot of hope as another healer ran a diagnostic hand up and down his shield arm.

Kat tuned out Sawyer’s razzing, trying to pick out the title.

It was easier than looking to Javi’s left, where Emory was bent double under the ministrations of yet another healer who hadn’t lucked into a token that could absorb the incredible amount of pain it’d take to set him to rights. He, too, had leather in his teeth.

He whimpered around it, and Kat swore the temperature in the tent ticked up a couple degrees.

“So what I heard,” Carrick muttered to Elise, the other shieldbearer barely bothering to lean in, “is that the whole thing was a setup. Even if the Demon Lord was close to alchemizing antigold, marching on the citadel made no sense. We never could have taken it—we were meat under a pestle. Or…metaphor, metaphor—”

“Bait,” Giselle piped up from the far end of the spear bench.

Carrick pointed to her. “Bait. Because the real strategy all along was to send in those Aureans.”

“Those weren’t Aureans,” Brandt interjected.

“You got hit in the head, what do you know?” Sawyer sniped, and Kat yelped around her gag as Brandt knocked into her trying to take a swipe at him. Fortunately Brandt’s injuries did more to subdue him than any of the healers could, and he dropped back to the bench clutching his forehead.

“Easy,” Ziva said, elbowing Sawyer from his other side. “If they were Aureans, how come we’ve never seen anything like them before? You’d think high command would use assets like that if they had them.”

“They were gold. They were glowing,” Sawyer countered, counting on his fingers. “They were just doing it a lot brighter than anyone we’ve ever seen. ’Sides, what else would they be?”

“The hosts themselves,” Giselle’s battle partner, Gage, offered from the end of the shield line.

It sounded outrageous in their low, tremulous voice, but the kind of outrageous that felt just shy of right.

Who but the hosts themselves could kill the Demon Lord and crumble the Mouth of Hell?

Maybe the Seal of Heaven had finally broken after a thousand years, and divine mercy once again shone on Telrus.

Maybe they’d entered the promised age at last—one where Aurean might was no longer the only thing capable of standing against the forces of evil.

“Wasn’t the hosts.” On the shieldbearers’ bench, Elise bent forward over her knees, glancing conspiratorially up and down the lines.

“Night before last, I wanted to know what the centurions were up to, so I snuck into that secret meeting. And then the even more secret meeting the high command called after that. ”

“Bullshit,” Brandt blurted, but Kat caught Ziva’s eye across Sawyer’s midsection.

The two of them had compared notes on the morning before the battle—Kat because she felt she might burst if she didn’t tell Ziva about her whirlwind night with Emory and Ziva to lament because her battle partner hadn’t come back last night, which almost certainly meant she’d scored with the gorgeous cook the two of them had spent the entire campaign fighting over.

But if Elise had been skulking around the centurions instead—

“They’ve been holding out on us,” Elise said.

“Waiting until we were close enough to strike without missing. That’s why we were pushing for the citadel.

It was never supposed to be a suicide run.

What I think I heard— think, ” she couched, “is that we were clearing a path for a team of heroes to make a surprise attack. And one of those heroes is a hundred-token Aurean.”

“ Bullshit, ” Brandt echoed even more vehemently and immediately flinched.

“Impossible,” Carrick agreed.

Javi’s book snapped shut. “It’s feasible,” he declared.

“Oh, feasible, ” Carrick muttered, waggling his eyebrows at Sawyer.

“It would take an incredible mind to wield a hundred tokens at once. Even with each piece cultivated individually, it must take half a day to attune them all together, but I don’t see why one couldn’t, given enough time.”

“You ever read about anything like that?” Ziva asked, nodding to the book in Javi’s lap.

“In one book—”

“Novel or history?” Carrick interrupted.

“…Novel,” Javi muttered, deflating. “If you want history, the great Magnus Lythos holds the record at seventy-two, which he only achieved at the age of sixty, and that was a hundred years ago.”

“Right, yes, how could we forget?” Brandt groaned with his head between his knees.

“Could you all stop being assholes?” Elise asked. “Nothing but a hundred-token Aurean was going to take out the Demon Lord.”

“Then why even bother with infantry?” Giselle muttered. A hefty silence settled over the tent, quiet enough that Kat could hear the healer currently wrestling her ribs back into place breathe a faint sigh of relief.

Kat loosened her jaw, letting the leather drop gracelessly into her lap.

“Because we can’t leave it all to the Aureans,” she gritted out.

“Like you said, Javi, we’ve never seen anything past seventy-two in our lifetimes—and even Magnus Lythos probably couldn’t have gotten the job done.

So we all had to do our part to keep the forces of evil at bay, even if all we could do was stick a spear in some thralls and pray the demons never broke our line.

Many of you chose to be here. Some of us didn’t.

But we showed up. We did our part. And look at us! ”

She caught the eyes of each and every soldier in her decade. Most were staring at her as if she’d sprouted a second head.

“We marched to the edge of the Mouth. We faced the legions of Hell at their doorstep, and we held fast. We…”

The next words wouldn’t come. Kat’s throat closed tight around the possibility of stating something that was by all counts true but still impossible to believe. We lived. We survived to the war’s end.

Worse, her gaze settled on Emory, on the way he’d leaned slightly forward while she was talking, the way he seemed to be begging her to go on. Because if the war was truly, truly finished, well.

There had been no conversation yet—not about what they’d shared, and not about what had changed between the choice they made at the fireside and the moment they now faced, where the future was suddenly full of possibilities.

Possibilities Kat had entertained, certainly, as a thought experiment, as a natural consequence of being joined at the hip to a handsome young soldier for the past three years, but not ones she’d considered with any seriousness.

Now they sat in the aftermath of their indiscretion, paying for it bone by mended bone.

No other member of their unit had been beaten as badly as the two of them.

They’d failed their decade as its hinges, and true to every warning about fraternization they’d ever been preached, it had nearly cost them their lives.

“You were victorious,” a new voice announced.