The Reckoning Fire

The scum Kings, a Broadsword Studio production created and written by Mike Daltrey. Episode forty five, The Reckoning Fire. The heat was a physical blow. It seared the air from my lungs and cooked the skin on my face. The triumphant roar in my throat was choked off by a wave of black, oily smoke. Our victory, our prize. The entire world we had fought to conquer was being consumed by a beast born from Stiggan's rage. Out find a way out, I roared, my voice lost in the deafening thunder of the growing inferno, fueled by packing straw and alcohol. The main door we'd entered through was a solid wall of flame. The room was a death trap. The heat in tents It felt like the air itself was on fire. The window, or so yelled, his voice, a raw bark. He pointed to a small barred opening high on the back wall, barely visible through the swirling smoke. It was our only chance. Stiggant, his face a mask of horrified regret, acted without thinking. He shoved a heavy crate against the wall, used it to launch his massive frame upward, and gripped the hot iron bars with a scream of pure desperate effort, he tore the entire frame from the crumbling mortar and stone. Go, he bellowed. Or So and I shoved the others through the opening selaine cob gix before scrambling through ourselves Brin right behind us. We dropped ten feet into the alley outside, landing hard on the slick cobblestones. The smoke was everywhere, a thick, choking black cloud that turned the night into a lined maze. I could barely see my hand in front of my face. I grabbed Celine's arm, pulling her along this way, Stay together, I yelled into the chaos. A scream cut through the roar of the fire. It was thin and terrified, full of a boy's panic. Rat. I turned, trying to peer back into the smoke filled alley we just left, but there was only a wall of roiling blackness and the sudden, sharp crack of a collapsing roof beam dre He's gone. Or So's voice was a harsh command in my ear, his hand gripping my shoulder. We have to move now. He was right. There was no going back for him. Rat, the boy who had survived on scraps and fear was now just another victim of the fire we had lit. His death was a pathetic footnote in the disaster we had created. We fought our way through the alleys. The world around us us a hellscape of burning buildings and screaming people. The fire, fed by the dry, cheap timber of the shanties, had leaped from the warehouse to the surrounding blocks with terrifying speed. The gang war we had started was over, forgotten. We had created a new, hungrier war, a war of flame against the entire city. We finally spilled out of a narrow alley into the relative open of the market Square, falling to our knees, gasping for air that wasn't pure smoke. But there was no safety here. The whole world was fire and embers. And then through the roar came the new sound. It started faint, then grew louder, cutting through the chaos with a cold, sharp clarity. Horns, not the chaotic bleeding of a panicked mob, but the clear, disciplined, coordinated blasts of real soldiers. The sound of the city guard mobilizing from behind the main walls, the sound of the cage door slamming shut