Mara Venn

Mara Venn organised grain deliveries for the Free Provinces, which meant that for the whole of the war she travelled toward the places everyone else was walking away from.

She was not a soldier. She was the reason soldiers ate.

On the morning after the fighting at the eastern burial road she brought a cart within sight of it, because the living there had not eaten in three days, and that is how she came to see what had been done to the dead. She watched bodies stand. She watched a loyalist priest working over the fallen with his sleeves pushed back like a man washing dishes. She did not see the separatist retreat, or the smoke behind it, or anything else that might have complicated a page.

That was why the Gilded Coven chose her.

Her account was narrower than the other witnesses’ and therefore cleaner, and it travelled to the Supreme Ruler’s court in a locked gilded case beside casualty lists, sketches of opened graves, and letters no loyalist officer could be proved to have written. She asked one thing before agreeing to go, and she asked it of a clerk rather than of the man who had summoned her, so it was written down and then forgotten: whether anyone in the capital would send food.

The Justicar’s Legion came. That had been the purpose of her.

Afterwards her village accepted the Legion’s protection. A neighbour questioned during the purges, looking for something to trade, told an inspector that the village had burned a Veinwright shrine two years earlier. Her two brothers were arrested pending an inquest that would run for years. With the brothers gone the land went unworked, fell behind on a debt restructured in the first winter of the war by a lender operating under Gilded licence, and was taken in eighteen months, exactly as the schedule provided.

Her district recorded her as departed without destination.

She was found again in a quarry in the west, among survivors wearing scavenged Veinwright armour and captured Justicar weapons, with the symbols of the rebellion cut and burned from their clothes. Darien Rusk came to them and told her he was sorry. She hit him hard enough to split his lip, and told him that sorry is what the defeated offer when they have nothing else. Asked what she wanted from him, she pointed at the fallen banner and said: nothing.

What she said after that was that there would be no more begging the realm to become better. The people around her burned the broken crown, and the provincial badges, and the seal of the Free Provinces, and had no name yet for what they were becoming. Hers is the first voice on record of the Apocalypse Horde.