When the mighty warrior Taphenes received her death wound before the city gates, the gray workers swept down, untouched by enemy arrows, and lifted her body up. The gate cracked and fell to the enemy, but they calmly carried her through, behind the first wave.
Terrified at the sight of their hero lying broken in the gray workers’ arms, the defenders fought on, buoyed by one thought only, by the city’s one eternal promise, that heroes never die. Somewhere within the city, Kalles yet lived, his sword as sharp as the day he fell. Somewhere within the city, Maishon and Naymella still lived, their weapons ready to defend the city. And other heroes of other ages, their names forgotten or changed by time. As long as the city had stood, age upon forgotten age, it had surely created heroes, and each of them sworn to defend the people within. The city’s survival could be traced in a line through those legendary warriors. Every last one of the heroes still lived—this the gray workers’ promise, that they would rise up and save the city in its need.
Taphenes would join them, no matter how dead she looked. They would save her, heal her, preserve her life so she might fight again. Rise to keep the city from falling.
And so the defenders fought with one glimmer of hope. And so they died.
#
Deep in the city, below the cellars of dry goods, below the cisterns and damp storage spaces, the gray workers carried their charge. A grove of impossible trees circled the underground room, no branches or leaves visible, but the trunks gray with age and scored deep with fissures.
The gray workers chose an empty face of one tree and pressed the body of Taphenes against it. A tendril reached out from one fissure, held her upright. Gray-skinned hands held the hero’s sword to her hand, but before it touched her clammy flesh, other tendrils came out, embraced the hilt, firmly bound it to her hand.
Taphenes’s skin lost some of its ashen hue, took on a hint of green as more tendrils slithered from the tree and into her body. Something like blood began again to flow.
The workers stepped back. Maishon, bound to a nearby tree, opened his mouth wordlessly, as if to welcome Taphenes. Or warn her. Though she couldn’t know it, he looked just as he had the day he fell, the day the city fell to Taphenes’s own ancestors.
Naymella beside him screamed without sound, straining her arm as if to lift her bow. Had she been able to speak, the words would have been unintelligible to both of the more recent heroes, though she might have recognized their words as cognates of the ancient speech of her enemies.
“Is it time?” one gray worker asked another, as one always did when a new hero came.
The answer was the same as always, too. “No. We mustn’t release them yet, or they may die. Give it a few days, and we will tell the city’s new masters how their heroes await them. How they stand ready to protect the city.”
The first gray worker nodded in agreement, and Taphenes joined her wordless cry of anguish to the silent terror of the ever-living heroes that surrounded her.