The Ordinary Commander

Assassination Attempt

The marble floor groaned under the assassin’s weight, the impact sending hairline fractures spiraling outward like a spiderweb. Before the dust could even settle, the figure was a blurred arc of steel, lunging toward Raka.

"Move, Raka!" Sofia screamed, her voice cracking the heavy silence of the library.

Raka didn’t need the warning. His instincts, sharpened by a lifetime of near-misses in the last forty-eight hours, carried him to the side. He felt the cold breeze of the assassin’s blade slice through the air where his throat had been a split second before.

"Is that all you’ve got?" Raka gasped, his lungs burning as he dived behind a mahogany study table.

"He’s fast," Sofia said, weaving through the narrow aisles of the bookshelf, her own daggers flashing as she parried a strike that threatened to take her arm off. "Too fast for us to just brawl with."

"We aren't going to out-fight him," Raka shouted, his eyes scanning the room, hunting for anything—a loose heavy book, a dangling chandelier, a trap. "We’re going to use the room."

"The room is just wood and paper!" Sofia gritted out, ducking under a horizontal slash that bisected a shelf of ancient scrolls. "What are you planning?"

"You see those rows of ink jars on the reading desk?" Raka pointed toward the back of the library. "They’re high-density. Heavy. If we can get him to overextend his reach into the shelving, we can collapse the stack."

"You want to bury him in books?" Sofia laughed, a sharp, manic sound. "That’s the most desperate plan I’ve ever heard, even for you."

"Do you have a better idea?" Raka countered, dodging a flying kunai that embedded itself deep into a wooden pillar.

"Fair point," she muttered. She turned to the assassin, her eyes narrowing. "Hey! You move like a puppet! Did Vane forget to oil your joints?"

The assassin stopped dead. The mask’s violet eye-slits pulsed, fixating on Sofia. "The Minister’s name is not for your tongue, girl."

"Oh, I’m sorry," Sofia taunted, dancing backward toward the trap. "Should I call him 'Your Lordship'? Or maybe 'The Great Thief of Rations'?"

The assassin snarled, a guttural, inhuman sound, and launched himself at her.

"Now, Raka!" she shrieked.

Raka surged out from behind the table. He didn't run at the assassin; he ran at the structural support for the northern bookshelf. With a heavy brass inkwell in hand, he slammed it with every ounce of his remaining strength against the brass pin holding the shelf upright.

CLANG.

The metal buckled. The entire row of shelves, laden with thousands of pounds of heavy, leather-bound tomes, began to sway.

"Get out of there, Sofia!" Raka roared.

Sofia slid across the polished marble, her body a flat streak of motion, just as the shelves groaned and toppled over with the sound of a collapsing mountain.

The assassin, caught in his own momentum, tried to adjust in mid-air, but there was nowhere to land. The avalanche of parchment and wood slammed into him, pinning him to the floor with the force of a falling wall.

"Did we get him?" Sofia whispered, breathing hard as the dust began to settle.

Raka didn't answer. He approached the pile of debris, knife raised, his chest heaving. "Stay back, Sofia. Don't touch the books."

He reached out with the tip of his boot and shifted a heavy, splintered plank. Beneath it, the assassin lay buried, his mask cracked down the middle. One of his daggers lay several feet away, knocked from his grip by the weight of the library’s history.

"He’s still breathing," Sofia noted, stepping up behind him.

"We need to bind him," Raka said, his eyes scanning for rope. "If he wakes up, we’re dead."

"What are we going to do with him?" she asked, her voice dropping to a whisper. "We can't take him to the barracks."

"No," Raka agreed. "But we can make him talk. If he’s working for Vane, he knows where the rest of the supplies are being moved. He knows the schedule."

He pulled a length of binding silk from his own pack—a piece of emergency gear he’d saved from the first day—and moved to secure the assassin’s wrists. The man’s hands were calloused, his skin marked with strange, runic tattoos that seemed to writhe even in his unconscious state.

"Wait," Sofia cautioned, grabbing Raka’s sleeve. "Look at the mask. It’s glowing."

The cracks in the mask were bleeding a faint, violet light. It wasn't the light of magic; it was the light of a soul-binding seal.

"It’s an override," Raka realized, his face turning pale. "He isn't just an assassin. He’s a thrall. Vane isn't just using men; he’s puppeteering them."

"We can't interrogate him, then," Sofia said, her voice shaking for the first time since the summons. "If we break the seal, his mind will shatter. He won't say anything, and we’ll have a corpse on our hands."

Raka knelt, his hands hovering over the assassin’s chest. He looked at the man’s face—a young, terrified man, far younger than he should have been, his eyes darting behind closed lids in a fitful, enchanted sleep.

"He’s not a monster," Raka said, his voice soft. "He’s a prisoner, just like us. Vane is using these people to do his dirty work because he’s too much of a coward to get his own hands bloody."

"Raka, don't," Sofia warned. "Whatever you’re thinking—don't. You’re an 'Ordinary Human.' You don't have the shielding to deal with soul-magic."

"I don't need magic to see what’s keeping him under," Raka replied. He spotted a thin, crystalline needle protruding from the base of the assassin’s skull, pinning his nerves to the mask’s power source.

"If I pull that," Raka whispered, "the link breaks."

"And he might die," Sofia said.

"If I don't, he’s going to wake up and kill us," Raka pointed out. "Or we leave him here, and Vane sends someone else."

"We can't win like this," Sofia sighed, looking around the ruined library. "We’re out of our depth."

Raka took a breath and gripped the needle. With a sharp, sudden tug, he yanked it free.

The assassin arched his back, a horrific, soundless scream escaping his lips as the violet light flared and then vanished. His body went limp, his head dropping back against the cold marble floor.

The library fell silent again.

"Did he..." Sofia began.

"I think so," Raka said, checking for a pulse. It was steady, slow, and human.

The assassin’s eyes flickered open. They were no longer glowing violet; they were a dull, tired brown. He looked at Raka, then at Sofia, his confusion evident.

"Where..." the man croaked, his voice raw. "Where am I?"

"You’re in the palace," Raka said, keeping his knife ready but lowering his guard slightly. "Who are you?"

The assassin struggled to sit up, his gaze darting around the room, taking in the toppled shelves and the wreckage. When his eyes landed on the Minister’s seal in the ledger, a look of pure, unadulterated terror crossed his face.

"I don't know," the man whispered. "I... I remember a garden. I remember being told to wait for the signal."

"Who told you?" Raka pressed.

The man gripped his head, his knuckles white. "It was... he was hooded. He said..."

The man’s breath hitched. He looked at Raka, his eyes wide and pleading.

"He told me to kill the Commander," the man said, his voice trembling. "He said I had to reach the 'Vesper Gate' before the stars aligned, or I’d be forgotten forever."

"Vesper Gate?" Sofia asked, turning to Raka. "That’s on the far edge of the borderlands. Why would they send you there?"

Raka looked at the assassin, his mind racing. "Because that’s where the rift is. The place we came from."

The assassin leaned in, his voice dropping to a terrified, desperate tremor. He grabbed Raka’s wrist, his fingers cold as ice.

"You don't understand," the man rasped. "The Minister... he isn't just selling your weapons. He’s opening it. He’s trying to bring back the Kael’thas."

Raka felt the blood turn to ice in his veins. The name echoed in his mind, ancient and forbidden, a weight that seemed to crush the very air out of the room.

"What did you call them?" Raka asked, his voice barely a whisper.

The assassin looked up at the ceiling, his eyes unfocused. "The Kael’thas. The ones who walked the world before the throne existed. He said... he said your arrival wasn't a summoning. It was a harvest."

Raka dropped the assassin’s hand, the reality of the situation hitting him with the force of a physical blow. He wasn't just a strategist. He wasn't just a commander of a group of kids.

He was the fuel for something far older and far more dangerous than anything he could have imagined.

"Sofia," Raka said, his voice cold, steady, and devoid of fear. "We aren't leaving the palace."

Sofia looked at him, her eyes wide. "What? Why?"

Raka looked at the toppled shelves, the broken mask, and the terrified man on the floor.

"Because if we leave," Raka said, "there won't be a world left to go back to."