Sunrise Invasion

Chapter 30: The Siege of Veracruz

The bell still tolled, fractured but defiant, swinging in a broken cadence that no longer obeyed time or rite. Hung crooked in the crumbling belfry of the old Kirishitan mission, it moved with the wind alone. No hand had touched it in weeks. Its surface, once smooth and finely cast in the foundries of Kyoto, was blistered from heat, misshapen like melted wax. Patches of patina flaked from its sides in curled green slivers, exposing the bronze beneath—etched long ago with sakura blossoms and kanji prayers now half-erased by fire. The rope had long since burned away. Only the wind rang it now, and the wind had no liturgy.

Above, a carrion hawk circled, its wings still and stretched like blades. It coasted the thermals above Veracruz, spiraling slow, patient, cruel. Below, the city was a pitted carcass. The northern wall had collapsed into slag and coral dust. Merchant stalls lay like broken ribs across the main thoroughfare. A kiln-like heat still rose from the nave of the last shrine, where the image of Amida had fallen onto a scorched offering mat, its face blackened. A child’s sandal was caught beneath it, half-melted into the ash. Smoke drifted upward in clumps, ragged and warm, slipping over the ramparts like it too had decided to flee.

Harrow stood silent at the edge of the watchtower’s shadow. His fingers gripped the lip of the parapet, soot pressed into the lines of his palm. The brass spyglass—Howland’s gift, salvaged from a gutted East Indiaman off Cozumel—rested against his hip, unused. The lens was cracked. There was nothing left worth magnifying. Beyond the breach, the northern quarter had been erased by the hours-long pounding of Ottoman siege mortars and Andalusian culverins. The grid of streets, once laid down in the meticulous symmetry of the Japanese colonial planners, was now churned mud, rubble, and fire. Where houses had stood, only cratered stone and slumped beams remained. What wasn’t broken was ablaze. What wasn’t ablaze had already been entombed.

He didn’t look outward anymore. He looked down, at the ragged notebook in his hand, its pages browned and bleeding ink. His writing had grown increasingly fevered, leaping between English, Latin, and half-scrawled kanji. Pages blurred with sketches—the curved ridge of a Janissary helmet, the flare of a tachi guard, the torn corner of a woodblock print prayer, its sutra warped by rain. One page was filled top to bottom with a single line, inked again and again until it cut through the paper:

There are no holy cities. Not anymore.

The wind brought no relief. The Gulf air, usually thick with salt and sugarcane bloom, reeked now of rot and scorched flesh. It carried the breath of death pits: the sharp lime bite of quick-treated corpses, the sour-sweetness of charred fat, the bile of ruptured stomachs. Gunpowder hung on every surface, a permanent film of residue and memory. He rubbed a hand across his cheek. His sleeve left a darker streak behind.

Beyond the rooftops, in the dunes where the outer ramparts had once stood, the Andalusian siege lines shimmered with heat. Their banners were unmistakable: red lions rampant on sun-bleached white, edged with golden crescents stitched from stolen altar cloths. Some had been patched with fragments of Catholic chasubles—blood-red silk now fluttering under foreign symbols. Don Mateo’s standard was mounted highest of all, atop a creaking siege tower: the checkerboard of House Herrera—black and white like a game board meant for war—quartered with a blazon of a flame-crowned sword. Harrow had seen that same emblem stamped on the wax seal of execution orders, and burned into the chests of prisoners.

To Harrow’s left, nailed to the temple’s bent truss, hung what was left of the Japanese standard—the red sun disc on white silk. It had been shredded by shrapnel, its threads faded and salt-brittle, and now it barely moved at all. The wind passed through it as if it were already a ghost.

Inside the temple, the roof had caved in, and with it the symmetry of its design. What had once been a restrained blend of Yamato austerity and Iberian devotion—paper walls lacquered in ink-dark sumi, incense burners carved from local hardwood, an altar box that housed both a crucifix and the mirror of Amaterasu—was now a ruin. The beams had split. The rice paper screens had curled into ashen scrolls. The altar box lay open, its contents stolen or burnt. A single candlestick remained, Iberian in make, its stem bent, gold leaf peeling.

Below in the plaza, wounded ashigaru staggered through knee-deep filth. The stonework beneath them had been laid generations ago by enslaved Tlaxcalan masons under Spanish rule—now it ran red with their heirs’ blood. The soldiers’ armor was coming apart at the seams. The tropical rot had eaten into lacquer and rivet alike. Lamellar plates hung from frayed cords or were gone entirely, replaced by patched cotton robes or bits of hammered tin. Some had wrapped mosquito netting around their heads like funeral veils. Others moved barefoot.

Harrow spotted one among them—a boy no older than sixteen, his body too thin for the loose haidate hanging around his hips. The cloth was sun-faded, salt-stiff, dyed once in the proud blue and gold of Clan Uesugi, an old samurai line out of Echigo, their cavalry long vanished beneath the reeds of history. Their heraldry—two cranes in flight, wings curved like crescent moons—barely survived beneath the grime. Now one descendant dragged lime and the wounded across sun-cracked stones thousands of leagues from his ancestor's battles, shoulders hunched like he expected sky to fall.

Still he moved. No ceremony in it, just motion. A broken cart creaked behind him, loaded with sloshing lime barrels and a moaning conscript whose leg had gone black. No one offered help. Every man had his own deadweight to pull.

The British marines under Howland had given up on uniforms days ago. Straw hats stolen from Veracruz markets sat lopsided on sunburned scalps. Their redcoats, patched and crusted with salt, had been stripped of anything not useful or edible. The boots had been sliced open at the toes to stave off rot, and buttons bartered for handfuls of stale rice or grease. Sergeant Garrick, once of Cornwall, had taken to smearing his face with charcoal before each patrol—part bluff, part to keep the mosquitoes off, though he claimed it frightened Andalusians more than musket fire. Some said he’d started talking to ghosts. No one laughed when he did.

Across the rooftops, through the shimmer of heat and soot, came the low wail of the muezzin—clear, sorrowful, unyielding. The Ottoman call to prayer echoed like a memory, slicing clean through the stench and chaos. Somewhere across the trenches, the Andalusians answered with their own blasphemed hymns: Latin chants barked in cracked Mozarabic, distorted by fire and stone, rising from throats that sang of conquest not contrition.

Behind Harrow, inside the soot-stained ruin of the temple, a lone Kirishitan nun knelt beside a body bound in straw. She lit a single candle and placed a chrysanthemum on its chest, the petals already browning in the heat. Her hands moved carefully, tracing old kanji and the sign of the cross in lampblack and oil. No one knew her name. She had arrived with the first wave of refugees, spoke little, offered balm without prayer, prayer without cost. Her robes were charred in places, her skin smoked and peeling at the wrists, but her hands remained clean.

A low groan carried over the square. Then, again, the toll. The bell rang—its voice split, shattered, but still singing. Hung in the mission tower, it listed now with every gust, leaning further with each hour, its cradle splintered. It had rung for feast days, for marriages and deaths, for war councils and parades. Now it rang for smoke and silence. The wind would bring it down soon. But for now, it remembered its work.

Harrow stood unmoving. The city, he realized, wasn’t dying—it had already died. All that remained were gestures: the smoke, the dragging footsteps, the whispered names of saints and ancestors. He felt the truth in his bones. He was not a soldier anymore. Not a man of empire, nor even of purpose. Only a witness. A lean, half-ruined witness with salt-cracked skin and a notebook of ghosts.

He turned to the stair, hand on the moss-slick rail. Behind him, the bell rang again. The sound was thinner this time.

Within what remained of Veracruz, the living moved like specters. They clung to rites, to words they no longer believed, to mad repetitions and fragments of old songs. This was not a garrison. It was a reliquary. It held no future, only ash and the things not yet buried.

Lieutenant Thomas Harrow sat hunched in the upper chamber of a gutted apothecary. The shutters had long since fallen, and the amber dusk poured in unfiltered, staining the room gold and smoke-grey. The journal across his lap fluttered with the hot breeze—pages warped by sweat, blood, seawater, and soot. He wrote in loops and shards, jumping between English and Latin and snatches of Nihon-go that came unbidden, left untranslated. Some pages were full of sketches: the silhouette of a ruined bell tower, the arch of a Janissary helm, a child’s charred handprint rendered in smudged charcoal. One margin held a quick outline of Fleet Street, roofs caved in. Another showed a broken aqueduct overgrown with vines. Along the spine of a page he’d scrawled: “London will drown, not in sea, but in men.”

Sleep brought visions not rest. He dreamed of the cities that once ruled his bones: London, red with fire, its bells silenced; Rome flooded, its priests wading through filth with relics hoisted above their heads; Kraków emptied, the echo of Latin psalms replaced by hoofbeats and cries in Arabic, French, Polish. He heard a thousand languages, all screaming the same prayer. And when he woke, it was always to cannon fire, and the collapsing groan of stone under fire.

Captain John Howland had taken command of the remains of the British detachment, though no rank truly held weight now. His men no longer drilled. They crouched among the colonnades of what had once been a Jesuit seminary, now turned hospice and mortuary. Linen strips hung from shattered windows, drying in the breeze, stained with blood and iodine. A makeshift flag fluttered above—pieced together from the cross of Saint George and a Kirishitan sunburst, its edges bullet-torn and streaked with ash, but still whole enough to mean something.

Howland wore scavenged armor—a lacquered do-maru taken from a dead ashigaru, the crest of the Mori clan flaking from the chest plate. He’d strapped it over his shredded redcoat like a penitent knight or a man who had forgotten the meaning of uniforms. His old sabre had broken days ago. In its place he now carried a captured nodachi, bound at the hilt with naval cord and bloodstains. His voice was ragged from smoke, his face sunken with fever, but his men still followed him. Every morning, before first light, he walked the perimeter barefoot, jug in hand, pouring warm rice water into chipped cups and pressing them into the hands of the dying. Each time, he left behind a single brass button from his coat, laid on the chest of the dead. No one asked why.

Even now, Howland refused to leave the hospice. He claimed he was “holding the line.” Whether that meant the building, the children inside it, or the soul of something long dead, Harrow no longer asked.

Admiral Ishikawa Rintaro no longer issued commands in the language of armies. He had withdrawn deep into the smoke-darkened inner sanctum of the Chūō Shrine, which now stood blackened and roofless, its beams warped like driftwood. Inside, amid toppled altars and the stink of damp ashes, he surrounded himself with curling incense smoke and the remnants of once-proud banners. Most had burned, their clan symbols scorched beyond recognition. The great bronze mirror, cracked along its center, still caught what light filtered in from the broken roof. Ishikawa stared into it for hours, whispering fragments of imperial poetry onto slips of parchment before feeding them one by one into a censer whose basin was choked with ash.

His attendants had dwindled to two temple acolytes—boys no older than twelve—and a blind monk from Kii Province who could recite sutras from memory but had forgotten the sound of his own name. The admiral muttered constantly of turning wheels, of burning birds, of rebirth that required total ruin. He believed Veracruz was a foretold crucible, the culmination of portents hidden in Go-Hanazono’s dream journal, in the entrails of fish pulled from the eastern seas, in the erratic flight of hawks over the Pacific coast.

Beyond the shrine, among the rubble and ruined porticos, Aoki Shun had rebuilt a kind of kitchen from broken cartwheels and firestones scavenged from collapsed bathhouses. Once a cook in the service of a Kyoto daimyo, he now presided over a line of children with their ribs showing, most missing something—fingers, eyes, names. They called him ojiisan, grandfather, though he looked barely fifty. He taught them to slice boiled palm root thin as paper, to simmer pine bark and garlic into something passable as broth, to turn a single fist of rice into a sacrament. One night he fed eighteen people with a yam, three garlic bulbs, and the last of a sardine preserved in vinegar. The meal was served in halved gourds and laid before a broken statue of Amaterasu whose face had melted away. “This is not food,” he said softly, as the children sat cross-legged around him. “This is memory.”

Father Esteban had shed his vestments long ago. His cassock was now a patchwork of wool and cotton dyed brown with sweat, his waist bound with rope. He moved through the alleyways and corpse-strewn plazas with a calabash bowl tucked under one arm, filled with brackish river water mixed with ashes from the temple brazier. He baptized in gutters, in doorways, in the shade of broken columns, murmuring in Nahuatl, in Latin, and in halting Japanese. Every name he recorded on slips of rice paper, written with a brush he had fashioned from his own hair, stored in a lacquer box that had once held incense. “All names will cross the sea,” he would say to no one in particular. “To the Emperor. Or to God. Or to whoever’s left to remember.”

Captain Ito Daichi had returned from the grave with his head unbowed. He limped into the southern quarter pulling a battered cart filled with scavenged arrows, his left leg braced with a carved crutch he’d hacked from mangrove root. A mestiza girl named Inés helped him tie a wakizashi to the shaft with silk cord, turning it into a blade and staff both. His armor was gone. His shoulders and chest were covered in scabs and salt sores. He wore no helmet, only a headwrap stained with dried blood. The brand on his collarbone marked him as property of an Andalusian sugar estate—its crescent and flame burned deep—but his gaze held fire still. He gathered the last of the ashigaru, the merchant guards, the limping elders and women with sewing calluses and fury in their bones. He drilled them in the merchant square, tiles still glazed with blood and oil. “Don’t block,” he told them. “No grand gestures. One strike. One death.”

In the refectory of a collapsed chapel, Nakamura Kenji scribbled his way into legend or madness. Once the imperial fleet’s official scribe, he now lived among bones and tablets, surrounded by rolls of bark and shards of pottery. He recorded the final words of the dying, the hallucinations of men in fever, the muttered phrases of the sleeptalking. One scroll read, “I saw my mother walking through fire, and she smiled.” Another, “He had teeth of gold and wore no face.” Kenji scrawled these fragments into whatever surfaces he could find—bark, clay, human skin if he had to. At night he whispered them back to himself, building a scripture no one else could follow but which seemed, in its way, complete.

These were not soldiers anymore. Not saints. Not martyrs. They were remains. Shattered vessels in a city whose name would fade even from the tongues of those who survived it. Veracruz did not live—it lingered. The walls wept lime. The bells rang for no one. The smoke never left the sky. And the last living inside it held vigil not out of hope, but out of habit.

Beyond the walls, the siege had become something older than war. It coiled now like an ancient serpent, patient in its hunger. Ottoman tents sewn from Anatolian goat hair dotted the jungle perimeter, pitched among stumps and thorn. Andalusian canvas, dyed with indigo and sand-dust from the Rif, marked the inner line, their guy ropes driven into the red earth with stakes carved from boar skulls and driftwood. Fires burned in uneven clusters, their smoke rising in tangled plumes—sweet from lamb stewed with clove and fig in the Ottoman kitchens, bitter from cactus pulp and salted pork boiled in Andalusian pots stained with rust.

At the heart of the eastern line, beneath a fraying silk canopy whose gold-threaded verses from the Qur’an had begun to unravel, Pasha Kamil al-Zahir sat cross-legged on a worn Aleppan carpet. His eyes were rimmed red, not from sleeplessness but from the smoke of foreign soil. The Ottoman banner behind him—green field bearing the curling tughra of Sultan Mehmed IV—hung slack in the still air, its tips singed by cannon flare. He reviewed his maps in silence, lines inked in both Arabic and Venetian by a calligrapher from Smyrna who had once copied poetry for eunuchs of the court.

To his side sat a mufti from Cairo, an elderly scholar who interpreted the stars through a brass astrolabe and consulted texts from al-Razi and Ibn Khaldun. He fanned the figs in their bowl with one hand and pointed at planetary alignments with the other. “Soon,” he said. “By the arc of Saturn, very soon.”

Kamil’s rule was not drawn in iron or fire. He governed his siege lines like a magistrate presiding over a city-state, not a battlefield. The Kirishitan converts—alien, yes, but literate and orderly—he permitted to surrender without chains. Their sleeves were marked with ochre, to be reviewed later, but they walked unbound. Japanese and mestiza women seized from the outskirts were not funneled into the concubine tents, but reassigned to the Ottoman infirmaries, where Syrian doctors stitched wounds by lamplight under paper lanterns daubed with lilies and verses from Surah Al-Baqarah. No shrine within reach of his command was desecrated. When a Berber captain, drunk on cactus wine and boasting of his conquests, burned a roadside jinja for amusement, Kamil had him stripped of rank, lashed to the bone, and loaded into a supply dhow for Algiers—shackled beneath deck beside bags of salt.

“We inherit,” he said to his senior officers the following day. “We do not desecrate. We preserve.”

He saw conquest not as possession but as stewardship. In his mind, victory meant assuming the burden of what had been broken. He imagined himself not as a sacker of cities but the restorer of ruins. The last gardener in a palace overtaken by weeds.

But to the west, where jungle met broken Roman roads and the red clay slicked underfoot with each storm, Don Mateo de Herrera held a different court. There, amid stumps and shattered stone, his soldiers had raised a crude palisade, a fortress of timber and painted cloth. Its drapery came from ransacked Franciscan cloisters, cut and dyed with oxblood and mud, and repainted with Mateo’s new crest—a white lion trampling a broken crown, set against the red sunburst of the Andalusian flag. In the lion’s mouth was clenched a sword, and its mane was rendered in overlapping curls of flame. It was not the sigil of old House Herrera, which had once served the Catholic monarchs of Córdoba before the inquisitors took Mateo’s father. He had remade it, like everything else, in fire.

The men called him El Ardido—the Scorched One.

He had mosque-like towers built on ridges overlooking the city. They were not for prayer but spectacle—half-minarets crowned with iron crescents nailed through shattered crucifixes and fractured Kirishitan icons. At dawn, a painter would be summoned to render the faces of that morning’s condemned. The likenesses were nailed to the gates by midmorning—mouths agape, eyes blackened with soot—while the real bodies were discarded in the ravines where dogs licked at the blood between rocks.

Mercy, to Mateo, was treason.

It was only a matter of time before the alliance cracked. The Janissaries, schooled in Edirne in the doctrine of campaign law and imperial propriety, had little patience for Mateo’s blood-drenched theater. The Berber cavalry—Tuareg mercenaries and clan chieftains promised land and silver—refused to ride alongside Andalusian cavaliers who spat on their prayers and mocked their rites. A Berber sergeant was found crucified to a gatepost with his own scimitar, his hands cut off and placed on his chest. A Janissary barracks near the coconut grove went up in flames the following night. Kamil sent emissaries bearing honeyed almonds on brass trays, and pouches of gold. Mateo answered with another execution tower.

And inside the city, where the walls bled lime and dust, betrayal bloomed.

Don Ramón Vargas had always appeared too clean for the mud. He was a scholar once, exiled from Seville for sedition, pardoned later under Herrera’s order. He returned to Veracruz as a liaison—part diplomat, part ghost. His messages were folded into French linen, written in saffron ink, and smuggled out in wine shipments and grain carts. He moved like someone who belonged nowhere. Polished, quiet, always just outside the ring of suffering.

But Mariko knew.

She had always known. Niece to Admiral Ishikawa, born of a concubine from Nagoya and raised in a Jesuit seminary, Mariko saw through him early. She watched how he touched his papers, how his eyes flicked toward shutters when wind changed direction. Her love for him was never false, but it was not blind. One night, as the city braced for another bombardment, she served him saké—sweet, perfumed, infused with the thick milk of the oleander. He drank, smiled, and collapsed quietly into her lap, eyes still fixed on her face. She wept. Then she folded a confession into kanbun, sealed it with her blood, and placed it under his tongue.

Her trial lasted less than a day. The officers debated behind the temple doors, but the crowd had already decided. The city needed something—someone—to burn. They remembered the poisonings, the broken aqueduct valves, the missing patrols. Father Esteban read her last rites in Latin and Japanese. She recited a single farewell verse about crows on winter branches. Her body hung until the sky turned violet.

They said her death was necessary. That it would quiet the city.

It did not.

Instead, it split the air. Graffiti bloomed across the inner walls of the Kirishitan quarter, scratched in soot, in blood, in broken Latin and angry Nahuatl. One phrase kept appearing, scrawled beneath icons and over shrine lintels:

“No sun saves the dead.”

Still, the drums of the siege rolled on, one echoing the other like opposing heartbeats. The city’s rot, though, had already set in. No cannon, no tower, no Berber charge had done what hunger and heat now did daily.

Dysentery swept through the quarters like fire on parchment. The water channels overflowed with gray-brown filth, dragging waste into the streets. Bodies curled up against walls, jaws locked in rigor, lips blistered. Dogs gave them a wide berth. Ashigaru patrols used long poles to roll corpses into the gutters. Plague followed—malaria, shaking fever, sweating sickness. The air itself thickened, slick and unbreathable. By June, pyres were burning from dawn until nightfall at the Sun Gate and the central square. Fuel came from anything dry enough to catch—broken shrine gates, uprooted floorboards, crates of silk gone moldy.

The mestizo quarter broke first.

Packed with displaced families from the outer wards, they slept shoulder to shoulder, eating bark and boiled shoe leather. When the water carts failed to arrive one morning—diverted by a samurai officer whose men needed it for dressing wounds—the riot began. Furniture was splintered for torches, carts overturned. Bayonets and fish knives clashed with old cavalry sabres left behind in the chaos. Smoke choked the streets.

The Kirishitan priests stood between the mob and the ashigaru. Many were mestizo themselves—men who had once preached peace in cathedrals now burned to husks. They formed a human shield around the children’s kitchens, the birthing rooms, the candle altars. One carried a crucifix blackened with soot, its base carved with kanji for mercy. Another, too old to stand, leaned on a pole stripped of its banner and declared in Nahuatl, “If we die, let them see a cross, not a blade.”

By sunset, five priests were dead.

The riot ended only when Admiral Ishikawa ordered the samurai officer responsible for the water seizure beheaded in the plaza. The crowd gathered in a hushed ring, no one speaking, no one cheering. The blade was chipped and the edge gone soft. It took three strikes to finish the work. Ishikawa’s face remained unchanged. He did not flinch when the blood sprayed. He turned without word, streaked with red along his cheek, and walked back toward the shrine, robes stirring ash. Behind him, someone sobbed. The bell in the ruined tower gave a single groan and went silent.

When Captain Howland brought the evacuation plan—maps folded stiff with grease, supply figures scrawled in the margins, a rough path traced through the southeastern breach—Ishikawa did not rise. He knelt at the low shrine table where he’d laid out offerings of rice, salt, and dried persimmon. His armor sat behind him untouched: a red-lacquered tosei gusoku dulled by soot and rain, its cords unraveling. The imperial crest painted on the hanging sumi scroll had faded to the shade of burnt tea. The lacquer bowls trembled slightly from distant artillery.

“There will be no retreat,” Ishikawa murmured. His voice was calm. “The sun does not flee the storm. It burns through it.”

Howland stood motionless. His boots were coming apart, his eyes were raw with fatigue and ash. “We’re not the sun,” he said. “We’re bones and blood. And we’re running out of both.”

Ishikawa did not respond. He poured water over the altar stones in three measured strokes, whispering something in old court Japanese—words meant for the dead, or perhaps for gods that no longer listened.

It was Father Esteban who moved what remained of the living. Beneath the shell of San Luis Obispo—a Kirishitan mission shattered by mortar fire and nearly buried—he unearthed a forgotten cistern tunnel. Jesuit-cut, two generations old, once used to channel spring water down from the hills. The walls bore the chisel marks still: Latin prayers beside kanji inscriptions, lines of saints and bodhisattvas painted in the same hand, halos overlapping. The floor was cold, the air inside tight as a buried grave.

By the light of whale oil lamps, Esteban mapped the route. He found the children first—mute boys who had scouted ruined rooftops for rice, girls who ran notes between safe houses. He trained them to move quietly, to breathe through cloth, to avoid lantern shadows. Then he whispered the plan: the water path would open after sundown. No possessions. Only those who could walk.

By the second night, eighty had passed through. Esteban kept their names, written carefully on mulberry slips in black soot ink, tucked in a pouch strapped to his wrist. “If I die,” he told one boy, “this must reach the east. If I live, I will speak their names to heaven.”

Next came the mothers. Then the infirm, the blind, the ragged ones light enough to carry. The tunnel surfaced in a ravine half a league out, where two mestizo scouts waited in silence under a net of dried palms. From there, the refugees crept east, toward fishing villages left derelict since the first Japanese landings.

By the third week, the tunnel reeked of sweat, burnt oil, and damp limestone. The walls grew slick. Mold crawled along the frescoed faces of saints and bodhisattvas. One priest collapsed near the midpoint and never rose. They folded his arms and left him beneath the painted feet of St. Thomas.

The secret could not hold. The silence was too loud. Soldiers looked away. The ashigaru guarding the entrance began murmuring blessings instead of orders. One officer, demoted and long embittered, handed Esteban his family blade—a dull tanto etched with a heron crest. “Cut a hole in the dark,” he said, and limped back into the flames.

The city above smoldered now, slower, quieter. Fewer screams. Fewer shells. Just the crackle of pyres, the groan of wagons heavy with corpses, and the humming whine of a million flies.

The end came not with a trumpet, but a noise beneath the earth—low, grinding, deep as something being broken inside the ribs of the world. A tremor rattled loose tiles and sent copper fittings humming like bells. Then the mortar cracked, a white flash from the north, and seconds later the shock arrived—wet and thunderous, like flame erupting from beneath the sea.

The last wall fell.

The Ottomans had brought up a captured Venetian mortar, modified for Greek fire. A monstrous thing—its flared bronze throat mounted on a scorched cedar platform, decorated in old Catholic etchings halfway melted away. The canister struck the bastion high and exploded in a sheet of flame that scorched the very rain from the air. Lime dust and oil-slick fire cascaded over the rampart. Screams followed. Then silence.

Harrow watched it break open like a wound, the sky gone dark with ash and dusk. He tasted metal in his mouth and spat. Around him, the last defenders scrambled—conscripts with half-melted spears, ashigaru with empty matchlocks and rusted blades. A boy beside him wept and held a shield made of a temple door.

Captain Ito Daichi stood at his side, crutch sunk in dirt, the wakizashi lashed along its shaft glittering in the firelight. His armor gone, he wore only the gold shoulder plates of his clan—peonies on lacquer, now dulled and chipped. The crest of House Ito, sworn once to the Shimazu, now held by no one but a broken man.

“They’ll be through by sundown,” Ito said. “We hold, or we vanish.”

Harrow nodded. He had stripped his uniform to rags. A rosary wrapped his forearm. His sword, re-hilted from a Spanish cavalry blade, was notched to the tip. The flintlock at his belt hadn’t fired in days but still hung like a weight he refused to abandon.

Behind them, the last men stood in line—not a formation, not an army. A mess of bodies, armor, and prayer. A nun with a rake. A mestizo child with a broken crossbow. An ashigaru holding the standard of a dead lord from Shikoku. Someone had painted a red sun on white cloth and scrawled a line beneath it in broken Latin:

Fiat voluntas tua.

Then the Janissaries came.

They moved through the breach in rhythm, silent but for the beat of their war drums—deep, slow, pitiless. Quilted vests, bronze helms, cloth veils soaked against the heat. Their sabers gleamed. Behind them came Berber auxiliaries with curved blades and snarling mouths, and Andalusian zealots screaming curses between charges.

Ito shouted first. The defenders surged.

They met on broken stone. There was no grace in it. Blades clashed, fists struck helmets, men screamed and fell into red puddles. Harrow ducked a blade and drove his saber forward—felt it slide into soft belly, then rip free. Blood hit his cheek and he kept moving. Beside him, Ichiro—once a fencing master in Edo—buried his katana into a Janissary’s collarbone and whispered something before he slumped forward, eyes open.

They held for ten minutes that felt like an hour. Ito fought until a Berber axe split his leg at the thigh. He dropped, caught a soldier by the tunic, and pulled him down into the dust with a roar. The others staggered, bled, screamed, and died.

Atop the temple steps, Admiral Ishikawa stood in flame. He had soaked the Chūō Shrine in oil and sake, then set it alight. Camellia oil made it burn blue. The murals of the Rising Sun peeled away. Paper screens curled inward. He stood within the heat, in black ceremonial robes, chanting sutras not meant to be heard outside the palace walls. His hands did not tremble. His eyes remained fixed on something beyond.

He did not leave the shrine.

Harrow stumbled, blind in one eye, and nearly tripped over a curled shape at the aqueduct’s base. Kazuo. The boy clutched his flute, feet blackened, face unreadable. He looked at Harrow without speaking.

Harrow crouched and put a hand on his shoulder. “We go. Now.”

They slid down the ruined aqueduct, between broken coral and slime-coated stone, into the black. The channel stank of mildew and burnt fat. Kazuo couldn’t walk. Harrow carried him, chest heaving, eyes stinging, past collapsed beams and forgotten murals. They moved like shades. Above them, Veracruz cracked open. The world howled.

They did not look back.

The dawn that followed was wrong. A yellow light like sickness cut through ash. Shadows moved strangely, like they were trying to crawl backward. The sea stank. Smoke curled against the cliffs and stayed there.

Veracruz had no more breath.

Only the echo.

By mid-morning, the last defenders had been swept aside or gone silent. The eastern ramparts had folded inward like waterlogged paper, their lime cladding peeled away in great ribbons of ash. The plaza still smoldered from the pyres that had burned all through the night, casting oily smoke across rooftops now sagging and red with fire-glow. The Chūō Shrine had collapsed to coals and fractured tile, its once-ornate courtyard scattered with the warped remains of votive mirrors and incense braziers. The great bell, which had tolled through wars and weddings alike, had fallen sometime before dawn, split clean through. Half of it lay half-buried in the dirt, tipped like a broken crown, the kanji on its face melted into unreadable streaks.

The city hadn’t fallen with ceremony, only attrition. It had cracked, peeled, smoldered, groaned—and now there was nothing left but grit and the metallic scent of dying things. The sound of boots rang sharp over scorched stone, and in the alleys the wounded were pulled from cellars by foreign hands. No one begged. Most no longer spoke.

The Ottomans were first through the breach. Their entrance was deliberate, paced, professional. Janissaries in layered cotton and lacquered steel moved like craftsmen at work, their curved sabers still sheathed, banners rolled. Behind them came camel-mounted scouts and engineers in wool tunics and broad sashes, already pointing out cisterns, old walls, and the better wells. Pasha Kamil al-Zahir gave his first orders from beneath a battered parasol of green silk: seal the central cistern, convert the seminary to a field hospital, forbid looting.

The tughra of the Sultan was hung from the customs house, hand-lettered decrees were posted in Turkish, Arabic, and rough Spanish. The city, they declared, was now under protective administration. Rations were distributed by weight, starting with the maimed and fevered. Curfews were drawn. The mosques had not yet been raised. But the message was unmistakable.

To the west, among the shattered churches and shrine complexes, the Andalusians arrived less like an army and more like a storm in human shape.

Don Mateo de Herrera’s men poured in with a zeal that bordered on hunger. Their standards snapped in the sulfur wind, white lions stitched over blood-red sunbursts. His own crest—once belonging to a minor Córdoba house now extinct—was reimagined: a lion biting through a crown while fire spilled from its mane. They raised it above the ruins of the oldest chapel, nailing it into scorched stone with the hafts of war hammers.

The old gods were dragged into the daylight and broken. Shrine by shrine, scrolls were pulled from lacquered cases and tossed into open flames. Clay images of Jizō, wood-carved Kannon, and Amida icons were shattered and discarded into wells. Kirishitan priests were lined up, made to kneel in dust, and forced to desecrate their own altars—those who refused were given the sword or, in Andalusian fashion, the choice of conversion to their peculiar Islam: part Qur’an, part twisted remnant of Reconquista Catholicism, fire and glory bound by rhetoric and blood.

Edicts painted in tar were nailed to the surviving walls. One read simply, in flowing Arabic script: “The Caliphate is risen.” Another, across the orphanage threshold, was one word: tawhid. Its doorway had been hacked in half. Inside, the cots were empty.

Captain John Howland was found in the shell of the seminary’s infirmary. He’d been wounded days earlier, taken no food since. They bound him with rope soaked in vinegar and dragged him through the streets, a chain fastened through the hilt of his own saber. His redcoat, barely holding together, bore the ghost of the Royal Marines crest, while the Japanese armor he’d worn—borrowed from a fallen ashigaru—was now displayed beside him like something skinned.

They paraded him through the camps, through the cheering Andalusian ranks. Some spat. Some threw dried dates, others stones. They tortured him by degrees—his fingers first, then his shoulders, then the soles of his feet, sliced with brass wire. Still, Howland remained quiet. He had lost three ribs to the siege, and one of his eyes was sealed shut under a bandage crusted with pus and dried blood. When they finally forced him to his knees beneath the ruined Kirishitan banner, he looked up as the Andalusian standard unfurled over the city and smiled.

Not in triumph. Not in defiance. It was the smile of a man who had reached the end of the story and accepted that it would be finished without him.

That same hour, tucked inside a mangrove-choked cove east of the old shipping channel—where the air swarmed with gnats and the water stank of brine and decay—a narrow boat slipped into the surf. The hull was teak, scavenged from a ruined dock, patched with boiled pitch and rags of painted silk. The sail was ragged and gray with salt, stitched from shrine banners and funeral cloth.

Fourteen souls were aboard.

Harrow sat hunched at the tiller, hands blistered and raw. His journal was wrapped tight beneath a silk coat salvaged from the corpse of a merchant guard, its embroidery charred but still visible—pine boughs and wave crests curling into an obscure noble emblem, its house long buried. Beside him, Father Esteban held the oilskin pouch containing the names of the dead, his cassock soaked and his face lined with exhaustion. He had not spoken in hours.

Kazuo sat near the stern, swaddled in a funerary robe too small for him, the kind stitched for a girl-child. Faded cranes spread their wings across the fabric in red and gray thread. He clutched his broken flute, knuckles white, lips parted as if listening for a sound that refused to come.

Two mestizo women huddled near the mast, their infants pressed against their chests in silence. One man, an ashigaru too far gone to speak, stared out to sea with blood dried in the corners of his mouth. A boy sat at the bow, his arm wrapped in bandage and a rosary tied tight to his ankle.

They said nothing. No prayers. No sobs. Just the slosh of water and the slow, aching pull of the tide.

Behind them, the city bled smoke into the sky. Its walls had ceased groaning. No bells rang now. The shrine roofs were ash, the markets were bone. Veracruz was not taken. It had been erased.

And still, none of them wept.

The sails cracked. The sea opened.
And Veracruz, once the citadel of the Rising Sun in the New World, smoldered behind them—its empire ended in cinders and blood.
No one ever found Ishikawa Rintaro’s body.

When the ash settled over the city like a burial shroud, and the shrine beams were picked over by Berber scavengers fingering through scorched lacquer and twisted brass for votive coins or incense cups, only his name remained—inscribed on the brittle registry scrolls of the vanished. The inner sanctum of the Chūō Shrine had collapsed in the final bombardment, its tiled roof groaning down through smoke and fire like a dying lung. Beneath it, embers pulsed in the dark like fading stars. Some said he died seated in seiza, robed in his full court vestments—black sokutai silk with gold-threaded phoenix feathers, now fused to ash and bone. Others claimed his retainers had dragged him out before the flames took him, half-mad and burned to the marrow, armor fused to his back, still reciting imperial sutras through blistered lips and what voice he had left.

Rumors took root in the wreckage like spores on wet stone.

A sailor claimed he saw a tall man with an imperial sash torn and soot-blackened board a Portuguese junk off the Yucatán coast, bound for the Florida Passage under a Christian name no one recognized. Another tale came north from Tlaxcalan traders, of a one-eyed noble in ragged samurai garb wandering barefoot through the ruins of Teotihuacan, kneeling at the Sun Pyramid with his palms pressed to the obsidian, weeping and silent. Some swore he had abandoned language altogether, offering incense and rice to forgotten gods with names older than scripture.

Ishikawa had been born to the lesser Hoshikawa line, a branch of the Nagasaki daimyo family. Distant kin to the Fujiwara through a legitimized concubine’s son, his lineage once traced in gold ink on embassy rosters bound for Satsuma, for Korea, even for the court at Hangzhou. Now his name traveled by mouth through jungle trails and charred port towns—half-prayer, half-curse. No longer venerated. Only feared. Or waited for.

In the blackened shell of the eastern quarter, where the mission’s scriptorium had stood, a cache was discovered beneath a half-burnt tatami mat: fifteen scrolls, silk-wrapped in hibiscus red, tied with cords spun from women’s hair. Their script—alternating between immaculate brushwork and delirious scrawl—was unmistakably Nakamura Kenji’s. There were no titles. No structure. Just fragments: dying whispers translated across three tongues, dreams scratched down in ink and blood, half-remembered sutras, unanswered letters signed with incense ash.

One line read: “A sun swallowed by a tide not of water, but of mouths.”

Some scrolls were burnt at the corners. Others bloomed with mold or smeared with handprints. They held the cadence of prophecy but none of its certainty. Not scripture—dirge.

They moved quiet through hands. A mestizo priest carried them south beneath the folds of his robe. A Dutch captain smuggled them across the Pacific under crates of fermented soy and pickled plum. When they reached Edo, they were wrapped in mulberry paper marked only with the imperial chrysanthemum and delivered in a black lacquer box to the Chrysanthemum Pavilion.

The Emperor read them alone.

He sat among lacquered screens painted with cranes and pine, the scent of cherry sap and sandalwood heavy in the summer air. No ministers. No scribes. He read in silence, lips moving over the inked ghosts of a fallen colony. At one point, his shoulders shook with a thin, cracking laugh. Later, he did not move for the span of an hour, the last scroll unspooled across his lap, tears staining the paper where the calligraphy bled.

At dawn, he rose.

Into the stillness, he spoke four words:
“Not yet. But soon.”

In the jungle south of Veracruz, Aoki Shun vanished without a word.

He had slipped into the mangrove thickets with two children—one bound to his back, the other nestled beneath a rice-straw cape against his ribs. His trail was faint: damp footprints that vanished in reed beds, bits of boiled cassava left on stone ledges for dogs or spirits, a broken ladle carved from driftwood. In the fishing village of Tlapacoya, a woman swore he passed through, trading river eel for clay bowls. His face was drawn and deep-lined, his eyes hollow. He wore his hair in a merchant’s knot, but the thick calluses across his palms betrayed him.

Others said he died in the swamp. Some claimed he was taken by fever. Others said jaguar or caiman. But all agreed—he would not have feared the end. He had already tasted it.

Then, one rainy season later, a barefoot child staggered from the mangroves into a hamlet near Tlacotalpan. Mute, sunburned, legs bleeding from cuts and thorns, she spoke no word of where she had come from. But she carried three things: a broken pestle carved from coralwood, a strip of bark inked in kanji with a stew recipe, and a square of rice sack cloth. Sewn into it with cotton thread and sinew was a flag—rough, crooked, hand-stitched. A rising sun, inverted. The red circle slipped low, near the corner, as though sinking or beginning again.

The villagers named her Midori, after the river.

They hung the flag above the hearth—not in loyalty or defiance, but as something else. A remembrance. A prayer. A warning, maybe.

It was not a flag of empire.

But it was not a flag of surrender, either.

In Iberia, the last embers of old Christendom guttered and died beneath banners of silk and smoke. The Andalusian emirates—once fugitive caliphates reborn in exile—now governed the peninsula with a braided hand of bureaucracy and fire. Their standards, embroidered with Qur’anic verses in indigo thread and trimmed in gold, fluttered from the towers of Segovia and Salamanca, where cloisters had been stripped of their saints and repurposed into madrasas. The walls were whitewashed, overlaid with zellige mosaics, and the air filled not with incense but with the dry scratch of reed pens over palm-leaf and vellum.

The monks were cast out in silence. Their illuminated gospels catalogued, their vestments sold off in city auctions, their libraries picked over by scribes trained in Tunis and Córdoba. The few texts spared—often for their rarity or the strange beauty of their Latin illuminations—were rebound in goat leather and displayed as novelties in the salons of new lords. The rest burned.

In Segovia, the Alcázar no longer bore the banners of Castile. The red-and-gold lions and castles were replaced with a crescent rising from the heart of a crimson sunburst, edged in green—the emblem of the Al-Andalus Resurgent. A symbol of rebirth, but with teeth. The last cathedral choir in the city had tried to finish the Salve Regina as Andalusian guards pulled them from the transept. They were found the next morning in the olive groves outside the aqueduct, hanged from trees by their own rope cinctures. By week’s end the chapel had been converted. A new muezzin stood atop the bell tower’s shattered belfry, calling the adhan in both Arabic and Castilian, his voice echoing through streets that no longer bore crosses but painted shields—symbols of a new aristocracy, heirs of Cordoba bankers and Berber generals who had bled for the Reconquista’s reversal and now ruled in its aftermath.

In Salamanca, the university was gutted. The halls once echoing with lectures on Thomist theology were emptied of parchment and purpose. Scrolls of Aquinas, Hildegard, Augustine—ripped from oak shelves and hurled into the courtyards. Their places taken by volumes copied in Fez and Marrakesh, penned in Kufic or Maghrebi script, thick with the philosophy of Averroes and the juristic debates of al-Ghazali. The Dominican cloister became a college of fiqh and mathematics. The Latin inscriptions on the sandstone walls were chiseled out with mallets, replaced by star-pattern mosaics laid in hand-painted tile.

The purges were surgical. The last bishop of Zamora, a man who had once translated Chrysostom by candlelight, refused conversion. They strangled him with his own censer chain and left his body at the cathedral steps. His death was the final mark in a ledger that had begun years before, back when the Andalusian resistance had moved through the hills like smoke. Now they ruled openly, and they remembered.

The Catholic clergy fled west and north, many on foot, others packed into fishing boats bound for Languedoc or Liguria. Narbonne and Genoa swelled with rag-robed bishops and veiled nuns, clutching relics in oilcloth, bartering fingerbones of obscure saints for bread and passage. Some carried church keys on twine necklaces, refusing to admit the locks no longer existed. They crowded the quays beside tanners and salt merchants, begging sanctuary from towns already drowning in their own desperate flocks—refugees from the Ottoman incursions into Provence, Rhineland heretics flushed south by fire, Huguenots sick with fatigue and suspicion.

Avignon, once the city of popes, now drowned in tents that bloomed like sores along the Rhône. The bishop’s palace, abandoned a generation earlier, had been broken into and repurposed. Squatters turned its nave into a soup hall. Weevils floated in millet stew. A single tallow candle lit the vaults where conclaves had once debated the Holy Spirit. When a grain barge overturned in the shallows and the guards hoarded what little was left, a riot tore through the camp. They beat each other with spoons and crucifixes. Within hours, thousands were dead. The city gates closed for three days. The river ran black with grain and blood.

That winter, Pope Clement X died in a convent attic in Savoy, wrapped in three layers of burlap, his breath visible in the candlelight. The nuns who buried him spoke no Latin. They dug a shallow grave beneath a crooked fir, marked it with a plank of riverwood, and wrote only: Pax huic servo Dei.

His successor, Alexander IX, was chosen months later by a conclave so thin in number it could barely fill a chapel choir. He had been a Polish minor prince once, now emaciated, fingers blistered from frostbite, voice like cracked shale. They elected him in a granary converted into a cathedral, the wind leaking through the thatch. His first bull was a call for a Third Crusade. The parchment bore the usual fire—of swords, of glory, of the redemption of Jerusalem and the cleansing of Iberia—but the ink was frozen before it dried.

No banners answered.

Not from England, where merchant-princes in Kent warred with the Anglo-Dutch governors of the Humber, and where the Church was now a footnote on shipping manifests.

Not from the Holy Roman Electors, who no longer debated theology, only trade rights and mercenary contracts. Their knights fought for the highest bidder, beneath Japanese silk or Ottoman gold, not under the cross.

Not from France, shattered by exile, its churches hollowed, its relics turned to ash or currency.

The bull was read aloud by a barefoot monk in the snow of Geneva. No cardinals attended. A few peasants listened, kneeling in the slush with cracked lips and hands wrapped in barkcloth. One man raised a sword carved from a fencepost and shouted, Deus vult! But no one followed.

The age of crusade was over.

And yet, beneath the ash and silence, something shifted. Not loudly. Not in the streets. But deep in the marrow of the continent—like ice groaning beneath thaw.

By the end of 1662, the tides did not recede. They surged, dragging the wreckage of old faiths and empires across the Atlantic like driftwood, splintered and sodden. What began as a flood of exiles had become something larger—a migration of memory, a convulsion of belief.

From the charred cloisters of Salamanca, from the damp crypts beneath Segovia, they came. Whole lineages scraped from their roots, bearing what could still be carried—signet rings dented from pawnshops, psalters with their bindings burned off, crucifixes whittled down to fit into pockets. Some wore cassocks patched with curtain cloth, others armor stripped from the bodies of cousins. One bishop crossed the ocean with only a chalice and the title of his diocese carved into a plank of driftwood. They were called pilgrims, but most were beggars by the time they arrived.

New France took them first. The grey Jesuit stones of Quebec groaned under the weight of too many strangers. The missions swelled. Whole longhouses turned to infirmaries. The narrow alleys reeked of sweat and poultices. Wendat and Algonquin settlements watched from the treelines, wary, remembering the gifts of influenza that French trade had once brought. Now the priests came again, pale and shivering, asking for shelter—not to convert, but to survive. The coats of arms the exiles painted on their crates told a story the locals did not care to hear: lions of León bleeding at the flanks, broken castles for Castile, black towers crumbling beneath painted suns. Symbols of a world too heavy to carry and too sacred to leave behind.

Further south, in the territories of Japanese Mexico, the situation unraveled with less pity. Veracruz lay blackened behind them, still reeking of salt and death, but the roads leading inland—those cut through sun-bleached cypress and half-policed deserts—carried stragglers forward. They came in patched wagons, dragging icons carved from firewood and bundles of relics sewn into sashes. A fragment of a saint’s jaw. A strip of altar cloth stained with chrism.

The Japanese administration in Morelia, cautious and inward since the loss of Veracruz, watched them arrive with clipped courtesy. Many officials were third-generation settlers, their ancestry tied by both blood and bureaucracy to a distant Shogunate that no longer sent ships. They wore lacquered lamellar reworked for the heat, their helmets lined with cloth dyed in Nahua patterns. Their eyes stayed hard. Their stores were nearly bare. Now came monks who spoke no Japanese, who genuflected before shrines as if they were altars, who refused rice and asked instead for wheat and wine. The Kirishitan enclaves—descendants of samurai outcasts and native converts—held their tongues. The earth had changed, and the exiles had not.

In Ottoman New Granada, the reception took on a stranger tone. The beys of Cartagena and Santa Marta ruled with a fatalistic ease, their robes dyed with indigo and trimmed in filigreed brass. They issued edicts that permitted settlement in exchange for jizya and disarmament. No arms, no priests, no trouble. The result was a slow marriage of convenience. Catholic hymns drifted over plantations beside Sufi zikr, blending into something unrecognizable. Mudbrick chapels bore crosses without faces. In one, the Virgin had been painted without eyes, her head wrapped like a Bedouin matron. In the markets, lace from France lay beside kola nut and cured maize, Ottoman silk traded for Andalusian medals. For a moment, it almost worked—until the ships kept coming, and the mouths outpaced the bread.

In Dutch Suriname and the Anglo-Calvinist ports of Carolina, there was no mercy. Protestant militias turned ships away with signal fire and threats. At Charleston, a galleon out of Porto—four hundred Catholics, skeletal and fevered—was denied docking. When the captain fired a shot in protest, the harbor batteries responded. The ship burned to the waterline. Survivors flailed in the shallows, where children onshore waved scripture banners inked with blood-red paint and militiamen picked them off with arquebus fire. Hans van Oort, the colony’s Dutch-born Mennonite governor, stood on the ramparts and declared it divine cleansing. His scribe recorded the moment in Latin, in a book of judgments bound in deer hide.

And on Andalusian Cuba, the purging was methodical.

The emirs, fresh from the fires of Iberia, moved quickly. Catholic families—some descended from conquistadors—were dragged into public baptisms conducted in drained sugar kettles. Names were rewritten. Family crests burned in open squares. Convents were emptied, their walls repainted, their women clothed in linen and fear. The muhtasib patrols combed the cane fields for relics, pulled men from their beds for harboring rosaries or carved saints. Some submitted. Others didn’t.

The first plantations began to burn in Trinidad.

A man named Sōji, son of a fisherman from Higo and once a minor Kirishitan preacher in the southern markets, had translated fragments of Father Esteban’s final sermons into both Nahuatl and Yoruba. The scrolls passed hand to hand. They said little of God, but much of fire. The kingdom of heaven is carved with flame and footstep. Let your blood walk the earth again.

The first uprisings followed in Cartagena. Dockworkers, many former Muslims pressed into labor, rose without banners. They carried pitch and sabers made from cane knives. They burned the warehouses. They shattered the aqueducts and slit the water barrels and danced barefoot in the cinders. They named no prophet. Only memory.

In the ruins of Veracruz, where even the bones had gone brittle from heat and vulture’s beak, a group of escaped slaves raised a banner from scavenged cloth. They stitched it from ceremonial surcoats and torn tabards. Red thread on white. A burning tower, wrapped in broken chains.

They called themselves Los Hijos del Medio Día—the Sons of the Midday Sun.

They had no anthem, no scripture. Only silence, and smoke, and the echo of too many tongues.

No one ruled them.

But their names spread. From highland to mangrove, from salt mine to forge. Across a hemisphere reeling from doctrine and plague and empire’s collapse, they became whisper and talisman. Not as invaders. Not as saviors. But as proof.

The refugees had not simply arrived.

They were reshaping the world.

High in the cloud-shadowed ridges of the Western Cordillera, beyond the shattered passes and pine-wracked escarpments the Japanese called Kōzan-tō, the tribes were no longer scattered. They had become a host.

The Grizzled Host, they were called now—part myth, part thunder, spoken of in the same breath as storm gods and famine winds. A confederation shaped not by treaty or bloodline but by memory. Born of basalt and frost, they ruled the highland corridor between the Pacific colonies and the great interior with a force unseen since the era when their ancestors carved stone totems taller than trees and danced the mountain into song.

They were no longer only men.

The Battle Grizzlies came first.

Raised in cradles, not cages, suckled beside infants and reared in dens hollowed from snow and cedar, the war bears were bred for scale and fury. Their bones were thick as ship masts, their coats matted with pine pitch and clay. Clan elders fed them mash of root bulb and elk marrow, brushed their flanks with eagle down and prayed over them before each snowfall. From cubhood, they learned the language of war: drums carved from hollow birch, rhythms pounded into the ground like heartbeat signals. The bears mimicked the cadences, then mastered them. When they charged, they struck the earth in patterns—a battle tongue of thunder that rolled down the slopes like avalanche.

Their riders—tall and silent, faces painted in soot and bear fat—sat on saddles carved from alder and bound in horsehide, reins braided with copper wire and feather cord, charms dangling like teeth on breath. No whips. No spurs. They guided their mounts with song, with motion, with memory.

When the Host came down from the ridgelines, even the matchlock companies—trained in rank fire and powder drills—broke before the first volley. They were not routed. They were swallowed.

Behind the spear-line moved the Blackhands.

Black bears smaller than their kin, nimble, clever, trained not for war but for labor. These were the smiths and haulers, the water-drawers and tent-raisers. They could climb, lift, twist knots. Each bore a painted pawprint across the haunch: green for harvest, red for fire-tending, blue for construction. Their intelligence was measured not in words, but in rhythm. A drum-code told them what to do and when. They answered. Children of the Ursaque—what the colonists called the highland folk—were raised with these creatures. They slept together in snow pits, foraged together under mountain berry groves. The bond was kinship, not mastery.

During rites, the Blackhands wore cloaks fashioned from hide and feather, stitched to mimic the dress of their human companions. Some even bore paint on their muzzles, ceremonial, reverent.

The Ursaque themselves were not a kingdom. They had no throne, no capital. Power moved through a double lattice: the Weavers of Bone—matriarch shamans who held memory in trance and chant—and a council of war-chiefs, each bearing a token of ivory or obsidian passed down or won in single combat. Their assemblies were not courts but convocations, held in cave-lodges blackened with pine soot or in high circles of standing stone, where the bones of the slain were ground to ash and cast to the wind, so that no spirit of violence lingered in the valleys.

This was no rebellion. This was reawakening.

For decades, the mountain trails had carried goods: gunpowder from Kyokutō-jō, silk and scrolls from New Hangzhou, rice and fish dried and packed into cedar barrels for the climb east. The tribes permitted it. They honored the rites of passage, exacted tithe in food or musket, enforced old terms. But cities grow greedy. The silver roofs of Kyokutō-jō soon shadowed valleys leveled by convict gangs. New Hangzhou’s merchants, armored in silk and coin, sent ronin into the pines to blaze trails with shell-crushed stone, to nail brass claim discs into tree bark as though the land could be notarized.

The Host saw this not as diplomacy. They saw it as conquest.

Two Japanese outposts vanished within a moon.

Seishō and Umiwaka—mountain garrisons, manned by regulars from the shogunate’s border legions—sent no word. Their signal towers were gutted, their mirrors cracked. No smoke rose from their fires. The relief parties found only bones, armor plates, and the claw-scraped remnants of a rice cache gnawed down to husk. No journals. No orders. No banners.

A scholarly caravan from New Hangzhou, ten men with scroll satchels and ivory brush cases, vanished on the westbound trail beyond Kawa-no-Hara. Only one horse returned, foam-flecked and scarred with claw marks.

Refugees spoke of silence in the pine. Of furred figures moving in formation. Of riders who left no hoofprints, only crushed moss and frost. And always, the scent of wet earth and cedar pitch—heavy and close, like something breathing too near.

Trade ceased without warning. The mountain became a mouth. And it had closed.

In Kyokutō-jō, Governor Asano Nobuyoshi summoned his council to the great inkstone hall, a long chamber lacquered in deep black, its walls inlaid with the names of each Japanese province, rendered in gold leaf that caught the candlelight like threads of fire. The floor, polished to mirror sheen, reflected the feet of riflemasters and court scribes as they assembled at his sides. Silence held until he gave the order: all non-essential caravans to be halted, all bear cubs within colony walls to be seized or killed. There were no debates. Only bowed heads and hurried scrollwork.

But edicts could not dam fear. Merchants armed their guards with hunting spears and cast nets lined with iron hooks. Rice farmers abandoned their terraces and trekked downslope with bundles of dry barley lashed to their backs. In New Hangzhou, lanterns once hung like stars above the canals, but now they remained unlit, smothered before dusk—better to lose the light than draw the eyes of whatever waited in the highlands.

From those ridgelines, the drums began.

They sounded at dawn. Low. Hollow. Carried on the wind through pine and stone, like ribs struck from within. There were no words. Only silence in answer. A silence heavy with memory, like breath held before execution.

And still the smoke curled upward from the pine-choked west.

The Canal bled.

From Port Said to the mouth of the Red Sea, the land was torn wide open, raw and dry as a butchered carcass. The canal was sixty percent complete—a black gash between continents, its banks packed hard with broken stone, its trenches laced with bone and rust. It was not unity. It was empire carved by whip.

At each camp along the cut, flags snapped against the desert gusts: the chrysanthemum of the Japanese crown, its edges eaten by sun and grit; the hexagonal crests of Korean bureaucrats; the narrow, brush-painted Manchu pennants, their calligraphy faded under salt and time. The Korean overseers wore quilted lamellar dyed the yellow of old court scrolls, crests obscured beneath sweat and dirt. The Manchus—tall, sharp-eyed, silent—stood guard over payroll chests and lime pits. Their armor, burnished blue lacquer, was domed with iron rivets and cinched beneath reed-woven cloaks soaked in brine to fight the oven heat. Their rifles hung across their backs like instruments of fate.

But the hands that dug were Tamil, Oriya, Bengali, Sinhalese—indentured or deceived, some sold in the dark corners of Kolkata, others seized on pilgrim roads or rice barges along the Hooghly. They worked barefoot and shirtless, their ribs like bowstrings, their eyes ringed in salt and ash. They carved the trench with spades of horned iron and baskets stitched from palm, hauling rock in teams of six. Gong and lash kept time. Engineers ventured down only with escort, and even then with eyes flicking to every shadow.

The death toll passed forty thousand. Most were burned at dusk—lime pits ringed in lanterns, the pyres stoked with diesel scrap and dried dung. The smoke was thick, mingling with coal ash from the dredging engines brought in crates from Nagasaki, their gears corroded to clatter and hiss. Some foremen tried to tag the dead—tin tablets, inked names—but the wind erased everything.

Then came Rajendran.

None could say what village had borne him, though word spread that he had once been a vidwan in Thanjavur, and that his hands, beneath their calluses, still bore the scent of turmeric and paper. He walked with a crooked gait, as if part cripple, part dancer. He fought with a stolen katana, chipped near the hilt, and quoted Sanskrit sutras before each kill.

His name spread in whispers. His words etched in blood or coal onto ration tins and tent canvas. If they cut the earth, we cut their throat.

The first strike came at Bitter Lake. A convoy of oxcarts loaded with forged rail and powder kegs was intercepted. Thirty Korean guards burned alive in the explosion. The survivors were hunted down with sickles and adze. The commander’s head was found in a shattered lantern casing, tongue nailed to a water ledger.

Attacks rippled from there. Foot bridges vanished in midnight blasts, the air stinking of saltpeter and clay. Bamboo caltrops soaked in goat dung were scattered along patrol routes. One Manchu captain—respected, even by his enemies—was flayed alive and nailed to a latrine wall with a parchment message in Tamil stitched across his chest: Let water run red if not blue.

Tokyo responded with fire.

First came infantry from Okinawa, then a detachment of Mori-clan samurai—veterans flown under the crossed white tomoe of that ancient and merciless house. They wore red streamers tied through the back plates of their jingasa helmets to distinguish them from the Korean detachments. Their orders: restore order by ash and blade. Villages suspected of harboring rebels were flattened. Wells were salted, rice caches torched. Mosques and temples both burned, for ghosts had no sect. But Rajendran was already gone, his likeness painted in soot on banana leaf, his voice turned parable. His name spoken only under rain.

Still, the Suez held. Barely. But not in silence.

The dirt pulsed with rumor. Something old stirred in the trenches—fear not of death, but of becoming forgotten. The land seemed to whisper, even under the sun. And elsewhere, in palaces and war camps, those whispers gathered weight. The world watched. And waited.

In the salons of Paris, where gilt cherubs once peered down from frescoed vaults onto bishops in purple and powdered wigs, now hung filigree lanterns of Ottoman brass. The light they cast was softer, foreign. Beneath them, French delegates—draped in subdued blue and ivory silks, with ink-stained fingers and crumbling coats of arms—signed a non-aggression pact with Istanbul. Behind them loomed two portraits: Suleiman the Magnificent, his turban high and eyes serene, and Napoleon Bonaparte, cast in oil, his hand forever tucked into brocade. Together, they flanked the chamber like twin shadows of empire. The pact secured grain from the Levant. France promised no soldiers would cross the Pyrenees while Andalusian flags flew in Iberia. In return, missionaries were permitted back into Ottoman Tunis—stripped of crosses, their cassocks searched at the gates, their gospels memorized rather than carried.

In London, the Thames rolled grey beneath towers that once glittered. The docks muttered of collapse—empty crates, ships sold for parts, dockside taverns offering bread for promises. The Crown weighed surrender by another name: the sale of its Caribbean possessions to Dutch syndicates headquartered in cold, stone halls of Enkhuizen and New Rotterdam. These were not empire-builders with sabers and trumpets. They were ledger men. Marbled offices. Etchings of sugar mills. They promised no glory—only margins, dividends, replanting with imported muscle. Barbados would be Dutch. Port Royal might follow, silent as a slipped noose.

And in the quiet corridors between nations, the Jesuits moved once more.

Stripped of lands and titles, they wore their old black robes like disguises. Doctors, lecturers, spice traders. In Nagasaki, a man called Paulo Soeiro was arrested for distributing banned sutras annotated in Kanbun and Latin. The ink was old, the paper lined with burnt edges. In New Hangzhou, a Coimbra scholar vanished after conversing with a Shinto priest whose sermons spoke of the “invisible keys of Peter” and a door opened by memory. And in the northern highlands—where the ridgelines cut like teeth into the sky—stories rose of a man in white who healed without touching, who spoke fluent Nippon-go and claimed to have seen the Virgin near Macao, her hands cupped around a lamp that bled oil and salt.

Far away, in Kyoto, Emperor Go-Hanazono sat beneath the veil of summer moonlight, his garden hushed but for the soft clack of pine ash in the brazier. He had not taken food in days. Chrysanthemum oil burned slow beside him, warding insects, but not thought. He read again from Kenji’s scrolls, his hands unmoving, his breath shallow. The garden was silent. The clouds above the city hung like silk curtains hiding something vast.

His courtiers did not speak. He had told them he awaited a burning messenger from the west.

Some said he meant war. Others believed salvation. But none asked.

Across oceans and burned fields, across canals and salt flats, across treaty and betrayal, men bled in trenches cut by hand and claw. Treaties were written in sand and rewritten in blood. The old age of orders cracked. Something older pressed through.

At dawn, Harrow’s skiff broke the surf. Its hull was lashed with tar and barnacle, its sail a stitched patchwork of rice sacks and sailbacks bleached to pallor. The beach was bone-white sand littered with shale, and behind it, the trees leaned—palm, mangrove, almond—like sentinels too tired to warn again. Fort Kingsmark, a Protestant port on Jamaica’s windward edge, stirred already with the rattle of muskets and trade. But when the skiff scraped ashore, the noise stilled like a lid closing on breath.

Three figures emerged.

One limped.

Lieutenant Thomas Harrow, once an officer in the Royal Expeditionary Corps, moved like a man half-remembered by his own body. His coat, what remained of it, was salt-eaten, its brass buttons greened to powder. The sash across his shoulder was stained a color that might once have been red. In his hand he carried no sword. Only a journal wrapped in oilskin—its spine inked in Latin, Japanese, and Nahuatl. A reliquary of memory, buckled and water-warped.

The boy Kazuo followed. Silent now, and smaller somehow than he had been, his eyes ringed in soot that never fully washed out. His flute was gone, somewhere beneath Veracruz. Around his neck hung a charm of twisted copper and coral, strung on woman’s hair. It had been given to him in fire. He had not removed it since.

Father Esteban came last. His coat was stolen from a dead Andalusian officer, the crimson sun and silver scimitar of the House of Herrera still visible across the back. He wore it like a wound. His hands were stained black at the fingertips—ink or ash, none could say. He did not preach. He did not bow. His eyes had lost their priestly gleam. There was only witness left in him.

The dock guards stood stiff. They were men from English slums, black freemen, ash-children of empire. To them, Harrow was a broken myth. Esteban was worse—a revenant in a holy thief’s coat. But it was Kazuo they feared. One old woman, eyes milk-blue with age, turned from him muttering in Ashanti that she saw smoke rising from his shoulders.

Still, no one stopped them.

That night, Harrow wrote in a rented attic above a warehouse. The roof creaked with each gust from the Atlantic. Candlelight crawled along the beams like pale fingers. His hand shook, but the letters came all the same. The final entry read:

“We mistook our temples for kingdoms, and our blood for permission. The gods are gone. We are what remains.”

He sealed the journal and placed it in Kazuo’s satchel. The boy said nothing. But he clutched it close.

Elsewhere, the world came undone.

In Kyoto, Go-Hanazono fasted again. He spoke only to painted screens—old ones, where storms were painted in gold foil and dragons curled through clouds like forgotten promises. The Chrysanthemum Throne was draped in white, as if mourning. He muttered once, to the garden and the dusk, “It will come from fire, not sky.” No one wrote it down. No one needed to.

In Fort Kingsmark, the boy Kazuo remained under Dutch surveillance. But the surveillance frayed. He walked alone through the mangroves. He returned with snakes that did not strike. He sat beside the fevered and they woke whole. When the port’s chapel caught fire and burned to plank ends, he stood in its ashes and sang scripture in Nahuatl and Japanese, word for word. Moonlight did not touch him.

They whispered he was the child of fire and silence.

Father Esteban vanished weeks later. Some said he rode north with escaped slaves, armed with only a carved staff inked with glyphs and psalms. In time they called him El Vidente—The Seer. He did not preach revolt. He spoke of memory. He said land could not be conquered, only forgotten—and that it must be remembered in full before it would give itself again.

Northward, the texture of the air changed—thinner somehow, dry with the hush that follows gunpowder or the closing of church doors. Wind moved different over the burnt plains. The trees along the frontier leaned inward, as if listening.

The remnants of the Japanese Empire, scattered and hollowed by the southern purges, moved east through the forests like wolves out of range. Stripped of command but not discipline, they carried with them the scars of Veracruz and the collapse of the inland holdings. In the Protestant territories of New England and the Upper Hudson, they found wary shelter. The men they met wore rough linen and oiled leather, their speech thick with Calvinist certainties, their walls painted with Scripture and pine tar. They did not share gods. But they shared enemies.

At Oswego, on the wind-lashed lake edge where the trees gave way to slate, a pact was signed. Not in gold, but in blood and ink. Beneath three flags—Japan’s Rising Sun, the red cross of Saint George, and the evergreen pine of the New England League—the alliance took shape. The terms were simple: mutual patrols of the Mississippi interior, shared munitions depots in the salt marsh forts, and coordinated resistance to both Andalusian incursions and rogue warbands from the southern wastes. They would build a wall, not of stone, but of riflemen, coded lantern signals, and winter rations hoarded deep in hillside cellars.

But the fire came anyway.

At Mount Shasta, the bear riders returned.

They came at twilight. Always twilight. Drums echoed down the ridgelines like the heartbeat of some god just waking. Columns of pitch-smoke curled upward in tight spirals—signals drawn in fire. The outpost stationed there, a timber palisade ringed with gravel redoubts and manned by riflemen of the Yamato Corps, fired two volleys before their line buckled. The bears came armored—mats of bark, rawhide, and bone lashed to their flanks with copper wire and deer sinew. The beasts moved low, their breath steaming like coal engines. Matchlocks snapped under their weight like stalks.

One bore a girl no older than thirteen.

She rode without reins, bare-legged and upright. Her eyes were painted with soot. She held a hatchet of hammered copper. Around her neck, strung on cord dyed with elderberry and sweat, hung beads of polished shell and warped musket balls smoothed by fire. Her mouth never opened. She screamed nothing. She struck nothing.

A panicked samurai shot her from the saddle.

But the bear did not stop.

It tore through the ranks with a sound like a felled oak cracking over rock. The second volley never came. By nightfall, the fort was gone—splintered timber, smoke-choked corpses, and a prayer bell melted to slag.

At dawn, scouts found her body laid out atop a basalt altar. She had been wrapped in wolfskin, her hatchet placed in her hands. Her eyes had been closed. The bear was gone. Not a single track remained.

Far east, where desert met engineering, the Suez crept closer to completion.

The canal’s edge was a chasm of red rock and blasted salt. It wound its way through scrub and bone, sixty percent finished and bleeding men every mile. Japanese field engineers reported sabotage nightly—cut ropes, poisoned wells, fires that burned without flame. The camps shivered at sunset.

And then, a courier boat bound upriver for Cairo never arrived.

Intercepted near a flooded marsh by an Andalusian patrol, the boat was pulled ashore. Its contents were sealed in wax, then ash. The language inside was Tamil, but the signature was something older: a single letter pressed in smudged black, like a thumbprint left on an oath. R.

The documents were clear.

The plan was not fantasy. It was clockwork. A map of tribal loyalties from the Sundarbans to Oman. A sequence of coordinated strikes—bridge sabotage, payroll thefts, canal breaches, false surrenders. Each marked with a symbol or phrase in different tongues, carefully color-coded by region and caste. Bengali insurgents. Tamil saboteurs. Oromo sailors. Bedouin whisper-networks. Arab-Sinhalese code passed through date crates and burnt prayer scrolls.

It was not prophecy.

It was orchestration.

At the bottom of the final page, beneath a drawing of a severed canal line bleeding into the Red Sea, one phrase was scrawled in faded English. Underlined twice. Just four words.

Not yet. But soon.