The veil lifted.
Zion awoke kneeling, hands in the soil at the very edge of Bassoon's frontline command. The ground trembled with tension. Smoke coiled in the distance where forge fires had been burning for days. The air was thick with firesteel and the pungent scent of sweat, iron, and ozone—the scent of war.
His body was cold, but his spirit was ablaze.
He had returned from the realm of the dead—not just with memories, but with voices that would never leave him. The words of Dessalines, of Toussaint, of Capois la Mort still thundered in his bones like the echoes of distant war drums.
Zion rose slowly, the weight of command heavier than before. His generals—his wives, his seven closest friends, the pantheon of Ginen—looked to him not as a man, but as the living bridge between worlds.
He spoke not in haste, but with thunder.
"Bring forth the captured queen," he ordered. "Now."
The camp moved like a living beast, his command rippling through officers and soldiers. Within minutes, a procession of chained warriors appeared—escorting the Hive's captured queen, a grotesque and elegant thing, trembling in hatred, her carapace cracked and oozing luminescent blood.
Zion stepped toward her, unflinching. She hissed something in a tongue too ancient and insectile for most to comprehend. But he understood. Her thoughts clawed at his mind—disdain, fear, hunger.
"You once told your swarm that you would devour us," Zion said, his voice calm. "But now you are our nourishment."
He turned to the assembled commanders—gods, demons, mortals alike.
"We have bled too long to keep feeding our armies from our own lands. The enemy has gifted us their bodies—let them sustain us. Let the Hive become our harvest."
He pointed at the queen with the edge of his sword, not glowing, not divine—just forged iron and unwavering intent.
"Behead her."
A moment of silence. Then the executioner stepped forward. In one clean stroke, the Hive queen's head was separated from her body. It didn't drop with a thud—it hissed, then collapsed like steaming sap, dissolving into strange minerals and potent compounds.
From behind Zion, soldiers and alchemists surged forward to gather what was left—flesh that could forge weapons, blood that could strengthen sigils, bones that hummed with residual power.
"We do not raise cattle anymore," Zion said. "We raise warriors. The Hive will feed us… and fuel the fire of our vengeance."
And with that decree, the tide of war began to turn