Janus had never been afraid of the sea.
The city had been built around it.
Its harbour was the heart of everything, merchants shouting across crowded piers, fishermen hauling nets onto the docks, sailors drinking in waterfront taverns, children running between stacks of cargo, and great wooden ships coming and going beneath the banners of distant kingdoms.
For the people of Janus, the sea meant life.
Fish.
Trade.
Travel.
News from distant kingdoms.
A child could stand on the harbour wall and spend an entire afternoon watching ships arrive from foreign lands.
Janus had seen storms.
It had seen pirates, naval battles in the distance.
It had even seen dragons flying over the horizon.
The people of Janus had learned long ago that there was very little in the world that could truly surprise a port city.
And they were wrong.
It all began shortly after midday.
A fisherman was the first to notice something strange.
He had been standing on the upper deck of his boat when he noticed that the horizon seemed darker than it should have been.
At first, he thought it was an approaching storm.
Then he realized there were no clouds.
The darkness was moving.
He narrowed his eyes.
There were ships.
Hundreds of them.
No.
Thousands.
His hands slowly loosened around the rope he was holding.
The vessels were unlike anything he had ever seen.
Some were ships, certainly. Great metal vessels whose hulls were so dark and massive that they seemed more like pieces of a fortress than something meant to float.
Others were smaller.
Some skimmed across the sea with impossible speed, throwing white waves behind them without sails.
Others seemed to hover barely above the surface.
And then the fisherman noticed something else.
Something was flying above them.
He stared.
They had wings.
But not the wings of birds nor leathery wings of dragons.
Not even enchanted constructs.
These things were machines.
Hundreds of them.
Their rotors beat against the air with a deafening mechanical roar, descending and rising in ways no living creature could imitate.
To the fishermen below, they looked like enormous metal insects.
One passed directly overhead.
The fisherman drop his rope.
"What in the gods' names..."
The other fishermen turned.
For a moment, nobody moved.
Then someone screamed.
"LOOK AT THE SKY!"
The harbour changed in seconds.
Merchants abandoned their carts.
A woman dropped a basket of bread.
A group of children stopped playing beside the docks and stared upward.
"What are those?"
"Dragons?"
"No, they're too small."
"Then what are they?"
Nobody answered.
A sailor stumbled backward as one of the strange machines flew over the harbor.
He spent thirty years at sea.
He had seen wyverns.
He had seen some sea creatures.
He had seen storms that swallowed ships whole.
But he had never seen a creature hover in place.
A little girl standing beside him pointed upward.
"Papa..."
The sailor grabbed her hand.
"Inside."
"But—"
"Inside!"
His voice was different now.
She never heard her father sound so afraid before.
The first guards on the western wall thought the fishermen were drunk.
The second group thought they were exaggerating.
The third group looked through the city watch's spyglass and stopped laughing.
One guard lowered the glass.
"What... is that?"
His commander took it from him.
He looked.
And for several seconds, he said nothing.
The horizon was filled with movement.
The sea was filled with ships.
The sky was filled with machines.
And beneath them, approaching the shoreline, were things that looked like armoured beasts.
Some had legs.
Some had wheels.
Some had enormous metal bodies that moved through the surf without slowing.
The commander had fought pirates before.
He had seen siege engines.
He had seen magical beasts.
He even fought a wyvern once.
None of those experiences had prepared him for this.
"Sound the harbour alarm!"
The bell rang.
Once.
Twice.
Then continuously.
Janus began to panic.
People poured into the streets.
The ordinary noise of the city disappeared beneath shouting.
"What's happening?"
"An attack!"
"From where?"
"The sea!"
"Who are they?"
"We don't know!"
"How many?"
"We don't know!"
A shopkeeper locked his doors.
A baker pulled his apprentices into the back room.
A mother grabbed her children and ran toward the city center.
The children kept looking behind them.
"What are those things?"
"I don't know."
"Are they dragons?"
"No."
"Then what are they?"
The mother didn't answer.
She didn't know.
Nobody knew.
That uncertainty was almost worse than the invasion itself.
Janus had no word for what was coming.
The city watch attempted to organize itself.
Nobody knew what they were organizing against.
"How many ships?"
"We don't know!"
"Are they pirates?"
"No!"
"Then who are they?"
"We don't even know!"
"Where are the royal forces?"
"Still two days away!"
That answer spread through the city faster than the alarm.
Two days.
Janus had two days' worth of soldiers nowhere near it.
The city garrison was small.
Its walls had been designed to repel raiders and pirates, not an army arriving from beyond the horizon.
The harbour defenses were old.
The coastal ballistae were meant for ships made of wood.
The defenders had never imagined that the enemy might simply ignore the harbor.
Because they didn't need it.
They were coming over the beach.
The first explosion struck the seawall.
The stone shattered.
A wave of debris flew into the marketplace.
A fruit seller scream and ducked behind his cart.
A horse bolted.
A wooden sign crashed into the street.
For a few seconds, everyone simply stood there.
Then the screaming began.
A second explosion followed.
Then another.
The city had no idea where the attacks were coming from.
There were no visible siege engines.
No catapults.
No mages standing on distant hills.
Only ships.
And the machines flying above them.
A young city guard looked toward the sky.
A silver shape descended through the clouds.
It had wings.
Long, sleek wings.
It gleamed in the sunlight like polished metal.
Someone screamed:
"DRAGON!"
The cry spread.
"Silver dragons!"
People ran.
Others froze.
Some dropped to their knees and began praying.
The machine passed overhead.
Fire fell from the sky.
The harbour erupted.
A wall of heat rolled through the waterfront.
Ships caught fire.
Wooden stalls exploded into splinters.
The civilians who had gathered along the harbour fled into the streets.
A man carrying his infant son stumbled and fell.
His wife dragged him upright.
"GET UP!"
"I can't—"
"GET UP!"
Behind them, the harbour burned.
The machine disappeared beyond the rooftops.
Then another came.
Then another more.
The people of Janus had never imagined that the sky itself could become a threat.
The first amphibious machines emerged from the sea.
They were enormous.
Some had tracks.
Some had legs.
Some looked like armoured wagons with no horses or oxen pulling them.
They simply moved.
Through the water, straight onto the beach toward the defenders.
A city guard fired his crossbow.
The bolt struck one of the machines and bounced away.
The guard stared.
A fisherman beside him whispered:
"Run."
The machine opened fire.
The shoreline vanished beneath smoke.
Men were thrown backward.
Wooden barricades exploded.
Horses screamed and ran.
The defenders' formation collapsed almost instantly.
Behind the armored machines came soldiers.
At first, the civilians thought they were monsters.
Their faces were hidden behind strange masks.
Their ears were covered by unfamiliar devices.
Their bodies were covered in armour unlike anything in Altrea.
Some wore enormous suits of armour that made them look less like men and more like reptiles standing upright.
The soldiers advanced without shouting.
Without banners.
Without issuing challenges.
They simply moved forward.
And killed everything that resisted them.
A group of civilians attempted to flee through an alley.
They heard something approaching behind them.
Not footsteps.
A mechanical rumble.
A steel wagon turned the corner.
There were no horses.
No driver sitting visibly atop it.
The machine simply rolled toward them.
Everyone froze.
Then someone shouted.
"GET OUT OF THE WAY!"
They scattered.
The armoured vehicle continued past them.
A little boy stared at it from behind his mother's skirt.
"Mother..."
She covered his eyes.
"Don't look."
"But what is it?"
"I don't know."
The first battle mech stepped onto the beach.
It was taller than any man.
Larger than any horse.
Its body was made entirely of metal.
Its legs moved with the deliberate weight of some enormous animal.
Weapons were mounted onto its sides.
A group of royal soldiers stared at it.
One of them whispered:
"Steel abomination..."
A civilian standing behind them heard the words.
He would remember them for the rest of his life.
The machine turned toward them.
The soldiers raised their shields.
The abomination fired.
And the formation disappeared.
The civilian screamed and ran.
Behind him, more steel abominations followed.
Some walked.
Some carried enormous weapons.
Others moved alongside armoured personnel carriers—the strange steel wagons without horses.
The beach became a battlefield.
Then a bloodbath.
Then simply a road.
Because the invaders kept moving.
The Cohort of the Deeps came first.
Their amphibious troops poured from the water in wave after wave.
Behind them came the Iron Jaws.
Their heavy soldiers advanced through the ruined shoreline with impressive discipline.
Among them were the enormous figures wearing their distinctive suit of armour called Gharial suits.
To the defenders, they looked like armoured crocodilian demons.
To civilians watching from windows, they looked like something from a nightmare.
One woman shut her curtains.
Another simply stood frozen.
A child whispered:
"Are those men?"
Her grandmother pulled her away from the window.
"No."
"But they have people inside them."
"Don't look."
The invaders moved into the city.
The streets that had been crowded with merchants only an hour earlier became avenues for machines.
An armoured vehicle rolled past a bakery.
A battle mech stepped over a collapsed building.
Infantry moved through the alleys.
The strange masked soldiers communicated through devices around their ears.
They seemed incapable of confusion.
That frightened the civilians more than the weapons.
The soldiers knew exactly what they were doing.
They weren't raiders.
They weren't pirates.
They weren't a mob.
They are an army.
The army that Janus had never known existed.
A wounded city guard crawled through the rubble.
He heard footsteps.
Heavy ones.
A Gharial trooper appeared through the smoke.
The guard raised his sword.
His hands were shaking.
The creature stopped.
For a moment, the soldier thought it might speak.
Instead, the masked figure raised its weapon.
The guard closed his eyes.
Then the shot came.
By late afternoon, the harbour belonged to the invaders.
By sunset, the outer districts had fallen.
By nightfall, Janus was theirs.
The city watch had been destroyed or scattered.
The surviving defenders had fled into the interior.
The harbour burned.
Smoke covered the streets.
Foreign machines occupied the plazas.
Armoured vehicles rolled through streets that had previously been filled with merchants.
Soldiers in strange masks stood beneath buildings whose inhabitants had never heard their language.
Some civilians hid in cellars.
Others barricaded themselves inside homes.
Some simply sat in the streets, too terrified to move.
The children were the quietest.
They had stopped asking questions.
The adults had stopped pretending they knew the answers.
Outside, engines rumbled through Janus.
The sound continued long after the fighting ended.
That was perhaps the most frightening part.
The monsters did not leave.
They come to stay.
Far offshore, aboard one of the mercenary ships, Roswald stood silently at the railing.
He watched the smoke rise from Janus.
The landing had gone almost perfectly.
On the shoreline below, Cohort's troopers were already clearing wreckage from the beaches.
Dead bodies were being dragged away.
Burning wagons were being pushed aside.
Supplies were being unloaded.
Engineers were establishing temporary positions.
The whole operation had the cold efficiency of people who had done this before.
Roswald watched silently.
There was something strange about the city.
It had been taken so quickly that it almost felt unreal.
He looked toward the distant streets.
"So that's Altrea."
A voice answered behind him.
"Disappointed?"
Roswald didn't turn.
"Not disappointed."
Jessica Hazen walked toward him.
Her blonde ringlet hair moved gently in the sea wind, completely at odds with the smoke and destruction surrounding them.
She stopped beside him.
"You look worried."
"I'm thinking." Roswald said.
"That's dangerous." And Jessica reply.
Roswald finally glanced at her.
Jessica smiled.
"You can worry later."
She leaned against the railing beside him.
"When we meet their real armies."
Roswald looked back toward Janus.
"The ones we fought weren't real?"
Jessica shrugged.
"That was a port garrison."
She smiled again.
"I want to see what their knights can do."
Roswald sighed.
"You just want to shoot a dragon."
"Obviously."
For the first time, Roswald almost smiled.
Below them, another machine emerged from the water.
The soldiers on the beach cheered.
The banners of the mercenaries rose above the captured harbor.
Neither Roswald nor Jessica knew exactly how Altrea would respond.
Neither did the people of Altrea.
But generations later, historians would mark that day as the beginning of something far larger than the fall of Janus.
The people of Janus were the first Altreans to see them.
The first to hear their machines.
The first to call them monsters.
The first to watch the sea itself become an invasion route.
And the first to understand, far too late, that the world had changed.
The mercenaries had arrived.
And Janus is just their first foothold.