1

By this point, the field command had moved to the central yard between the well and the cottage, where the wounded and civilians had been evacuated. Although some of the Varnamites had joined the fray of their own volition. In fact, armed with their work axes, they managed the familiar job of chopping up wood considerably better than their allies. But despite their input, there was no changing the fact that the situation was dire. The conflict had gone on for nearly two hours already, and the slow but steady flood of invaders showed no signs of ending. Hundreds of dryads had been cut down against the palisade, but more climbed over, and the knights were growing exhausted. Like yesterday, the night now was filled with the sounds of metal hitting wood, occasionally broken up by the shrieks of the injured and calls for help by the wounded. A moment's oversight could mean being gripped by the inhuman hands in the dark and being pulled apart. And in the company of less than a hundred combatants, even a few casualties hurt.

“Captain, update on the losses?” Colonel Miragrave asked her assistant.

“Ma'am. Eighteen confirmed dead. Twenty-four incapacitated. Eight missing.”

“Damn it, no hope of lasting until daybreak. For how long can we keep the front gate?”

“At the rate the line draws back, moments at best.”

“Any openings emerged in the siege?”

“No foes are attacking from the hillside, by the looks of it.”

“The locals said there is a shrine for Lord Matheus at the peak of it,” Yornwhal mentioned. “It is possible that the dryads will avoid the holy ground, as it is of spiritual significance.”

“So we'll make a hole in the palisade and withdraw uphill,” the colonel concluded. “The problem is, what do we do with the supplies, the horses, and the wounded. There is no time to save all. No, if we set fire to the palisade and the cabins, we may be able to buy more time. Perhaps enough to evacuate the wounded, at least.”

“That would mean abandoning the outpost,” vizier Attiker pointed out. “We would torch our only foothold in this accursed forest?”

“The alternative is being wiped out to the last man.”

—“Master!” At that moment, Yuliana came running up the hill, accompanied by Brian.

“Yuliana?” Miragrave raised her gaze at the girl in surprise. “I told the sergeant to release you if the gate is lost. Does that mean...”

“Not yet,” the princess answered. “But at this rate, it won't be long. What are you going to do?”

“The match is lost. We will evacuate the outpost and make our last stand at the hill.”

“No,” Yuliana shook her head. “We have to attack and drive them back. While we still can!”

“Attack?” the colonel repeated. “How do you presume to do that? We have no men!”

“We do! They're still holding out, somehow! We have to gather our forces and ride out through the back gate. The dryads don't realize it's an opening, do they, since it's blocked? We can catch them by surprise and clear them up. On open ground, they can't gang up on us like this.”

“An irrational gamble,” the colonel refuted. “Lose the fort behind you and you're trapped between the enemy and your own walls.”

“Only a squad of twenty will do. Even fifteen! It's about mobility, not the numbers. The rest can still hold the outpost and keep evacuating while the pressure of the offensive is shifted.”

“And how do you presume to round them up so easily? They don't exactly fear our swords.”

—“Look out!”

A knight keeping watch suddenly called out. Three dryads had slipped past the defenders and were now approaching the group. The guards quickly stepped forward to shield the leaders.

And then, something unexpected occurred.

One of the dryads abruptly burst into fire. It burned with intense heat, engulfed in bright green-ish, almost white flames and fell mid-step. The one responsible for the miracle wasn't the Court Wizard. Instead, a young girl dressed in dark clothes appeared behind the dryads, like a shadow, and stabbed the woodman with a weapon hidden in her hand. She repeated the feat with the other two, dancing around them while they vainly searched for their killer. The two bodies likewise perished in an unnatural fire, hot enough to make the onlookers avert their faces.

“How about using these?” The girl, Riswelze, stepped before their astonished eyes, twirling something that looked like an arrow between her fingers. “Hot stuff, isn't it! Whatever the arrowheads hit burns happily away.”

“That would be because of Yodiath, the rune of immolation,” Yornwhal said. “Anything marked by the rune, or the weapon inscribed with it, is offered a sacrifice to the Gods and consumed at once by divine fire. Try not to prick yourself with it, child. Those flames do not discriminate between the wielder and the foe.”

Colonel Miragrave's sharp glare fixed at Riswelze.

“I see princesses these days include thieves in their merry company. Were we in Tratovia now, you'd be relieved of the hand that can't tell other people's belongings apart from her own.”

“Oh trust me,” the assassin replied, “I'm only too well-versed in the laws of your uptight empire. But is this really the time for that? With these babies, we can make short work of those blockheads.”

“The problem is, we only packed three hundred of them,” Attiker said. “Well, less than that are left now. Once they're used, the arrows naturally burn together with the target. Hardly enough to turn the tables on such a horde.”

“Can't we have the wizard draw the rune on other arrows?” Brian suggested.

“I am sorry to say, but it is not quite that simple,” the court wizard answered. “These particular arrows were produced by a master of magic head and shoulders above myself. They represent ingenuity I cannot hope to reproduce with my humble talents.”

“It's fine. They can still give us the edge we need to clear the siege,” Yuliana retorted. “What do you say, master? I am prepared to lead the charge myself! Please let us try! I'm certain it is better than sitting here with the noose tightening around our necks.”

“You cannot predict the future,” Miragrave told her. “What if you fail? And there may yet be a way to break the siege without the arrows.”

“But how many more sacrifices will it take? Lives are lost each moment we stand here deliberating! Are people really worth less to you than letters carved in metal?”

“How dare you—!” Fury lit up in the commander's eyes. “Do you think this is a game for me!”

“Commander!” The vizier took Yuliana's side in the debate. “What are you saving them for? Open your eyes! We are not going to live! The daemon is dead! Stop chasing the ghosts of the past and look at what's in front of you!”

For a moment, everyone stood still under the heavy silence, only the hacking of wood, cries of rage, and an occasional pained shriek for a background track. The colonel, biting her lip, looking down, torn by doubt—and the others, anxiously awaited for her to make up her mind.

Then, Miragrave finally spoke.

“If it is indeed dead, then why does it seem like our every action is playing straight into its hand?” Nevertheless, she glanced at Yuliana. “You have my permission. Take the arrows. As many as you need. Ride out with my captain. And come back alive.”

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

The knight princess of Langoria nodded with a resolute face.

“I will.”

2

Against the hasty speculations, the front grate was not yet lost. A group of eight knights or so—it was hard to count in the dark—kept hitting anything that moved in the cramped passage, while behind their oblivious backs, the yard was kept clear by a solitary woman with a greatsword.

“I'm getting a bit tired here,” Izumi told the men pushing back the dryads in the entryway. “I'm going, I'm going to go. I'm really, really leaving. I mean it. Are you going to be fine with that? You're going to be stuck between two fronts, you know? You'll probably all die? Is that okay?”

No one paid any attention to her. But as tired as she was getting, Izumi couldn't bring herself to leave. Turning around, she swept the legs from under a dryad coming from behind with her greatsword, and then decapitated the falling opponent. Still, even legless and headless, it blindly groped at the hems of her surcoat.

“Ew! Gross! That's gross! Die!” she smacked the dryad further away, golf-style. “How many more are there left? This is boring! Could I get a progress bar on display? Or even just a percentage of how many I've beaten so far? Or am I on the clock? Give me the countdown timer then! Where are you, Yule…? Come baaaack!”

Despite her complaints, the offensive wasn't particularly intense at their side anymore.

The dryads wouldn't attempt to clear a path for those coming after, or assist their kindred that were in trouble. Perhaps the ancient spirits of the forest simply saw no difference between a wall and a road? Neither did they pay attention to the shed with the supplies, or the animal shelter. Their way of war was in every respect fundamentally different from that between ordinary people, lacking in strategy and secondary objectives.

But a goal they did seem to have, even if obscure. As unintelligent as their maneuvering seemed on the ground level, looking at the big picture displayed a clear shift in the focus. It seemed almost as if they could tell where the leaders were. All the woodmen ignored the defending knights where they could and instead headed up the slope, towards the main building.

Instead of massacring every last one of the humans intruding in their kingdom, destroying their houses or supplies, were they content with simply eliminating those in charge? Or were they perhaps attracted to the wizard's magic?

“Or...did we mistake their intentions all along...?” Izumi pondered.

“AAAGGGHHHH—!” One of the knights at the entrance had his arm caught by the dryads trying to force their way in. They forcibly pulled him straight through the spiked obstacle. His companions tried in vain to get him back from the relentless might of the treemen, he didn't make it through in one piece.

“Fuck, it's lost! Fall back!” The others deemed the situation hopeless and retreated.

In the dark, narrow passage, it was hard to tell which of the many pieces of garbage was a living invader and which only a dead branch, or a broken barrier. In the tired men's gazes, it all blurred into one abstract mess. The knights now picked torches and threw them into the mixed pile of wood and dead knights.

Soon enough, the whole entrance was in blazes. A number of dryads burned alongside, but it also meant that once the fire died down, the path would be wide open for more coming behind.

Not that they would obediently wait for their turn.

While the flames still remained livid, brightly blazing figures already waded through the inferno, not all that unlike the robotic villains of a famous science fiction movie. Not that anyone other than Izumi was able to make the reference.

For those beings, their bodies were only ephemeral shells, vessels temporarily inhabited for the necessities of the physical world, and easily discarded. Elementals lacked the advanced minds of their divinely created relative spirits, strangers to the concept of self and will. They moved for the will of the collective, and nothing beyond that mattered.

The early pioneers burned to cinders and fell before reaching the other side, but little by little the fiery dryads started to reach further than their predecessors. The knights on the path could only anxiously ready their weapons again, after the much too brief breather.

But at that very moment—a loud sound rang in the air, carrying far, far between the trees of the forest in every direction.

It was the pompous boom of a genuine war horn, signaling the start of an offensive.

Surprisingly enough, this bold, encouraging sound was enough to stop even the advancing elementals. They halted, turning their faceless heads in its direction. No one could guess what went on in their primitive minds, but perhaps it was a sense of nostalgia. Perhaps their spirits, spawned from the creators' lingering will that coursed through all existence, still retained a faint echo from the time long gone; the Golden Age, when bravery and purpose were strongly felt in everything.

Shortly after, more strange sounds could be heard beyond the palisade.

The galloping of a dozen horses, as well as strange hisses and whooms.

Izumi took the chance to run up to the watchtower left from the entryway and climbed up to see what was happening outside.

It was certainly a spectacle one wouldn't want to miss for any money.

A mounted squad of fifteen rode through the dryads' mixed ranks, bows in hand, firing without rest. And everywhere their arrows hit, dryads were lit up in explosions of bright, greenish flames, as if they had all been doused in petrol. The elementals hadn't cared about being burned before—but this fire was special.

The brief distress of those struck by it was apparent in their gestures. In panic, the burning woodmen flailed from side to side, spreading the hungry flames to others nearby.

This was a fire that burned body and spirit alike.

The moment they were hit, their souls were no longer their own, but only fuel that burned away in the glory of the departed Gods.

To humans, death was an ever-present companion. They were used to it, some more, some less. But for the immortal, everlasting spirits that knew no demise, being given a definite end to their existence was a new and abominable concept. Witnessing their comrades one by one depart from this world with their otherworldly senses, the dryads forgot about their task and turned to flee.

The cavalry rode on, firing one magical arrow after another, the black stallions surrounded by bright, colorful explosions all around, as if it was only a joyous new year's parade. They rode around the entire outpost along the wide slope, then turned and rode back again, and again, for as long as their ammunition lasted, sowing death among the deathless, while the onlookers raised their voices into a booming cheer.

“YEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!”

Accompanied by this noise, the surviving dryads fled back to the woods, whence they came.

But they weren't safe there either.

Up on the roof of the cottage overlooking the slope, the imperial court wizard surveyed the battlefield. After the last of the arrows was fired, the knight captain leading the charge blew his horn again, as a sign that they were ready and retreating.

Hearing it, Yornwhal raised his wooden staff high in the air and spoke again arcane words of the ancient tongue.

“Capi tule, loco tensalewa catate. Nimuri deos de televa lamesate. Ioios co lea sadatem.”

Akin to an earthly pope reading out his sermon on a day of Easter, the wizard spoke to the primal forces of the word, summoning strength far beyond his mortal human frame. Speaking those words, taught to humans by the very God that had created them, he was at that moment made a peer and a brother to the Lord of these woods.

And nature listened to Yornwhal.

A fire much greater than any of those burning up on the ground appeared in the sky above the treetops. As if the old man had captured the heart of the sun and dragged it to his level, the intensely hot, pulsating orb hovered over the outpost.

“Cataste rhea.”

Firestorm.

The blazing sphere split. It was divided into dozens of smaller, but no less intense meteors, which rained all around the settlement, among the trees, exploding upon contact. In a blink of an eye, the nearby woods were turned into a literal sea of flames. Fire rained over the fleeing dryads, swallowed them up and released the spirits from their shells, lost in the ashes. For three times the fire sphere spewed havoc before fading away. But the forest still remained ablaze, in vivid reminiscence of Christian Hell.

The wizard lowered his staff and leaned heavily on it, exhaling deep.

“Okay, now tell me,” the young woman crouching on the edge of the roof asked him. “Why didn't we use that one before?”

The wizard gave Riswelze a bitter, helpless look.

“Look, child,” he said, gesturing towards the fire. “Look around you. Even seeing this, do you still feel such a thing was worth using? There is no holding back those flames now. For how many days will Felorn burn? How many trees, how many plants, noble spirits, proud beasts, and innocent, unrelated animals will have to perish tonight, only so that we humans may survive? There is no forgiving us, no excuses left. By doing this, we have committed the final betrayal against the Lord who loved us and gave us so many chances to turn back. And for what purpose did it have to happen? For our vanity and greed?”

“You would've rather died then?”

“No,” the old man shook his head. “It is because I want to live that I did it. But are we saved now? I fear it is too soon to tell. Much too soon.”