In fury, Part 2 of 3
Our time out beyond Darkhallow had been fraught with enemy presence, and we fought small skirmish after small skirmish always managing to come out ahead. It was probably due to the size of our company versus their patrols and pickets. We came across a few caravans and merchants wagons which had apparently been headed towards the fortress. These we burnt and left the civilians behind to pick up the pieces of their lives as they watched their lively hood go up in ashes. I felt bad, but we could not allow word nor goods to reach the fortress. Anything we could deny the enemy would make it so that our assault on Darkhallow cost fewer Hexenguard lives. Hungry soldiers couldn't or wouldn't fight.
We hit a patrol that had been out beyond their northern border walls like a storm, wiping them out in a few furious minutes of work. I found myself roughly two miles away from our hidden tower, covered in mud and blood. After Darkhallow town had started burning Roderick marshaled us into a rough column and we immediately set out to survey the opposite side of the fortress. Our engineers and mages took copious amounts of notes, observing the fortress from afar while ash rained down on us.
"That patrol was likely on its way to investigate the town," Roderick commented to me.
"They won't be missed for some time, all things considered," I replied as we once again set off. The rolling plains stretched out before us and I stared in that direction, watching for any incoming riders, scouts, or military forces. A column of smoke two miles high rose into the sky, staining a brilliant blue with its dark smoky color. Everyone within miles would be able to see the massive smoking column, and it would likely draw any patrols in the area eager to investigate the disturbance.
"We've been spotted!" Came a cry just as a line or horsemen broke the crest of a hill to our east. We were not very sneaky as a military force, and the enemy horsemen were able to identify us from far away. They immediately made for us as we got into a tight formation to receive their welcome. Those of us carrying spears, pikes, or pole-arms got pushed to the front while those behind helped to brace. The line of horsemen formed into a wedge, and we could hear their war-cries already as they echoed across the open plain.
Working to keep my spear dug into the ground while also pointing it at the horse bearing down on me, I couldn't help but expect to die. It was surprising therefore, when I felt the horse impact my spear and try to rear backward. It's momentum carried itself into me, but struck at an odd angle and I ended up getting deflected off the side of it's flank as it tumbled past me. The spear was ripped out of my hands, which stung, and I was dazed but alive. The knight who had been riding the horse had flown over us when his horse hit my spear and ended up landing in the middle of a bunch of pissed off knights, a mistake he never had time to regret.
Still, we took quite a few casualties as men were ridden down or stabbed by the passing riders. As they broke through our hastily constructed formation several of our men with bows popped up and took shots, hitting more often than they missed. Those would be the wardens, and they helped thin the ranks of the horsemen, who were beginning to rethink their plan now that they had lost half their force for a mere handful of us killed, even if they had wounded a lot more. What sealed the deal is when the ground under their horses hooves began to soften into mud, sucking at their legs and making it much harder to maneuver. That only made it easier for our wardens three foot laminated arrows to catch them, and they broke in their entirety after a single charge, leaving roughly 50 men dead on the field while the remaining 20 or so escaped.
"Okay, I think we've gone far enough," Roderick said to the group. We had gone roughly three miles by this point, and we were able to confirm that this side of Darkhallow was just as reinforced as the side facing our main army. "Let's take note of any final details, let the mages cast their spells, and move back to our lines," he finished, nodding to the war mage leading the mage detachment and the engineers.
"Okay gents," Warmage Oik said to the mages around her, "Let's get down to the dirty and roll around a bit," her crass humor amused me greatly and I chuckled, earning a bright flash of teeth from her, since I seemed to be the only one properly amused. "I need to hang out with Zerial more, the rest of you are boring!" she yelled at them.
"You really should try treating the nobility with more respect before one of them beheads you," grumbled her second, a surly earth mage called Giorgio.
"Ah, don't worry about it too much Giorgio, Oik," I told them as I followed them around, "If she ever lands herself in hot water, all she has to do is say she's friends with me. Then i'll bail her out," Oik shrieked a laugh of victory and Giorgio just muttered to himself.
"Of course, she might be poleaxed before I can get there, or before anyone asks any questions..." I continued, watching her eyes go round as saucers while Giorgio roared with laughter.
"Oh aye, you can poleaxe me any day, Milord," she recovered easily and attacked my glaring weakness - being a teenager. I went bright red at the insinuation and shut my mouth, causing the whole group to share laughter at my expense until they were nearly crying.
You might think it callous of us to be joking and laughing at a time like this. A whole town still smoldering and burning, several of our own men down or dead, but to be honest you have to find something to laugh about in scenario's like this. Not everyone can be Roderick, a stalwart rock with just as many emotions to show. Laughter allowed us to break all the tension we felt, and deal with the stress and grief of losing comrades.
"Okay, that's enough," Oik said, becoming business like as she and her mages got down to the work of probing their wards for weakness. The engineer's already had various tools and instruments out to view and measure the walls, and later the two would combine notes to give us a very detailed break down of what we were seeing.
Two Hours Later
"Sir! Smoke on the horizon!" shouted a knight who was in charge of watching our rear. I spun and noticed that large columns of smoke were rising from Darkhallow... No, not darkhallow. Smoke was rising from our fortress, and as if on queue we heard several large blasts go off, their sound-waves rolling over Darkhallow and across the open plains.
"Time to go, pack it in and lets move!" Roderick called to everyone, and we hastened to group together tightly. In very short order everyone had gathered together, with the wounded and dead being carried through various methods both mundane and magical. We would abandon stealth for speed on our way back to our tower, which had surely grown a short small wall surrounding it by now. We rushed through the open terrain, our eyes constantly roving the horizon and gently rolling hilltops, looking for any sign of an enemy presence.
We all sighted our secret tower at the same time. Apparently, it was no longer a secret. "Fuck," Roderick said, and I had to agree. That summed up the situation pretty well. The wall that I had assumed was to be created had been. Unfortunately, I don't think the massive hole in the side was a function of it's design, nor did I think that we decorated our walls with dead Aurelian and Hexenguardian soldiers. We saw flashes from inside the stone tower that spiraled up the side of the cliff. "The fight is still going, let's go!" shouted Roderick, and we jogged after him. There was perhaps a mile between us and our friendly lines, but ever second we delayed would see another defender fall and make our situation that much more precarious.
The sounds echoing from the opposite side of the valley, where our fortress is, were growing more and more ominous by the minute.
Not-So-Secret Tower
We stormed into the breach in the wall and found the opposite side occupied by a few sentries and pickets, which we quickly engaged with and destroyed. It did not take long since we outnumbered them a great deal. At this point we dropped off our utility mages and all of our wardens to look after the wounded and provide a rear guard. I figured our rear guard would fare much better than theirs, especially considering the earth mages who were already actively mending the breach in the wall and sealing the narrow exit that served as our gatehouse.
Roderick lead the way into the tower and we came upon the scene of a slaughter. Dead Hexenguardian's and Aurelians lay everywhere in one of the most gruesome scene's I had ever witnessed. The floor was thick with blood and bodies, and even the walls were covered in blood. The stairway curving up the side of the tower was also littered with bodies, and we could hear the fighting continuing from the upper levels, and something snapped inside of me at seeing so many of my countrymen dead, invaders or not.
I saw red and immediately sprinted for the stairs, all exhaustion from our long day and longer trek gone. Roderick and the others were hot on my heels as I mounted the stairs and climbed them three at a time, barely stopping in my mad dash to get to my countrymen and stop more of them from dying. The inside of the tower was divided into three floors plus the roof, and as I hit the second floor seven flights of stairs later, I saw a similar scene. Bodies everywhere and not a single one living. I continued straight up to the third and final floor, and here at last there were signs of life. A gaggle of Aurelian's stood clustered around the bottom of the staircase leading to the roof, and more lined the stairwell leading up.
The splatter of our feet splashing through blood and the clatter of our armor was the only warning the Aurelian's got before Roderick and I hit them like a tornado, swords striking out with precision and deadly efficiency. We were a whole four heartbeats ahead of our brothers-in-arms behind us, but still we managed to fell seven between the two of us before our enemies responded. They began to cluster around us, only for their burgeoning formation to be absolutely shattered by the arrival of the rest of our company. Every single hand-picked person we brought with us was an elite in their own way, from the Wardens of Greenward to the Knights of the Heart of Hexenguard, we were the best our country had to offer at our respective jobs.
I don't remember thinking overly much. My body went into it's own autonomous mode and I watched, as if from the third person, as I stabbed, sliced, bludgeoned, and chopped my way through the men at the bottom of the stairs. As time went on, more and more of us came up the staircase and flooded into the third floor. Roderick and I were halfway up the stairwell by that point, fighting at the forefront of our offensive charge. We moved as if in perfect sync with a third member of our order to my right and Roderick to my left. Every gap I left undefended seemed to find Roderick of Gaspard's weapon closing the weakness, and I diverted more than a few blades meant for the two of them. Our enemies became cattle, and we the butchers and grinders as we murdered our way up the stairwell.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
The three of us crested the final few steps and found a room in total chaos, with men-at-arms from Hexenguard clustered in a small group around the walkway connecting our tower with the cliff face and Mages Point. We didn't hesitated, and the three of us threw ourselves into the Aurelians with wide sweeping strikes meant to deprive them of space while opening up our own. More and more of our company flooded up past the staircase, and the Aurelian's watched as their only chance to contain the flood of enemies that had appeared behind them was lost. With the men-at-arms on one side and us on the other, it was a short, brutal knife fight that led to the total killing of every Aurelian on the tower roof. Soon our entire company was standing on the roof, even the mages and wardens with the wounded.
"Why are you up here?" Roderick asked just as Oik opened her mouth.
"Well, there seems to be enemy reinforcements," she responded saucily.
"And you just let them in?" Roderick asked, bewildered.
"Well, of course! We let them into the tower as well! How else are we supposed to drop an entire tower filled with Aurelians if we don't let them get in?" She asked, and Roderick was dumbstruck.
"That's brilliant" he said after gaping like a fish.
"I know. Now get off my tower and hold the bridge until they fill the roof," she ordered, and we all hastened to obey.
Roderick, Gaspard, and I held the mouth of the bridge on the cliff side after everyone had gone by. The wardens held bows and covered the cliff to our left and right, while our magi went to work crafting their spell.
"We're going to attack the foundation by rapidly raising the temperature of the stone, while simultaneously withdrawing the magical support that reinforces it. That should cause the entire thing to topple over. Then we will heat the entire structure, and rapidly freeze it. That will cause it to explode, showering the entire lower cliff with shrapnel. I would not recommend peering over the side," Oik informed us all before getting to work. With the three of us at the bridge, and several men behind us with shields and spears pointing over our shoulder, we presented a beautiful shield wall for the enemy to crash against.
We didn't have to wait for long before men started to flood out of the stairwell and onto the rooftop. They launched themselves across the bridge with a fury that nearly matched my own, and we poked and stabbed them with our pointy metal sticks, killing those in front and making it that much harder for their friends to get to us. More and more of them filled the roof, and more and more of them died on that roof as men and women with bows, spells, and spears reaped a deadly harvest. We could see in the courtyard below a whole swarm of men waiting to get up the tower and get at us, easily a thousand of them.
Too bad for them then that Oik activated her miniature spell circle. The bottom of the tower started to visibly heat, and we could hear the screams of men being cooked alive over the screams of those dying on top of the tower, or the war cries of those below. Our mages didn't give the enemy much of a chance as they poured more and more arcane energies into the base of the tower. Apparently not many mages accompanied this force, if there were any at all. The foundations of the tower reached critical temperature and all sides of the tower seemed to lose cohesion at the same time. One moment we were standing on the bridge fighting men, and the next we were being kept from falling off the edge of the cliff by several pairs of hands which latched onto the back of our clothing and armor.
The tower smashed into its own melted foundation, and then tipped backward into the courtyard below. The mages cycled their spell and began to heat the entire structure. This process went much slower since they had to work with the surface of the entire tower and not just a one foot high section of the base. The massacred force below wasn't making much noise, as most of them had probably died when our tower crumbled. The rest died when our mages practically melted the entire thing into lava before dropping ice-cold spells into the center of it, causing the areas hit to explode like alchemical bombs. They repeated this stunt over and over again until the entire tower resembled a dust-and-scree pile. Dust billowed out at us and covered the entire cliff side.
"Well, that was work well done, but we have more to do," someone said from behind us, and we turned to find the men-at-arms we had rescued. "The fortress is under attack, and they have breached our walls," he informed us grimly. The entire company rushed over to the opposite side of the cliff top, artificially smoothed into a sort of plateau by spell work. Waiting for us on the other side was a scene straight from one of the hells. The Aurelians had seemingly launched a suicidal attack on our walls... The only problem was that it was working.
The Other Side, Hexenguardian Fortress
Roderick had commandeered the entire force on the cliff top, roughly two companies counting our own, and left a small detachment to tend to the wounded, which we left behind. We had assembled at the base of the cliff, with the tower looming ominously over us and both the cliff and tower casting us in shadow. Not that there was any sunlight to be had down here, with the thick cloying smoke choking the air above us. Only a westerly wind kept the clifftops from being overrun by the deadly gasses and ash.
The situation in Hexfort was chaotic. Everywhere I looked I saw men in my duchies colors battling it out with men in Aurelian colors, and it seemed like we were losing, which was a terrifying thought. Judging by the sheer number of enemies in that crowd. They must have emptied the whole fortress against us, and added all of their support personnel on top. There was no possible way they would be able to defeat us en-masse, but it looked like they wanted to cause as much damage as possible before they died. As we drew closer, I noticed the hazy gazes of soldiers sat on the ground, mechanically drinking from water skins and chomping on rations.
"What news from the front," Roderick asked one man. The soldier looked up with glassy eyes, and responded, "They just won't stop coming. It's like they don't feel fear nor pain. You chop off an arm, and he stabs you with his other hand. You remove both arms and he tries to bite you," my eyes widened at that statement, and I took a careful look at the man. True enough, he had a pretty bad bite mark on his arm. "You have to behead them to get them to stop immediately. If you wound them bad enough, they bleed out... But they keep fighting until they do," his voice was a whisper, and we were silent.
"Thanks son... Get some rest," Roderick said as we turned to head back towards the front lines. The enemy forces were caught in between our outer walls and our secondary walls, but there were already mighty rents in our wall, and the breaks were practically frothing with frenetic activity. In the distance we saw Gerald overseeing the defense, and at his side was an exhausted looking Tika. We hastened to arrive at his side.
"Good, you're back. I need you to form the core of our defense once we lose these breaches," Gerald said to us as we hurried up to him. It was galling to hear him talk about it so callously, but from this distance I could see our lines buckling, our normal conclave defensive position was starting to look more like a brawl than an organized battle. "In a few minutes, once the majority of our forces are in position, I am going to give the call to retreat," he finished saying.
True to his word Gerald ensured that our forces were in position, including us, before he signaled the retreat. A line of archers on the wall shot volley after volley into the center of the enemy mob, which apparently still had the presence of mind to raise shields, so the casualties appeared to be minimal. But between them and a row of battle mages thrusting an edge of earth up all along the line, causing our enemies to stumble in their fervor to tear at us, allowed our forces to withdraw in good order. We opened our formation to allow them to stream through our lines and then closed it up just before the enemy got to us.
"If any of them are too much for you individually, step to the side. Let the bastard through and the people behind you will take care of it. Just make sure you get back into the hole," Roderick called out, and echoed agreements roared back at him. "Let's stop em here boys, if we kill them here we don't have to assault that big fucking fortress on the horizon!" this time the roar was louder, and filled with blood lust. No traces of fear remained in the answering call.
The initial clash shook our lines and echoed ominously. Blood splattered my face immediately as a man to my left lost part of his arm and still swung his mace in towards Roderick's face. Roderick effortlessly batted the mace aside with the palm of his hand and shoved the tip of his sword through his opponents eye socket. His opponent fell bonelessly to the ground to be immediately replaced by another mad, slavering enemy. This time it was a woman in your typical peasant's garb, swinging a cudgel with unreasonable strength and speed for one so slight. I caught her cudgel on my blade as I deflected an attack directed at me with my shield. Roderick killed her too and I recovered my short sword.
Spells occasionally shook the ground as a battle mage or a war mage let their fury be known. Arrows arced over our head to land out amongst the enemy, but these were mostly useless and the majority of them were fired by our militiamen since they would get slaughtered in this kind of battle. Much more effective were the wardens amongst our lines, firing point-blank into eye sockets or through noses from between our ever shifting lines. It became mechanical for us to chop and stab, deflect and block. Even through all the endurance I had gained over the years of training, I felt my arms turn to lead while sweat and blood stung my eyes. We were covered in it, so much blood that it seemed as if we wore crimson uniforms. We slipped in it, had to take steps backwards to keep the pressure of the line even and to secure our footing.
Our enemies didn't care about their footing, about the blood, about how slippery and sticky it was. They just tore at us with wild abandon, never seeming to tire of the death they threw themselves into. The minutes dragged by and turned into hours, and ever second felt like a year to me as I became more and more exhausted. Eventually strikes started to slip through my defense, and while a few were turned by my more experienced minders, several managed to land. I broke an index finger when I slipped a block and had the haft of a mace slam into it. I felt several cuts slip through and scrape through my armor. I had several puncture wounds on my body, and though they weren't too serious it all culminated in my worsening performance.
And then I felt it, the wild thrumming. I glanced to the side and saw that Tika had mounted the wall directly above us. He was by himself, and he seemed even more ancient. Until he began to draw in the arcane energies around him. His skin changed color and I saw the faint outlines of the energy of the world rushing in through his back, entering at his shoulder blades. Tika performed a strange, oddly martial dance. It was punctuated by open palms sweeping out into the air above his head and out to his side. He would reach out with one hand while his opposite hand seemed to hold something at his stomach, and then he would cup his outstretched hand and sweep it down and low towards his lower hand. Then he would repeat, and it seemed as if every time he performed the gathering it got harder and harder. Stress, rage, and exhaustion marred his oddly colored and deceptively young features.
And then he culminated his strange dance by balling up his right fist while straightening his left hand into a knife with all five fingers pointed and slightly crooked, as if there was string pulling them back towards his navel. He pushed his left hand forward and even though I couldn't see anything strange, it seemed as if he struggled to push his knifed left hand forward. His right hand drew back as if pulling on a taut rope, muscles tensed and eventually he cocked it next to his ear. Then he jumped and when his feet hit the ground they landed in a wide angled stance with his left leg forward, and it shook the ground violently when he landed.
Tika opened his mouth and screamed, and his voice shattered the air around him as his right fist shot forward, sliding along his left palm as he brought that left hand back, still in a knife hand, and lined it directly to the center of his chest. He held his right hand extended in a fist and his left backward in a knife and we could see that a small flame had ignited at the edge of his fist as it traveled. The world itself seemed to draw your attention to the flame.
And then the flame seemed to grow and it expanded out in front of Tika like an arrow for a few feet before it suddenly exploded outward into a massive wave of fire that swept the valley from wall to wall. The fire struck our forward wall and rolled backwards towards us, only to be halted just shy of our wall by a shimmering translucent barrier that popped into existence - probably our own mages shielding us. The fire that left Tika's fist in a continuous stream seemed to scream, the earth seemed to scream, everything seemed like it was letting lose a high pitched shriek that deafened me.
And then I paid for my lack of attention when the head of a mace came lancing around and smacked me in the helmet. The last thing I saw as I toppled backwards into unconsciousness was a wall of fire eating through everything caught in it's wake.