“That’s what we do first,” Saul said. “We take out the warlock groups conjuring the monsters. Those monsters are the warlocks’ best bet for breaking the defenses. We work together—don’t split up, don’t get too far away from me, understand?”
“Got it,” Zorea confirmed. “We’ll fight together. The tall mages in the middle, the ones casting the spells, they’re the anchors for the magic, and the others are the channelers. There’s no doubt about that. We should take out the anchors as quickly as possible. Can you use your magic?”
“I’ve already used my spells once to get an overview of the village, and I used magic once during the fight with your attackers. That means that I only have one more spell to cast before I have to wait ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes? That’s not so good.”
“I wish it was otherwise, but that’s the way it is.”
While discussing, they had descended through the woods to the only path that led from the forest to the plain in front of the village. They hurried downward, keeping low and hoping not to be spotted.
As they approached, Saul pointed out the nearest warlock group.
“Them first,” he said. “To use my remaining spell to the best advantage, we’ll take out the first group by hand, without magic, then we’ll move toward the second group, pass them, and then go toward the third. Hopefully, that will mean that the other groups will move toward us, bringing them closer together. Once they’re packed together, my magic will be available again, and I’ll use an area of effect attack to try to take out the whole group in one sweep. Afterward, we’ll go in and take out any survivors.”
“Got it,” Zorea said again. “Then, there will only be one group left, and hopefully taking out the conjuring squads will kill the summoned bone horrors, too.”
They reached the plain undetected. The attackers’ attention was on the gate and walls of the village. They were waiting for something.
The insectoid bone horrors that had been conjured were now sieging the wall at multiple points. Though they did not seem able to climb, they were attacking the wood with their powerful pincers. Soon, they would breach the palisade at several places and allow the warlocks to attack in force.
Without the full strength of the soldiers inside, an advance probably would not be repelled.
Saul dreaded imagining what would happen next. Probably, he thought, a massacre of the inhabitants, and perhaps even their capture and enslavement as thralls.
He was not about to let that happen.
He and Zorea snuck toward the nearest group of conjurers. They were all focused on their task. The anchor’s hands were raised, and power flowed from him as he controlled the Bone Horrors he’d created while the channelers all focused on empowering the anchor.
Saul and Zorea slipped up behind them, glanced at each other once, and charged in. Saul barged through the press of channelers, cutting one’s throat from behind with his sword and kicking the legs out from under another before stabbing him in the heart as he fell.
The magic flowing from the channelers to the anchor mage wavered, and one group of bone horrors at the palisade halted.
Zorea, taking advantage of the opening Saul had created, drove her sword through the back of the anchor. He staggered forward wordlessly. His blood splattered the ground as she pulled her sword back out of his body and, at the same moment, one squad of bone horrors exploded into piles of disarticulated bone.
“Next,” Saul said, and Zorea followed him as he turned left and ran toward the next nearest group of conjurers.
This time, the group had noticed them coming.
As planned, Saul and Zorea ran toward the group and dove to the left at the last moment, passing them and sprinting for the next group, who looked around in horror as they saw they were being attacked from the flank.
Just as Saul had hoped, the second group turned and chased Saul and Zorea as they charged toward the third group. Without hesitation, he called up the new Whirlwind spell and prepared it as the others got closer. Again, he darted toward the third group of monster conjurers and dashed past them. They, too, turned to chase him and Zorea.
He cast Whirlwind into the crowd.
The spell was very impressive. He watched in satisfaction as a sudden twisting wind appeared in the midst of the group. He had seen small twisters before, on the flatlands of Keldor, in the south where the heat made it hard to grow crops and dried out the earth until it was almost a desert. There, the winds would pick up sand and whip it around with such force that it could flay an unwary man who was caught out in it.
Here, the whirlwind picked up mud and stones from the ground, pelting the approaching warlocks with these natural missiles. Then, it picked up the warlocks themselves, raising them twenty or thirty feet into the air and hurling them abruptly back down. The wind was visible, like a gray mist that swirled up from a central point to create a tall pillar, then spread out around the central pillar in vicious bands of destructive force.
Clearly, the wind would keep going of its own accord for some time, and the warlocks would be kept busy with it.
Saul glanced at Zorea and saw her smiling in fierce satisfaction at the destruction of the warlocks.
“Now for the last group,” Saul said. They dashed past where the Whirlwind spell that was still destroying the warlocks, and to the edge of the battlefield, toward the last group of conjurers.
And it was then that Saul noticed the cooldown timer had not activated after his last spell use.
What had happened? He had expected to have to wait ten minutes now before he could cast again, but the system had given him no such message, and he felt the magic of his spells glimmering at the edge of his awareness still, ready to be used.
Well, he thought, that’s helpful, though I wish I knew why it had happened.
As he looked around the battlefield and thought over recent events, the answer struck him nearly straight away. Of course! He had visited the Workshop after using one spell to save Zorea.
The visit to the Workshop must have reset the cooldown timer.
Just as well it’s so dangerous for me to visit the Workshop during moments of crisis, he thought wryly. If I could do so more easily, I could just reset the cooldown timer whenever I wanted, but since I can’t rely on my time perception or my physical safety when I’m in the Workshop, that’s not an option.
“Couldn’t make it too easy, could you, Sarkur?” he muttered aloud, and Zorea glanced at him with an odd look.
By his count, then, he should have one more spell to cast. After a moment’s consideration, he decided not to change his plan. He could choose to blast the warlocks with another two magic spells now, but that had not been the plan. Instead, he would save the magic. He might need it for later.
The last group of warlocks had turned toward him, but instead of creating some new spell to attack him with, they seemed to be trying to bring the bone horrors that were still in operation back from the palisade to attack Saul and Zorea.
The other horrors had collapsed into shapeless heaps of bones when their controlling warlocks had been killed, but the remainder—some six or seven of the horrible creatures—were now making their lurching, ungainly way back toward Saul.
“Let’s take them out!” Zorea shouted.
Her bloody longsword was in her hand, and she put on a burst of speed that even threatened to outpace Saul. The other warlocks and their thralls at the gates had now become aware of what was happening, but they were too far away to make any difference.
Saul sprinted at full pace alongside Zorea toward the last group of conjurers.
Too late, the warlocks abandoned their monsters, who fell to pieces in the middle of the battlefield as soon as the magic was removed. In a panic, the warlock anchor tried to conjure a new defensive spell.
White light gathered around the channelers and the anchor. Their eyes blazed with fear and hatred but, before their defensive spell could take effect, Saul and Zorea slammed into them.
The pair were two merciless whirling warriors of vengeance, dealing swift and remorseless death to left and right with their swords. The warlocks were unarmed and wholly unprepared. They died swiftly, Saul himself taking the life of the anchor in their final group.
Dying, the warlock raised a hand, and Saul saw something printed on his palm. It was a black Sigil, but as life left the man, the Sigil peeled off the palm of his hand and disintegrated.
Without thinking, Saul reached out and grabbed the Sigil. It felt solid, smooth-surfaced, and warm like polished stone heated in the sun, just as the Sigils in his Workshop had felt. But this Sigil did not stay fixed in his hand.
There was a sudden burning sensation, and then the solidity gave way to a feeling like hot sand running through his fingers as he felt it vanish from his grip.
Black smoke escaped his grasp as if he’d tried to catch smoke.
He rubbed his hand against his jerkin, cursing at the unpleasant sensation.
“What’s the matter?” Zorea asked him. In just the way he had trained her to do, she had dropped into position by his side, ready to protect him as her fighting buddy, but not so close that a wild swing from her blade might catch him.
“I’m okay,” he said. “That warlock had the Sigil controlling the monsters imprinted on his hand somehow. I tried to grab it, but it disintegrated. But enough about that,” he added, straightening up and surveying the field. “Look to the gate.”
Now that the conjurers had been defeated, the attackers at the gate had changed their tactics. They had left the gate and were now rushing the one breach the bone horrors had made in the palisade.
Saul heard shouting from the walls and saw Brand and the other defenders leaving the palisade walkway, presumably to defend the breach.
“Let’s go,” Saul said, and he and Zorea set off across the open space in front of the village, ready to flank the attackers.
Saul was keenly aware he had one more spell to use. He would wait until he got closer, then he would use it for an effective strike. The cries of fighting and the clash of blades came from the direction of the breach in the wall, and Saul and Zorea sped up.
As they ran, Saul heard shouting from behind him and looked back to see a group of black-clad figures hurrying down the path from the clifftop toward the village.
“The reinforcements are on their way!” he said to Zorea.
She glanced that way and nodded. “Let’s get inside the walls!”
As they closed in on the struggle at the gate, Saul used the magic casting that he had saved earlier to summon an area of effect spell that he had not used before: Firestorm from the School of Fire.
He focused on the center of the packed attackers and activated the spell. Power rushed through him, and he laughed with satisfaction as flames blasted out from his hands and sped across the space between him and his enemies. The spell hit the ground in the middle of the attackers and exploded like one of the Feranese fire mines, a deadly weapon Saul had encountered in his old life.
An explosion of flame billowed outward from the middle of the tight-packed group, and the shockwave sent enemies flying in every direction as Saul and Zorea ran up.
When he had used his Burning Hand spell, he’d observed that the flames seemed to burn out an enemy’s life force but not to actually damage their flesh.
Not so with the Firestorm spell.
The enemies who flew into the air were alight with flame like burning candles, their clothing, hair, and flesh igniting and crackling as if they had been made of oil-soaked wood and rags. These terrible projectiles crashed into the mass of the other enemies, causing chaos.
The thralls seemed without any fear, and they continued fighting, but the warlock officers who had control of the poor, enslaved fighters leapt out of the way and ran screaming from the conflagration.
Magic use: Cooldown Initiated
Spellcasting available in: 8 minutes
There was the cooldown timer. It was as Saul had figured out; the timer was reset by a visit to the Workshop. He had scouted with Eagle Vision and used Whirlwind and Firestorm in battle. But the cooldown time was reduced to eight minutes from the usual ten!
A small improvement, but he guessed it must come with the increase to Level 9. Did that mean that, as he carried on progressing, the cooldown time would continue to reduce? He hoped so.
Saul charged into the press in the wake of the chaos caused by his fire spell, stabbing left and right with his short word. Zorea was in the thick of the fighting beside him, swinging her long blade with a two-handed grip.
The defenders, seeing what was happening, took new heart. Saul saw Brand himself leading the charge as the beleaguered villagers now took the initiative and hurled themselves on the attackers from the other side of the breach in the wall.
Saul glanced behind him and saw more and more dark-clad figures hurrying down the path. The first ones were forming into ranks at the base of the cliff.
There seemed to be many more of them than the initial attacking force. Whoever was in command of this assault, they were now throwing their reserves into the fray.
However, the attack at the breach had now been successfully repelled. The warlocks who had not been killed in the fight fled back toward the cliff, and the thralls were being finished off by the villagers.
Saul guessed they had a few minutes before the reinforcements arrived. It was a small window of time, and they would have to put it to best use.
Saul and Zorea walked together through the breach and into the village, where they were welcomed with cheers of the defenders. Brand, blood-spattered and muddy, his clothes torn and his eyes shining with the joy of victory, strode up and embraced them both.
“Brand, Zorea,” Saul said. “We have only a little time before the new warlock soldiers who are forming up by the cliff attack the village in force. If we don’t free our soldiers from the spell before then, we’ll not stand a chance. You two take charge of the defense here. I won’t have magic for a few more minutes, and the best thing I can do now is to go after the objective—the warlock bow that’s the center of the spell that’s been cast over the village to incapacitate the soldiers. You two hold the walls, I’ll free the others.”
“But won’t you be caught by the spell yourself?” Zorea asked.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I suspect the spell has been cast once and has caught everyone who was in its area of effect at the point of casting. I don’t think it’s going to catch new people.”
“That’s right,” Brand said. “I went into the shadow briefly because I saw one of the soldiers just standing there, and I didn’t know what was causing it. I tried to rouse him, but it didn’t work. I didn’t know that it might be a spell being cast by the warlock bow that we took to the barracks, but it makes complete sense now that I think of it.”
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
“You two hold the fort, then,” Saul said. “I’ll go and free the others.”
He took one last glance through the breach in the wall. Past the chaos of charred thrall bodies, broken palisade logs, piles of broken bone horrors, and churned mud from the fighting, he saw the first ranks of the warlock reinforcements marching toward the village.
Saul dashed away from the defense and plunged into the shadows.
Now that he was approaching the source of the magic, he could see and feel the spell more clearly. The air grew colder, and there was a feeling of damp clamminess as if he had been walking through a thick sea fog.
Almost straight away he saw evidence of this evil magic. Soldiers stood frozen in place, their eyes staring, unblinking. They were all in running postures as if they had been dashing to the walls when the spell took effect which, in all likelihood, they had been.
There were villagers here, too, with looks of alarm on their faces, half rising from their seats or turning to look toward the walls. As Saul got closer to the barracks, he found more and more soldiers in battle array, running toward the walls but frozen in place by the spell.
He hoped that when he broke the spell, they would pick up where they left off and not suffer any ill effects. If they awoke confused, he would have to be prepared to tackle that problem immediately.
At the door of the barracks, he found Jerryl, one hand halfway through putting his helmet on his head, the other hand raised and pointing toward the walls. His mouth was open in a shout of command.
From the direction of the breach, Saul heard the roar of a charge and the clash of weapons. The warlocks and their thralls had been beaten back from the walls, but the reinforcements were pressing in.
He had no time to lose.
Saul ran into the barracks and up the stairs, passing the figure of Sergeant Dryan, who was frozen in place halfway down a flight of stairs with a halberd in one hand and a bit of bread and cheese in the other.
Saul made it up the stairs, along the landing, and then kicked open the door to Jerryl’s command post on the top floor. There, Saul found that he had been right about the source of the magic.
The room was filled with tendrils of black mist, weaving and pulsating outward from the heavy wooden chest in which the warlock bow was contained. There was a solid lock on the chest, and the chest itself was heavy, well-dried oak reinforced with bands of thick steel around the edges.
This will take a bit of getting into, Saul thought, remembering wistfully a lockbreaking spell he’d had in his previous life that would have made swift work of the padlock.
Instead, he cast about for the key, searching the drawers and on the table, but without luck. Of course, the key must be on Jerryl’s belt along with all the other keys to the barracks storage.
Saul cursed again, looking around, and then thought of a solution.
Magic use: Eight-minute cooldown complete
Spellcasting available.
“Ah, yes,” he said. “Perfect timing. You’ll do.”
Rock Troll
He’d been very impressed with the rock troll when he’d summoned it before and had been looking forward to the opportunity to use it a second time. Now, he summoned the creature right next to him and was pleased to find that it immediately appeared.
The troll was even bigger and more imposing than it had been the first time round. Saul looked up at his monster, a tall, imposing humanoid who looked like a half-finished carved statue but that moved like a living being. It had a huge, misshapen boulder for a head and long arms, each with a slab of stone on the end that looked as if it would smash through a brick wall without too much difficulty.
There were two spurs of rock sticking out of the monster’s back, just below the shoulders, which looked suspiciously like handles one might use to ride the creature around. Those were new. He would have sworn they had not been present when he’d used the troll before.
And there was something else that was new; a sense of connection, hard to pin down, a sense that he and the troll were joined by a thread of magic awareness. The troll looked at him, and he felt very clearly that there was some kind of link there, reaching out between them.
“That box there,” Saul said to the troll. “Could you please break it open?”
The troll immediately lumbered forward, one huge fist raised. Saul frowned, realising that he wanted to see the shape that this magic took before the bow that held it was destroyed. The troll was ready to smash the box and everything in it.
“Can you do it without damaging the contents?” he added. The troll slowed, and as Saul spoke, he felt the connection ripple between them. It was clear that the troll understood. In due course, Saul felt that words would not be needed and that he could communicate with the troll with the same ease he selected a spell using pure intention alone.
The troll lumbered forward and brought one huge hand down onto the box with an immense crash that reverberated through the room.
However, as Saul had requested, the troll pulled his strike at the last moment so that he shattered the heavy wooden lid but did not damage the item inside. Saul peered in. On the bottom of the box lay the warlock bow.
The white runes on its surface glowed with a powerful radiance, pulsing with light against the dark, curved surface of the wood. And just as he’d suspected there would be, hovering above the bow there was a dark Sigil, glowing and pulsating like a living thing, it sent out tendrils of darkness into the air around it.
Saul reached down and gripped the Sigil. He pulled it upward, and the bow came with it. Holding the Sigil in his right hand, he reached forward and grabbed the bow in his left, and then wrenched them apart.
There was a snap like the crack of a falling tree in the air, and a great surge of magic flowed through the room as the connection was broken.
In one hand, Saul held the dark Sigil and, in the other, he still held the bow. Now, however, the Sigil seemed to have lost its potency.
The runes on the bow were not glowing as brightly, and the Sigil had stopped sending out the tendrils of darkness. There was a shuddering in the air around him, and the Sigil in his hand suddenly crumbled into dust.
At that moment, from outside in the corridor, Saul heard sudden shouting and running feet.
With the bow still in his hand but the Sigil gone, he moved to the window. He could not see out because of the grime that covered the surface. He was just wondering what to do about this when the rock troll lumbered over and helpfully put a rocky hand through the glass, shattering the window.
“Uh, thanks, I guess,” Saul said.
The big monster looked at him impassively, but he felt that the creature was quite pleased with itself. The simple emotion flowed clearly from the troll to Saul along the connection they had established.
Saul looked out of the space where the window had been and saw the soldiers who had been frozen in place all dashing forward, calling to each other as they ran. Captain Jerryl was in their midst, giving orders as they all ran toward the walls. It seemed that as far as the soldiers were concerned, nothing much had happened. Did they even know they’d been enchanted? He was pleased to find that the spell had not confused them as he had feared it might.
As he watched, he heard a loud trumpeting and roaring, and from around the side of the barracks came the raptors in full battle gear. The creatures ran to where their human riders were, and the Xornians leaped up onto the raptors’ saddles.
With a great thundering of clawed feet, thirty fully armed Raptor Riders were now heading to the melee at the breach.
Saul moved back to the wooden chest, dropping the bow inside.
That done, he leaped up onto the troll’s back. He steadied himself and grabbed ahold of the spurs of stone that protruded from the shoulders of the troll. Directing the troll by pulling on the spurs, he was able to turn the troll toward the window. The troll got the idea.
It hesitated for a moment. “Go on!” Saul said, and the troll immediately leaped out through the smashed frame, its rocky shoulders taking a bit more of the building with it as they fell.
The rock troll landed on the ground two stories below. The impact made the ground shake, but the troll was undamaged by the fall. Saul hitched himself up higher onto the creature’s back.
“To the breach!” Saul commanded, and the troll obeyed, thundering toward the fight.
“Troll rider!” the fighters at the breach shouted as Saul approached. “See! A Troll rider!”
The fighters at the breach looked over their shoulders to see Saul approaching, and then parted to make way for him, pulling away to either side and giving him and the troll the space they needed to make an impact.
The Raptor Riders had engaged already and were tearing a bloody path of destruction through the nearest warlock soldiers. Saul thundered into their midst on the back of his troll. There was joyous acknowledgement between them that they were all on the same side, and that their monstrous attack sent the warlock soldiers reeling back from the breach in the wall.
The Raptor Riders were armed with long-bladed halberds with short staffs suited for cavalry skirmishing. But, in this fight, the riders seemed content mostly to let their steeds do the work.
The raptors had long jaws full of rows of razor-sharp teeth, and their small but powerful front arms reached forward to rend and tear at the enemies with claws that gleamed like polished steel, as if each raptor had a fist full of swords to attack with.
Blood flew and spattered their feathery scales that gleamed like polished bronze and silver in the light of the sun. Where red touched the raptors, new colors flashed for a moment, and the blood soaked into the scales rather than running off.
The raptors tore and shredded their enemies, and Saul’s rock troll stormed in, swinging his great hands from side to side and smashing the warlock soldiers to pieces.
Now that he was up close, Saul saw that these soldiers were not the same as the warlocks he’d fought in the first stage of the battle. These were more like traditional foot soldiers, men in long black chainmail hauberks and armed with round shields and long straight swords. Their gear was lacquered in black, just like the thralls’. They had tall helmets that covered their faces, leaving only a glimpse of eyes visible.
But these did not seem to be thralls. They moved differently, more steadily and consciously, and they barked orders and cries of warning to each other in a strange, exotic language, where the thralls had not spoken at all.
Who were they? Saul stored the question up for later. He wanted to know more about the mountain people, and he would try to pin Jerryl or Zorea down to ask about it later.
For now, he was content to kill them without knowing what they called themselves.
And kill them he did.
His rock troll was a time-limited spell, and after a few minutes in the melee, Saul leaped to the ground as the summons collapsed into pieces, leaving nothing more than a pile of rough boulders.
Saul considered conjuring another one straight away, since the one he’d just used had been so effective, but he decided against it. There were other spells he could try.
He had already used Whirlwind from the School of Air, and he’d tried Burning Hand, Fireball, and Firestorm from the School of Fire. From the School of Stone, he’d used the summoned Rock Troll spell, and the Rockfall spell as well.
That left Catapult from the School of Stone, which was classed as a ranged attack, but that did not seem the best thing for just now as he was in the midst of a melee and wanted something for up close and personal combat.
After a moment’s thought, he picked Windspeed from the School of Air. He did not know what the magic would do, but it had presented itself as a Boost class spell. In his previous life, such spells were the kind of thing that gave a man extra strength, speed, or courage. They could be very useful, especially when used as an effect that could be given to someone else.
That was not something Saul was able to do, but perhaps in time…?
For the moment, he contented himself with casting the Windspeed spell. There was a sudden rush of air around him, a strange deepening of all the sounds that he could hear. A moment later, he found that everything around him had slowed down.
It was the strangest sensation. There was no sense that he was moving faster than usual. He did not feel that he was in a changed time himself but that everyone around him had slowed to a crawl.
He grinned, excited over the immense power granted him by this new ability. He ducked forward, using his Xornian shortsword to slash the throat of a soldier who was in front of him, sending a slow-motion fountain of gleaming red blood through the air.
As the soldier died, Saul noticed with amazement that the fountaining blood moved so slowly he could actually dodge past it. He followed up, stabbing another soldier through the chest with his sword, then dropping his shortsword and grabbing up a halberd dropped by a Xornian.
Swinging the halberd about his head, he slammed it into the head of a third warlock soldier so hard that the helmet shattered into pieces. There was a flash of fire where the blade hit the helmet, and the flames danced majestically slowly through the air.
The halberd blade was notched. Saul dropped it, grabbed the long black sword of one of the enemies, and slew three more before they had even seen him coming.
As the spell wore off, he took the head off one more soldier, then grabbed his shield and turned, bashing into the nearest foe.
The spell left him suddenly, and he found himself standing some way away from the breach. Behind him, the soldiers he had killed all dropped to the ground. He had been advancing so fast that all had still been falling when the spell wore off.
The warlock soldiers were fighting hard, trying to put up a shield wall against the raptors, but they were sword-armed infantry, and what was needed to fight off cavalry was spears or halberds.
Step by step, they were giving ground.
Saul’s speed boost had carried him into the midst of the battle and, to their eyes, it must have seemed that he appeared there in a moment, out of nowhere.
They turned to him in shock.
He slammed the pommel of his newly acquired black sword into the head of one of them, and the soldier’s helmet flew off.
Saul saw he wasn’t fighting humans. Or if they had once been humans, they were no longer.
They made him think of the emaciated mummies the far western desert peoples from the land of El-Alun over the sea made of their dead.
He had seen them once, wrinkled, collapsed faces, protruding teeth, skin stretched over bone and topped with wisps of graying hair.
This was what these soldiers looked like under their helmets.
With a curse and an expression of disgust, Saul put his blade through its eye. Blood flew but, as the soldier crashed to the ground, Saul saw him change.
For just a fleeting instant, Saul saw the emaciated corpse face replaced by the fully fleshed face of a strong, handsome-looking youth with dark skin and tight black curls on the top of his head. Saul heard a sigh as if of relief and caught a glimpse of something airy and light rising from the falling corpse.
As the corpse hit the ground with vision passed, what was left of the creature vanished into dust.
So, they were thralls of some kind. What horrible spell had reanimated these desiccated corpses, perhaps keeping them alive for countless years in the service of the warlocks?
Pity and horror welled up in him. These soldiers would not break, he saw that now. Why would they, if they were, at heart, some kind of entrapped spirit kept alive by foul necromancy?
But they might be withdrawn by whoever was commanding them. Many had been destroyed, but there was still a good force remaining. In that moment, Saul committed to freeing them all from their tormented curse.
As he activated Burning Hand, a horn blasted from the woods above, and the soldiers immediately withdrew.
“Finish them!” Saul yelled, seeing Zorea nearby at the head of a group of Xornian foot soldiers who had reformed and come back to the fight. “Finish them all!”
Hearing the conviction in his voice, she and the soldiers she led redoubled their attack, slamming into the retreating soldiers with a ferocity that almost matched the raptors.
The Raptor Riders sallied forth as well, attacking the retreating soldiers with renewed ferocity.
Saul felt fire flooding through his forearms and flames on his fingertips as Burning Hand activated. The cooldown activated, but he laid waste to enemies around himself with flaming sword and burning shield, and every enemy he touched fell backward, the strange magic of his fires burning out the evil force animating them.
However, Saul saw spirits rising from the corpses still. They were not being burned away.
Again, he found himself wondering about the life force burning effect that this spell seemed to have. The other fire spells just burned, but the Burning Hand spell destroyed the very animating force of a creature without damaging its flesh.
Still, it did not destroy the soul. He was glad of that.
One by one, the remaining soldiers were destroyed. They sighed in relief at their release from torment as the grateful spirits rose into the air and dissipated, heading to whatever land awaited them next.
A blow from a sword came dangerously close to Saul’s head, and he just dodged out of the way. He rebounded, turned to kill the soldier who had struck at him, then moved to the left, crouching and looking for more foes.
Cheers met him instead, and Brand, charging through the masses of empty, piled armor from the fallen warlock soldiers to hug Saul, grinning from ear to ear.
“What a fight!” he cried, exultantly. “What a battle! What a victory!”
Brand turned away from Saul and raised his bloody sword into the air for all the others to see.
“Victory!” he roared, and the others all shouted the word back at him.
Saul smiled. He remembered when he had been that young, that hot-headed and full of lust for fighting and winning.
Then, he remembered that, to the eyes of all around him, he was still that age, and it was only the strange magic that had changed his body that made him feel differently. He should not dampen the young man’s enthusiasm, though pity at the terrible fate of the warlock soldiers they had just freed still moved him most deeply.
He flung an arm around young Brand’s shoulders anyway and waved his sword about in the air with the youth, grinning and doing his best to join the revelry.
All the Xornian soldiers and villagers cheered.
It was the fate of a commander to think beyond the sport of battle, however. Shortly afterward, he left the civilians and the soldiers to their celebrations and returned to the village.
He found Captain Jerryl leaning against the smashed edge of the breach in the palisade.
“They’ll be back,” Jerryl said to him, and Saul nodded.
“They’ll be back with more,” the captain continued. “That was just a test, I think. They were testing our defenses.”
“What were those soldiers?” Saul asked quietly. “Did you see their souls rising when they died?”
“I saw them, and I saw how they changed for a moment as they died, crumbling into dust like mummified corpses. I have no idea what they were,” said Jerryl. “I’ve never seen anything like them before. They were like thralls but made from the corpses of dead people. And their gear… Saul, but I’m beginning to suspect there’s more than just a wytchlord’s spite behind these attacks. To tell the truth, I think those soldiers came from somewhere else, somewhere far away. I think they were transported here by someone who supports Grimdir in his rebellion. Someone who is putting resources into it. Why?”
They looked at each other for a moment, then Jerryl shook his head and shrugged. “We must allow the fighters their glory,” he said with a pale smile, “but I feel that, before the year is out, we’ll have more to deal with, and worse. We must be ready.”
“We shall be ready,” Saul promised. He placed a hand on the young captain’s shoulder. “We’ll be ready, and I’ll be here with you to defend this place.”
“What about your quest?” Jerryl said. “Time is passing.”
Saul shrugged. “I need to kill enemies, use magic, and help people. Doing that allows me to practice my magic and build my power. This seems like a good place to hit those goals.”
Saul spoke lightly to Captain Jerryl at the end of the battle, but there was another reason developing within him, another connection between Harkin’s Holdfast and his quest. He remembered the story of the origin of the great Keldorian Faction war that had led himself and Baraz Karak to raise an army and fight to unite Keldor into one realm. The trigger had been the fall of Xorn in the chaos of a bloody warlock rebellion. That event had brought chaos to the north and had led to the destruction of thousands of lives, and a bloody civil war in the lands south of Xorn.
He had been unsure at first, but he was certain now. He had been reborn right at the tipping point of that chain of events. There was no doubt in his mind that Harkin’s Holdfast was the pebble that started the avalanche. It was too meaningful to be a coincidence. He had been born into a world ravaged by the Faction Wars, and the whole course of his life in his old timeline had been defined by the events of those years.
Now, he was in a position to turn that around. It was too good an opportunity to miss.
* * *
Zorea was kept busy in the days after the battle, and Brand, too, had much to occupy him. Saul and Jerryl, with the experience of older battle commanders, spent a little time together reviewing the way things had gone and talking about the defenses.
The palisade had held out remarkably well, and this only served to make both of them more certain that the attack had only been a test not a full-scale assault.
They discussed the need for an outer ditch, for an earthen rampart, for spikes and covered pits and other siege defenses. When they got to talking about towers that could spit fire arrows at the enemies, Jerryl stopped abruptly and gave a slightly bitter laugh.
“We’re getting ahead of ourselves here,” he said. “Towers? Even a ditch and rampart might be more than my men can do in a short time.”
But Saul was not so sure. He had gained rewards from his fighting in the battle, and Arcane Dust and Gold XP coins awaited him in the Workshop.
There was new magic to unlock.