The world grew white and gray as the snow intensified. Through that whiteness, Grimdir’s army approached like a dark tide.

The defenders in the village were outnumbered five to one at least, and the diversity of monsters and strange, terrible, nightmare creatures was dizzying. Saul saw trolls and skeletons, wraiths and lizardmen, and alongside them all a host of warlock warriors in black armor, and tall thralls with pointed black hoods and long, curved swords.

Was this it? Was this the way that he was fated to end? He could not believe it.

He looked over his shoulder at the warriors in the village. They stood grim-faced and prepared, and in the shadows of the palisades the fearsome raptors waited, ready to strike.

No, this would not be the end. He would win this battle just as he had done in every battle before now.

He used two more spell castings to send lumbering rock trolls out into the field beyond the village, directing them to attack the large bridge building trolls. At the same time, the first of the warlock army came into range of the Xornian bows, and the soldiers opened fire.

“Jerryl,” he said quietly in the captain’s ear. “Listen to me.”

Jerryl looked at him, and Saul saw the hope had died in the man’s eyes.

“I’m going over there,” Saul said. “You’re right, we’re outnumbered, and we can’t hope to prevail in a straight fight. But these fighters are controlled by one consciousness, one entity, one mind that is directing them. I’m going to go over the wall and find Grimdir. You just need to hold out until I can find the head of this army and cut it off. It’s our only hope.”

To Saul’s great relief, Jerryl didn’t argue. He just nodded once, smiled, then turned back to the defense.

Saul slipped from the palisade and made his way round the side of the village, away from the main area around the gate where the attack was likely to hit hardest. When he got to the back of the village, he scrambled up and over the wall, landing softly on the ground outside.

Alone, he padded quietly through the snow, stealthy and alert for enemies. He was wearing Xornian armor, light mail with a well-made leather hauberk, and he carried one of the short, heavy-bladed halberds that were the core weapons of the infantrymen.

As he came around the side of the village, he saw the advancing army streaming over the bridges among the burning ditches. He crouched in the shadows, watching for a moment.

The flames in the ditches burned high and hot. Some creatures shoved each other, and a few fell, screeching as they died in the flames. But more still pressed forward.

His own two trolls battled with one of the enemy trolls, who was trying to whack them with the stone slab he carried. Small goblin creatures scurried around the feet of the stone trolls, stabbing ineffectually at them with their spears.

Keeping to the edge of the cliff, Saul slipped past the outer ditch, moving away from the village and further toward the back of the warlock army. He could feel all around him the pressure of the magic the warlocks used to control their army. Threads of the magic spread throughout the battlefield like tangled yarn, but running through it all was a deep powerful strand of dark magic.

Saul could almost feel the shape of the Sigil at the heart of that spell. He knew who was at its center.

Grimdir, the wytchlord.

Grimdir, Saul thought, you’re here, I can feel you. I’m going to find you and take you down.

Screams and clash of weapons signaled that the forces had reached the village wall. Glancing at the village walls. For a moment, the wind whipped the black smoke out of the way, clearing his view of the palisade wall.

There, he saw that the enemy had left a litter of dead bodies all over the ground, and that arrows still rained onto them from the defenders. But the vanguard had reached the walls, and ladders and grappling hooks were being thrown up, and many enemies were swarming upward.

The gates opened, and a sortie of Raptor Riders flooded out to flank the attacking force.

The brightly colored raptors sent fountains of red blood up from the attacking creatures as they tore into them, staining the white ground. Flames glinted on the swords and halberds of the Xornians. Then the wind changed, and the black smoke closed off the vision again.

Saul kept moving. The attackers’ attention was on the village. They had sent no scouts to guard their flanks.

Foolish, Grimdir, Saul thought with grim satisfaction. Always have a screen of scouts defending the sides of the attack, no matter how secure you think you are.

The further he got around the back of Grimdir’s force, the more confident he became that the wytchlord was no battle commander. Grimdir was relying on the force of numbers and the strength of fear and magic to take this little settlement, but he wasn’t using that advantage to its fullest the way a good general would have.

Sure, this brute force strategy had worked in the timeline Saul was from. The warlock army had swept through Xorn, but they had not managed to hold territory, or even hold together as a unified force in the long term.

Well, Saul would bring about the destruction of the warlock army sooner this time around. The fall of Harkin’s Holdfast was the first piece in the destruction of Xorn and the slip into the Keldorian civil war.

Saul would stop it in its tracks.

Once again, he would change the course of history.

The ranks of the warlock army were on his right, now, and the cliff wall on his left.

The degree of their poor leadership became increasingly clear as Saul snuck along the line of the cliff. The warlock commanders had completely ignored the possibility of a flanking attack.

In the back of his mind, Saul was constantly hoping to spot reinforcements from the villages or even from the Queen of Xorn. But he was not holding out for that.

No, for the moment he alone would have to be enough.

He was defaulting back to his old tactic, the one that had worked for him time and again in the old days. He had waited until the main body of the enemy forces were engaged at the walls of the village, and now he was acting as the strike force, striking out alone to try to go for the jugular of the enemy.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

In the past, this had been a tactic that he used to save his resources despite the fact that he usually had overwhelming force at his back. Now, he was doing it because he could not win the battle in a straight up fight.

There had been no battle in the past, he thought, where the stakes had been quite so high.

A harsh cry nearby made Saul look up. In the air above him, one of the huge bats was circling, its black-robed, red-eyed rider glaring down at him. He could feel the flow of information from the rider back to its controller.

Instinct took over, and Saul’s magic options flashed up in front of his eyes. The bat lurched forward through the air, but Saul adjusted his aim of the Catapult spell. The rock manifested in the air a little above Saul’s hand, and he heard the swish as it sped through the air.

His aim was perfect. The stone crushed the bat and flung the warrior off into the air. The black-clad warrior fell to the ground, smashing into the snow with a heavy, wet thud.

Saul dashed forward, his eyes scanning the territory around himself to make sure he had not drawn the attention of any other enemies. He hadn’t.

Swinging his halberd up, he brought it down again on the warrior’s helmet, cleaving the helmet and the skull below in two.

As the blow fell and the monstrous warrior died, the thrall momentarily regained the features of a young dark-skinned man with pale blue eyes.

There was a sigh, and a wisp of soul rose into the air.

Light crackled around the warrior’s armor. The Sigils that had kept it in control faded from the world.

Sigils, he thought. All of this is built on Sigils, much like my system. Grimdir is using the same technology to manage his army—a system nearly as complex and large-scale as my own magic interaction System, as created by Sarkur.

He wondered for a moment if there was any connection between the two, then banished the thought. He had only one goal here tonight: find Grimdir, eliminate the threat.

This flying warrior might have sent warning to the wytchlord that there was a human warrior out of the village and ready to attack. But perhaps not. If that was so, surely Grimdir would be sending orders to others within his control to come and counter the threat?

Saul pressed on. The long path that followed the side of the cliff was clear of enemies. Another sign that Grimdir, or whoever was in charge of this attack, was no battle commander.

If Saul had been in charge, there would have been a host of sentries here. If Saul had been in charge, the village would have fallen within the first hour.

He activated Windspeed, using the spell to blast at incredible speed up the narrow path and to the top. Here, he did find a sentry, but he ran so fast that the man was dead and had been thrown off the cliff edge before he realized Saul was even there.

This was not a thrall, but a warlock, with silvery runes all over his cloak and a wicked, wise, thoughtful face. He died easily, and Saul dashed under the shadows of the trees to hide himself as his Windspeed spell wore off.

Every time he used a spell, he felt the slick, satisfying feeling of the rewards slipping through the air and being absorbed into his Workshop. He no longer needed to physically activate the Absorb to Workshop command. It happened of its own accord.

Saul knew there were Glade magic rewards present in the Workshop now, enough to gain the Glade magic unlocking Sigil. Alas, that he was in the heat of the battle and couldn’t afford a visit to the Workshop.

For now, he would do what he could with what he had.

He had one spell left in his current casting cycle, and he used it to activate Hunter’s Sight. The world under the trees was dark and gloomy, but as soon as he activated the spell several figures appeared outlined in white against the foliage and trees that hid them from view.

Saul had seen many things in his time, and had done many magics, but he had never come across anything as useful or as interesting as this revealing spell. He’d never seen anything like it. A spell that could detect hidden enemies, as if he were seeing straight through the obstacles was unheard-of.

After all, he thought, this System was designed by a god. There’s no telling what powers he might have been able to fit into it.

That was an interesting thought. Where had Sarkur gotten his powers? Where had he found the magic that he was using to create the System?

Had he stolen it from the other gods? Dirty though he might be, he surely did not have command of all magics? The Sigils that had gone into Saul’s System must have a source, surely. Where had Sarkur gotten the power?

Again, Saul pushed the thought aside. This was not the time for such speculation, and he wondered in passing at how unfocused his mind had become. This was not like him.

In the old days—and even in the earlier days of the new life which he now inhabited—he would never have drifted from his purpose like this. It made him suspicious.

Was there some magic of Grimdir’s at work here? Some magic that was fogging his mind, sapping his focus? He would have to be careful, would have to be on the lookout.

His cooldown finished, and he refocused his attention in the now, activating Silent Step to shield his movements from detection as he sneaked up on the closest enemy. Interestingly, this was a warlock without thralls or monsters in hand, a warlock guard with a longsword and a black cloak, standing still and gazing out into the falling snow toward the village.

Saul left his halberd leaning against a tree and slipped his dagger from its sheath. The warlock caught sight of Saul out of the corner of his eye at the last moment and turned, but his scream of warning died as his throat was slit.

These warlocks had been deployed through the area here as watchers, with a level of care that had not been used anywhere else in the preparations of the wytchlord’s attack. Regardless, they weren’t prepared for a silent assassin.

Saul skulked from tree to tree, nearly soundless. The Silent Step spell was still in place, and the snow would have muffled his movements anyway. He was not exactly invisible, but he was confident that there was little chance of his being detected by his enemies.

The second warlock scout died like the first, with a silent, swift blow from Saul’s dagger and a quick drag back into the bushes to hide the corpse.

Saul moved on. The smell of the smoke from the village was in his nostrils, and he could hear the crash and yell of fighting, but he remained focused on his target.

He could feel tendrils of some distracting magic plucking at the edges of his consciousness, but he shut them out. He would not be drawn from this mission.

A third sentry, a third swift death. Blood on the snow, and the silent progress deeper into the trees.

And then, at last, he saw his target.

The warlocks had set up a command post here in the trees. There was an elaborate canvas tent with an area in front that was clear of snow. Three figures stood guard: a warlock in his silvery-runed robe, and two tall thrall sentries, their black hoods peppered with the falling snow.

From within the tent came the murmur of voices. Even stronger than the voices, there came the undeniable, irrepressible thrum of magic. Power emanated from the tent with a level of force that he had never felt before, not since the days of the Prism Academy, anyway.

Back then, he had guided the Academy to gather magical power the likes of which the world had not seen before. They had become the channeler for all the magic that was used by the emperor’s armies.

A slow smile grew on his face as he remembered those days. What a success that had been!

He shook his head. The magic that drained his focus was strong here, and it was pulling at his mind and his attention.

He must stay on task. Everything was reliant on this. If he could take out Grimdir…

“What’s that?” said a voice nearby.

There was a sudden, abrupt shift in the tone of the magic that thundered ceaselessly from inside the tent, as if the power creating it had become distracted, had shifted focus. In an instant, Saul became aware of being hunted, as if great hands were pawing the air, fumbling blindly through the world around him and searching for him, searching, searching, and if they caught him…

He had four spell castings left in the current cycle, and he was not about to waste them on stealth spells anymore.

He slipped his dagger into its sheath and downed a Basic Strength Potion to give himself a boost. Then he drew the short, stabbing sword that was the signature weapon of the Xornian foot soldiers, and got his spell list ready. He kept his left hand free for casting, and then strode toward the tent, making no attempt to conceal himself.

From within the tent, he felt Grimdir’s searching magic lock on him. He had the immensely satisfying sensation of feeling Grimdir’s power and control wobble as fear slipped into the wytchlord’s mind.

That’s right, Grimdir, Saul said to himself. Be afraid. Your death is coming for you.