They waited a long time atop the ridge, listening to the distant sounds of the mountain keening. There were men shouting down below now, at the base of the caldera’s slope, too distant to make out what they were saying. Duu didn’t know why the big battle didn’t happen all at once, perhaps Torun, Rook, Halvard or Yaosen would know, but Duu was just thankful for the additional time.

She had returned to her seated position, tendrils of root and vine blossoming beneath her with her residual energy.

The volcanic rock chips of the cladera looked hostile and bare, but just beneath the surface there was actually a lot of good rootsnack. She was so intent on mentally moving from pocket to fertile pocket beneath the earth that she almost didn’t notice the first drumming of footsteps on the slope of the caldera. It was a lot of footsteps.

“They’re coming,” Duu whispered without opening her eyes.

She heard Yeller rustle beside her as the old man peeked out from cover.

“They sure are,” he said to Duu, then lifted his voice, “ON THE READY!”

A few other defenders lifted themselves to catch a glimpse of their enemy just as Yeller had done, but he reminded them in that thunderous voice to stay low until his signal.

As if to punctuate his point, a missile came screaming out of the distance to slam into the top of the ridge, driving into the scree just short of the ridgetop. It came dangerously close to where a pair of lanky boys huddled beside their grandmother with bows and bushels of arrows.

“Those are getting close,” Duu whispered. She didn’t need to look to know that the far-flung projectiles, some of them as large as full-grown darkpines, had landed higher and higher up on the ridge, missing the people atop it by less and less. No one but Duu noticed the little blossoms creeping up the shafts after they buried themselves in the hillside.

“YOU THREE!” Yeller shouted, “RE-POSITION!”

Duu heard the shuffling as the archers nearest the most recent missile picked a new point on the ridgetop.

“They’re coming up on the red flag,” she said.

Yeller peeked again and nodded. “How far was that?”

Duu shrugged.

“KNOCK!” Yeller yelled. Dozens of bodies along the ridgeline shuffled and fumbled with their weapons. It sounded like a windy forest in wintertime, twigs all clacking together.

“Orange,” said Duu.

“STAND!”

“They’ll be at the yellow in three…

“Shit. DRAW!”

Bows creaked like a dozen old leaning trees.

“…two…one.”

“LOOOOSE!”

***

Arne didn’t notice that the sun had risen behind them until he found himself sweating in his furs. All he could think about was the wall of black and green marching up that trail in perfect rank and file.

The foreign army was like nothing he’d ever seen before.

They were silent as they marched; no warcries or ululations or shield-beating or anything. The only sound as they drew nearer was the crunch of their boots in perfect unison, the rustle of their armor in perfect time.

They looked unworried by the hail of arrows. They were unhurried as they drew nearer. Even when Arne’s arrow took one in the neck, a moment later it was as if it had never happened. Another man – same uniform, same weapons, same scowl – replaced the soldier Arne had felled. If Arne couldn’t see the body, partially trampled and then kicked off to the side of the trail, he would have sworn that they were impervious to his arrows, immune to death.

They seemed as lifeless as the earth they trod upon.

Arne realized his sister, Kara, had stopped firing the moment the first body fell.

“What did you do?” she mumbled, standing above cover on the ridgeline as if she were about to fire, but bowstring slack with the knocked arrow.

“Just keep shooting, Kara,” said Arne, “It's just like target practice.”

Arne stood and loosed another arrow. It was so much easier than target practice. All he had to do was aim for height and distance; they were so packed in together he couldn’t miss.

“But they’re not targets. They’re people,” said his sister.

People that want to kill us. Somehow Arne didn’t think that was the right response for his sister who refused even to hunt.

He didn’t want to think of them as people either. He also didn’t want to think about what would happen if they reached the top of the ridgeline. He didn’t even want to think about what would happen if they reached the white flag. Somewhere between the white and blue flags they would be able to fire back arrows of their own, and some villagers even said that these men had special powers that could kill you with a punch from within the closest flag, the blue one.

Kara was safe as long as they didn’t reach that white flag.

Arne grabbed his sister by the sleeve and pulled her down to a crouch, just in case. “You have to think of them as targets. They even have a circle on them. Aim for the center of the circle and don’t worry about anything else. It’s target practice. Put the arrow in the circle. That’s all.”

Arne grabbed her hand and put it on the fletching of her knocked arrow, shaking it for emphasis.

She nodded, dazedly.

He grabbed an arrow of his own and knocked it.

“Just do what I do.” He stood and began his draw.

The earth beneath his feet shattered.

He heard a snap and then was suddenly falling in a small landslide of rocks and scree. Somewhere, far away, much too far away, he heard his sister scream.

***

Duu’s eyes snapped open, and she looked to where the penetrating bolt had driven through the top of the ridgeline, fletching sticking out of one side, a metal tip sticking out of the other, and a shattered depression in between. A perfect shot.

The boy who had been standing there was gone. The girl who had been next to him screamed as she watched him tumble down toward the blue flag in a cascade of stone chips. Her own face was pouring blood from the shrapnel, but she seemed witless to everything except for the boy’s impending doom.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Duu lept to her feet and ran for the gap. Yeller grabbed for her but was too late as she slipped past.

Before she could think she was jumping into the gap where the ridgeline had once been flat and sliding down the rubble, sharp stones tearing at her moss coverings and into the soft flesh beneath.

This was supposed to be easy, thought Duu. This was supposed to be the part of the assault the bad guys gave up on quickly. This didn’t feel easy. It didn’t seem like they were about to give up. And the ridgeline was supposed to protect them as they shot their bows.

No one was supposed to get hurt.

Duu passed the blue flag at a lurching, sliding run. She came to a stop beside the boy’s groaning, half-buried body, just as he came to rest beside the white flag.

The whistle of arrows overhead suddenly stopped.

Duu looked up to realize that they were not a dozen paces from the first line of Earthbreaker soldiers, close enough to see the green stitching on their Earth Kingdom emblems, close enough to she which ones had shaved that morning and which hadn’t, close enough to see the small, wicked smiles break past their military professionalism.

Duu didn’t need to remember what Torun had said about arrow ranges and the range of a typical earthbender. This close, she knew the Earthbreakers could hit her with whatever they wanted.

“Please don’t,” she begged.

The first rank of soldiers planted their feet and chambered their fists with a clink of armor.

“No.” It came out in a whisper, and she wrapped her arms around the half-conscious boy.

The first rank of Earthbreakers stepped forward and punched in unison.

***

Rook wouldn’t wait in her quarters any longer. She dragged Yaosen, protesting all the way, up to the top of the northern peak. Smoke billowed around them as they stood atop a precarious perch, a vertiginous drop before them, roiling smoke and fire at their backs, nothing but sky above them.

Intermittently, the wind would swirl and they could catch a glimpse of the Earthbreaker army’s progress and the ridge defenders below.

“They’re too slow,” said Rook as she watched, “Do you think they’re running out of arrows?”

“It won’t matter if Lu Gun gets to you,” said Yaosen, “Can we please go back inside where you’re safe?”

“If that ridge falls, it won’t matter if Lu Gun gets to me,” she retorted, “their volleys are coming too slow. I knew we should have put more hunters on the ridge, or at least more experienced ones. Tell me I’m wrong.”

Yaosen looked down to humor her but saw that the Earthbreaker column was indeed closing too fast, and not leaving enough of their numbers dead or injured along the trail. The column was halfway between the yellow and white flags, and they still seemed relatively whole.

Yaosen scowled.

Rook saw his expression, and that was all the confirmation she needed.

“Gama!” she shouted.

There was a scrabble and billow of smoke as the ashraven launched skyward. Rook leapt into the swirling abyss.

“Rook!” shouted Yaosen.

Talons emerged from the wall of smoke and closed around Yaosen, tearing him from his feet and out into open sky.

Yaosen would have screamed, but suddenly he was falling in a different direction. There was no up or down, as the sky spun around him. There was a jarring impact and before he realized it, he was clinging to Rook, the ashraven beneath them both as if they straddled the same flying steed.

The shadowbender chief didn’t give Yaosen time to feel embarrassment at the way he clutched at her, but forced Gama into a dive that once more crushed the air from the monk’s chest.

Yaosen might have been used to the feeling by now, but one couldn’t get used to not breathing.

As the slope of the ridge came up to meet them, Yaosen could see that something was horribly wrong. The ground was coming up too fast, yes, but it was also a different shape. The ridge was altered in some way.

Even though they slowed their dive not at all, Yaosen recovered himself enough to notice that the rain of arrows had stopped, the Earthbreaker column had stopped, and there were two small figures crouched on the trail before them. One of them was Duu.

Even at this speed, even at this distance, Yaosen recognized an earthbending form. Duu had no defense, other than to cling tighter to the other figure.

Yaosen wanted to cry out, but his wind was snatched from his mouth. He wanted to unleash his fire, but they were still too far.

Suddenly, to Yaosen, they couldn’t dive fast enough. He didn’t care if he was shattered upon the earth as long as he was able to reach those Earthbreakers in time to stop them.

Even as he watched, the Earthbreakers stepped forward to summon the earth and punch it forward in a fatal volley.

Nothing happened.

Somehow their bending had failed them, and as Gama, Rook and Yaosen plummeted toward the column, they seemed as confused as Yaosen was relieved. But the feeling didn’t last long.

***

Nothing but dust and pebbles rained across Duu and the boy she held. The Earthbreakers had tried to summon the earth, in a bending form so basic that it could be fatal from even the lowliest of earthbenders.

They were so surprised it hadn’t worked that they didn’t move for the span of a few heartbeats.

There were archers among them, too, but they had been so sure the benders would take care of the two children in their path, that they hadn’t even drawn their arrows.

They all just looked at each other, the two children and the Earthbreaker column, for a few seconds longer.

A few of the first ranks tried the form again, kicking up nothing but dust a second time. The motion shifted enough of the first layer of the trail that sinuous dark lines could be seen in the scree beneath their feet. A soldier tried the form again and again, frustrated at his impotence, yet he only succeeded in dislodging a few pebbles at a time from the rootbound soil.

It had taken hours of motionlessness, and it had pushed Duu’s treebending powers to their absolute limits. Before the Earthbreakers had even set foot on the slope, Duu had threaded countless roots and vines so tight throughout the western face of the caldera, that it would take hours to dislodge a single stone worth throwing.

Duu might have smiled if the man in the second row hadn’t drawn his sword and marched forward purposefully. Binding the earth in roots was meant to protect them from earthbending projectiles while they held their position atop the ridge. Duu had no defense against sharp steel at arm’s reach.

The enterprising soldier didn’t get more than three strides before he erupted into flame.

The ashraven screamed from mere yards above their heads and it pulled up in a tight maneuver that left several balls of fire falling, then erupting in its wake.

The Earthbreaker column, that had been so cool and collected up until that point, screamed as whole sections of them succumbed to the fire.

Duu spared only a quick glance upward to see the white furs of Yaosen, sitting on the back of the ashraven, throwing more and more fists of fire before the bird flew too high for bending to be effective.

Duu didn’t waste another moment. She lifted an arm and the roots pushed the boy from the debris. A root curled around her and she curled around the boy, and then the sinuous tendril of bark surged forward through the loose gravel like a sea serpent slithering through the waves.

They passed the blue flag as the Earthbreakers recovered enough to send volleys of arrows in their wake.

She flicked a palm forward and the root flung them that last few paces, dropping them painfully onto the top of the ridge’s natural wall. Duu scrambled the last yard and fell over the far side, grabbing the boy by the collar and dragging him behind her. A dozen other hands grabbed at her and the boy until they fell over the lip of the ridge and into cover.

The boy made no sound.

Duu looked down to inspect him, not realizing that all of the ridge’s defenders crowded around them.

There were only superficial scrapes from the pebbles flung at them when the earthbending attack had failed and from the quick, sloppy rootbending escape. The boy’s ankle was at an odd angle, but-

“Arne! Arne!” the girl with half of her face covered in blood pushed through the crowd, “Let me through, that’s my brother!”

She lifted her brother to her, but the boy had gone still, his face ashen.

“What’s wrong with him?” the girl’s face stared up at Duu accusingly, “What happened?”

She looked back down at her brother, grabbed him by the collar and shaking him, then cupping one hand to his face. Only then did she realize one of her hands had come up covered in her brother’s blood. She lifted Arne to her breast to reveal the broken arrow shaft protruding from his back. It had struck him from behind, perhaps mere feet before he had reached safety.

Yeller bent to him, pressing a finger beneath Arne’s nose and then to his neck.

“He’s dead, Kara,” Yeller said, voice no more than a whisper of wind.

Tears welled up and spilled from Kara’s eyes, cutting runnels down the blood that covered half of her face.

***

The tears didn’t stop. Kara sent arrow after arrow into the column of Earthbreakers. She stopped aiming for the circles on their chests, as Arne had told her, when she realized that many of the soldiers wore armor too hard to penetrate. Their throats and faces were softer targets, and as they drew closer, it got even easier to take their lives.

Kara’s arms burned with the speed and ferocity with which she sent arrow after arrow speeding into the people who had taken her brother from her. If she hadn’t been so lost to her grief and hatred, she might have noticed that many of the defenders along the ridge now matched her furious pace.

Tears streaked from many faces and a hail of arrows rained down. Eventually the Earthbreaker column broke, running to the safety of the red flag and out of range.

No one cheered their victory.

It didn’t last long anyway, as the Earthbreakers reformed and began marching up the trail a second time.