Duu watched as the tower grew larger and larger, rolling toward the base of the caldera. No more Earthbreaker columns walked the trail to the ridge. They all either milled about in a cluster far below, waiting to rush into the tunnel, or waited in neat orderly squares behind the slow-rolling tower of dusty orange stone.
“They’ll never get it up the slope right?” asked Yeller, bow uselessly limp in his hand.
Duu shrugged.
Surely enough, once the stone tower got far enough up the slope that the wheels wouldn’t turn anymore, it stopped. Burly shirtless men lined up alongside it. The wheels shattered at a gesture from the men and the tower slammed to the ground. They widened their base and punched their effort. The tower moved forward a few feet.
“What in the spirits’ name do they think they’re doing?” Yeller asked in disbelief, “It’ll take all year for them to get to us that way.”
“They breaking it,” said Duu. She still sat with her back to the tower, focusing on readying her roots, but she could feel the tremors each time the men stepped forward and punched the tower forward a few feet. Each time they performed the maneuver, the bottom block of stone was left behind, and the rest of the tower moved forward without it, one block of stone shorter, but one block of stone closer to the ridgetop.
Chunk. BOOM! Another block broke off the bottom, the tower moved forward and slammed down, again.
“They are! And it’s forming a staircase!”
Yeller was right. Duu could feel the blocks of stone lining up in a large staircase going straight up the middle of the mountain. The men that stepped up onto their earthen staircase disappeared from the view of her rootbound soil.
This way the tower could form itself to any slope. The soldiers no longer needed to walk the winding trail to reach the ridgetop, and they would have cover behind the tower almost the entire way. What was worse… they were bringing their own stone with them.
“Save your arrows,” said Duu, “until the blue flag.”
Chunk. BOOM!
“The blue flag?” Yeller asked, “It'll just be a straight shootout by then.”
Chunk. BOOM!
Duu grimaced. When the Earthbreakers reached them, they would be able to use the stone of the staircase beneath their feet as ammunition, and it wouldn’t matter that the ridgestone beneath it was all bound up in roots.
“I’ll do what I can,” she said. She remained motionless, save for the furrow of her brow as she shifted her attention and pushed harder on the roots. She abandoned the ones throughout most of the ridge and focused her attention on priming just the ones at the very top.
Chunk. BOOM!
***
Rune wiped the blood from his eyes as he pressed into the breach left by the woman who had just fallen. He laid about with his sword, barely seeing the invaders in the tunnel before him.
When Torun had pulled Rune from the front lines he had been furious, caught up in the rush of battle. He knew now that the old foreign soldier had been right; it was nigh impossible to fight with this much blood in your face. But there weren’t enough of them left to hold two full ranks of defenders, and many of the other injured were far worse off than him.
In truth, Rune would rather be up here, fighting for his wife and newborn son who were even now huddling deep in the heart of the village, than sitting on his arse surrounded by the dead and dying.
The one beside him fell, and he had to retreat another pace as it took longer and longer for fighters to fill the gaps. He wasn’t even sure who had just fallen, though he had known every man, woman and child in Shadow Ridge for years. He wasn’t even sure who now fought beside him now. All he knew was that there was a breeze at his back and that must mean they were running out of tunnel.
A long polearm swung down from overhead, clipping the side of his helmet and sending a new wash of blood from the gash across his face. Rune cursed and had to retreat another step before he could see again and plunge his sword into the invader before him.
The invader that fell at his feet dropped a sword as he died, Rune noted absently. Swordsmen in front, polearms behind. It was like fighting two men at once, and that was if you were fighting only the ones in front of you.
The villager on his left screamed and fell, Earthbreaker boots crunching over her as she died, and suddenly there was no one holding the space on his left. Suddenly he was fending off not only the sword and spear in front of him, but a sword on his left too. And then a sword came from his right and knocked his helmet clear off in a spray of blood.
Rune retreated a step and bumped into a wall of warm muscle.
Suddenly none of the soldiers in front of him were too keen on closing in. Rune smiled and flourished his sword. “Come on you bastards! You scared of little ole Rune?”
Rune knew he was neither little nor old. He was in the prime of his life, big for even a Farwilder as Torun had called him, and he positively towered over these Earthbreakers. They did indeed look scared all of a sudden.
Perhaps the blood running down his-
The roar from just behind him was deafening, rattling his skull and making his bones hurt. His bladder let loose at the unexpected onslaught of sound, and he turned just in time to see the full-grown bearmoose, a spar of a broken antler and the many scars of a hard life dotting its brow. Rune dove to the side of the missing antler, and only barely avoided its thunderous paws.
Rune rolled on the ground. He first noticed that the bearmoose had charged alone into the breach. Twenty Earthbreakers formed a line, unable to retreat for the comrades that packed in behind them, and twenty earthbreakers died in the first sweep of the bearmoose’s antler. It thrashed and plowed and lashed out, killing the invaders with every movement of its massive berserker body.
The second thing Rune noticed as he sat up, was that the star-studded sky hung above him. They had been backed all the way out of the tunnel, and were on the cusp of the village’s main thoroughfare. Dozens of his fellow villagers limped or groaned beside him. They were falling back from the grand entranceway. Some were dragging injured companions, some were dragging dead bodies. Not a single man or woman that retreated into the village was without a wound.
They had done all Torun had asked. They couldn’t have done more. But that was little consolation for the small children and pregnant woman – like his Bryn and Little Rune – who were in the deep reaches of the village, counting on their defenders to bring them through this.
“Where do you think you lot are going?!” Rune launched to his feet, covered in blood and piss as he was, “Gonna have a nap in your own bed before you die?”
The injured stopped limping. The moaners stopped moaning. Silent, staring faces turned to him. The poor bastards of Shadow Ridge couldn’t have done more. So how could he ask more of them, now? What gave him the right?
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Bryn and Little Rune.
“Follow me you lazy bastards! There’s women and children in the tavern cellar.”
There were women injured beside him. There were children shooting bows up on the ridge. But they all knew what he meant.
Torun had said if they lost the grand entranceway, they were as good as dead. The foreigners had a power, that earth power, that could crush them all if they thought to fight house-to-house, street-to-street, Torun had said. But Torun was dead wasn’t he? And they had lost the tunnel, so what were they supposed to do now? Just stick themselves for the invaders’ convenience?
A woman, newish to town, Astrid was her name, must have thought the same, since she had the most typical Farwilder response to his summons. She signed and bent – ever so slowly – to pick up the bloody spear as if it were a hoe and she was getting sick of the garden-work. “She’d never liked garden-work, it wasn’t even her garden, the damned weeds multiplied too quickly, the vegetables too damned measly.” The gesture said all of that. But she picked up her tools just the same.
***
Duu was on her feet now, in a stance not unlike that of the earthbenders, fists clenched and shaking as she struggled to complete the movement.
The tower was short now, only a few blocks high, and it was well past the white flag, not more than a dozen paces from the blue. The entire column of earthbreakers huddled behind those last few blocks of stone, and the four, shirtless, burley men responsible for moving the tower forward were in postures that mirrored Duu’s.
A tree had sprung up in their path, and it leaned dangerously to one side as its roots clutched at the base of the stone tower, like a squidsnail with an oyster.
At Yeller’s order, the defenders of the ridge had fanned out to either side, so they could shoot around the battle of colossi, and the Earthbreakers were close enough to return fire, though the slope was still too great for them to try a straight charge. For the moment, Duu was able to hold the progress of the tower and creep her roots up to the feet of the halted column to hold the stone in place, but she was quickly flagging. Still, she didn’t give a single sign of her fatigue, and neither did the burly men beside the tower.
Grandfather would have been proud of her, her treebending more than a match for four full-grown earthbenders.
An arrow whizzed over her shoulder, as the Earthbreaker archers realized who was controlling the tree in their path. Duu glanced to the side and saw recognition spark in Kara’s blood-wreathed eyes as well. She turned her bow and planted an arrow right into the nearest earthbender pectoral. The man stumbled and the tree righted itself by increments, but Kara’s target rose to a knee and continued straining.
“GET THE SHIRTLESS ONES!” hollered Yeller.
Another arrow took the earthbender in the quad and he slipped back to the ground. Wood groaned and the tree surged further over the tower.
Many more arrows flew the way of the tower-pushers, but only a few found their mark, and those that did merely wounded the stalwart benders.
Duu strained and her foot slid, threatening to slip. She blew air out of her cheeks and glanced to the side to see Kara loading up her last arrow. She’ll get one, Duu thought. She doesn’t miss.
Kara inhaled as she drew, as if noting the importance of this last shot. The ridge would stand or fall based on its flight. Shadow Ridge would live or die based on its mark.
A roar split the night air and it all came crashing down at once.
Kara, perhaps startled by the sound, perhaps tired from the day of strain on her young muscles let the arrow slip. Its wooden tip trimmed the earthbender’s beard and flew wide. Duu’s foot slid out from under her, and with a last surge of effort the earthbender tower-pushers fell forward.
Chuuuunk, BOOMBOOM!
The last stairs fell into place and the Earthbreakers took their first steps in an hour toward the ridge. Their cover was now gone too though, and many of the defenders now found their marks.
Perhaps the defenders could have salvaged it. Perhaps Duu’s treebending could be more than a match for the earthbenders nearing the blue flag. Perhaps Yeller could have organized one last salvo to break the last column of attackers.
But in the same moment Duu slipped and fell to the ground, she fell face-down so that she had a perfect view of the tunnel mouth into the city. Headbutt was charging. The tunnel defenders were retreating. And one pair of villagers was dragging a blood-drenched suit of armor that housed the body of Torun Bo.
Duu shrieked a wordless cry of fear and pain and disbelief.
Without a backward glance at the Earthbreakers charging the ridgeline, Duu lept from the parapet and sprinted down the stairs carved into the back of the caldera. She descended into the village without a thought for the Meteor Knight’s grand plan or the village’s stalwart defense. All she could think about was Torun, one of two men who had plucked her from a life of loneliness, where she only had spirits and trees for company, and had given her a new one of warmth and friendship, a new family, people to call home, not just a place.
The many steps blurred in her tear-riddled vision and eventually she fell to her knees beside the blood-soaked body. She could feel hands clawing at her, voices making insistent sounds. She shrugged them all off, clinging to Torun as if dying were an act of physical motion, and staying in place could forestall it. She made an off-handed fist-opening motion and her mossy attire shot outward like the spikes of a green porcupig. The people around her stopped clawing at her. The voices around her rose in surprise, then faded.
She reached into a fold of her sleeve and pulled out a wad of sap. She hesitated as she saw the armor, then forced a palm into the air, shooting a pair of roots out of the ground to either side of Torun. The roots tore the breastplate in half, snapping themselves with the violence of the motion and Duu pressed the poultice to Torun’s chest.
Something cold and wet poked her but she pushed it off. She lifted the poultice to see the blood slowing, but Torun’s face was so white. It was still and white like young Arne’s was on the ridgeline. She pressed the poultice harder to Torun’s chest with one hand and tore open a packet of powder to dump between his lips with the other.
The cold wet snout forced its way under her hands.
“No!” she shouted at the wolfboar, returning to her ministrations.
Grunt pressed his way between her and Torun, pushing her backward even as she shouted at him.
Before she knew it, she was clinging to the warm, black mane of the three legged wolfboar and crying until her throat was raw. When nothing more came out of her and Torun still lay motionless in the pathway, Duu turned furious red-rimmed eyes on the tunnel behind.
“Headbutt! Down!”
The bearmoose flung the man from his antler and paused in his furious rampage. He was bleeding from a dozen deep gashes.
The semicircle of Earthbreakers jabbed spears as he backed away.
“Headbutt! Come!”
The bearmoose roared once more and backed away a few steps before turning and bounded to Duu’s side.
Then she set her feet as she had seen the earthbenders do and raised her arms above her head, fingers bared like claws.
***
General Fong pressed forward through the frontline of spearmen. He wanted to end the bearmoose himself, once it was suitably worn down. He wanted to lead the charge into the city himself. Lu Gun may try to take the glory, but Fong’s contacts in the Earth Kingdom would be sure to name the official, rightful general as the conqueror of the Farwilds’ only city.
The sight before him stopped him in his tracks as it had done to his men. A girl half made of tree and moss stood between the bleeding bearmoose and an angry wolfboar. Surely this was no little girl, but a spirit of the forest itself. Perhaps these beasts were no beasts, but manifestations of river and mountain.
She set her feet and raised her hands.
Fong should have realized immediately what she was doing. It was half earthbender after all. But the complete posture was like nothing he had ever seen before. Half earthbender, half bloodbender??
Fong didn’t realize what he was looking at until the tunnel around him started shaking. By then it was too late.
“She’s a bender!” Fong shrieked, “Take her down!”
He looked up and saw the rock of the tunnel split, tendrils of root pressing their way through from above.
“Charge! Archers!”
Most of his men ignored him. The soldiers that were listening to him looked around in confusion. Archer charge? Was that something they could do? Some spearmen took it upon themselves to charge, but they were few. Some archers took it upon themselves to fire, but the earth shook around them and fouled their shots. Many Earthbreakers didn’t give a damn about their commander but knew the tunnel was coming down and threw down their weapons to run.
They made it as far as the bearmoose.
By the time Fong thought to run for his life, the forest demon was already pressing her hands downward. She closed her fists with an audible snap. Roots too free from above like a hundred wooden serpents and thunder rolled through the mountainside. The last thing Fong saw was the darkness of descending stone before the cave-in crushed him to death.