The drums had been growing in tempo for days now as Harrant stared over the edge of the wall at the distant treeline. Night had been growing increasingly early in the day, as though to coincide with this moment in time, and yet the one thing that he hadn't expected was the sudden absence of sound when the moment finally came.

A single woman ran out from the woodline with a feeble gait that looked like it was about to trip her up at any moment under her long flowing dress. This was no warrior come to attack the fort, and harrant looked to his left and right to find matching confusion on the other men by his side. Jolted awake from the normally dull nights on guard duty, the small group didn't even sound the alarm as the girl ran across the field towards the rushing river and tall walls.

What did she seriously plan on doing when she got to the other side?

He never found out as one wrong step suddenly sent her body plummeting into a hastily dug pit with wooden spikes at the bottom of it. All he heard was a short yelp from the girl over the long distance as she lost her footing, then nothing at all when her entire body fell out of view into the hole. It was like she had never been there to begin with.

Doug's mouth hung open. He had no way of knowing whether he had dug the hole that killed her with his own hands. It had seemed so long ago, so unimportant to remember where he had dug over the previous few weeks, yet now he wished that he had some way of knowing whether this was his fault. Yet still, nothing happened as the once solid throbbing of drums in the distance had turned into a strange new sound.

The clang of metal on metal made its way out from the forest in sharp peals across the empty plain, the tell tale noise of metal weapons being slammed into one another from within the woods. Then, the pyro's started lighting up the woodline in a way that hadn't happened in the past. They no longer sent up a single gout of flame into the air that dissipated over time, but instead he saw large swaths of the distant woodline catching fire as though a forest fire had just engulfed a large section of the area all at once. Then, everything just got worse.

The elderly came first, accompanied by women and children that barely rose to the height of their companion's hips, all running across the clearing. Harrant could only stare in open horror as he realized what was about to happen, but even if he yelled out it would have done them no good. The look of complete and utter fear in their eyes drove them forward, dodging left and right as several individuals had the foresight to at least look where they were going as they crossed the death trap of a field. A horn blew in the background somewhere atop the stone wall.

Harrant looked down as he saw several little ones misjudge a jump over one of the larger holes and disappear from sight. This time, the noise didn't simply drown out, but grew as piercing screams echoed from across the field as a mother reached in with her arms towards the depths of a hole and the unseen body that likely lay at the bottom of it.

He couldn't catch it all though, as his eyes were drawn to a lone boy that had stopped running halfway across the expanse, a scabbard locked to his chest by small arms as the little boy carried a sword that was almost as tall as he was. His tired little steps bobbed and weaved as he slowly trudged across the field around large pits lined with death as he made his way closer, then fell to his knees, scabbard still held in his arms.

Yells could now be heard over the distant ringing of metal, and a handful of drum beats echoed once then twice over the clearing in a different tempo than he had heard for the last several weeks. Able bodied men and women emerged from the woodline this time and the horn that had called a warning upon Harrant's own defensive line called out once more. The distant warriors started charging, though for some reason their heads kept turning backward as they crossed the clearing.

“Ready!” The words from a nearby officer drew Harrant out of his stupor as someone took charge of the wall.

“Draw!” He hurriedly snatched up his bow and pulled an arrow from the nearby wooden quivers set permanently into the battlements and notched his arrow.

“Fire!” The nearby soldiers around Doug all released at close to the same time as he quickly drew back his own bow string with cold shaking fingers and released a moment later. He hadn't aimed, and he certainly didn't watch the arrows flight to see where it landed. He didn't have to as he heard screams from below interspersed with the sudden appearance of flame in front of many of the approaching warriors. His eyes registered several of the late arrows from the attack flying into the wall of fire erupting over the clearing, only to disappear from the air itself in a cloud of ash.

“Draw!” The man's commands reminded Doug of his place in this battle and he hurriedly snatched another arrow, drawing it immediately.

“"Fire!” He loosed the arrow along with the men by his sides as another volley cut across the clearing to be met with fire and screams. Harrant settled into the rhythm of his shots as the command's continued behind him, distracting him from the increasing heat as those plumes of fire got closer and closer each time.

A bolt of something white flashed by his view as an object passed by his head with an oddly hissing noise through the air. He ducked and looked behind him, tracking the small missile as he watched it impact with a house roof behind him with a shock of white dust like a puff of snow. While he was still ducked another red ball passed overhead that looked like a molten piece of metal passing through the space where he had just been standing. This time when it impacted the wooden building there was no explosion, but rather the red hot material seemed to splat across the roof and smolder.

“Free-fire!” The officer called, evidently coming to the same conclusion as Harrant as the rest of the archer line started to duck in between their shots, trying to dodge the incoming attacks. Doug drew his bow while slightly crouched behind cover, stood up just long enough to get a decent angle, then loosed the bow once more over the side, but it seemed to disappear into the near constant wall of flame that covered the battlefield at this point.

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He chanced a glance down the line, and saw as one of the men got hit in the head with one of the white balls, the sudden explosion puffing out to coat his body in a strange mist of white that coated the nearby soldiers as the man dropped on the spot. Whatever the white and blue flakes coming off from the object were, the men who got hit by them shrieked and patted at their clothing like they had been burned by the stuff, dropping their bows to try and back up from the cloud of white mist that slowly settled down around the dead soldier who had been hit directly.

“Hold!” The officer called the order to stop shooting for some reason, which the men gladly followed as everyone ducked even further behind the stone as more and more strange objects flew up the walls at them. Harrant could see everything clearly as he raised his head only the slightest bit over the lip, taking in the far side of the clearing that now burned high into the night. As the hail of arrows from the keep walls slowed down, he noticed that more and more of the missiles that had been coming up the walls were then redirected into the forest opposite them, firing off into the distant inferno despite the lack of anything visible through the fire.

“What is even happening here?” Doug couldn't stop himself from asking aloud as his eyes barely skimmed the top of the stone defenses until another missle passed by his head causing him to flinch away. Behind them, another fire had started to rise into the night as several of the wooden roofs in the town below had caught fire. people swarmed around the streets around the town, screams rebounding up the wall from either side as Harrant crouched in place amid the chaos in his strangely safe position.

A crunching, rumbling sound started to draw his attention from beyond the stone crenellations, and Harrant found himself once again watching over the lip as his curiosity drew him to the source. Whatever he had been expecting, it wasnt what he founnd as a series of strange tube-like stone tunnels started appearing at the far end of the clearing.

Every few dozen feet a stone wall would rise up out of the ground seemingly out of nowhere as bolts of magma and ice pelted against the makeshift barriers, leaving dents in the thick surfaces but not breaking through. Next, a series of diagonal stone pieces would spring out of the ground to land in a triangular formation, making a cieling behind the stone wall before the strange above ground tunnels continued forward once again.

‘Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump.” The sound of distant stone bricks falling into place rumbled over the clearing as the rock defenses grew closer and closer to the flamers stuck between the moat and the forest. The arcanists must have planned this all along, forcing the flamer tribe to flee into the Seton walls when and only when they were ready to begin the battle.

Harrant watched as several flamer warriors started charging away from the wall now, running across the battlefield with long wooden sticks ending in small bowls held within their wrapped and bleeding hands. The warriors reached back into small wicker baskets upon their backs where they withdrew small stones that suddenly lit up with fire or encased in ice that was now easier to understand as Harrant watched them move in the light from the nearby wildfire. When they finally reached the moving tunnels, he saw several people place their superheated rocks into the bowls at the end of their sticks, then jumped up and threw the rocks into the open corners between the edges of the stone tunnels and the darkness within.

Muffled screams echoed from within the stone tunnels as the warriors evidently hit someone on the other side, sudden bursts of light bleeding out from the edges of the stone as they made contact with the men within. A couple of the warriors even waited quietly on the other side of the stone slabs protecting the front side of the tunnels like they were waiting for the next extension to occur. Unfortunately, the stone mages decided to fight back and a series of stone spikes suddenly jutted from the inside of the tunnels like a porcupine pushing out its quills.

The warriors who had been in hiding were suddenly pierced with a dozen small rock spears shoved through their body. Several of the warriors that had thrown the rocks into the center of the tunnels were also attacked as large vines slithered across the ground, trapping the men and women as they tried to run away. Thin tendrils of water errupted from the cracks in the stone tunnels like strange arms that reached out and cut through the warriors bodies like they were nothing but wheat stalks. That was, until a massive stone block suddenly came crashing down on one of the stone tunnels from the direction of the keep walls. The rock imploded upon contact with the falling boulder, causing a loud crashing noise that drowned out any possible screams that could have been heard over the dull whistle of another large boulder passing through the sky above.

Harrant watched as the boulder seemed to change direction mid-air moving from a clearly miss aimed trajectory to correct its own cours to target as a human figure spun away from the massive rock in the opposite direction. Even as the rock smashed downward into the center of one of the stone tunnels then rolled away deeper into the fire engulfed forest, the green clad figure flying through the air started to fall downwards just short of Harrants position when he felt a tug.

His legs fell out from under him, and he had to stretch out between the sides of the crenulations to keep from being pulled off of the wall entirely as he suddenly felt tugged by a massive force towards the edge of the wall. A second later, a flash of red hair passed him by, releasing him from the tugging on his body as she arced over the wall and back within the safety of the town. Released from the pressure, Harrants body buckled at the knees as he saw another dark figure push away from a downward arking boulder, redirecting it mid flight as the dark haired man careened back towards the wall.

This was what it meant to be stuck in a war between mages as Harrant knelt there, head looking over the wall at a field pocketed with random bits of burning ground, as defensive tunnels sprung out of the ground and man guided boulders rained from the sky. To his right and left, the former archers merely huddled in place, forgotten like the remnants of a forgotten time, while catapults continued to creak in the far distance, sending force mages far into the air. Even as he watched, the enemy mages adjusted their strategy, strange vines growing from beside the edges of the stone tunnels, creating a green layer of protection, even as a torrent of water poured out of the holes in the tunnel towards an oncoming boulder. He watched as the delluge of water slowed the stone down, then the vines and wood seemed to catch the rock in mid air then leaned to the side, depositing the massive stone safely away from their siege formation.

And through all of it, Harrant felt entirely, completely, helpless.

This was not a war for men like him. This was something else entirely.

He retracted his head behind the stone formations and sat there with his back to the wall like all the other men by his side. Facing the inside of the city, he watched the burning roofs within the town itself as human beings carried buckets between the wells and their homes, desperately trying to do something of value to protect their home. They didn't know what was happening on the other side of the wall. They couldn't see both sides like Harrant had seen.

They weren't stuck in the middle of this madness. Not like him.