…..:::::|. Sidian Garden Terrace .|:::::…..

The waves of his black tress hugged the appalled scowl on his face like all the veins in this bloody marbled stone terrace. The opposing armies had chosen both the best and worst time to invade the Half-Giant home of Sidian Garden. It was in the middle of their annual festival commemorating the annexing of their lands into Ashok Territories. A time when all four young royals had joined them to celebrate.

He was wet and his reddish-golden skin discoloured with bloody streaks. Gems and fine stones and broken bodies littered the white terraced steps as upward lumbering deadsteeds trampled what was left of them into the breaking rock.

The Young King Shor, only two years crowned, spat blood to the left of his naked shoulder from an injured jaw. He flicked viscera and dirt from his generations-old glistening Carabaaniel blade and cursed harshly once again at the horrid scene. His manservant inched up on his right close on his Lorde's shoulder just brushing the middle of his arm.

"My Chief." Risoldh began. "If I may hazard to say..."

"Don't hazard." Shor's scowl shot toward the softly greying man next to him.

A rushing roar boomed from the throat of the general across the field. He was so large. Seemingly more full-Giant than half.

"We cannot fight them. They have Immortals on their side." Risoldh whispered coarsely.

"I told you not to hazard! We want nothing from these monsters save their heads on poles." He said as he stared with an intense hate across the mess of bodies on this terraced garden steps. It had been a rush so fast upon them they'd been thankful for their instinctual readiness against the onslaught these armies had thrust upon them.

The warmongers responsible, the mindless horde of brandywine-clad soldiers, headed by their large snowy-skinned general, glared up at them with empty eyes; having cut through Half-Giant citizens and Ashok visitors with slabs of coarse carved iron they called edged-weapons.

There stood only three score of them left now. Young King Shor and his pack-sibling-royals had run through most of them. Rending flesh from bone with tooth, fang, and sword. They’d sent appendages flying skyward with wild circling slashes. They severed the bellies of enemy steeds with Carabaaniel steel made from generations of smiths having honed the craft.

"The Dicus did nothing to deserve your massacre this day!" Close King Hagar Aphsa-Hagoniel belted astride his valiant grey steed. He was Shor's brother in arms, the eldest of their kingly post's generation.

"I won't be done until I rip out ever last one of their throats!" Barked the feral one-year-younger King Khorl Aphsa-Cashtiel; fangs already slathered in the arterial bloods of their first defense here.

To the left of Shor and Hagar and Khorl roared a youthful hate from the Crowned Prince not yet King, Ahtunowhiho Aphsa-Carabaan. "We end them here!" His banded crown wafted with purplish spiking energies matching the heated lavender of his eyes.

The Prince, only two years younger than Shor, stared into enemy eyes twice his age with the glare of a man three times their cycles, always on the grounds his opponents were a fourth his wisdom. Ahtunowhiho was a cocksure Prince. An audacious royal who’d boasted pridefully of his prowess in battle. But it was that brashness that brought the enemy forces to half its invading size this special day.

Ahtunowhiho's waking dreams had shown him armies on deadsteeds ripping apart the seams of Ashok, so his four royal pack-siblings took his words for truth and were made somewhat prepared for how the day would end. His audacity didn’t end at just the warning dreams. When the enemy had come upon them, those mind-cracking screams Carabaaniel wolvkin were known for, had flayed the minds of the invaders and a good number of them bled from their nostrils and collapsed in death.

Prince Ahtunowhiho had brought the Kings some level of control over this attack against the invading horde but his retinue had furthered their victory over the first wave.

A brown-haired man, the one Prince Ahtunowhiho's hot lavender eyes had slid to, stepped ahead of his Kings. This one, donning a warrior's streak of locks running down the center of his shaven head, jostled his Agency armours and huffed for a second round of warfare. He was born Osef Ondavan, but was gifted the name Killingmoon once he became a Zadagen Agent in Service of the CloseKings of Ashok. He was Stone-Gifted and his use of the primeval material had rendered five enemy Giants dead at once with marble pillars having been shot upward through their bodies. He tapped the tip of his crimson blade against the dew dampened and bloody stone to shake what blood had been on it, off.

A black haired man with a disturbingly hungry grin flipped two gore-covered daggers and readied himself for the next wave. He was slim but seemed four times larger in the cloak of falcon feathers he always donned. They called him Jarko, the Bird of Pale Blooms. For he’d been promised into the service of the young cocky Prince to ensure he'd see his coronation; for the young royal loved to display his fighting prowess.

Before all their furies could be unleashed again, a streak of four bluish-white lightning bolts struck the white steps on which a half a hundred dead men lay. Four figures draped in billowing white robes smacked the stone, standing tall and facing the ugly opposing armies.

Across from them, the enemy forces, who donned brandywine armour, reeled in waves of confusion. The pearl-skinned Half-Giant at their lead settled them with one croon of his voice and moved to raise his great flaming blade toward the tall ones in flashing white robes.

Two of the robed figures, who closely resembled one another, slapped four small round devices with spikes into the broken stone, setting a line between the opposing forces, and the other two spread glowing palms out to draw a shield of shimmering magecraft across the round cams they'd just dug into the terrace.

"Gaennish tech?!" Crowned Prince Ahtunowhiho screeched.

The rest of the young kings and retinue immediately cursed.

The Brandywine armoured Half-Giant mimicked their sour sentiment.

Both parties stood stunned that their bout had been cut off.

Behind the shield, within the line of the four robed ones, a dark-skinned man spoke first. "Take your minions and leave this place, Skongdravindh!"

Skongdravindh, the Brandywine Scourge. The VVarRaven. The Red End, roared and flashed into a fat bolt of black lightning, dust, and blood droplets upward toward the storm-clouded skies; transforming into a large black and scarlet corvid. It cawed and soared up the height of the shield wall; scraping the skin of it with his feathers' edge. Then upon finding no end to the shimmering skins way up where lighting bolts danced between clouds, the raven turned downward and dove fast before becoming that black streak of lighting once more.

It blasted to the ground at the shield's edge where he resumed his Half-Giant form and snarling pace. The thin glimmering wall of light cowered in weak waves at the bullish huff of his hate-filled strut; his pearlescent snowy skin glistened under ocean-like caustics undulating across it's blood spattered surface. This close they were again reminded how large The Red End was. How large that slab of flaming sword metal he carried was. Half armoured in brandywine, The VVarRaven was laid in layer upon layer of red plate. Only his chest lay bare and laced with the arterial gushings of this gory scene. Standing before them sharing the breadth of his capability in bloodshed, he shook a slow head in the negative to call the robed one's bluff.

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"Then we will remove your opportunity for conquest. And wipe the evidence of your presence from this place." Declared the slim dark man.

...

In a bright flashing instant, The four Close King Royals and Risoldh and Killingmoon and Jarko and every one of the King's semeguardsmen that yet still lived, were stood on a wide balcony in Anter's castle-keep, Sjindere Heit; some seven-hundred and twenty kilometers from the bloody marble steps of Sidian Garden.

Shor immediately erupted into a rage that shook his castle-keep's walls. "What have you done?!" He spewed onto the robed figures. "What, are we to just leave them to die?! What of my men?! What of the dead?! Skongdravindh was crushing Sidian!"

Moments into his rant the eldest of the four robed figures flashed forward on the balcony, palms clasped in petition. "Our shield will hold and the Engineers will aid the Dicus and Sidian's caretakers in warding their lands from those that have invaded. This is not your fight nor should you have ever known of the Scerci's plans."

"Not have known?!" Crown Prince Ahtunowhiho cried. "The ancestors made me to know! If not my brothers and I would have seen far more blood and murder. How could you know better than our own guides?!"

"You all traipse about in your gleaming white robes and wild magecraft as if you are all rulers uncrowned and you want to be forgotten?" Young King Shor raged.

"Waved away like some simple bug?" King Hagar fumed.

Both he and King Khorl were wearing ruts into the balcony floor with the short pace they stomped.

"Your Immortal feud with that warmonger is killing us!" Hagar loomed.

"Our brothers in arms died today defending Half-Giant families from becoming slaves again to more of your brotherhood in robes!" Ahtunowhiho screamed.

There was blood in spatters all across their faces from the words the young kings flung into them.

"Which is why we cannot afford your involvement. The prophecy is too close to you. Too close to Ashok." The one short-haired female in robes declared.

"No, Ashok can't afford not to be." Khorl jabbed a pointed finger into the white finery of her robe.

"We have every right to--" As if Young King Shor had taken a hard swig of something strong, the inside of his throat locked cold, wavering in a stalled image of the room in which he stood. They were all stalled there, locked in whatever movement had started before time itself ceased to respond in normalcy. Only the four in robes felt the passing of the moments. They let their eyes rove the balcony and halls beyond for the culprit by which time's motion had been stolen.

A dark man in dark trousers with yellow eyes and a flaming stare stood with a bright staff, twisted about itself seven times in an irregular spin.

"You will be judged. Scerci Kaehn." His voice came on a powerful low drone across the room. The four in white robes grit teeth and glared at the dark man with yellow eyes.

"No one governs us. There is no Rite of Judgement." Idrissa asserted.

The dark man's head shook slowly, almost pitifully. "And still your arrogance speaks first." a tap of hardened wood on stone sounded from his movement. "Even the one not yet crowned King, whose loins yet yearn to sire many a litter, carries a string of humility more than your insidious words." his scoff was angry and indignant. "Even you must bow to His AllKing's power." The staff he referenced, the very one in his grasp, cast a strange sphere of greenish-blue light. Skinny rays danced from the surface of it as it blanketed the room with a glorious shade. Nothing passed the balcony's edge or interior windows could be seen, all else seemed darkened by this intense jade light. "Ashok lies on the edge of destruction and you fiddle with Gaennish trinkets to shield them. Instead of teaching them to fight...you." His disdain was palpable and his gaze brimmed with reproof. "You, instead, seal their doom with your reactionary planning. They should be being groomed and prepped and schooled on the knowledge you are all interlopers caring nothing for their wills. Not frightened into choosing to side with you."

He motioned downward, with one tilt of his near bald head; where one braid, wound in gold, hung from the crown of his skull to the calf of his strong legs. At his gesture, out of the depths of the time-twisted shadows came seven slim figures clad in dark leather. Women whose fox-like faces were half-covered with leather behind gold filigreed masks. Their deft fingers tossed about tiny gadgets between one another and waved them over the faces of the warriors in the balcony and rooms. They whispered small phrases into their ears as they, then, whizzed to wave and speak over another.

"Re-writing their memories won't erase the Scerci Kaehn." That same female voice in the line of robes warned.

"Your words are as useless as you are." The dark man shifted to stroll closer toward them. His gait was strong. His posture was steady. His gaze was fixed upon them as he passed the Kings' semeguard, passed their Agent Osef, passed their Bird of Pale Blooms, on up alongside the King of Anter himself.

"They will certainly know you. But what good is it for them to know you this way?" He cut an eye to its corner toward the Young King Shor as he addressed those in white robes. "For them to lie prostrate before you every time you streak from the sky to save them from annihilation? For them to offer fruits upon an altar they construct in your magnificence? Kneel and grovel and beg in deep passionate gratitude for your ever-present protection? These men are warriors. They need not bend knee to anyone, save one another. You claim to save them, yet you only wish to instill fear in them, so you can appear as able and absolute as your stations may suggest." His words turned the expressions of the four standing before him, sour. They did not fold, neither did he flinch, but all knew the words he spoke were truthful. "If Ashok is to be the birthplace of the universes' last war, as their own EverTree Heparin has foreseen, then let them be what they are. Warriors. And come to their knowledge of you as they should. Your involvement is hereby nullified."

The other dark-skinned man in white robes fluttered what looked to be wings under his cloak as he stepped forward to sourly address the stoic countenance of the one with the staff; holding time at bay. "Why don't you return to the tomb from which you leaked out of, off-worlder? Dead men carry no sway here."

He cut cool yellow eyes into the winged-one's glare with a certain whimsical curiosity. “Does it ache you, Idrissa?” His voice had a belly and colour, it almost seemed other-worldly, which made his reprimand carry more weight than most. “Is it vexing to see it in my hands?” There was a tacit smirk on those words.

The slim dark Idrissa snarled and huffed.

"Please, Exemplariat." The eldest looking of the robed lot held one feeble hand aloft and shuffled forward. "We will go. Some of us here would truly like to see the Split-Wolves survive this...this...Onslaught. We've no time for petty squabbles between us."

"Oh, how I wish this were but a petty squabble." The dark man mused.

On the heels of the drone in his tone, the deftly-fingered fox-women scurrying about, all turned in unison to glare at the Immortals in white robes.

"While Dome'nce is yet occupied, I keep his charge and whatever was his decree, stands. You are indeed unruly and do not know your place. The Close Kings will retain what is necessary of their memory as is their station as Kings, but the rest of their folk need no aid from your kind. The Agency will cover Ashok...and all its territories."

"Please, then, know this Exemplariat Dun'ahka-Stavros of the Bolo and Ring." The eldest shuffled even closer toward him. "Yes, Heparin may have already foreseen terrible moons for our Split-Wolves, but there are twenty-two decidedly separate agendas threatening the safety of all you've been charged with. I have offered and will offer once more permanent ward because...because these are my kin, too! And yes, I play part in these agendas but I was born here. I am one of them and I would like to Shield them from whatever I am able to. As that is my name and function given to me by your Dome'nce. Please, may I rest my offer at the Kings' feet? Let them remember my petition to Shield them, for ultimately it will be their decision."

Dun'ahka thought for a moment about the quivering nature of this Immortal's pathetic petition, then cast disapproving eyes onto the old Immortal. He sighed and uttered foreign words to the foxen folk tending to those halted in time. Some of them uttered back with disgust on their tone but some offered warmer recourse. He thought again for a time, then uttered words in an ancient language they all knew very well. The fox-women nodded and began--with the addition of an eager old-looking robed man—to further adjust the memories of the Young Close Kings of Ashok as Dun'ahka released his null on time.