“Should you be below, Lux Irovex?”

It was Larash who asked me. Zirilla was below and Valir had been caught out hunting, and so Larash was next in the chain of command. He stood next to me on the battlements, perfectly still as we looked out across the silent, mist-lit vale at the base of the mountain.

It was the right question to ask, at least: our enemy was coming at us from both the surface and below. And there was far more to fear from those beneath us than those out in the open.

“I’ll go below once it’s clear that we need me to channel mana or move air to gas them out,” I told him. “But the first stages of their approach will be dominated by those with [Earth Magick]. Besides, they’re not so deep. Those coming for the surface will emerge first.”

“You think they’ll attack out of step with one another?”

“We’ll see,” I said. “Engaging on both fronts is obviously the better strategy. But we don’t even know yet whether the creatures who are doing the digging will be those they attack with. I suspect these insects beneath the earth are very easy to acquire and control. All Palimpsest needs is the food to grow them to this size, and then they can store them beneath the earth in a kind of stasis.”

Beside me, Larash nodded slowly. “They’ll fight more like a necromancer, then.”

“At least with these creatures,” I said. “Palimpsest doesn’t want to kill us, they want us so scared that we sacrifice a portion of our colony to them. If they don’t value the lives of their drones… flooding us with attackers will give them an idea of our strengths, of how difficult it will be to breach the keep. And if they succeed even a little, they may think they’ll have a chance of subjugating us before they have to field any more valuable minions.”

“So if they swarm the walls without coordination, that’s a bad thing.”

“More or less,” I said. “I’d like to say it just means they’re stupid, but in reality it will likely mean they have an endless supply of drones. Palimpsest is fond of our keep, after all—they’d probably like to win without destroying it.”

I didn’t know whether to feel hopeful or despondent, whether to believe we had the upper hand or that we were fighting an unwinnable battle. With the burrowing capability that Palimpsest had already demonstrated, fighting them meant it would only be a matter of time before they collapsed our keep, regardless of the many defenses we had in place to stop that. Unless we were willing to go down into the earth beneath us, a week-long siege would topple us.

But that was only if Palimpsest knew what I knew. They attacked us now with burrowers: their nature surely meant that they would have some skill in engineering earthworks. But did they know how to shift a building on its foundation by excavating hundreds of meters below it? The roots of our keep ran deep, and our spellcasters were well-versed in attacking through layer after layer of rock. Unless our enemy knew exactly what they were doing, they’d be throwing themselves at us to no avail.

Did Palimpsest know how to properly ventilate its tunnels for when we filled them with unbreathable gas? How to properly drain them when we flooded them with freezing water? If not, we might force a quick peace.

Then there was our archers. If they had watched us for a while—perhaps through the eyes of some smaller creature that it sent to spy on us—then it might have seen the many elves practicing at the range we’d built on the river-facing side of the keep.

The range’s most frequent occupants had been the children, but Palimpsest could have seen our warriors loosing arrows with all their strength, if they’d watched often enough. Whether they had, and whether they’d made the calculations necessary to determine just how difficult it would be to approach the keep with anything that our arrows could kill, remained to be seen.

As we waited, these thoughts, fears, and hopes seemed to chase each other in my mind. Few things were as frightening as an enemy I knew so little of.

The first indication of their arrival was nothing but dimpling of the soil further up the slope, toward the forest. The crater widened, deepened, and eventually collapsed, the damp soil falling inward

The bugs were undoubtedly those I had seen on my first day, each of them a horse-sized beetle that had a narrow face dominated by two bony tusks. They had blue-black carapaces, and each of them was coated in gray dust from the work they’d been doing.

At first, we saw only a flash of motion just beneath the soil line as the beetles worked to move the earth out of the way, presumably passing it down to be brought away by their kin. Then they spilled out of the hole all at once, their movements making it clear that insects were crawling along every surface of the inner tunnel.

They swarmed around the tunnel’s entrance, gathering but not charging us yet. Some distance behind them, a few trees fell away as another hole was opened in the soil.

“Lux Irovex?” Larash’s voice was steady, his eyes intent on our foes.

I knew what he was asking me without needing to hear more. The force with which one of our archers could send an arrow flying was more than enough to clear the distance between ourselves and the opening: we could easily let loose a deadly rain.

“Let’s not be too emphatic in correcting their mistakes,” I said, speaking both aloud and through the bond with our commanders. “Hold your shots. We’ll wait until their charge and strike when they’re within a comfortable range. Our decay mages will do best with nearby corpses. I want the ground before these walls to be a blanket of Palimpsest’s dead.”

“Aye,” Larash said. “What Lux Irovex wants, our archers give—in this case with pleasure.”

I watched them gather, but curiously they didn’t use their [Earth Magick] to form any fortifications in the earth around them. I’d expected trenches which would give them some modicum of shelter from arrows on their approach—yet they did nothing.

Before I could ask Mirio why, he volunteered some information himself.

“Almost every one of them is level 8,” said Mirio. “Mostly [Strength] to move their weight, some [Channel] to move earth, with.”

“Are they out there drinking mana?” I asked, looking out at the growing horde of beetles.

“Yes,” he said.

I nodded. They weren’t digging ditches because they’d collectively used their mana tunneling—likely they were channeling mana into themselves now to fill up and prepare to throw stone missiles when they attacked.

“Would they need help channeling mana in order to tunnel as quickly as they have?” I asked.

“I don’t believe so,” Mirio said, sounding uncertain. “They have a remarkably efficient method of breaking the stone and carrying it away, with new bugs constantly rotating to the front with fresh mana. The bugs carrying stone also channel mana forward from the tunnel’s entrance—as long as they have an unbroken chain ending in mana-dense air, they can dig continuously.”

“If they start building fortifications, we shoot,” I said. “Otherwise we wait. As for now I don’t want more than half the archers loosing arrows.”

“Aye,” said Larash.

It would be a worthwhile gambit: we had our stormcallers, our windcallers, our icebinders and lightweavers all on the wall. If I’d underestimated them and something unexpected happened, we’d have more than enough power to suddenly wipe them away.

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

Two more holes in the earth appeared, each of them at a different approach—one closer to the river and another at its opposite side.

“They’re gathering at the base of the cliff as well,” said Larash, who was getting reports through the bond. “In the limestone hills. They’ll be coming at every side at once.”

“Nothing we didn’t expect,” I said.

We’d actually discussed eventually making the surface of the cliffside smoother, potentially out of a material that couldn’t support much weight… once we’d finished building the walls that ran to the cliff’s edge. For now, there would be no point—Palimpsest’s army of insects would have no difficulty climbing to our location.

“They’ve sent a message for you, Lux Irovex,” Mirio said. “It’s more or less just: ‘Capitulate.’”

I nodded. “Ask for terms, then,” I said. “Act like we’re considering it, play like we’re scared. Anything to stall for time while we find out where it keeps its brain.”

As I spoke, my eyes never left the growing swarm, examining the massive beetles. The insects had a ridge that ran along their backs, a raised seam where two pieces of their carapace met. I guessed it was to help bear the brunt of any falling stone they encountered while digging. Like other natural earthshapers, they would probably have storage space for stone projectiles, potentially even one that tumbled the stones and smoothened them for greater efficacy as missiles. The two tusk-like chitin protrusions that emerged from their faces would also help in digging: they’d be what had made the seeming toolmarks in the stone maze and tunnels I’d found below.

I could only imagine the sorts of structures that Palimpsest could build with so many bodies, each of them built for digging. I’d already found the massive, tomb-like chamber where he’d stored so many drones—what kind of city-sized architecture was this one creature capable of?

It wasn’t a comforting thought. If they could put these creatures in the stasis I’d first found them in, and they could build as much storage as they needed, then how many did they have? The limit of how many they could send against us would be in how quickly they could birth and feed more of them, rearing them to adulthood. And on this world, where food was plentiful… perhaps my earlier estimate of a million was too few.

I had some knack for guessing an army’s numbers by sight… if they walked on two legs. The sea of bugs stampeding toward us might have been five thousand or ten: I couldn’t guess better than that.

“Get the icebinders ready to coat the walls,” I said. “But not until they hit the trench.”

I didn’t know exactly what instinct gave away that Palimpsest’s attack would happen soon, but something in the seemingly random movements of the insects as I looked out at them told me they would. I even felt Larash tense beside me. But whatever their instincts recognized in the insects turned out to be correct: they began to charge in unison just moments later.

They were a few hundred meters away. The ramparts began to tremble with the force of their charge.

“Forty meters from the moat,” I said to the commanders through the bond. “That’s when you shoot.”

The trembling of the earth grew more and more intense. The charging insects, previously a set of large clusters that had each come from a separate tunnel, merged into one circular ring of oncoming enemies.

They were a hundred meters away. Their tiny, fingernail-sized eyes glittered black from where they were deep-set into segmented faces.

“Incoming swarms,” Larash reported. “Wasps from above.”

I frowned. It wasn’t unexpected, but it was late—we should have detected them earlier.

“Wind and fire,” I said steadily. “We’re prepared.” To the commanders, I added: “Focus on the beetles.”

Below, the wall of beetles came on, their bodies tightly packed together as they came for the walls in a flood.

Larash and the other commanders gave the order to loose in unison—a sharp, chanted word that rose up from every corner of the battlements at once.

Our enemies met a hailstorm of arrows.

My archers shot fast: their bows conjured arrows, meaning they didn’t need to reach for the quiver—drawing the bow was the only motion needed. With high [Strength] and [Agility], multiple arrows a second was no difficult feat, but rather the standard which even an archer of tenth level was expected to meet.

My archers shot accurately: Sabina had given us the hand and eye to surpass all other species with the bow, and now these insects were feeling the bite of arrows aimed by elves who had been shooting for many centuries.

My archers shot powerfully: the softest armor was no match for an [Aegis] strengthed arrow launched with the full might of a leveled elf wielding a matchbow. And there were those among them who used [Surge of Might] to raise our physical attributes or its cousin, [Missile Surge] to grant [Aegis] penetration, easily piercing the bodies of the insects no matter where they struck.

And so Palimpsest’s army came forward into an endless flurry of hissing shadows, each elf planting multiple arrows into their marks by the second. Beetles fell and were trodden over by their companions, who fell in turn: our marksmen, who were expected to deal with primeval convergences in the field, were no strangers to multitudes of fast targets. Arrows sprouted from the enemy’s faces, jutting out above their twin tusks as they fell to the ground.

I was aware of a great many black specks being buffeted about in the air above us—the wasps. Palimpsest had arranged for many swarms of them to come upon us just as their wave of beetles reached the walls, but our windcallers had them meet a wall of fast-moving air that simply pushed them up, out, and away from the keep, their wings not strong enough to cut through the air and reach our people.

Most of the beetles angled their heads upwards and launched smooth rocks through the air toward us… but a level 8’s [Channel] meant that their stone slugs travelled slowly through the air, where our earthshapers, who were positioned just below the battlements, nearby but covered from sight, could knock them out of the air.

[Agility] gave one a better ability to track projectiles quickly, anticipating where they’d strike. [Focus] gave one more ability to concentrate power into smaller areas, striking down projectiles with pinpoint precision.

But neither of these things was truly needed for our defense. Automatically pushing back against any projectile that entered one’s magical claim wasn’t a difficult skill to learn, and the last two months had done much to strengthen our earthshapers.

Even if they missed some, my people wore the armor that that we’d arrived in—padded leather helmets lined with thin steel plates. With their [Aegis], a block to the head by a fist-sized stone would only require healing—and all of my fighters—be they warriors, wildhearts, or elementalists—had some capacity to heal themselves.

The flood of insects came on, the beetles reaching the moat and crawling down down into it headfirst. These were promptly ignored, our archers, our archers aiming for the easier targets behind them rather than shoot for their well-armored backs. The beetles crossed the concrete base of the moat, then clambered onto the rougher surface of the walls below it, arrows biting into their heads and carapaces all the while.

It was when they reached the walls that Larash and the other commanders called for the icebinders to cast their spell.

The concrete of our walls was made with more than just a steel inner lining. Pipes and plates that were lined with runes had been sealed within it, spell focuses that had been duplicated many times over for redundancy. The icebinders and waterweavers reached for these now, drawing a thin layer of water onto the glittering black surface of the walls, then freezing it in place within seconds, forming a layer of ice that began just where the walls were flush with the level of the ground beyond the moat.

A small beetle’s claws might have found purchase on some of the quickly-conjured ice, but the beetles below us struggled to climb the sheer surface of even the bare concrete that led out of the moat. The tunnels that I’d seen them build had used built-in ridges for them grip with their tarsal claws.

Now they were attempting to climb a smooth-surfaced wall that broke and fell away beneath them as soon as they mounted it—and the weight of the falling beetles bore down on their kin beneath them, turning our moat into a pit of churning insectile flesh.

Arrows found target after target, the beetles easiest to strike when they faced toward us up the walls. Their projectiles were tossed uselessly aside.

The wasps that our windcallers had diverted fell from the air in a steady stream, our firedancers overriding the weak claim that the tiny creatures had over their own bodies and then burning their tiny brains away with only a small effort.

Then, in the passing of only a few moments, it became clear that the assault had been destroyed. The moat had been converted to a ditch filled with bodies—those few that showed any movement were quickly filled with a dozen arrows.

Fewer than half a thousand archers had demolished a force ten to twenty times their size.

But crucially, we’d done as much I could think to make Palimpsest think that they’d come far, far closer to making it over the walls than they had.

My people let out a cheer around me—but I was silent as I looked down at the heaped bodies. Our enemy had just thrown thousands of bodies at us. Who knew the full size of the force they could muster?

We needed to find them, and soon.

“Lux Irovex?” Mirio said.

“Yes, archdruid?”

“Palimpsest wants to speak with you again.”