Warden Lightstone

I kept an eye out my window, watching the battle below. Oh how I wanted to be down there in the thick of it, but as the commander I needed eyes on what was happening, so I might call for what needed to be done.

The Corian force was still testing us at the outer fence. The madman responsible for this oversized monstrosity they called a prison had at least had good defensive sense, and had given us a small outer wall. We let the low security prisoners, and those who had behaved well in medium rest in the field it created on holy days, the fresh air reminding them what they could have after their sentences were done. Now it served the purpose for which it was built, a killing field should any try to take this place.

“Tell the archers to be ready. I furthermore want the low level supervisors here now so I can run them through the information I've gotten on the current Corian tactics. Also get me the heads for each section so we can prepare.” Those three didn't much like each other, but being that they'd be important in enforcement of this we needed them ready. Thorin the high security head should be done with the executions soon at any rate, and then all of his men could be reassigned to defense.

My instructions to the runner was interrupted by another. One of the junior paladins serving here as part of his training. “Sir! Sir Thorin needs reinforcements on twenty-nine, there's been a riot.” He huffed, trying to catch his breath.

I sighed, it was one of those things that had been a risk. No warden had ever initiated the Towerfall, no, I had been the first. It pained me, those men, and the few women, it wasn't their time to die, perhaps, perhaps some of them might have seen Vitala's mercy.

“Details,” I commanded.

“Unknown sir, I'm passing on all I received.” We had to alternate where the stairs were for the floors, only the one staircase going from the atrium to the very top, so having messages passed was an unfortunate need sometimes.

“Get ten men and send them up through the staircase to The Room of Judgment, and send ten more to Thorin. We'll pincer them in place and end this quickly.” I passed over a keyed stone for delivery, it would allow them to exit into the top floor; an extra fail-safe just in case.

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Moments later the bombardment began, it was at the least rather short. Somewhere between and dozen and two dozen projectiles hit us, and my men, having already been briefed, should have been able to handle it.

Should, but my briefing had been wrong. I now understood why the wall had fallen as I looked at the blackened sword sitting on the table of the meeting room.

“Ochre jellies do not do that,” one of my aids said, and he was right.

“The thing sir, it wasn't brown, it was...” the soldier giving the report hesitated, clearly disturbed.

“Black, it was black, I know.” I'd done my fair share of monster slaying in my younger days, and read more than one bestiary.

When I'd heard that the Corians had begun tossing ochre jellies into our armies during the battles I was surprised, it was a rough tactic, but one dealt with straight forward enough. Draw your spare weapon and hit the damn thing if in melee, split it and take off the smaller ones first, but try to toss spells or arrows if you were further away. That was what I'd told my men to do if they saw any oozes. The weight of knowing I'd sent my men to their deaths settled upon me like a lead weight.

My secretary joined us next, she looked grim. “Warden... two more reports.”

“More of the oozes?” I asked grimly.

“Yes sir, the group you sent up to The Room of Judgment through the atrium stairs encountered one. Two survivors, heavily injured, but they reported seeing someone approaching from the other direction too, perhaps some fleeing the riot, two guards and a prisoner, marked as having gone through Judgment,” she explained.

“Perhaps they survived as well, the second?”

“Thorin sent word, the rioters are using undead,” she whispered the last word.

I froze, there was only one known necromancer in The Tower, and she wasn't supposed to be anywhere near powerful enough to make any undead. If she was, if I'd missed that, and if she was loose, we were in far deeper trouble than I could have anticipated.

Most had never encountered a caster of her particular persuasion. Wizards were well known, as were the sorcerers. Warlocks were lesser known, but well feared. There were a few others as well, men who could steal spells from others, casters who obeyed obtuse laws to make elemental magic, mages specializing in war, or illusion, or half a dozen other things.

She'd never have the raw combat ability of most of those, or many of the tricks that each one manifested with ease. No, what she would become if she got to the point of making her own walking corpses was a plague. She had the potential to become a wave of death that slaughtered the weak like grass before the scythe.

I'd seen one while still in training, one of those dealers in death. A horde of the dead had wiped out several villages, and we'd been dispatched to take them down; we did, and then he made more. Then we did again, and he made more. The man could control an obscene number of walking corpses and sent them at us like a flood. Many were released not even controlled, just pushed in the right direction.

He managed to sneak into cities and release his creations from the inside, graveyards, slaughterhouses, even a butcher shop once became his source of troops. Only through a lucky break finding his source of black onyx was he stopped, the bane of so many obsessed with the undead, and the reason the possession of it was so very regulated.

My mind wandered briefly back to the day I'd told her that I had executed the heretic priestess who'd tried to break her out. I heard her screams of rage as she learned that the woman she'd trusted and who'd cared for her had been beheaded, her promises that I would reap what I had sown. All that and I'd created piles of dead prisoners, perfect materials for a necromancer to ply their trade.

“We need to burn every corpse, and I need more men,” I rasped out.