The storm crashed overhead, sky torn and agonized by thorned crowns of lightning.
Rain flowed down like blood from the wounds, to hammer the red mud below.
All around were the bodies of fallen adventurers and sellswords, even valiant knights, cut down and ground into the filth by boots and tails. Broken and scattered, as had been the fortifications. Made from people into defiled, desecrated ruins, to make even the Goddess weep.
The onslaught of the monsters had come in the dead of night, by cover of the storm,
Yet their treachery was nothing to the sheer perfidy of Thunderbolt.
In striking down her own commander, Lyanna had doomed them all.
That much was obvious even to Priest Adelberht.
He had never ventured south of Faron in all his fifty years in the town church, man and boy, and he had certainly never taken up the holy call of the Paladin, the warrior-priests who led the faithful in battle as well as mass, but even as a man of letters and of prayer, he could see how the fall of Guildmaster Bomond had undone the last lynchpin in their defense.
So then, why could Lady Ondora not?
As they stood in a flood more lifeblood than rainwater, his cantor led the deacons in song, praying to Soleil for healing and salvation, but no matter the power of their sacred ritual, they were mere mortals; their voices wavered and cracked as they pushed themselves past their limits, stretching ever thinner their dwindling essence.
Limitless mana still would not have turned back the profane tridents and spears of so many foes.
Naga gathered in their masses, cutting down noble knights and coarse mercenaries alike, along with those few adventurers leal and pious enough to remain.
Most of the latter had already fled when Jalera left them.
Another traitor, a foreigner of great power yet without grace or nobility. Now they saw the folly in their misplaced faith.
“Do something, man! By the gods, save us! In the name of Soleil!”
The baron’s cries fell on deaf and dying ears.
His retinue had strapped armor to him and placed a sword in his hand, yet even so he cowered at the middle of their shrinking island of safety.
Huress Faron, the thirty-fourth noble lord of that domain and the last of his ancient lineage, would be the last to die. His soldiers would see to that, as would the loyal, courageous Lastborn. As must be so.
But die he would.
On all sides death was closing in.
There was no more escape.
The lines of the Naga were dozens thick in every direction.
In the distance, on the broken earth walls, Adelberht saw a few isolated figures still fighting, torches in hand, holding out against the rising tide of their foes.
Lightning cracked overhead, and the roiling ocean of serpents was exposed for a moment.
Then that wave crashed upon the poor souls, and tore them down into its depths.
Too many screams were sounding all around for the priest to tell which might have been theirs.
He continued his incantation. The prayer was all he could offer now, against the darkness which would soon take them, to sunder and defile as so many had been already, in tribute to some foul serpent god.
~~~
By the time Qamar arrived at the scene of the battle, the outcome was already decided.
They were no warrior, and so they had been all the more shocked by the sudden, daring attack from behind their lines, however there was no coordination or follow-up strike.
Certainly the invaders lacked the numbers, to send out multiple detachments, but they also lacked the mentality.
So much was obvious, in seeing the half-measures of their fortification, and ease with which their forces broke and fled, even turned on each other, by some breathless reports.
They hadn’t come to the Bloodsucking Forest with unity of purpose or the resolve to face their enemies.
How could they have failed to understand that they were existential threats, trampling the lands of the people they had spent millennia oppressing? How could they think that their invasion would draw no reaction, if not from the Naga then the Harpies?
Qamar doubted that the humans even thought of their people as enemies to begin with. To the humans, the Naga were no people, brought together by common culture and lived experience, forced to cooperate just to survive. No, to the humans they were just a rabble of monsters, no more organized than a swarm of razorflies.
They could listen for the subtle hum on the air or watch for the tell-tale cuts on the tree branches where the creatures alighted to avoid razorfly territory, or they could rub a little guinon sap on their bodies and wind around the nests in peace. Instead ‘adventurers’ would simply trample and smash their way through every time. They never even thought that there could be a better way, and all the while they would curse the razorflies for protecting their homes.
Now, as the storm overhead churned their fallen into more grotesque mud below their boots, the broken core of the enemy force struggled on in futile defiance. The ‘adventurers’ were fled, as were most of the ‘lesser’ species – the ‘demihumans’ as they were known. Yet even after losing half their number, the humans still struggled in futile resistance.
Perhaps their old friend was right. Perhaps the humans really couldn’t unite, even in the face of losing their stranglehold over the Hronaram Gulf.
Perhaps that was how the Naga would win.
They hoped so.
Ahead, through the bitter, lashing waves of rain, they saw their Sultan moving to the fore.
His trident was in hand, his guards at his side, but they stopped just short of the human lines. He slithered up onto a pile of broken wood and dirt to overlook the encircled, shrinking mass of his foes. Spells flew at the figure. His own mages were ready to intercept each.
It stung Qamar to see the spells of the mountains woven by naga tongues, but they knew better than any how rare the old magic was. The sorcerers of the distant past had fallen, as their people had, their secret incantations snuffed out. Qamar was one of the last smoldering embers of that long lineage, and even they knew only a fraction of what had once been.
In place of what was lost, the Naga had learned well the use of the weapons of their enemies.
They had learned too how best to make use of a defeated foe.
“Naga! Disengage!”
Adivan’s voice boomed out, even over the tumult of the battle, and at his command his forces slithered back, just far enough to halt the fighting.
It was already closer to a slaughter than a battle, but killing these humans here and now would still cost many more Naga lives.
“Cease this meaningless struggle, invaders from Bellwood! Your incursion into Naga lands has failed! Your fortress falls and your allies abandon you! With them goes your hope! Yet we Naga are not monsters as you are – we the People of the Scale are merciful! I, the Sultan of Scales, ruler and guide to all Naga, am merciful!”
Within the huddled survivors, other voices were shouting too.
~~~
As the so-called ‘Sultan’ spoke Lady Ondora and her second, Jowe, were screaming orders, desperately trying to rally the Lastborn, to organize their disordered ranks in their brief pause they had been given.
“Hold fast!” the duke’s daughter commanded. “We are not beaten, and never shall be! The Lastborn will give no surrender to monsters! We fight to the last, to victory or death!”
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“Victory or death!” Jowe called out.
Others joined the chant, but any fool could tell that was hopeless.
The Baron, at the center of his troops, could see the monsters closing in on all sides. Even this momentary reprieve was just that.
They were relentless. They had come to finish the work that Educar Randire and the Thunderbolt had begun. To take everything from him, beginning with his pride and ending with his life.
Once he had thought the Bloodsucking Forest so enticing and romantic, a place where valiant adventurers explored ancient ruins and battled fell beasts for fame and fortune, but it was nothing like that.
It was an accursed, evil place, just like the beasts which crawled and slithered and scuttled and flew all about within it.
The expedition had been a nightmare from the first, a cursed endeavor of sabotage, infighting, fires, withering heat and terrifying dangers.
Now he was beaten by rain, covered in mud and blood and worse, as he watched all his hopes collapse before his eyes.
He still couldn’t make sense of any of it.
Tears rolled down his cheeks as he thought of the safety and comfort of the holdfast, back in Faron.
He should never have left.
The Lastborn were gallant to their last, but even Baron Huress Faron could see the truth; surrounded, outnumbered and unprepared, they were going to die.
Somehow, the Lastborn could not.
“Ignore their lies! They would cut us down as they did the fleeing cowards!” Jowe shouted. “Our hope lies only in their doom!”
Those not immediately embattled or at the front were rallying to him, a large force, perhaps fifty strong.
With them the knight struck out. In the rear impeccably-trained war-mages gave their all in support, as did the archers, the sudden onslaught driving back the Naga lines.
As powerful serpentine warriors toppled under Jowe’s blade, the cheers rose up again.
“Forward!” Lady Ondora screamed, “drive them back! We are not some adventurer rabble! We are the Lastborn! Our three centuries of lineage and honor will not end here, on the spears of these mere monsters!”
It was true of course – they weren’t just any mercenaries he had hired – these were the noble, heroic figures of great houses and esteemed families from all around the Gulf. Theirs was a company steeped in warfare, with record of battle as storied as some lesser nations.
Jowe’s push broke through the towering figures of the pretender king’s guard, a dozen elite knights converging to overcome the suddenly-outnumbered foes.
Only two more naga stood between him and the golden scales and ostentatious adornments of the serpent chief.
Victory lay in sight.
The self-proclaimed sultan might have struck down mere adventurers, but he would face true steel now.
Dauntless, Jowe was already laughing in his triumph, as he neared the small mound where his prey reclined.
The naga made no motion even to raise his trident.
Essence lit up his blade, an enchantment from the mage at his back. Holding it aloft at the figure over him, his voice rang out.
“Face me, coward!”
Baron Faron watched in rapt attention, determined to take in every moment of this triumph, the victory of good and order over evil and ruin.
Leaping forward, Jowe struck with a crack, blade hurtling towards the golden figure.
The supernatural slash continued on, past the snake, carving a gleaming line in the night, until it sheared into the arm and shoulder of a luckless spear-bearer behind.
Even the great Jalera hadn’t managed a strike such as that!
In a moment, the ‘Sultan’ would collapse, run through by the killing blow, and with him his rabble ‘army’.
Jowe looked confused, however.
His hand reached out, and following the man’s motion, the baron saw that it was his sword itself which had flown.
Lightning crashed overhead, and lit the scene in shocking contrast, the gold scales of the naga blinding in their radiance.
The muscular tail of the monster had the lieutenant by the ankle, trapped in place, cutting short his lunge.
Jowe gurgled.
Blood vomited from his mouth and nose.
Another flash lit up the tortured heavens, and Baron Faron saw the red clinging to the snake’s trident.
He had never even seen the strike.
Jowe clutched at his chest and neck, and staggered back a step. Blood was welling up from his throat too now.
With a sick clarity, the Baron realized that the man didn’t even know what had happened to him.
Lieutenant Jowe fell forwards, into the mud.
Darkness closed in once more, and the storm beat down all the harder as his murderer slithered forwards, and crushed him into the slurry of corpses, flesh and effluence.
Somewhere nearby, he heard the sound of Lady Ondora’s wail, of grief and horror.
No-one among the knights attempted to repeat the heroic efforts of their lieutenant.
“You cannot win.”
Only the storm vied with the Sultan now, as he spoke again.
“If I should choose it, all of your wretched lives would end here and now on our spears. It would be justice. A mercy, after the ravages your kind have inflicted upon all Naga. Yet in my benevolence still I offer you your lives, not in deference to any right you may claim to them, but for the sake of my kindred; that fewer families shall wait for a loved one, never to return, and fewer children shall know the agony of this cruel world before their time! I offer you your lives in return for your surrender! Refuse, and you shall be slaughtered to the last, along with your fallen champion. Just as you have slaughtered so many of us!”
In the wake of his proclamation, there was only the sound of rain and thunder.
The calm stretched out, the metallic clinking of drops hammering armor blending with the splashes as it fell on the mire underfoot, and the occasional pings as it struck unsheathed blades, frozen in their owners’ hands.
The Baron was distantly conscious that many eyes were turning to him, but his were on the broken shape of Jowe, partially visibly under the coils of his killer.
Heat joined the cooler waters, pouring down his legs, and running over his cheeks.
“We surrender!”
Lady Ondora’s voice was frail, enraged, yet on the brink of cracking.
At her cry, the Lastborn lowered their arms.
“Take them,” was all the Sultan needed say.
~~~
Having not witnessed the Sultan’s clash with the adventurers earlier in the battle, Qamar had thought their Sultan reckless to see him allow the human knight and his band to make a direct attack on his royal person.
In the wake of the clash they understood, however.
Qamar doubted many of the humans did – to their eyes, their champion’s fall must have been as inexplicable as it was horrible – and that was part of the point.
Now, as a result, they were throwing down their weapons, accepting surrender when mere moments before they’d chanted for ‘victory or death’.
It had been necessary to show them the hopeless certainty of that choice.
Near the middle of the huddled mass there was still shouting, some holdouts arguing against surrender, but the leaders of the invasion party silenced them.
Qamar could hear the tremulous voice of a large, rounded human, practically pleading;
“Ondora, cease this madness at once! We shall all be killed! I shall be killed! Take up your arms, take them up! I command it! Your baron commands you, knaves, defend me! We shall be slaughtered like poor valiant Jowe!”
He was babbling and crying, clutching at the arm of a women in ornate armor, who seemed to be the human leader.
Her fist caved in the solid metal of his visor, and crushed the man’s running nose, turning the stream of snot red.
The ‘baron’ was sent sprawling, wailing and screaming in fear and pain from a blow many times the power of what an ordinary being could mete out.
After that there were no more holdouts against surrender.
~~~
Marching the humans through the night, through mud and rain, they had returned to the naga’s previous camp – the human one having been rendered utterly unfit for any sentient being to inhabit. The humans had carried the bodies of each slain naga themselves, but while no-one prohibited them from gathering up their own dead too, they had instead left those bodies in the revolting mire of the battlefield.
There were, after all, three invaders lying dead for every one naga.
The second clash, at the bottom on the hill, had been far more one-sided. A massacre rather than a battle.
Still, hundreds had made it back to the clearing where they had spent a wet, fearful night. None had slept, for it was clear that many expected to be set upon by their captors at any moment, and even had they wished to rest, the moans and wails of the dying would never have permitted it.
Most healers among the invasion party had survived uninjured, but all had collapsed after depleting their mana, and so many scenes of slow, painful, frightening deaths played out over the first few hours.
The naga were busy tending to their own casualties of course, but the naga were not humans – once their healers had treated their own they tended too to those wounded invaders who had survived.
Even that act of mercy had drawn bitter protest from ‘Ondora’, the leader. The woman seemed to think that the naga should have healed her people before the other humans, and the humans before the naga. Qamar had resisted the urge to suggest that the naga not heal any of them, and instead wait for their own collapsed healers to revive and save what few lives they could.
Now, with the rise of the sun the following day, setting the jungle steaming after the night’s downpour, Qamar finally got a real sense of the number of survivors.
Around five hundred remained, the bulk of them those ‘mercenaries’ who so haughtily named themselves the ‘Lastborn’. Qamar was uncertain why being the runts of their respective clutches was such a point of pride, but in such matters they would need only look to ‘Lady Ondora’, or ‘Baron Faron’.
The former had spent the night organizing her survivors and ordering burials for the dead.
From the wooden cage nearby, the kneeling, naked and bloodied figure of the later gave an incoherent howl.
The man had been apoplectic after the surrender, demanding his litter through his broken nose, ordering the soldiers to take up arms once more, even weeping for home and mother.
How fitting for a human lord. Ever their nobles hid themselves away. They only started the killing – why should they go out to fight?
Even after venturing so far, surrendering all his protections and offering up so many lives for whatever vein cause drove him, the human still demanded more, of everyone but himself.
In the end his own vassals had dragged him, screaming, wailing and writhing through the mud.
It was the Naga, of course, who had stripped and caged him, after his repeated attempts to flee. It was pointless cruelty, but the proper response to a refusal to surrender would have been to spear him and leave his corpse with the rest of his dead. For some reason the Sultan had insisted on special treatment for the enemy leaders.
Ondora was still abusing that privilege, ranting about ‘honor’ and ‘duty to their captives’ as the Sultan emerged for the morning.
The radiant golden figure quelled her temper with a glance.
But not her protests, it seemed.
“You cannot treat us this way!” she called out, “we are not mere commoners, but knights of high birth! We must be given suitable accommodations for the duration of our captivity!”
Qamar couldn’t fault the human’s bravery, even if they questioned her wisdom.
The Sultan of Scaled gave a hiss so low and deep it rumbled.
“You are not knights, nor nobles, not even mercenaries. You are invaders, captured in battle. A battle in which many naga gave their lives, defending their homeland.”
Ondora seemed to want to argue, but the pressure emerging from the gleaming figure before her weighed down heavily, the weight of mana and of bloodlust combining to stifle her words.
“Then… then what are you going to do with us?” she asked eventually.
“We Naga are merciful. That is why we shall not slaughter you, as you would us – as you do us. Instead you shall make recompense for your violations by shedding blood in service to our cause.”
Eyes blazed with renewed defiance.
“We’ll never help you attack Bellwood!” she exclaimed.
“Nor would I expect that. Even base and savage humans have some modicum of loyalty to their own… when it suits their purposes…. No, your band shall move South with us. You shall join us in battle against the vile Harpies, and your lives shall shield ours.”
Ondora gasped, eyes wide, outrage and horror vying in her expression.
“You mean to send us to our deaths!”
“It shall be for you to see that your people survive. Endure this penitence, and you shall be freed, given back the lives you so recklessly discarded when you invaded the Bloodsucking Forest.”
It went unspoken that, should calamity befall them, and the Naga be defeated by the Harpies, the humans would be the first to die.
Qamar’s tail squirmed unhappily at the scene.
They understood the necessity of this – Naga lives had been lost dealing with the humans, and the least that could be demanded of them was that the humans would in turn save them from more deaths. It was a far better fate than any naga had met at the hands of ‘adventurers’.
Still, they felt a sorrow in their chest.
This wasn’t the way they had hoped to see their people reclaim their lost dignity and prosperity.
They hadn’t wanted a peace built on the deaths of their enemies.
~~~
As many deaths as lay behind them, more were surely ahead.
Nothing in the church records made mention of anyone exploring so far south, into the Cyclopean Bones, and making safe return. He could understand why now.
The expedition to catch the mimic could only have been the work of the foul Demon God.
Following day after day of grueling march and the slow attrition of starvation and predation, that was the only explanation Priest Adelberht could conceive of, for how things had gone so terribly wrong.
Each sun rose hotter than the last, and each mile grew more barren – for while the valleys between peaks remained lush and fertile, they grew smaller and sparser in number – even as the Naga host at their backs remained immense.
Thousands of serpents drove them forward, sent them out to forage and wayfind, even forced them to clear the monster nests they came upon.
What bitter irony… monsters sending them to fight monsters.
They lacked all but the most rudimentary tools or supplies too – what had survived the fire, storm and flood had been left abandoned at their campsite. Rather than the comfort of bedrolls, tents, fires, rations, carts or cookware, each of them was instead expected to bring only what they could carry on their backs over their armor, to sleep rough with only leaves and branches as shelter and padding, and to eat raw whatever they could gather or kill.
Time saved in forsaking all such comforts and even necessities was spent instead on more marching.
It might be the way of the Naga, but humans were not monsters, and were not accustomed to such monstrous ways.
Mercenaries and noblemen alike were driven like cattle before their persecutors whenever they should flag, and beaten if they should try to resist.
Their noble lord, the Baron himself, was dragged along in cuffs, his legs forced to work even as the tears rolled down his hollowing cheeks, past the crooked nose which had never set right.
Adelberht had never seen a man shed so much weight so quickly.
Part of that was due to the same terrible hunger blighting all the survivors.
The Naga sent them foraging and hunting with total disregard – secure in knowing that they bared not attempt escape, while their only patch back to civilization was through the far larger monstrous army travelling some miles to their rear – yet the spoils of those life-threatening trips out, up brutal mountains and down murderous gorges, went in principle to the snakes.
What remained was pitiful fare, most nights, yet all protest was met with an absurd demand to just do better the following day.
In the heat, and with the sheer exertion and stress, all of them were losing weight, but Baron Faron would soon be half the man he once was. If not for the priest and his cohort, the nobleman would surely have died. His legs had failed him before the first day was out, but the Naga made clear that should he refuse to walk, he would be dragged.
More words had been chanted and motes of essence spent on keeping their lord alive and walking than on the rest of the survivors combined.
Adelberht wondered how much longer they could go on for – especially if they were expected to fight at the end of that forced march.
Yet even as the Cyclopean Bones rose up ever higher with each new day, the distant Spine grew no closer… or lower.