Yet another dream-vision, pulled from my body to view something far away while I was sleeping…who was going to die this time?

...Sentry duty? Why would whatever gave me these be showing me Jamal Himdalli on sentry duty? Sure he might be a Guardian of the Baifrost Rainbow Bridge and one of the Dukes of Noldur’s Northern Reaches, but those were mostly fancy titles; like most soldiers, Jamal’s job was normally quite boring…

Except, of course, when it wasn’t, as I saw him raise his head to look out the dark window into the storm, and became aware of what had drawn his attention. An unseasonable snowstorm and a batch of rookie Mithgars to go with it? He must be thrilled.

The grizzled warrior-mage rose from his chair with a sigh and took down the twin rune-bound maces from above the mantle as he stepped out of his cozy tower into the swirling snow.

“What seek you here?” he boomed at the great snake-men who had loomed out of the dark a few hundred yards from the foot of the Bridge. Really, he must be pretty sure he knew exactly what they were after, but the formalities did need to be observed, however minute the doubts.

“We sseek yourr liffe,” the spokesman--most likely not their leader, among Mithgars--hissed vehemently, “ffor the insssultsss done my people’ss dead.”

Yup. Jamal snorted, and I could only sympathize, locked as I was into the silent, unmoving witness of whatever this was. Only necromancers would consider preventing the animate dead from roaming the world an ‘insult,’ but arguing that with this lot was a pointless exercise. “You are truly fools if you think to claim me with no more than a dozen of your own Folk,” he said calmly, readying the activation spell for his weapons, “but I have no objection to adding a few more bodies to the Pyre.”

The flickering lance-light of the runes ignited as he stepped off the Bridge’s shimmering surface to meet them.

It was far too easy, even with the continued insult of sending untried and ill-equipped mages of a lesser school to face one of the most powerful battle-mages in history. I noticed, too, that the Mithgarians’ blood markings seemed awfully intricate for the reckless youths who normally engaged Jamal and his brothers in this ridiculous game, though it wasn't unheard of in a culture so devoted to the dead for older and better-tried warriors to waste themselves at the Bridge alongside their younger fellows.

Though usually the older ones came better prepared than this, with bodies or cannon fodder of some kind other than the snake-men themselves. Only the greater levels of their adepts could do anything meaningful with their own dead; humans or demon derivatives were supposedly much easier to work with.

Even as his maces danced, something niggled at the back of my head, something nagging that this looked too routine, and far too easy; among other things, the absurdly fanatical snake-men (who were presumably here to die) were doing too much dodging and not enough fighting….

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Then I heard a distinctive, and terrifying, crackle from the great Bridge he had stepped off of to battle these cretins, and my blood ran cold.

Waesiran fire mages were on the Baifrost.

Great squat tubs of red muscle far wider than they were tall, the former Noldurian allies were possessed of possibly the only magic destructive enough to seriously threaten the Bridge itself, and they were notoriously difficult to stop or kill, even for a powerful battle-mage such as Jamal. How they had managed to come so close without being seen, I had no idea, but they were a far greater threat than a few Mithgarians who were clearly being used as a distraction.

Worse, the only possible explanation for the Mithgarians’ present actions was an alliance between the two ancient enemies to the detriment of our own mountain home. They had hated each other for centuries, a circumstance Noldur had taken advantage of more than once, and any alliance between the two was truly dire news.

Jamal’s reaction was instant and perfect, spinning towards the clearly greater threat on the Bridge even as the surviving snakes behind him began the hissing chorus to raise their own supposedly difficult dead as battle-liches against him, yet another indication of the severity of this attack and the seriousness of this remarkable and troubling alliance.

Jamal, meanwhile, had more urgent issues than the potential political ramifications, and he dashed back for his Tower, presumably calculating odds in his head as his maces hissed into a considerably higher spin velocity. This was bad, but he knew as well as I did that all was not lost. Only the Drinorae Magna out of northern Joltun could match a blooded Alsir for speed, and even a Waesir with a full battery of fire elementals at his call--and one dared assume nothing less--would take time to do serious damage to the Bridge, time Jamal was very capable of denying them. The Mithgar liches behind him could still cause trouble, but they'd be unable to catch up for at least a few precious moments--

Bham.

Jamal yelled in startlement as he dodged the lightning bolt and very nearly slid right into the skeletally tall creature that had thrown it, feeling the skidding tingle of a near miss from the only creature fast enough to get between an Alsir and his prey.

A Drinorae, too? Oh no.

Jamal’s mouth, too, had tightened after his uncharacteristic outburst, for he knew as well as I that, renowned battle-mage or not--and there were few better--his odds of survival, let alone saving the Bridge’s vital infrastructure, had just gone way, way down.

And while Jamal was a friend, I knew, too, that any potential alliance between these three old enemies, all of which had (I believed, and I knew for a fact so did he) hated and feared each other just as much as they did us, could have some truly terrifying ramifications. Fire elementals, the most powerful weather mages in history, and necromancy working together…

The vision, however, as the death-visions always did, had its own ideas of when to release me, and Jamal was not among the greatest of our battle-mages for nothing. It took almost half an hour before they were able to claim him, and he succeeded in keeping them all more or less occupied and off the Bridge for long enough for reinforcements to arrive, and he saw most of his foes dead before the Drinorae’s dying spell succeeded in taking his head.

I had no option but watching, silently, unable to move or intervene, the entire wretched time. By the time I was released back to my own body to "wake," though I had found precious little rest this night--I had seen enough, and then some, to know that the next war (this kind of attack could presage nothing else) was going to be both ugly and long, even for a war.

I did my best to forget about it when I woke, but knowing that it was real--and from many similar experiences, I knew it was--kept me from being able to let it go entirely.

I was still brooding about it when my father came up the valley to call me to council.