Under a din of shivering earth, the tired cry of rent stone, Condur muttered. Siren couldn’t hear him so she snapped back but neither of them was really in the mood for that old dance.

Bortun had ceased his quaking stomps, and now danced down the hillside, bringing his knees up to his hips, and tremorous pebbles to careen down after him.

As he came more plainly into view, Siren thought:

What kind of dirt hovel did they drag this creature out of?

His helmet, a crude fold of bronze which might have been scraped from the oldest mountain foundry, seemed barely capable of containing his broad, flexing head. Beneath it he was hideous and massive. His body, a canvas to scars--and it was a broad one and well filled. Corpulent muscles wrapped him completely, obscuring the simple lines of humanity. His Noriac eyes, sad and brown, were twisted into little drowning clods of granite sparkling with a gleeful rage. The stone of his wide collar, piqued into horned pauldrons, ran so deep with shattered lines that it seemed only precariously held together. His feet made soft flesh of the ground as he danced.

Siren bit hard to keep her ear bones from shivering out of her head. She left Condur alone, to fret with the soldiers and their always tepid morale, and forgot all about Vallan and his cursed nephew. She felt her own legs bounced up by the tremors, her knees rose high to the side and she twisted. She stomped at the ground profanely, danced on hopping toes, then shifted. It was less a dance than a struggle to locomote.

They met in the low ground as the Sirennican army backed up clumsily toward their ridge. Siren slammed her fists into the ground and the clumps of withering grass in the low spots erupted, growing like tears over a sad terrain. She hissed in unison with their browning, flaccid blades, and though the Burgisnoriacs kept enough faith to cheer their placeless champion, they reflectively receded up their own slope. Only a few brave champions remained on the low ground--not to count Vallan, who impatiently dragged the scrawny body of Tundur toward the Sirennican line.

Meanwhile, the mountains leaned on the horizon. A thousand unseen cracks squeaked out of the broad, ancient walls of Ond Burgisnor, singing into the high, still air.

Siren raised her voice: “Enough pageantry, you creature of the mountains. You hairless bear. It’s a shame you’ve been brought down just for me to bait you. Keep your feet on the ground, and take up your weapon. It is your time, Bortun—“

She’d had a thousand other things to say--familiar reprisals, formulaic and recombinant insults such that would test the rote memory of a Litherian bard. But Bortun swiftly obeyed. He planted both feet into the ground, and brought up his weapon--a fittingly paleolithic instrument of some yard-long therian leg bone. Affixed to the socket joint with stretched-tight and petrified rawhide was a rather thick cone of umbrous gray stone, uncarefully faceted.

Is this a man, or an ogre?

The hammer crackled through the air, a rhythm of aftermaths which snapped audibly shut. Goosebumps raised on Siren’s arms, and her nose crinkled and itched.

Throw dirt in my eyes, why don’t you? Through the distraction, she hardly noticed his approach, his pivoting body sliding over the earth…

But in that fractional moment she dodged, his wide swings cracked before her face like monstrous claps. Wetness drew from her eyes. But every dodge left her no further from the encroaching wildman. His face was locked in distance, like a haunt or a vision stain, burned even into the backs of her eyelids--though she dared not blink.

Without a hair’s breadth moment to spare, the sturdy ash shaft of Bleeding Leaf swung into the crude hammer’s beleaguering arcs. Time and time again, when dodging failed. The spear shuddered, but held. Siren’s arms were numb against the smooth, burnt wood, concave polished by a dozen years’ sweaty friction. Her grip shook (and when was the last time…?), but she held onto it as if some magnetism had joined them. By that same logic, the steel tooth swung out, guided by senseless hands and an instinct which stretched from the primal processor of Siren’s neck to Bortrun’s own. His own body retreated--finally. Bleeding Leaf reached under his chin, but found only air, fogged by Bortrun’s musty, barbarian breath.

Condur was bellowing something (“Where’s your damn star, Siren?”). The words were a low grumble behind snapping winds, quaking earth, and the soft, plucky voice of Bleeding Leaf in joyful harmony, and easy to ignore.

These fractious increments stretched into seconds, then eventually to a full minute. Though few, periods of stillness, where Bortrun and Siren shared grins under seeping sweat, allowed a chance to watch the battle evolve around them. The lines were advancing once again, slowly closing into the flats as these opposing Noriacs proudly brought themselves into this grave valley. Champions, dissolved back into the lines, reemerged. The shivering skeletal armor of the Hollows echoed inaudibly behind Siren, in the indefinite (almost nonexistent!) space outside of her vision. Some thousands of unseen eyes still watched the duel, breathless as they advanced

Neither Siren nor her adversary spared the effort for so much as a grunt. The armies halted and silence reigned but for the whiplike wind of a brutal hammer-swing, cut by the glittering blue, elfin edge of Bleeding Leaf, and the patient, muted gasps of the two champions. No characteristic war cries. The ground slid Bortrun about like a sculptor shifts the form of their golem model. He pressed one foot forward, and thus his whole body went. And it was a half-panicked realization that the ground was also shifting her into the moment of his swings. She fought as much to keep her stance, a dance on slick ice, as she did to grant her weapon its namesake. The shaft grumbled hungrily in her hands, translating the silvery tooth’s dissatisfaction.

She realized, with horror, that the tide had not once shifted, that she hadn’t for a moment compelled her opponent to defense!

Instinct told her to press. A single moment would need to resolve this in her favor. So she erupted into a galing fury of feints, testing distance with the length of Bleeding Leaf. Bortrun grinned as he shifted into automatic safety. He did not forfeit the upper hand. He slid to the side and bent around the arcs of the slashing spear. His pride ignited as this faltering onslaught dwindled and retarded, each jab and poke dropping lazily, coming always slower.

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The armies’ thousands sang a two-tone chorus, which took for granted the duel’s impending conclusion. They had met between the hills, in this gentle valley which seemed fated to run muddy with the blood of its countrymen, and decided to spectate. Victorious chants collided with hopeless encouragement on both sides.

Bortrun the Placeless reached out his shield hand, which had been leisurely rested at his side, and with the kind of steely grip one could expect from his bearlike palms, caught the faintly wobbling shaft of the falling spear, and tightly grasped it. His grin intensified, a sick growl of laughter broke into the conflagration of battle cheers.

Sirne tugged at Bleeding Leaf, but with each pull the mountain warrior’s grip tightened. Her smile waned, tightened, and she pulled some more, moment by moment forcing the enemy to tug against her efforts. He laughed and laughed, started toying Siren with broad yanks which brought her feet off the earth.

And then perhaps he saw that her smile was not falling to terror, or some hopeless fury, but to a considered wrath that was somehow more than joy. Perhaps he knew that he’d fallen for it. His eyes darted and shrunk with a lugubrious intelligence.

Riding the momentum, and twisting her body so that she could bring her shield hand to the spear’s shaft, Siren thrust her palm against the Bleeding Leaf, and the sturdy ash rod split into an even two, sheering off diagonally at the grain. Bortrun faltered only momentarily backward as the force against him subsided, but the ground (always favoring him) caught his backward stumble. He held his hammer in one hand, and the business end of Bleeding Leaf in the other. Siren, meanwhile, ducked into the space between them, and pressed forward with her improvised stake until it gave into Bortrun’s prodigious diaphragm. She had to push hard to split those unseemly muscles. She grabbed at his stinking belt of hide and hammered bronze and pulled herself further in.

Bortrun the placeless shuddered. Blood poured from his belly and seeped from clenched teeth, sputtering bubbles and sickly pink foam as he spat his last breaths. Bleeding Leaf and the bone hammer fell at his sides. He did not fall. He died on his feet.

The battlefield was silent. Terrified Burgisnoriac eyes beheld the bleeding wooden shank erupting with spouts of blood from the mountain man’s impossible back. Sirennicans cheered as they saw his cherried face spill its color. Siren stumbled back and framed her handiwork against the defeated countenance of her many-thousand enemies.

Then Bortrun the Placeless shuddered again.

Siren pulled back, grasping at her side instinctively, but clumsy--tearing Heart Lover from its slender, leather scabbard and shifting it fearfully in her palm. Borturn’s body convulsed, always staying upright.

Doesn’t anybody fucking die anymore?

The earth shared in his spasms with a sense of falling, dying. Warriors on either ridge collapsed as the ground rolled beneath them. Screamed orders fell on panicked ears.

Siren sneered at the Burgisnoriac’s collapsing line. She turned her head back and caught Condur’s panicked expression with a nervous snickering. She didn’t look too long away from Bortrun’s standing, shaking corpse. Bloody rivulets, following the absurd lines of his musculature, took hard corners, confounding gravity’s steady pull.

Then Bortrun’s head pulled back in what was more a twitch than a convulsion. His red tongue wagged in his hanging maw, spraying blood as it fought to…vomit? The neck muscles contorted, straining tendinous lines to the point of snapping. His larynx shifted and collapsed and sprang back up until it pressed white against Bortrun’s dead, dun skin. Siren wrinkled her nose and gripped at the failing earth with her toes..

Then at once the tremor pulled into Bortrun and all the fighters fell like timber toward his gravitating center. Siren caught her fall hard on one elbow, and in the sudden stillness craned her neck to see this final action--this hopeless last attack. Instead, she watched a mist rise from his mouth, a limp regurgitation of some shadow which had been fermenting inside him. It came out like a cloud into the atmosphere, a splayed cone that towered over the battlefield and shaded all those beneath it. It cried a wordless, voiceless mourning. It died in the sunlight like steam, then everything was still.

“What the hell was that, Mattric?” Siren asked.

Mattric of the Felkta, bent in shamed supplication on the wide, single flagstone of Ond Burgisnor’s council room, twisted his full and trembling lips uncomfortably. His broad, Noriac brow was sweat drenched, stringing out the dramatically carved peak of his coarse, graying hair, which Siren had always remembered as a close but flowing crop of Sprunish straight and chestnut brown.

“D-do you not expect me,” he stuttered, “to protect my lands and my people as they would have me?” Siren could taste the conflict of dread and defense deliciously on his voice. “It is my duty, Siren--”

“That’s ‘Archon Siren,’ Mattric, unless you’d rather say ‘my lady.’” Through furious eyes he smiled politely.

“Apologies, my lady--”

“And I wasn’t talking about the battle, Mattric. In fact I must commend your use of the chariots--Deltric needed a chance to prove himself, and I had heard that Podur of the Bartul has become quite the commander.” She chuckled. “Had become.” Mattric bowed his head low. “But I was talking about the god whom you employed. Your ‘chosen’ creature, Bortrun of the Fucking Wilderness.” Mattric sighed and spat a curse beneath his breath.

“That was a god, wasn’t it?” she continued. “I should know…”

“One of Coryn’s daughters,” he said, shrugging like it was some natural phenomenon over which he’d had no control. “A creature from the mountains--a true Noriac--”

“Enough of your blaspheming, Mattric,” said Siren, approaching from the High Stone, the throne of Ond Burgisnor. She patted his shoulder and grinned. “Oh, the Dread Goddess is going to be furious with you.” She rested her hand paternally on his back, and bent to whisper in his ear. “I’ll intercede on your behalf, Mattric, but…well, she’s not called ‘the Dread Goddess’ on account of her congeniality.”

She left him with the Hollows, listening with some pleasure to her own footsteps on the cold stone of the Ald Palace (and Mattric’s seething, sputtering breath). It was, ironically, refreshing to be free of the goddess’ constant lumber. She smiled as she came out the great arched portal, and beheld the stony whites and grays of the old city spanning out before her. She breathed in an air unrefreshed by any forest, smelling of shit and woodfire and wet rock. Smelling of humans.

She had a remembrance of first coming to Ond Burgisnor, when the only humans she’d met were the humble woodsman who chopped out a living in the relatively thin forest hinterlands, and the urbane, by contrast, settlers of the Keldu river. She bathed in the intoxication of humanity--the distinct and pleasantly corrupting sense of a world more base and instant than the one she belonged to. An exciting world, changing and passionate, which reminded Siren of her own mortality.

She looked over the spoils of her conquest with a pride hitherto unknown. I did this, she thought, and the small people were gathering at the palace square just to see her. They praised the name of Burgis, they praised the name Siren, and she thought:

I could get used to this.