Things did kick off, and faster than Collin might have expected. Soon enough he spied trebuchets prepared around the walls at his locations, turned towards him, bolstered as archers repositioned and defences bolstered. He saw the bombardment coming a full minute in advance, and knew he barely had time to move from its path himself- let alone his men.

He smiled, and gave the signal.

As one, dozens of Raboviax hit the wall, all leaping from bushes and tunnels, clawing apart dirt as if it were nothing but water. Their bladed limbs dug into the stony walls and their climbing started with all the mechanical intensity he’d come to expect from Shaiagrazni’s creations.

Their position was blocked from the enemy by two walls, one lengthways and the other widthward. It had been design, not luck, on Collin’s part.

He’d known there was a very specific place best used to attack him on the ground, and sent the grotesqueries to attack it from the most vulnerable flank it had. Like usual, his guesswork bore fruit.

The Raboviax came down like a scriptural plague, falling on their enemies and cutting, carving, tearing. Chainmail split apart before their natural weaponry, and even plate armour proved too fragile a defence to fully protect the Knights wearing it. For each that died, a score or more enemies died with them. It was like watching Rangers fight children, and Collin felt a curious sense of nostalgia.

Something about how they moved, how they fought. A particular deftness…Surely he was just imagining things.

He wasn’t imagining their deadliness, in any case.

Collin watched archers die, then spearmen hurry in and try futilely to stem the flow of blood among their ranks. Then he watched the grotesqueries move on, sweeping across the wall to tear apart siege engines and clear them of defences.

War had been harder, once. More complex. Collin almost felt a shade unfulfilled to watch how effortless a victory had just been dropped into his lap. Then the feeling was buried as he let the triumph of having weakened their enemy’s position wash over him.

Something touched his wits. A pressure, a heat. The sensation of magic flooding out in volumes the air was too slight a weight to keep its position against, Collin saw men wincing as great winds rushed over them, and barely managed to force himself to look on at the source. Silenos Shaiagrazni was rising high into the air, body shifting and growing in all the ways he’d learned to recognise as features of a combat form.

By the time his ascent stopped, he’d already become a thing made of nightmares.

***

Flight was a curious sensation. Silenos had never noticed it before, he had never had cause to. It was not an unpleasant thing to feel- indeed, it was rather delightful. A thing of liberation and freedom, with not even gravity holding sway on him any longer. His wings beat in great cyclonic arcs, powered by musculature strong enough to lift thrice the weight demanded of them, and the ease with which he moved left Silenos to dwell exclusively on the tactility of it all.

Silenos was not sure how he felt about taking such pleasure in a simple physical impulse, and he knew that he did not care one bit for finding himself even consulting his feelings on much of anything at all. For the moment, those concerns did not exist. He had others of a more pressing nature to be focused on.

It had been some time since Silenos truly worked to synthesise any great volume of material, at least within a combative scenario. Indeed, the last time he’d emptied his mana so quickly it had been for the very same thing. He created nitrous explosives, letting it all cling to the insides of a great, hardened shell.

Silenos felt his reserves of power shift, dwindling just a hair. Then he felt the weight of carapace grow more in his hands as the interior filled. Finally it held enough to be ready, and he dropped the sphere of death, watching it fall. Letting a smile dance on his lips as he did.

Among House Shaiagrazni, the power of nuclear fission was a rarity. It was a perfectly understood technique, of course, but the ability to actually induce it by overpowering molecular forces was beyond all but the most powerful. Silenos was not certain he had the raw power needed, and even if he did he had never studied the fields of magic which would make it possible. His own explosive was no substitute for the atomic devastation unleashed by those who did.

But it was certainly resting on the second highest rung of that particular ladder.

The air itself ran away from the detonation, as if fearing the density of energy spat outwards. Silenos watched chemical stores break down into heat, force and light. To his enhanced vision, there seemed a significant second passing between the sight of it all and the sensation of overpressure breaking against his body where it hovered some hundred metres above.

Four thousand kilograms of sinewy, muscled war-flesh was nothing compared to the sheer kinetic wall that met him, and he spent several moments fighting to retain his balance in the skies. Down below, the devastation was without equal.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

From where it had landed, just ten metres behind the outer walls, the bomb cleared out everything. Buildings came apart and flew away as clouds of jagged shrapnel, stone and dirt leapt high into the air and cleared a crater measurable in litres by the million. People died so quickly and so completely that they could not truly be said to have lived at all.

It took far too long for the air to be sufficiently cleared of debris, and Silenos had no patience to await it. He flew around, observing the aftermath from the side and studying the ruin he’d left beneath him for any sign of insufficiency in the bombardment. From what he glimpsed, nothing of substance had survived.

Around the devastation things were moving just as they had been planned to. One of the liches had been near the epicentre of his blast, that much had been by design, and the other had been too occupied by Baird’s clearing of the far wall to provide any sort of defence for its peer against Silenos’ aerial assault. Now one wall was cracked and the enemy’s defences mangled, the time was perfect.

He gave the signal, a shrill, air-splitting sound formed by so complex a structure of muscle and cartilage that he almost feared even his skill had made a mistake in its construction. The forces below received it as clear as anything.

Grotesqueries moved as a wall of keratin and meat, setting the ground aquiver as they stormed along it. Many defences remained, Silenos saw, among the enemy’s positions, and with the tight approach his creatures were slow to cross the distance separating them from victory. Ballistae spat bolts, trebuchets stones, casters magic. It was enough that it may have caused casualties, even in creatures as toweringly massive as his.

He swooped down to ensure it did not.

Silenos blew one enemy apart after another, focusing the bulk of his power on those who boasted the largest magics, or operated the particularly fearsome siege engines. His deadly work was sustained for a full minute of strafing attacks, keen eyes picking out movement from his own wake, powerful wings twisting his trajectory back around to leave it still with yet more blasts.

Close to ten minutes passed before his forces finally reached the walls, and Silenos finally allowed himself to simply watch the carnage. It was an impressive sight, even for one wrought by the grotesqueries of House Shaiagrazni.

By the time he came down to plant his feet back upon the earth, much of the fighting was over already. Defenders had been dismembered or eaten, fortifications properly widened to make room for his grotesqueries. Numerous Knights lay dead with familiar, iron lances jutting out through their eye holes, or throats cut savagely from behind, and those remaining creations of the Dark Lord were boxed in. Silenos knew no magic to turn a summon or reanimate against its original maker, such things were rare even in House Shaiagrazni. He had them all destroyed instead.

King Alfonso received him by bowing so low as to almost kiss the ground.

“My Lord.” The monarch whispered, eyes remaining affixed pointedly away from Silenos’. “I must humbly beg your forgiveness, I should never have tried to resist you. Your power…In my foolishness, I did not recognise its extent. I know of you, know of your famous cruelty against those who resist, but if you would give me a moment to speak I think you will find it inopportune to punish me as you have others.”

Silenos considered the notion quickly, then nodded. There was little to lose by hearing him out, and the man had already demonstrated considerable mental resilience by even remaining coherent enough to try and persuade him at such a time in the first place.

“Granted.” He said at last.

“Thank you, my Lord.” The monarch replied, speaking with all the haste of a man who had studied Silenos’ reputation before finding himself at his mercy. “Then let me first point out that Ironbane is a city heavily reliant on knowledge, our pathways through these mountains were set out by generations of study and mapping. All of that work was burned when I first saw that your forces would begin to gain the edge in attacking.”

Silenos felt his temper ignite, and it was all he could do not to change the man right then and there.

“You have more, I suspect, than simple spite to inform me of?” He asked, hearing the rage even in his own voice. The king finally looked up, with eyes far less fearful than his voice had been.

“Of course, because all of those ancient records still exist. I memorised every single page of them before giving the order. If you want to know the best, quickest ways to navigate your new territory, you will need to learn them from me. And I am, of course, willing to offer them to your highness as tribute…Provided I am accepted as a subject.”

Silenos had to stop himself from smiling. It was a fine play, a very fine play. Clearly this one had made a very deep study of his reputation, and gleaned that pragmatism was far more important to House Shaiagrazni than cruelty.

“And how do I know that you are not simply fabricating these routes, buying yourself freedom on a false promise?”

“You do not, yet.” The king replied. “But you will know the moment you have finished testing the first of them that I reveal, at which point I will have already proven myself a boon to your nation- and to House Shaiagrazni.”

It was a proposition worth considering, and so Silenos did. If he allowed the king to go unpunished, he would be reducing the incentive of others to surrender without a fight in the future. Furthermore, the king’s status as a previous servant of the Dark Lord would surely work against him. Silenos would be seen as giving favoritest treatment to him, and his diplomatic relations with other nations would suffer.

The benefits were considerable, there would be ways of gaining the knowledge he spoke of more quickly, but if it truly did require generations of scouting to accumulate in the first place then Silenos had no delusions of replicating that in more than a few years at best. He found himself torn.

But not for long, the answer was clear.

“I cannot accept your offer.” Silenos replied. “The consequences would be too great-”

“No!” The king snapped, then tempered himself. “I mean to say- apologies my liege- but I have more, much more. Information about the Dark Lord’s plans for this region, orders he sent to prepare me for them, and secrets. He needed my people, you see, to prepare for his next plans. I didn’t learn much about them, but I learned enough. Enough to know he intends on doing something which will shift the balance of power completely to his favour in a single fell swoop.”

Silenos eyed him, remaining silent. The king’s panic did his work for him, dragging out yet more from his blubbering lips. Most men only had so much courage, after all. It was the critical failure of emotion.

“Speak.”