Venka had been hesitant to believe rumours of an asteroid impact, let alone investigate. It had been his casters who had convinced him, sensing a scent of magic upon the wind which, so they claimed, was greater even than that of the Dark Lord’s own power. Such a claim demanded investigation, verification and, if appropriate, punishment. It was this that motivated him to lead his warband several miles off-course until they came upon the wreckage.

“Generl, would you like us search the runes?”

It had been Chtun who spoke, one of Venka’s officers. He turned to the orc, finding a stab of irritation at the near-monosyllabic grunting escaping the Colonel. Venka considered sarcasm, for a moment, but knew better. Orcs were dull creatures, closer in cognitive prowess to mere apes than they were to humans. Sarcasm had a way of confusing the poor beasts.

“I would, yes.” Venka replied. “Sweep the perimeter first though, send in a…Hm, send a company of heavy infantry first. Surround the ruins, make sure nothing gets out.”

Chtun nodded, turning and shambling back to the rest of his savage kind without another word. Venka watched him go. Orcs were a disturbing sight, even after long years of proximity to them. No taller than the average man at first glance, Venka had long since discovered their heights were actually a good half-foot or more above what they first appeared as due to the species’ apparently inexorable urge towards slouching. No doubt a product of their natural predisposition towards ill manners and savagery.

Their bulk was beyond human, and most of it was muscle and bone. Behind their low brow and sloped forehead, the orc’s underdeveloped brain controlled a frame of four hundred pounds, close to three hundred of which was muscle. More than a slight amount magical, this robust body could typically raise double its weight fully overhead using shoulder strength alone. And that was only to speak of the average specimens.

The orcs under Venka’s command, however, were nonetheless a well-trained group. Led by individuals among their kind that could at least remember more complex orders, and serving under a human General. He watched them shift around the ruin, thousands of thirty-stone behemoths organised so tightly, they almost behaved human.

It did not take long before the survey was complete, and Venka himself, finally, safe to close in and examine the site personally. It was an illuminating study.

As it was, flattened against the ground and obliterated into scraps of broken stone scarcely bigger than a man, it was no wonder Venka had not immediately recognised the legendary Castle Edmari where it lay cratered and diffused across the landscape. Once he did, though, it recontextualised everything.

Venka had never actually seen the ruin, of course, but he’d made a study of it. All good Generals had, and most of the mediocre ones too for that matter. The prospect of a flying fortress large enough to hold thousands was rather an important thing to consider when planning the movement of armies across countryside.

He tightened his eyes, focusing them into that ever-imprecise, esoteric sight that had marked him as special from his birth. Studying not the physical presence of stone and debris littered out a horizon’s width before him, but the wisps of remaining magic that still clung to it. Venka’s eye for magic was not something that could be taught, and that would forever remain a tragedy. It revealed so much to those who inherited it from birth that the world would surely have changed, were it to spread across humanity as a whole.

There was no small amount of magic to be seen, of course. One would be foolish to expect anything else when studying the ruins of Castle Edmari. Nonetheless, Venka found plenty of useful clues to go off of. By the state of arcane decay he could tell the wreck was close to a day old, for one thing, and mixed in with the mangled magic of the structure itself were less physically-anchored remnants. Magic of density and intensity that let it stick out even among the sea of ambient power around it.

Necromancy. That much was visible, and might have been even at a glance, it was thickly seen and concentrated all around the same rough area. Dark, in that ephemeral way that energies untouched by light could be coloured at all, and churning like the currents of a storm-driven sea. Necromantic magics tended to look like that, inherently vicious and destructive as they were. The thrashing around of all that invisible power almost distracted Venka enough to let the other presence slip his notice. That would have been a humiliating mistake, because its intensity was almost impossible to believe.

What was it?

“Prepare a vanguard.” He ordered. “And close the circle around that mound over there.” Venka gestured to some visibly jutting stone about where he’d seen the magics, knowing that none present shared his gift. “I wish to examine it more closely.”

The orcs obeyed instantly, proving yet again the effectiveness of Venka’s civilising influence.

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Venka made his way through the rubble at the very pace he’d spent so long drilling his troops to sustain, more than most humans could withstand. More, in fact, than any could, without the assistance of passive magical energies suffusing their muscles. He soon found the site in question, and upon studying it closer, found a great more to boot.

Not the specific style of magic that made up the second kind, however, that remained a mystery. Venka had simply never seen its like before…No, he had, once. The Dark Lord had had wisps of it around him, and it was found in even slighter traces about the bodies of growing orcs. Beyond that he had no basis of what it could possibly be.

But the scale of power that had been unleashed was without a doubt. Venka turned his gaze from that to see if he might find other kinds.

Had it not been for the physical wreckage of the skyship, Venka would not have even noticed the fractional difference in flavour between the propulsion and levitation magics woven around it and those around the ruins of Castle Edmari. Once seen, however, the picture painted was easy enough to interpret. There had been an air battle, perhaps even a collision, and at the ridiculous speeds aerial vessels could manage it was not hard to imagine that it had been responsible for the descent.

Mangled undead lay around them, but many had the tell-tale wounds of death to weaponry of the largest and most devastating kind. Clearly there had been a battle on-board before or after the crash. No, before, without a doubt. There was not nearly enough blood spilled on the ground for it to have been after, whatever veins had been emptied, it had happened in the air, and then had the evidence distorted by the collision.

Venka peered once more at the magical, comparing the ambient Necromancy to that infusing the undead, and then once more to his memory. The conclusion he drew was not difficult to formulate.

Sphera, then, eh? It was you. You got your nose stuck in this.

He wasn’t surprised. Easily the youngest of the Dark Lord’s Generals, Sphera the Necromancer had fallen into the trap that so many natural prodigies tended to. She had become intoxicated on the drug of her own power. Everything was about magic and strength, for her. Even her service to the Dark Lord himself, Venka suspected, stemmed only from a desire for more might.

Ordinarily that was not such an issue, for it motivated her into further excellence, but Venka had long since feared the girl would overstep and bring ruin upon herself. Or worse, upon her side. He saw, now, that she had made such an error.

Sphera’s body was nowhere to be seen, though there were several human corpses among the rubble so mangled that they could scarcely be recognised. All were, nonetheless, undeniably male. He was not entirely sure whether it ought to have been relieving, knowing that Sphera still lived.

Venka studied the place further until he found evidence of further magic, far from the wreckage of Castle Edmari, and once again ushered his orcs on after it. More of that mysterious kind he’d seen used amid the Castle .Not as powerful, but there, visible as ever. It was a mercurial thing, slippery, transmutative. As if someone had cross-bred the principles of megalomania and mathematics, then somehow blended the resulting offspring with poetry. A hybrid concept that could only ever have stemmed from magic. He committed it to memory.

Tracks led away from the site, which he followed further, and scrutinised hard.

“What can the trackers smell?” He asked, aloud. It did not take long before orcs rushed to bring forth their fat-nostrilled scouts and hunters. The beasts hurried ahead, throwing themselves down onto all fours and drinking in the air around every track in the dirt, snorting whatever imperceptible scents remained. He followed them, slowly, as they grunted to one another, then fed their input to an interpreter. Venka had long since learned to assign some of the quicker-witted and civilised of his orcs to translating the verbal sludge of their lessers, oftentimes humans were barely better at recognising the intended meaning of regular orcs than bloodhounds.

“Six humanoids.” He murmured, once the information had been conveyed. “Two women.” Venka saw a trail of Necromancy which, upon further study, he recognised as Sphera’s. Then he thought.

Despite his concerns, Sphera had been ever reliable in sending reports. The last word he’d heard of her work in the field had been that Elkatin’s so-called Saviour had allied himself with a Paladin and the magus Arion Falls. He had heard word himself of King Galukar’s departure from Abaritan and even Arbite. That left only one individual possibly unaccounted for.

The pilot of the skyship, perhaps? He paused, turned back to the ship itself, and resumed his examination, more detailed. Venka could discover no identifying marks or sigils despite searching for close to half an hour, and withdrew himself from the task only reluctantly. It would not do to tie himself up in scrutinising the wreck for non-existent details, not when a trusted champion of the Dark Lord was being hauled farther from him with every passing moment.

He paused again, thought harder, then made up his mind with the same military precision he tended to place into all things.

“Men, we will be changing course slightly, assume marching formation double-time, and prepare for a brisk pace. We’ll be making up for lost time.”

As the orcs shuffled and reorganised, Venka considered his decision. He was on his way to a siege, with weaponry that might well alter its course. His presence was a grave thing to be delayed on any battlefield, and doubly so under such circumstances as these.

But his forces were elites in all, and the speed they could sustain over land was greater than almost any other army on the continent. They would, he wagered, be catching up to their prey quickly, if stride size was any indicator.

And that prey had the second most potent Necromancer to draw breath within a thousand years. Every day she remained deprived from the Dark Lord’s side was a loss equivalent to a thousand orcs or more. Her death would be the equal to a million.

“Forward!” Venka called out, hauling himself back onto his mount and urging it on. Around him, orcs shook the ground with footfalls that came down into the dark dirt like hammer blows, and they headed for the horizon.

Headed for whatever enemy was stupid and unfortunate enough to be lurking just beyond it.