It was a nasty wound, and one given no small measure of time to worsen itself. Silenos saw Collin Baird’s blood had mostly stopped flowing, perhaps only due to already being so drained, and his guts were escaping the boy’s belly like a sack of writhing worms eating through the fabric. Without him, left alone, he’d have been dead within a day, two at most. Transhuman physicality was all that had sustained his life even this long, and such things had their limits when their wielder found themselves so thoroughly disembowelled.

But Silenos had seen worse injuries himself, much worse. It was remarkable the things a person might find done to themselves in a battle of magic.

“Back.” He instructed, watching as all but one of the crowding soldiers obeyed. He took the offending man by one shoulder and hurled him aside, barely exerting himself to separate the man from the floor, not even looking as he knelt down in his place and heard him land hard out of sight.

Collin Baird did not seem to even know he was there, his face was soaked with clammy sweat, pale with exsanguination. Both of the boy’s eyes were open, but they were unfocused, staring out into the empty air as his lips and tongue worked silently.

A message, perhaps? One he was desperate to see heard before he died? Silenos hoped so, it would offend him to be in the presence of something so unforgivably stupid as a prayer.

“Can you save him?” Asked the Governor, having the sense to remain yards back as he threw his question at Silenos like a javelin. Silenos took a moment to examine his patient further before replying.

“Yes.” He said. “But ensure everyone is silent, working with distractions is horribly tedious.” He got to work extending his magic out without another thought.

The difficult part about magical healing was nothing about the physicality of it. Rather, it was the magic one had to work against. All magic was intent made manifest, reality shifted and shaped by the exertions of human will, and such acts left their mark. When a suicidally stupid boy found himself disembowelled by Necromantic limb and Necromantic strength, the arcane forces powering such an attack dwelled in the wound and resisted their closing. It was these Silenos contested, and he found the act of doing so rather an enlightening experience.

He eased aside magical residue around the shredded tissues, studying it even as he isolated and purged it with his own power.

Such things were made easier by his arcane sight, which allowed for more fine control and targeting. Without it Silenos would have had no choice but to mindlessly exert will until he pushed the opposing magic aside rather than targeting it directly.

Even still, it was a surprisingly testing endeavour. Whatever had done this was powerful, more powerful than the Dark Lord’s Necromancy had yet managed to prove itself. A deadly, formidable creature in life, then, further given power in excess of their own through the process of reanimation. They must have died recently for the effects to be so pronounced.

Silenos almost grew distracted from the actual work of restoring Baird, so trivial was it. But he considered the matter a moment before starting the efforts of doing so. Instead of merely fixing flesh, he started to strengthen it just as he had his father’s.

He altered muscle fibres, breaking them down and reshaping them into compact, tightly coiled bundles able to multiply or divide their length exponentially with a single twitch. He shaped the minerals of his bones, weaving in natural carbon fibres and encasing it all with yet more made for hardness and scratch resistance. Soft tissues were woven into armoured fabrics able to turn aside blade thrusts, vital organs were duplicated in body cavities, circulatory channels shortened and made more efficient.

Silenos even took the time to reshape the boy’s lungs entirely, converting them to a circular, looping channel that left air running a circuit through his chest cavity the way a bird’s would. Far more efficient, able to sustain respiration in far more scarcely oxygenated environments.

By the time he was finished, Collin Baird’s healing was the least of his changes. The entire procedure had been more difficult than was necessary, made harder by the irksome resistance of natural magic, but Silenos managed it all the same. Ensharia had been harder by far, her own durability exceeding this one’s by a factor of double or more.

“It’s done.” Silenos informed the group, sitting back as he finished his work. Half an hour had passed, far less time than he was used to spending on such changes, far more than he would have on mundane flesh alone. Finlay Baird stared at him, expectant. “Your son will live, and he will have no long-term after effects. But he was close to death, you are lucky gut wounds take so long to kill.”

The Governor did not look like a man who considered himself lucky, but then so few lucky men did. He only nodded, relieved by a hair but still tense by a scalp.

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“Good.” He sighed. “Thank you, caster, once again it seems you have done me a service.”

Silenos saw the men around him relaxing similarly to their Governor, smiles growing and muttered prayers of thanks flitting around. Evidently Collin Baird was popular among his soldiers. Silenos himself stood, having little time for the sentiments. He had gotten only fifteen paces from the group when he heard more footsteps behind him, and turned to see Finlay Baird closing in, moving past the Necromancer as she trailed behind Silenos and eying him with unbroken focus.

“A word.” He said, somehow making the phrase neither a question or a demand.

With a nod, and a quick detour to somewhere more private, Silenos indulged him. Baird did not waste time or mince words once the two of them- save the Necromancer- were alone.

“I thank you for what you’ve done in fortifying my city.” The Governor said. “I really do, you’ve made it a defensive position worth two or three of its previous self. Defied my expectations and understanding both, and quite possibly revolutionised warfare as a whole. The things you’ve done here were beyond expectation and are too great for me to fully do justice. Thank you.”

No man gave so much flattery in such a concentrated stream without a “but” on its way, and Silenos remained entirely quiet as he awaited it. Sure enough, Baird continued a moment later, seeming more hesitant.

“...But I can’t continue this siege.”

The words hung between them like a lynched man, kicking and jerking, fouling Silenos’ mood. He took a moment in gathering his thoughts before replying, wanting to ensure he did not bisect the Governor.

“You are giving up?”

“I am.” Baird confirmed, still meeting his eye, still unapologetic about every word. “There’s no choice about it, I’ve seen the quality of these orcs, I’ve seen the quality of these undead, and I’ve almost lost my son just from a skirmish. The only thing I can do now is give up.”

“You have numerous options.” Silenos replied, speaking with patience, knowing that a show of contempt only tended to make lesser men dig in their heels. “For one thing, your forces will be made stronger by the undead I reanimate from this latest attack, and you have yet to bring out my secret weapons. I also took the time to enhance your son as I did you, making him considerably more potent, and now that Venka is drawing so close to beginning an offensive we ought to hold all of our forces behind the walls. Which means you have King Galukar to bolster your forces too.”

Baird’s fury grew despite Silenos’ best exertions of rhetoric and rationality.

“There’s easily a hundred thousand out there, and the least of them are orcs. Now we have these new undead able to draw sweat from a Hero, not to mention Venka himself, who actually is a Hero!”

Ah, so he had discussed the particulars of his son’s failed read. With Galukar, perhaps. That was inconvenient, it would make the act of convincing him to continue resisting only harder.

“And you have me.” Silenos pressed. “I’ve not shown my own power yet, only my creations, and let me tell you when I do battle in earnest I am more than a match for even Galukar. More by far.”

Baird must have believed him, because he actually looked halfway uncertain. For a moment. His eyes hardened with resolve after another.

“No.” He sighed. “I can’t, I can’t risk this, I can’t put my people in this position. Have you ever seen a city taken after a siege?”

Silenos said nothing, just nodding.

“Then you know it is the most barbaric fucking thing man is capable of doing. A siege is the most awful, deadly kind of fighting there is for the attackers. I know, because I came up from the ranks of conscripted scum whose job it is to die in them. You’ll have siege towers if you’re lucky, hot and clammy, smelling of the sweat wafting off the hundred other men you share them with, dark and rumbling. All the while you ride them, you do so knowing that most don’t make it to the walls, that the enemy will need only a few catapult shots to tear enough chunks from the structure that it leaves you screaming and falling amid a hail of jagged wood and dropped weapons. If you’re lucky enough to even make contact with the target, you come out finding the walls already flooded with men ready and waiting for you. Only a few of the tower’s occupants can come out at once, see, five, maybe six if it’s a big one.

The enemy are equipped with long spears that let them jab you from over one another’s shoulders, so you have more than a few bits of steel coming for each man charging. The only thing you can do is fight and try to widen a hole in the defence so that your men can get a foothold on the walls, and if you’re very, very fortunate, you might even live in doing so.”

Silenos opened his mouth to reply, but Baird was far from done.

“And that’s assuming you have siege towers, of course. If you just have ladders then you’re forced to climb pelted by arrows from all sides, dying in droves until enough men get to the top at once that the fire is disrupted. If you have a breach in the walls to enter through, you can guarantee it’ll be doused with burning oil and archery, then defended by the toughest bastards your enemy has. You understand what I’m saying? No matter how you attack or where, the enemy has all the chances to concentrate their forces and enough cover and space to hit you with weapons bigger than any man can carry. It’s a slaughterhouse.”

It seemed to Silenos that he was hearing reasons for why they had a chance, after all, but Baird’s face tightened.

“And attacking soldiers blame the city for putting them through that. If you survive a thing like that, if you’re fast, tough and fucking lucky enough to come stumbling out the other side of it, you’re driven half-mad. Not believing you even lived, still remembering the deaths of your comrades and the near-deaths of yourself, covered in the blood of men you called friends. Men like that vent their fury on the city, they take revenge. Rape, pillage, but also burning, lynchings. I’ve seen men take turns trying to cut people in half with one swing, or march people up to the highest tower they found just to watch them thrown off the side and break on the ground below. They’re less than animals, like that, and they remain less than animals for hours.”

His face turned jagged as a spear.

“And orcs will be fucking worse.”