The castle was a cage. It wasn’t as cold as Ado’s cell, wasn’t as dark, and the company she found within its stony embrace was so great as to contrast her previous isolation to an almost laughable extreme. But it was a cage. A prison, a cell. It was an unshakeable, inescapably tight embrace. Its doors opened from within, locks obeying keys held at her will. But it was a cage, because there was no leaving.

Anyone who set a single foot beyond its outer wall, now, was dead. The sounds of endless undead hordes smashing against its exterior made that abundantly clear. Even with the fighting taking up every entrance point that had room for fighting to occur, she could hear them over it.

For Ado’s part, she was still involved with the slaughter. There was simply no choice in the matter. She had power, and she had the nerves to use it, which meant failing to do so would be tantamount to suicide. But her current conditions weren’t quite as favorable as they’d been just an hour earlier.

Wudra’s central fortress had been built for just such an attack, long ago, and Ado found no shortage of advantages within its walls. Each gate seemed to house a cacophony of native edges at one end, primed and perfect to turn any attempted assault to so many bloody ribbons as magic and metal rained down upon the invading enemies. Ado herself cast enough ice to freeze a river, watching time and again as her power blasted rows of undead apart. She stopped only when exhaustion made her, taking refuge behind conveniently placed cover until she’d recovered enough to continue the devastation.

But there were limits to any creature’s stamina, and she was no exception. Magic or no, fragile undead or no, safely shielded by fortress walls or no. There were always limits.

And one million was a number almost beyond the reckoning of any.

First the Paladins started dropping, their Vigour and training, armour and arms, all proving an inferior match for the sheer multitudes staring them down. Some died as heroes, barring enemy violence from reaching other lives with their own bodies. Others went miserably. Dragged down, taken by surprise, simply giving in as their strength finally abandoned them and their will finally broke. All made more or less as much of a difference as each other, however their lives ended. Because each one meant there was one less elite warrior to crush the reanimated bodies coming on as a flood. Each one was that single, deadly step closer to an end for every other life in the fortress.

And they were far from the end of it. As Ado held one of the main gates, she saw the King joining the fray to beat back a particularly savage enemy advance himself. He wore armour of resplendent silver, enchanted with a magic so fierce she could feel it even over the hum of necromantic power flooding the air so revoltingly. He swung a sword which looked more like a sunbeam than any construct of metal and mechanics, lopping enemies fully in half, taking chunks out of stone surfaces on his backswing. At his side were half a dozen Paladins, seemingly invigorated by their King’s presence, all doubts regarding treachery and coups forgotten before a snarling enemy and royal ally.

But the King, too, was nothing more than a mortal man. And he was not immune to the rare creatures of potency among their enemy. A Fomori opened his throat up down to the vertebra with a single swing of its great tendrils, and in one stroke the royal line of Wudra was bereft of its patriarch.

The battle raged on around him, heroism made somehow inconsequential by the grander carnage unfolding in its proximity. Ado herself barely even glanced at the King’s corpse.

Heroes, she had learned, did not truly exist. There were simply those who survived and those who didn’t. Today, it seemed, there would be none of the former. She continued casting.

One stride at a time they gave ground. The outer sections were taken at the steep price of many tens, even hundreds, of thousands undead. The median points for a fraction of that. Each new area of their collapsing defense was bought more miserly than the one before it as exhaustion, fatigue and death slowly sapped the fighting strength of Wudra’s defenders. Ado herself found magic an increasingly stubborn familiar, her will and powers blunted with the overexertion hard fighting demanded of them. Fingers numb, eyes bleary, wits savaged, it was all she could do to even identify the great blocks of frosted water she sent smashing into enemy ranks.

Desperation set in quickly enough, always eager to pounce on any situation like Ado’s and make itself known. This time, though, there was a terrible, rational flavor to it. This time they really didn’t have any other options save for the madness it was making look so appealing.

Plans were discussed to spearhead an assault beyond the walls, to try and take the head off the Dark Lord’s army by killing its leadership. Plenty remembered the early assaults, when entire attacking forces had been rendered harmless and aimless by the death of the greater undead around which they gathered. And all knew they had no chance of holding the city conventionally.

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Ado vetoed the idea, if only out of risk reduction. They were holding, still, and holding well. There might well be another time to act brazenly and dangerously later, a time when they could do so more easily and safely. Estimation of their enemy’s inexhaustible numbers failed now, but Ado’s glances beyond the windows told her they’d been thinned.

By a hair.

So they would continue their defense until they’d managed to thin them by another. Every minute advantage made a difference, and they needed every one they could get. She got back to fighting.

A gate fell, then more undead were pouring in through yet another vulnerability. Arrows flew, bodies hit the ground, and they were forced back. For half an hour. They came back, they always fucking came back, and this time the defenders were low on ammunition. Divine magic churned the air with holy castings and appeals to the heavens, igniting necrotic flesh, restoring stamina, reknitting wounds. A second wind hit the defenders.

They used it to hold for an hour more, mangling more of the Dark Lord’s army until his attackers had to scale walls of their own slain allies before they could even reach the actual defenses. Even this did not slow them, not even by a shade. Ground started losing again, Paladins died, Magi died, everyone was dying. Ado’s brother.

He fought bravely, heroically. He died no differently for it, throat torn out and entrails spilling from him as the endless horde continued. Another casting of divine magic came seconds too late to save him. Ado’s heart broke.

She gathered the advisors and Paladins, spoke quickly. They prepared their spearhead.

Their assault began from a window, superhumans leaping or gliding themselves down through the air as every defender still within the building unleashed all they had in a single, controlled volley designed to batter the enemy and leave them briefly stunned. It worked, for seconds, and they all hit the ground killing.

Ado was among them, because there was nothing more important she could be doing now than unleashing the power of a Magus upon the battlefield.

They were a wall of Vigour and might, dozens strong and barging through the horde. Everything that came within paces of them died, instantly, split or crushed apart, pulped, liquefied and allowed to fall at their feet. They closed slowly, inexorably on their target and Ado felt a flutter of hope.

It was interrupted as the Elves came.

Ado recognised them, vaguely, by species. Not the specific breed, but their tall, lithe forms and sharp, thin features were unmistakable. They moved like eels, seeming to disappear from the path of sword swings, bettering even a Knight in physical speed and dwarfing him in dexterity. They halted the advance almost completely, two scores of razor-sharp elites to engulf their hackneyed assassination squad and crush their chances.

There was no hope now, Ado knew that, and she was almost certain every man and woman fighting beside her knew to. But somehow that didn’t have them fighting any less hard. Somehow, it only bolstered their fury. Maces swung, axes and polehammers with them, magic roared out. Ado put an icicle the size of a man clean into an Elf’s face, watched his head just come apart like something crushed by a siege stone. His corpse disappeared under the thousand feet thrashing all around them, and another pace was earned. Paladins were dying again, momentum taken, but she didn’t care. Because they could still bleed the Dark Lord’s forces. They could still make him pay as deer a price for their lives as was payable, and leave his victorious army a ruined, crippled thing not able to take a single city more.

Her heart ached, and Ado thought of Folami. Her treatment of him, all her mistakes. She realized she was staring down into her last few moments alive. It was funny. Ado had always intended to die properly, dignified and aging in her bed, surrounded by family.

But a death was a death, and somehow she didn’t mind this one as much.

The movement ahead caught her, eyes flicking up just in time to behold the sight of an iron bolt flitting through the air nearly faster than human perception. Ado froze, the world seemed to slow, and she traced the projectile’s deadly path across the battlefield. That was an end. But who’s? She found herself without an answer, and cursed the one responsible for sending her out without even knowing the enemy’s army had so potent an archer as to fire it.

And then it struck home, and Ado’s worries were displaced by a gaping, gasping confusion.

***

Collin had nailed the Dark Elf perfectly, and he allowed himself a smile as the head just sort of…Came off. Neck surrendering to the momentum of his arrow, meat ripping, vertebra bidding each other a tearful goodbye. The cranial missile disappeared from sight and bounced off somewhere among the thrashing undead. He’d already nocked and drawn another arrow by the time it did, eyes still on Ado.

The idiot was stunned, staring, pausing. Rookies. Collin really wouldn’t ever understand why the human instinct in battle was so often to freeze. It was just asking to be killed, and he was almost tempted to put a bolt through her foot as a reminder.

Instead, he put it through another Dark Elf. The slightly more productive option, perhaps.

Around him ten more Rangers were loosing ten more projectiles, while Hexeri was doing horrible, awful things to everything that got within ten feet of her. Collin actually felt slightly sick watching her fight, a hilarious state of being, but perhaps a reasonable one. Combat with arrows and knives only did so much to prepare a man for watching a child whirlpool of blood liquefy whatever it touched.

There’d not been many places they could have headed and done anything of substance, so they’d all taken their harassing force- now re-armed after pilfering the spot of their capture- and headed off to help Ado.

It had been a smart decision, because she damned well needed it.