“Do not look a gift horse in the mouth.” - Old folk saying.

“Should we help, Aunt Aideen?” asked Eilonwy as she kept watch over the distant situation. The Vitalican nobles running for their lives were at least another quarter of an hour away from the city, by her best guess, so there was time to formulate a response should it be needed. Aideen had also climbed atop the same building Eilonwy was on and peered at the distance using a spyglass, as she lacked the same sharp eyesight Eilonwy naturally possessed due to her elvish heritage.

“Looks like those local nobles don’t have any good in mind for the people here anyway,” noted Aideen sternly after she took a good look through the spyglass. “They came to conquer, armed for war,” she noted with a frown. Aideen and the siblings might be able to take on a small army if they used the city’s terrain wisely, but it would be difficult to shield the survivors while doing so. “Send your undead to the southern gate. If they try to force entry, you can take care of them.”

“Understood, Aunt,” replied Eilonwy with some grim satisfaction. She had heard Aideen’s retelling of her fight against the mad king at the ruins of the Royal Palace, and witnessed the Divine Punishment that followed with her own eyes, so the girl had been chafing for a bit of action herself of late. This opportunity was one she took on with glee.

Within moments, all eleven of Eilonwy’s bone constructs took form, and she clearly had not skimped on the mana as one of them was easily on the level of a Death Knight. The constructs leapt across the rooftops and headed towards the city’s southern gate, where they hid themselves and prepared to welcome any rude and unexpected guests.

While Eilonwy favored fighting alongside her constructs in close combat, she was perfectly capable of commanding them from a distance as well. This time, she took that option as the girl – as were her siblings, for that matter – was feeling rather weak since they shared the same meager rations that the survivors lived on for the past month. Aideen was the only one unaffected by the lack of nourishment since she was Unliving and could subsist off the ambient mana of the region, and the capital still had plenty of that due to the ritual that took place there.

Aideen kept watch of the situation together with Eilonwy, who sat down cross-legged with her eyes closed so she could concentrate on the various inputs she received from her undead constructs. By the time the riders who they guessed to be Vitalican nobles reached the southern gate of Danna, there were maybe fifty of them left, and even then they looked ragged, as they had just ran for their lives for a good while. Following closely behind them, no more than a couple of minutes away, were a group of black-armored cavalry with bone wings decorating their backs astride skeletal steeds.

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It was the Lichdom’s famed Wings of Night, though Aideen couldn’t tell which division from the distance.

Given how some of the lances carried by the Lichdom cavaliers were stained with blood, they likely ran into an army led by these same Vitalican nobles and came to blows, which ended poorly for the Vitalicans, to no surprise. If there was one military unit in the world Aideen would trust to not get rusty despite decades or even centuries of no actual combat activity, it’s those of the Lichdom’s.

After all, they could always train using the undead as their opposition on the regular, with such training often dangerous enough to cause severe injuries to the unlucky. The Lichdom had plenty of healers to deal with such injuries, even if Aideen wasn’t around.

Aideen couldn’t get a good look at what happened by the gate since the structure was on the way, but Eilonwy had enough leeway to brief her on what was happening there. Apparently the Vitalican nobles who rushed to the city only to find the gates shut were hollering for whoever was there to open the gates immediately, all while throwing around all sorts of threats backed by their names and titles.

Too bad dead people couldn’t hear them, and the only things present near the gate were Eilonwy’s bone constructs.

When a minute passed with no response, the nobles panicked as the Wings of Night approached rapidly from behind them. A few of them tried to detour towards the other gates, but that was when Eilonwy had her constructs strike out. The bone constructs easily leapt from the top of the city’s wall towards the escaping nobles below and landed accurately on top of them, bringing the escaping nobles and their horses down in a messy heap.

The constructs themselves were magically enhanced and reinforced, so they took practically no damage other than some scuffing to their outer layers. To the horror of the remaining nobles, the bone constructs rose up from the heaps where the nobles had fallen – most of them not getting up since the fall likely knocked them unconscious or worse – and turned to face them with wicked grins and bared weapons.

It was not like the remaining nobles had much time to think of other courses of actions, however, as while they were hemmed in from the sides by Eilonwy’s bone constructs, the pursuing Wings of Night had arrived, and those ran through the remaining survivors amongst the Vitalican nobles without blinking an eye.

After the grisly work was done, the woman in command of the detachment – a subcommander of the division, most likely – looked towards Eilonwy’s Death Knight and politely greeted it.

“Lady Eilonwy, we are from the Second Division of the Wings of Night,” said the woman with a slight bow to the bone construct, confident that Eilonwy would be listening to her every word through it. “We have arrived with aid and supplies, as Lady Kino had asked of us. Most of the supplies are with the main force trailing an hour or so behind us. May we have your or Lady Aideen’s permission to enter the city?”