It was Dean Corinth Weatherby who ordered the sounding of the home call—which hadn’t blared for over a hundred years—in the observation tower of the Monstruacans. As the massive copper plates reverberated with their deafening drone he reflected that all he had worked to be known for prior to this moment was nothing in comparison. From this point on his tenure as Dean of the Arcanum of Durum would be highlighted by the sounding of the call.
And the approaching warbeast.
The chief Monstruacan stood beside him and watched through a massive crystal plate as the new monstrosity approached the city from the west. They both knew the meaning of such a bearing, although neither would freely admit to the implications. If this wasn’t a ploy at subterfuge, then this creature had come from Asche.
War was upon them once again.
For the last few days he’d been receiving updates from the Monstruacans. Memos that warned of increasing essential gradients to the west, strange movements in the city’s own warbeast: the Rotting Hound. He periodically received reports on the Hound—it was, after all, the Monstruacans’ duty to catalog and report the movement of all magical creatures and warbeasts which surrounded the city—but these reports had the scent of terror on them. A fear of the unknown.
An hour before, the chief Monstruacan had arrived breathless at his office, sweating through his thick outer robe, and begged the Dean to follow him up to the tower. In all their years of sitting side-by-side at faculty events he’d never seen the chief so shaken, so he swept out from behind his desk and followed the Monstruacan to the small brass cage which whisked them up to the highest point in the Arcanum, and of the city itself.
They’d registered a glow over the horizon in the last few minutes. Once they trained their sensitive instruments on that point they were able to get essential readings, and those didn’t bode well. Essence capacity the like of which they’d never seen before. The air seemed to split and come back together from the passage of the fell beast. What it could be none knew, but its approach was an ill omen.
He, technically the Mayor of Durum from his post at the arcanum, made the decision to sound the home call. To close the gates that had been open for a century. To protect his people.
What he didn’t expect—what none of the Monstruacans expected—was the reaction of the Rotting Hound. When the approaching warbeast crested the last hill which had mercifully spared the viewscreens from its visage, the Rotting Hound began a charge from the north of the city that brought it to tremendous speed. Dean Weatherby had never seen the Hound move so swiftly, although it had been written about in ages past.
“What does it mean,” he’d asked the chief Monstruacan, who only responded by shaking his head. It had been even longer than a century that two warbeasts were on the field at once, and more than three hundred years since those two were from opposing city-states. What that meant no one knew. Would they team up, finally stirring the Rotting Hound from its stupor to attack the walls anew?
It didn’t take long for them to find out. They watched through the magnified screen as the Hound leapt over the warded tunnel and bounded toward the crawling thing. Its form was truly hideous to behold, and the Dean had the sickening impression that this warbeast had been based off a human body. What sickness of the mind could lead man to twist the form of his fellow man?
The Hound and the creature met in brutal combat. Monstruacans around the transparent domed pinnacle of the school shouted readings as each clash produced scrolls of data that would be later analyzed. The creature threw the Hound to the side like a wet bag of mulch and loped toward the warded tunnel—as if it knew where it was!
The Rotting Hound made one last attempt at the creature’s life, where the creature threw it in the air and unleashed its true might. Lightning speared down from the heavens and sprayed against the Hound, who hit the ground in a boneless smoking heap. The creature reached the churned delta at the entrance to the tunnel and began burrowing into the wards.
“Gods,” Dean Weatherby whispered. Monstruacans were shouting numbers that made the chief’s face pale beside him, but the Dean knew there was nothing more they could do. The sounding of the home call would set the wall guard to preparing the ancient cannons. Soon enough they’d see the creature destroyed by the city’s defenses, pummeled by the cannons until it was little more than ash scattered under the warded—
No! The guard wouldn’t be able to see the creature, not if it was crawling through the warded tunnel. Even with the Monstruacans’ instruments it was nearly impossible to discern the beast through the interference. Every few seconds a band of warding popped free to expose a slash of pale flesh, but nothing more came clear to them. They were being blinded by their own defenses.
Dean Weatherby removed the intricately inscripted device from the inside pocket of his robe. A symbol of those days when the defense of the city rested solely on the power of the Arcanum, he’d received it when he’d been elevated to the position of Dean. Many thought the device was purely ceremonial.
Not so. He slid a brass switch and the cover of the device hinged down. A filigreed plate within began spinning at high speed and he spoke into the whirling metal.
“This is Dean Corinth Weatherby. All able-bodied mages are ordered to appear at the western gate. A warbeast is approaching.”
Short and sweet, an easy to follow order. Any mage who’d graduated from the Arcanum would have an inscribed plate which both proved their credentials and also served as a short-range receiver for the Dean’s broadcast. Soon at least a hundred mages would arrive at the gate to battle the creature and they’d see how strong it truly was hemmed-in in that tunnel.
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The large crystal screen flashed white, then a distant boom shook the glass panes of the observatory. The Dean looked at the chief Monstruacan, but the man was already shouting orders to those involving tuning and filtering the lens.
Long seconds passed until the image came back. The creature was still there distorted in the tunnel, but a plume of smoke drifted between it and the observatory. One of the tuners panned the image down to utter devastation. The inner wall just above the gates had been rended and brutalized. The gates were nowhere to be seen. Stone and wood and silver littered the staging area before the western gate, splashes of red indicating sights best left unseen.
“Gods,” it was the chief Monstruacan’s turn to mutter. “It blasted the gate.”
Dean Weatherby could do nothing but watch as the creature clawed its way through the tunnel. Some of the turrets above let off half-hearted shots where the warded bands had popped and they could see the creature’s flesh, but none wanted to damage the tunnel any more than it already was. He couldn’t have told them to do otherwise—the tunnel’s defenses were such that even their most massive cannons wouldn’t be able to penetrate the warded bands.
“Sir,” a Monstruacan shouted, and a flurry of hand-movements panned the screen down even further and zoomed in. There were bodies strewn about—things the Dean didn’t want to see—but among those were two women standing directly before the gate. One, dressed in the white robe of the Sisters of Mercy, was supporting the other, and they were gazing out at the oncoming creature. The Dean wanted to scream at them to run. Why wasn’t this nurse taking the wounded woman away? It was clear she’d been terribly burned on one half of her body, her hair melted to the right side of her head.
“Demter, release the sighting glass—,” the chief Monstruacan said, but he was interrupted by the observer in question.
“These numbers are off the charts,” he yelled, hands flying furiously over his own crystal plate, and an overlay appeared on the large plate. The woman in white had a thin yellow glow suffusing her body, which the Dean assumed was a measure of her essence. The wounded woman, however, was something else altogether.
Purple nodes dotted her legs and back, a countless number, and a white glow shifted back and forth from arm to arm. The nurse had let the woman go, stumbling back in the rubble and nearly fleeing, but the wounded woman held her ground. As he looked longer, he began to recognize the motion.
Cycling? This was the first of his mages come to defend the city from the creature? The colors on the screen meant nothing to him, but when he turned to the chief Monstruacan to inquire, the man’s face was ashen.
“That’s… that’s not possible,” the man said, and the Dean looked back at the screen. The blob of essence moving from arm to arm had intensified to the point that it overwhelmed the lens, leaving only a slowly shifting white-out. The interrupting Monstruacan tapped on the screen and the overlay disappeared.
The woman was standing on her own—with her injuries, he had no guess—and laid her fingers to her chest. Her right hand, horribly burned from the savage attack, was glowing. She swept her fingers out in what the Dean recognized as a spell form.
A thin line of fire exploded from the tips of her fingers and passed instantaneously through the gate. In response purple lightning arced along the stream of fire, landing directly beside the woman and blowing her off her feet. The screen whited out completely and the Monstruacans scrambled until the image pulled back until they were looking at an overview of the carnage, the gate, and the warded tunnel beyond.
It was a maelstrom Everything to the west of the city was on fire for a thousand feet. A massive burning thing scrabbled at the ground in a localized inferno, which then collapsed and exploded in a crackle of lightning. There was fire everywhere, which meant that the warded tunnel had been completely destroyed. The devastation was unreal.
“I’m going down there,” the Dean said to nobody in particular, and swept out of the silent observatory.
🜛
By the time Dean Weatherby got to the remains of the western staging area, the ruins was crawling with mages and medical personnel. He stumbled across the broken scree, staring dumbfounded at the carnage. Bodies lay covered with bloody sheets, amputated limbs piled in front of cafes and shops. He made his way through the scurry of activity toward the place where the two women had been standing. The fires outside the city were guttering now, but the creature was still burning like magnesium.
A young man screamed in pain as two mages worked to lift a stone block off his legs. The Dean glanced back at him, then quickly turned away at the grievous injury. It would be a miracle if the boy ever walked again.
“Willow,” he screamed, clawing at shards of stone and silver, attempting to drag himself toward the gate. “Where is Willow? Willow!”
In the fugue state the Dean found himself in, the name struck a memory. A thin young woman sat before his desk—he hoped to smooth over a potential litigation nightmare. Not only had students of his used Arcanum resources to perform a near-lethal experiment, but then they’d had the gall to disappear before disciplinary proceedings. The entire episode was extremely embarrassing for both him and the Arcanum. If he could convince her that they would be dealt with if and when they could be found, all might be forgiven.
“Willow,” the young man sobbed as a nurse held him down while a doctor wove anesthesia over his head. His eyes began to droop, and he murmured. “She was right there.”
Dean Weatherby looked where the young man’s hand had dropped, pointing toward the gate, and he saw her again. Not seated, but standing. Not whole, but burned. Could it be? That young woman. That… waif?
He looked out the broken gate to the city, past the field of flames and ash, toward the undulating hills in the distance. Toward the wild. Toward Asche.