A terrible ripping sound filled the air as the portal attempted to manifest in hardened space, but her ward won out. With a loud crack the portal shunted away beyond the protection of the dome, where it finally opened to a view not so dissimilar to their own. Trees, forest, sky above. But a horde of creatures poured out and began tearing at her shields.

Another portal tore through space at the edge of her barriers and released its own deluge of minor warbeasts. These weren’t like the terrors Andrew had sent to face her—each one was a hundredth the power of those, but there were so many of them. They went straight for the barriers and unleashed their attacks, rippling the air with sheer essence concentration.

Portal after portal opened as Willow sprinted to the edge of her camp’s protection, a scant handful of yards from the rampaging warbeasts.

“Please, you don’t have to do this,” she screamed against the roar of tearing essence. “You can be here, with us. You don’t have to fight anymore.”

Not a single comprehensible voice responded from the horde, but upon seeing her they redoubled their attacks. The barrier grew darker, shading from golden to amber. Soon, she knew, it would fall under the deluge.

She walked back to the tent, but Leopold met her halfway. That’s where the elves joined them, along with Sun Geon and Sun Lin. Their staging ground.

“None of the warbeasts are sentient,” Willow muttered. “They’ve been grown too quickly, or without skill. None have the spark of intelligence.”

“So the other cities really were still growing warbeasts,” Leopold said aghast. “I suppose it makes sense, but it just seems so awful.”

“No one will ever know but us,” Willow said and shrugged. “Why not pull out all the stops.”

“Indeed,” Sun Geon cut in. “This appears to be the full force of their assault. Paltry, compared to our own abilities.

Willow shook her head. “This is only the beginning. Soon they’ll set up essence shunts, drain the shields faster than I can recharge them. When they break through, and they will break through, I’ll be exhausted. They’ll have already won the battle against one of us.”

“You’re not seriously suggesting…,” Leopold said, then trailed off at the look in her eyes.

“Yes. We meet them full-on. Most of these half-baked warbeasts will be easy to dispatch, but what worries me is what comes after.”

“Mages,” Leopold said.

“There’s no telling how many are behind those portals. Ready to spill out as soon as the warbeasts have done their duty and brought down the shield. They’ll kill us and every magical creature in this clearing. I cannot let that happen.”

“Then lets to war,” Sun Geon said. Willow looked from him to Sun Lin, who gave a small bow. Then to Leopold, whose ashy face was set in a grim mask. He would follow her into hell itself. She wouldn’t let anything happen to him.

“War it is,” Willow said.

🜛

It took a bare ten minutes for the horde of warbeasts to exhaust Willow’s magical barrier, and when it cracked it broke into a thousand shards which sifted down on the camp like a magical rain.

Willow took control of the shards, as they were made of her own essence, and directed them outwards.

Trees fell and warbeasts cried out in anguish as the shards sliced through wood, stone and flesh, finally spending the last of their substance to evaporate in the ethereal wind.

Leopold was stationed before a group of three portals, Sun Geon and Sun Lin each had their own portals, and Willow stood in the center. She closed her eyes and bloomed out of her body.

She became the spherical thing, the Wraith, and she reached deep into the earth to uproot wood and stone, and turned them into lethal projectiles. She threw the missiles through every portal not currently manned, and from the shimmering of the air within she knew they hadn’t expected an attack to come back through just yet. Not a single mage had emerged.

Sun Geon leapt into a portal and Sun Lin another, to the sound of screams of terror from the other side. Leopold fired off the spell capsules one after another, pouring destructive essence into the portals and whatever was set up on the other side.

If this was war, then let it be done.

Still, the warbeasts came. A few trickled out and made for Willow’s body at the center of the camp. They didn’t make it far, as she was surrounded by her own guard. The elves downed dozens with smooth arrows and the salamanders roasted the un-fire-resistant in droves. There was such a turmoil of essence in the air that the ethereal winds roared in Willow’s ears like a hurricane.

Still, it wasn’t enough. From one of Willow’s portals emerged a mage with a staff much like the dean’s, which he used to instantly blast a hole through a griffon. The griffon didn’t seem to understand what had happened because it took a step forward to attack, then fell apart.

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More mages poured out, each with their own magical weapons. Trust it to mages to counter the weakness that Sun Geon had discovered. Some had hollow devices which launched powerful bursts of energy from within, some had whips or swords which sought their enemies and passed through flesh as though it was nothing. A dozen artifacts Willow had never imagined, wrought for war.

The magical creatures, who looked to her as queen, fell by the dozen as mages poured out of the portals. They cut easily through her missiles as she hurled them and she realized too late that she had lost control of her set of portals. They were coming, and they were coming for her.

The guard around her body surged in the direction of the lost portals as the magical creatures threw themselves into battle. Elves were struck with lances of ice, falling to shatter on the ground. Salamanders were doused, rocs were blasted from the sky. Yet they surged on, protecting their queen.

These people, who she’d promised to protect. Who she’d taken from their home in search of a life of peace. She had led them to their deaths.

The shame and fury boiled up within her until all at once she stretched her mind to the limit and sent a dozen psychokinetic stalks spinning out far past what should be their maximum range. She felt the strain in her mind, but how could she stop if others were dying to protect her?

Each tendril found a portal and the mages who’d set up a perimeter outside it. They didn’t have the same armor that the dean’s men had. Why? Had there not been enough? Why were there so many weapons of war, but not enough armor to protect their wielders?

Willow pondered this as she crushed and rended the mages guarding the portals. This assault from an invisible source came too quickly and suddenly for them to counter, and the magical creatures overwhelmed their line like a flood. Flesh was torn, bones cracked, and all the while Willow laid about with her tendrils, throwing mages into the air and crushing them beneath her psychokinetic weight.

Her body sweated and trembled with the strain of it, and a splitting headache set up behind her eyes, but as the Wraith she noticed these things only secondarily. If Annabelle survived, if Willow survived, then she could be healed. If not, then it was all for nothing anyway.

Willow stretched again and her tendrils shot into the portals themselves. On the other side she found staging areas in the woods. Some form of proprioception told her that these weren’t so far away, dotted in the mountains around the battlefield. In the end it had taken the rodent to find them. The city-states still had no idea where they were located.

Alarm bells clanged at her intrusion, some kind of detection-system meant to alert at exactly this kind of incursion. Mages lashed the air before the portal ineffectually with their weapons, but they were no use. Willow’s tendrils were not beholden to the laws of physics, and they moved with a speed and grace impossible for mere matter. She plucked mages from the ground and bowled them into each other, smearing gore across the denuded forest floors.

Their staging camps became butcheries.

Her body was failing; she had to return. The tendrils retreated when only the stragglers remained, those mages who had retreated at the alarm bells. The tendrils passed back through the portals, over the backs of the magical creatures that rushed in to finish the job, and back to the sphere of Willow’s intent. Her body fell to its knees, but she had done it. She had staved off the mages in her own portals.

How were the others holding up?

Blasts of her own essence across the field told her that Leopold was still active, still pouring shot after devastating shot into the portal assigned him, while Sun Geon and Sun Lin’s portals hadn’t had a single mage emerge from them. The magical beasts ignored these portals in favor of rushing into Willow’s to ravage the remaining attackers.

Let them. Willow mostly came back to herself, although she was still the hulking psychokinetic storm which hovered above her head. With the stretching finished, her headache had disappeared. An honor guard of elves surrounded her with chitinous armor, their backs to her, aware for any possible threat. She had the fleeting thought that she didn’t deserve such protection.

But was that true? She’d taken on a dozen portals while the others only had one each. She’d almost single-handedly stayed the invasion. Maybe she was more powerful than she gave herself credit for. Maybe the creatures weren’t wrong to look to her.

Sun Geon stepped from his portal, along with Sun Lin who hopped from hers, and no mages followed them. Willow didn’t want to see what was on the other side of theirs, nor of Leopold’s, which he’d stopped firing shots into. They crossed the field, Leopold sparkling brilliantly with a full-body barrier, and her honor guard let them through. She rose to her feet.

“It appears that the attack was unsuccessful,” Sun Geon said, and Willow thought she noticed a twinge of disappointment on his face. After three hundred years, maybe he’d grown used to the carnage, or even enjoyed it. As for her, she was glad that they had the day.

“Yes,” Willow said. “It’s over now.”

As if waiting for her word, the air around them bent in three places. Without the portal-shunting defenses, the rents appeared right where they were meant to. Surrounding them.

These three portals were much larger than their staging counterparts, and in the second before the attack began, Willow saw city-walls appear beyond them. Mages, young and old, were lined up in companies on the other sides. The full fighting force of three city-states brought to bear in the center of their encampment. It was too much, it was just too much.

The magical creatures didn’t hesitate, and poured through at once into the maelstrom of essence and artifact attacks. Willow saw with a thousand eyes as the mages slaughtered the creatures that looked to her as queen. She couldn’t keep herself from seeing—even shutting her eyes wasn’t enough. The psychokinetic storm saw all.

And then, when all was lost, the guillotine dropped. The sword hung over her head that she’d suspected but prayed would never come. Sun Geon cut through the air with the flat of his hand toward her neck. Only a low-grade detection spell caught it in time, and barely. A psychokinetic push threw her in a random direction—luckily away from Sun Geon. She slammed into an elven guard and the circle turned inward at once, bows raised toward Sun Geon. With a stomp of his foot, Sun Geon brought them all down with an invisible attack. Only Leopold, who’d been shielded with a barrier spell, was pushed away out of the circle of chitinous corpses.

Sun Geon locked eyes with Willow and smiled.

The reckoning had come.