The sun fully set. Mages anointed the tips of the archers’ arrows, who’d then aim high above Aldren’s walls. The released arrows disintegrated in the air, and pale light rained down onto the dirt. The black battlefield became monochrome, a massive expanse of white surfaces and black shadow. The soldiers could now see their enemy.

In the pale light, skulls looked bleached and their empty sockets like portals into the void. The soldiers saw rotted flesh adorned with the crest of the two headed deer at their pauldrons. The Aldren symbol. Like insects the limbs of ragged corpses were sprawled low to the ground. They moved like cockroaches. Aldren’s own crawled towards them from beyond the walls. Each undead left a trail of fog in its wake. What little fertile earth remained after the torching finally succumbed to the trampling of the restless.

“Don’t overlap fields of fire!” The captains would shout above the rising panic in their troops. “That’s what they want! To waste our ammo on fodder!”

The young men loaded explosives into trebuchets. Archers loaded arrows onto nock. The helepolises spat munitions close and far, with heavy crossbows on the lower decks to catapults at the top of the tower.

Percival watched the first defense unfold through his farglass. He watched numerous arrows embed into the bodies rushing at their walls. One in particular resembled a porcupine, shambling still towards the base of a helepolis, until a large man with an axe separated the corpse’s head from its neck. Finally the body collapsed, reduced to a twitching, headless thing.

He switched lenses with a flick of a finger. The view port magnified distance. He looked deep into the horizon where the pale light barely touched. There were far, far more on the way. So it was true; the defense lines behind the first were not obsolete. Percival glanced to his side to the stuttered whispers of the young woman in robes. Her hands were cupped around a faint ember, flashing in the dark. She had been trying to maintain it for the past few minutes.

“Hey,” Percival said gently. The woman’s hood flicked towards him. He couldn’t see her face. “Stay with us and you’ll be safe.”

Percival heard a deep breath being taken and saw the hood nod. Moments later the ember sustained itself, and the woman held it in a claw grip, ready to cast. Percival smiled. He resisted scratching his neck.

Blinding light.

Percival recoiled along with many of the soldiers and mages at the second line. One of the helepolises had been reduced to a tower of billowing flame. Shards of wood and melted steel traced graceful arcs down to the ground. He brought the farglass to his eyes. The view trembled in his slick grip.

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There, in the distance, a moving platform. Its legs were human legs. Hundreds of them. Frayed and rotted, but moving. Atop the platform was a throne. Standing in front of the throne was a thin figure clad in black armor, with a cape that flowed down to the floor and trailed into mist.

“He’s here personally,” Percival said. He had been feeling hot in his armor. Now bumps grew along his skin as though he had been awoken in the dead of winter. “He’s come to finish us off.”

A red star suddenly neighbored the pale ones in the sky: the retreat order. The helepolises began emptying. Soldiers were running back.

Whispers were already travelling.

“They’re falling back already?”

“It’s too soon.”

“The first line just started!”

Percival shouted, “It’s time for us to do our jobs!” That silenced the murmuring. Caster energies buzzed. Swords were raised, then imbued with fire from the mages. Percival brought his own two-handed sword to bear, a claidheamh-mòr he had won from a decade-ago campaign in the Heldrasi Peaks. The edges were eternally chilled with creeping frost. Living or dead, ice abhorred anything that moved.

The second line soldiers parted to allow the retreating men through. Mostly spearmen and helepolis operators. They would have a few minutes to rest and re-equip while the second defense performed their duties. Percival doubted they would hold much longer than the first. But there was no time to second guess.

The ground was trembling. Holes were punched through the capital’s walls and towering giants made of bones shambled through. Their shoulders sprouted the upper torsos of human skeletons like a flower bed, each armed with a bow and quiver of arrows. The giant itself wielded a massive scepter. In one swing, a house was eviscerated. They were followed by more of the crawling corpses.

Bones rubbed against joint, flesh groaned and cracked; these were the sounds of bodies in restless rigor. Like a moving slaughterhouse. His men were shifting in their positions. It was getting to them. Percival took a deep breath.

“Fire at will!” Percival’s voice pierced the unrest. His men replied with a holler.

Archers on the roofs with mirror bows launched three arrows at a time, two made of light flanking the original in the middle. Mages threw balls of fire. Crossbowmen fired explosive tipped bolts at the giants. The dimly lit sky was covered by thousands of tracers from projectiles.

Some of the enemy made it through the trial. Percival stood at the front with his men and relieved their limbs in wide strokes. The bodies he cleaved sometimes shattered into cold chunks. His hands were beginning to feel numb.

“Tolerate me a little while longer, my girl Friday.”

“Talking to your sword again, Lord Mason?” Captain Barathon quipped as he pulled his own sword from an undead’s chest. It twitched, sputtering puffs of black fog, then finally stopped dead.

“I’ll have your tongue, Captain,” Percival said. “Doubt that’ll-” He thrust his sword into an undead, keeping its flailing arms well away. “-matter since it hasn’t seen action in years anyways.” Frost encased the damned creature soon enough. It fell fully dead.

“If only you had a wife to disappoint,” Barathon said. “We’d both be less bored.”

The enemy wasn’t slowing. The bodies were piling up. The black fog was growing denser. Percival and Barathon laughed. The soldiers who overheard laughed. And the shadows cast by the bone giants continued to lengthen towards them.