BECMI Chapter 144 – Cold Relief

It was a cold and pale late winter day, just another day in the chill northern winter before the ice broke and spring came.

Men and Beast-folk screamed war cries and death rattles. Bows twanged. Steel skirled and clanged and clashed. Blood of crimson and yellow-green washed the white snows with dark stains. Blows crashed upon stone and wood.

There was no chance of overheating from combat, so it was a fine day to fight, the starving Beast-folk coming streaming down from the mountain to attack the city of Klonnarg, burning and looting all the homes in their way. There was no way the caves could have held such numbers… unless the caves went very, very deep indeed.

The words of King Antius of Darkmoor were proving true.

The secondary attack after the main horde rushed the east walls and most of the city’s strength was committed to stopping it was very unwelcome, but there was nothing for it but for Skrotti Halfhand to leave the main fight in the hand of his lieutenants and race over to add his Axe to the fighting.

The Axe that, in the end, King Antius had left with him for daring to surrender.

The appearance of a twenty-foot black Skull over the besieged walls of Klornnarg was certainly the herald of the end for the city, Skrotti Halfhand grimacing as it materialized. The shamans of the mutant creatures all dabbled in dark magicks and foul witchery, although he’d seen no undead among them. He assumed it was because the dead had been eaten by their own to sustain them.

The abomination was girt all over in black flowers, like some macabre funeral offering, the thorned vines upon it winding into and out of its eyes, mouth, and nose cavities, writhing and twisting as if alive.

The cries of shocked horror rose all around him as the thin line on the far side of the city walls, barely enough men left to fend off the Beast-folk who’d come raging down from the mountains manning it, clearly showed that his clan thought it was the end.

Then he blinked once, for the Beast-folk in all their multi-colored, multi-sized, hideously mutated and crazily different forms, were also pointing at the Skull and screaming in terror.

That… shouldn’t be right? He could tell they were terrified simply by the way their captured or crude weapons fell from their hands, as if they knew they were about to die.

Then the great Skull tilted down, and vomited out death.

It was a stream of screaming skulls riding deadly thorns of blackness, girt all in flames of greenish-yellow that seemed to match the blood of the Beast-folk below. The stream of them played across the lines assaulting the walls of his city, crude ladders and poles and simply taller creatures hurling their small brethren up and over trying to get up them, to pound the western gates open threatening to take the city from behind while the main force occupied the primary fight to the east.

Skrotti had thought they were going to die. Then he watched the Skulls trailing flames black and Beast-folk blood-hue play across the raiding mutants below, blow through them, and corpses immediately flare with those dual flames and collapse, disintegrating into black dust and mist tinged with odd whiteness. Coils and tendrils followed the screaming skulls racing in all directions, seeking out Beast-folk folk with unerring precision, driving through them. Even the largest of them dropped with holes burned right through them, flesh and bone eaten away even as they fell.

In mere seconds, there was no more assault on the western walls, because the attacking Beast-folk were all corpses on the ground, Burning down to dust or less and coating the ground with dangerously liquid black mists.

That’s when he saw her, floating out about a hundred yards off the wall in mid-air. He saw the flash of ruby eyes even at this distance, silken black hair swirling around her as if alive, her black and scarlet attire rippling around her like blood and night together, held up motionless in the sky by spread wings that seemed to be looking onto a starry sky filled with ghostly pale moons and bloody weeping suns.

The Lady Edge was here. The elfin spellcaster who had exterminated the Khirifi, hunted them down like dogs and wiped them from existence for their sins against the living and the dead.

Here.

He felt the eye contact across the distance, and it was no lie, Skrotti Halfhand’s blood went colder than it had since his first forced fight against a hungry polar bear when he was just a boy, the fight that had cost him two fingers on his hand and earned him his epithet.

She gestured with the Staff in her lace-gloved hand, the tip of it gleaming like a bloody-eyed black star in the sunlight, and what looked to be a trio of long, winding thorned vines erupted from the tip of the thing, trailing that same black and Beastial-blood fire. Like a living thorn vine woven of silken black dreams and barbed death, coils of living shadow and that inhuman blood flashed in all directions, taking out the Beastial stragglers who had survived the main bombardment as they lashed out instantly into and through one hapless mutant and into the next.

The attack on this side of Klonnarg was utterly obliterated.

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The sound of explosions came from the other side of the city, lower towards the water. Turning around, he saw dozens of erupt among the dark colors of the enemy, flashes of silver from magical Weapons and enchanted arrows finding homes, and the whole flank of the attacking enemy was basically obliterated in seconds.

A great winged black and crimson demonic Bat plummeted out of nowhere, and the massive Earth Drake that had just smashed its stony head through the reinforced doors, of the main gates, tearing them open for the screaming horde beyond to enter, was impaled by a lance that had to be at least thirty feet long. The massive Bat slammed the drake to the earth with the Lance impaling it right through, reached down around its neck with his dewclaws, and tore the drake’s scaled throat open in a massive spray of crimson.

The onrushing horde of Beast-folk naturally faltered in their howling charge into the city.

The cloud-streaked Blue dragon came out of nowhere, opened jaws that looked like they’d been chased with ice or snow, and raked the Beastials with living lightning through the thickest part of their lines, chewing through dozens of them at the exact moment they thought they had victory delivered to them.

The demonic Bat turned around, and Screamed at the heart of the press.

Skrotti heard the shriek all the way over here, everyone and everything clasping their ears as it cut into them.

The Beast-folk in front of the Bat? They were hurled right off their feet, bones breaking, flesh splitting, eyes liquefying, and blood spraying as the sound shredded the whole attacking vanguard at once. Hundreds of them died, and Skrotti Halfhand knew the attacking force over there was done for, as well. The flashes of fire and silver coming from the flank were advancing with appalling speed, and the fights on the walls there were resolving hastily as the Beast-folk realized what was happening.

Some tried to flee, and streaks of silver followed them with uncanny speed and accuracy, dropping them as they tried to run, even as the advance of the attackers continued without pause.

There didn’t seem to be more than a hundred of them, but it was enough to utterly crush what had to have been over three thousand Beast-folk as he watched. Fiery blasts, the light of magical Weapons and Arrows, and strobes of brilliant hot light flashed and clove, and the dark colors of the raiders fell and died.

“We are not rescuing you.”

Hackles rose on his neck, and Skrotti turned slightly, finding the elfin now floating next to and above him, her Wings spread wide and holding her aloft effortlessly without beating, watching the scene on the other side of Klonnarg without emotion.

“We are killing them, that is what we are here for.” She tilted her head just enough for the ruby and black eyes in her snow-white pale face to meet his. “I suggest greatly that you do not attack my people or seek to make trouble with them, or hostilities might well continue. Given the state of your city, I do not think you can afford what would happen if old grudges were released upon you at this time.”

Skrotti could only nod back to her and watch as she glided forward, her Wings not beating. She made a straight line towards where the great Bat had leapt into the air again, pulling its massive Lance out of the drake’s corpse as it did so, and was swooping down to the clustered and terrified center of the remaining Beast-folk attackers.

The thing which unnerved him the most? The elfin’s breath did not fog in the cold air...

he thought, rather surprising himself, watching and wincing as the Bat opened his jaws and Shrieked again. Skrotti grit his teeth at the distant, ear-tearing sound, and saw multiple heads explode from the force of the scream, even as he hastily leapt from the walls here and raced for the east side of the city as fast as he could, praying to Grimr that nobody got stupid and threw a spear or launched an arrow at those doing the killing.

He didn’t think that would happen, but as she’d said, those who were cheering might think those without were their allies, and that certainly wasn’t the case, either!…

The battle was done. He went out to them alone, Axe in hand, because they weren’t friends.

They had looted little, because there wasn’t much to loot. If he had the right of it, the corpse of the earth drake that had served as a siege engine was the most valuable thing the mutants possessed. One of the fair-haired elves had turned it into a paper Scroll with their faerie arts and simply walked away, giving the clansmen there a look that showed that he wouldn’t mind doing the same to them… but that was not why they were there.

That elf was covered in gore from head to toe, everywhere except his golden hair, which gleamed as fresh and clean as if just washed and combed. Skrotti had seen him dancing through a dozen Beastials without slowing, hewing through necks, opening bellies, slitting throats, impaling hearts, flowing from one kill to the next with impossible speed and savagery. A whole troop of the elves had followed him, moving like dancers through an ungainly horde which fell down and apart around them, as if unable to bear the weight of their own clumsiness.

The towering warlord of the Beast-folk had led the remnants of his elite brutal guards at the elves, all of them armed with stolen axes or spiked clubs the size of tree trunks, crude mail ripped apart and patchworked together upon them, even trying to use shields.

It wasn’t the elves who came howling to rip them apart, it was the humans.

The elves parted around the rush of the charging Beastials like water, dancing beyond their reach, and the wedge of glowing Spears had crashed into the towering brutes and stopped them in their tracks. Massive bodies weighing three and four times that of a man kicked and danced, impaled on the ends of unmoving Spears… and then a single short hyn and a lightly clad man with a ridiculously thin sword had scampered right over their shoulders, up to that line of impaled bodies twisting and grimacing for life, and zipped down the length of it, opening throats with incredible precision and cold efficiency as the spearmen forming their stepping-stones held grimly on.

No man of the North would tolerate being trod under the heels of others, but the spearmen just grinned and stayed steady while the impaled brutes just died all the faster.

On the flank, the last of the main horde had crashed upon a line of dwarves and gotten nowhere, while the archers behind the Stout Folk cut them apart with point-blank shots, popping those mutants in mid-leap who were clambering over their fellows. Dwarven Axes hewed and hacked with grim speed and purpose, wading forward through the dead, over the dead, their shields a moving wall the mutants could not get past, tromping over the freshly slain with grim purpose and layers of carnage.

He had never seen dwarves working so well with others, and his blood ran cold to consider trying to break that thin line that was defying the Beast-folk so well…