mmat

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Off in the vast wooded hinterlands, alone and surrounded only by beams of moonlight and deep shadow, Avius felt the latest of many icy notes thrum within his soul. The aspects' song of which it formed the terrible crescendo could now never be ignored. The cinder druid had expected to hear new things, indeed he had been told such. Nevertheless, this veritable rolling chain of death, perceived raw and constantly in his bad luck, was hard to endure. Platitudes crossed Avius' lips of the aspects and stalwartness, but at length he slumped into his own crossed legs and he sobbed, unknown to all but the trees. Whether that was for the mentor and friend he had lost, or for his own internal suffering, who could say?

Casting an icy gaze onto his comrade Eir'thall's denouncement, Avius let out a kind of tired sigh which had become typical of him. He briefly glanced aside to the populated hearth of Amaethea, but then deigned to continue reading, although reluctantly. Line through line, the firebird became ever more conflicted by what he saw. Vulen had deserved what he got, but Laetranis, however cordially Avius viewed the Tahorran, ought to have burned in the inferno he initiated, like a warrior. Figuratively, of course. Still, turning on a friend sat badly with him, a fact made all too clear by the sour look which sat on his face. And with that, Avius climbed to Amaethea's highest place, where he once again became brother cinder. Things were so much simpler that way.

Ambience if you want it idk Brother Cinder he was indeed. It was a fact which was, to Avius Csarathaire’s all-but unmoveable soul, unbelievable. A valah’s lifetime of waiting, postponing, procrastinating. The Elven warrior, and warrior he had always solely been and thought he would ever be, found himself contemplating the fraternal moniker keenly in his own mind. Uncannily, a false thought burst forth that he and this Brother Cinder were not one and the same. The amateur weaver of nature - the greenhorn Brother Cinder was an interloper, set solely on its nefarious task to dethrone and drag down the mighty phoenix of Csarathaire, greatest among warriors and highest swordsmen of all the mali’ame, as well as all the peoples beyond. Brother Cinder - that very same phoenix, felt a pang of shame at the boundless arrogance of his fleeting thought. So what, even, if it were true? A centuries’ worth of honing his skill, training the reactions and drilling ones endurance, he had done it all and more besides. Still, when the hour of trial came and every moment of that long-accumulated lethality was most required, Avius Csarathaire had singularly failed. The shadow of an old, but familiar anguish made its way back onto his face as a sad consideration swept unlooked for through his mind, with the destructiveness of a hurricane. His lioness, the mother of his only son, had died. She had actually died, and would’ve been lost to him forever if not for some miracle, a miracle of pity to him as he wrongly judged it on the days of guilt. The warrior’s mind set to upheaval by such evil thoughts, Avius Csarathaire, sat cross-legged in the uttermost centre of a stone circle, opened his tired, icy eyes. He nonchalantly blinked away a solitary tear and scowled. Focusing on the voices and discarding all distraction was not going well. As though paranoid, he looked around the empty stone circle and let out a sigh. Then shutting his eyes anew, the ‘ame recalled how he had been instructed by his mentor: breathe, four seconds. As he had when the elder had been teaching him directly, Avius shut his eyes and slowly drew in a breath of the cool, high-up air. One. Two. Three. Four. Doing his level best to drown out every meaningless aside that wasn’t his breathing or the ever-present, rancorous song of nature, Avius gave forth a measured, hushed exhale of the refreshing breath he’d just drawn in. One. Two. Three. Four. Again and again he breathed like so, repeated ably over the course of ten minutes, half an hour, an hour, two, more still, each time allowing himself to, against long-held instinct of life and death, immerse and drown himself in the perpetual song of tree, plant, bird and beast that now permeated his every living thought, and that of all druii. There was some inherent companionship in that, Avius thought, and it made him glad. It was at that moment, with struggle and vast concentration, Brother Cinder’s eyes ignited as a dull red fire. Scattered wisps of the same dry-blood icolour danced fleetingly around the upper part of his form, weak and barely formed. With eyes focused on naught but a single rose which stood immediately in front of his crossed legs, Avius held an open hand out and perceived, as though resting a palm on the beating heart of another sentient being, the life of the flower. But when barely a single second had passed, and perhaps not even that, this most unprecedented of moments in the life of Brother Cinder came to a disappointing end. His muscles enfeebled, sweat flowing down the bridge of his nose from wet hair and vision growing ever more faint, Avius slumped onto his back and stared in exhaustion at the blue sky. He felt dejected and weak. After all, it was just the first step.

The following piece was discovered, faded and worn, amid the personal effects and stores of Khaine Csarathiare after the latter’s death, and was then passed onto his son Avius. It details an origin tale for the Csarathaire seed and is one of only a few works to survive into the Second Age. If the events alluded to within actually occurred, the piece was almost certainly written in the later fifteenth or sixteenth centuries of the First Age, before Khaine came to Axios. Amid a river of blood, and an ocean of tears. Amid an empire’s folly, its cruelty and its cheers. Malin’s children unnumbered suffered, wept and died. The end of all things, and the young who cried. But not all the Mali knelt, content with their fate The fire-hearted took up steel, and fought back in their hate. As the vindictiveness of war is so wont to do All this valour did was make the suffering more true. And so in their despair, the warriors made a choice To neither fight where they stood, nor give sound to their voice In anguish they went as one, passing from the land. Where the warriors would go was left to fate’s hand. Through forest, across plain and by mountain pass they fled Until the path before them afflicted the heart with dread. The depth of the snows and the malice of the ice, Failed to daunt the exiles through even its cruel device. But by hunger, by rock, by frost or by fall, These wretched Mali met their end, as it seemed, one and all. As if lured to their sorrow like a moth to the flame Did the fell phoenix come and complete this dark game. Desperate and afraid, the doomed exiles made a plea For the winged fire to save them, and in return to take the knee. Willing slaves were thus marked with a firebird on the chest In its dark service the warriors slew, enslaved and oppressed. So it was that they became as the valah they abhorred But the fires of revolt stirred and we took up the sword Our own kin we killed to free them from the beast In malice and evil, the being saw only its feast. It burned and seared, scorched and consumed Until the aspects came and sealed its black tomb.

A newly attuned brother cinder stood alone atop Amaethea's high stone circle and peered at the fae-clouded sky above. With a clenched fist and a readied mind he prepared himself, whispering a prayer to the aspects.

States Avius.

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"This has nothing to do with flame!" Flame mascot Avius exclaims in faux outrage, after barely skimming the text.

"These quivering High ones do so conveniently time their impotent threats to hide behind and among the steel of others." Avius stated with a mixed sense of disgust and and contempt.

"This one has lived far too long." remarked Avius.

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1.9 dueling is fine enough I guess, but 1.9 group pvp is absolutely the most boring thing in the history of the universe. 1.8 is way better.

There was nothing overly special about the sword Eldarian. The metal from which it was forged possessed neither exotic nor otherworldly power, aside from the fact that it was of very great quality. The subtly curved weapon had never been blessed by a deity or cursed by foul magicks to enhance its bloody function towards whatever end. The only notable things about Eldarian were that it had been forged in higher days during the Dominion of Malin, and that it was wielded by one of the greatest Elven warriors of the age. So believed Eldarian’s master Avius Csarathaire, anyway. The ‘ame didn’t consider that to be an arrogant thought. Through a century of focused honing, he had slain valah, uruk, dwed and even some of his more estranged Mali kindred. Incomprehensible horrors crawling forth from the depths of the void, overreaching sorcerers and nightmare inferi invaders alike had also tasted the old weapon’s deadly edge during especially evil times, together with a score of other assorted beasts and creatures. A thought stung Avius with a hint of proud irritation as the warrior stood atop the stone-adorned mount, sunrays bathing the peak in a new days' light. He still hadn’t slain a dragon. It was valah and Xannite nonsense to laud the slaying of a dragon above all other things, and to deprive the world of such a magnificent, powerful creature was, to Avius, a fearsome shame despite the danger they caused. He actually quite liked dragons, all things considered. Still, the thought of standing atop the corpse of such a titanic winged firebreather, sword through its eye in glorious victory, was an alluring one to say the least. Maybe someday the opportunity would come. Avius lifted Eldarian in one hand in the direction of the shimmering light of the sun, an action which made the weapon appear as though it had divinity inside it, even if that wasn’t true. It was beautiful. Then, with the hand of his tattooed right arm wrapped around the hilt, the ‘ame swordsman gracefully slashed the air from upper right to lower left, eliciting a satisfying whir as nothingness tore before cold steel. The sword felt as good as it did every day, not too heavy, not too light. Time to begin. ...Step. Thrust. Pivot. Guard. Wait… Wait. Go. Parry. Step. Slash. Slash. Avius finally came to rest after his second consecutive lashing strike, panting lightly with the strain of the victory’s stroke’s exertion. Purposefully straightening his back to stand at his full height, Avius took a tighter hold of Eldarian’s hilt and then took a minute to peer around at the sentinels all around him. Seven stone pillars of unknown origin and unknown purpose ringed the Wood Elven warrior’s makeshift arena at the mountain’s summit. It struck him that they were judges of a sort, surrounding him on all sides, a silent council of old masters analysing and critiquing his every darting thrust and dashing tear. Avius let out a silent snort at the anthropomorphic consideration. The stones were just stones. Still, he couldn’t help but wonder about them, and many of the other ruins in this new, barely explored domain. Although far from a scholar or historian in both competency and interest, Avius had, for apparently little reason, found himself more and more fascinated by his race’s beginnings as of late. The warrior readied his long, falchion-like weapon once more, both hands on the hilt, blade pointing forwards. Guard. Pace. Thrust into slash. Withdraw. Guard. Who raised these stones? Avius considered the unanswerable question mid-flurry, and suddenly felt very out of place. For all he knew, this ring of uplifted rock could’ve been a hallowed site, perhaps one of ritual significance to the worshippers of his own gods. Was the warrior engendering their fury by using it as a mere training ground? Avius thought it unlikely. Slash. Slash. Slash. Pommel strike. To the contrary, Cernunnos was a lord of hunters and warriors alike. To increase one’s potency in the Horned Lord’s sacred places was reverence in itself, especially if that prowess was to be used in his service, that of his more caring counterpart and the wider balance. The thought made him train all the harder. Each slash was keener, even than usual, each thrust displaying greater swiftness… Slash. Thrust. Thrust. Parry. Thrust. And it was done. Without a moment of further ceremony, Avius Csarathaire threaded Eldarian back into its resting place at his side and made his way down the mountainside. All that day, the ‘ame’s mind continued returning to the stone circle and the secrets it might hold. The obsession left him feeling unsatisfied, like there was something deeper he was missing. Soon, things would change. Soon, he would be connected to his aspects in a more direct way, and he could begin delving into the secrets of the past.

South Almaris | ~2800YA Why did you abandon us? The question, screamed silently without voice, was saturated with unshed tears, tears which, if they had been shed, would’ve displayed profound anguish to any who might’ve bore witness. Demoralisation too, and insecurity also. That could not be, not now. Did even I prove unworthy? Why did you not tell me? Unanswered, phantom questions, never to be satisfied. Suddenly, provoked by a melodic, trance breaking bird call on her left shoulder, the emerald green eyes of Irrin Sirame, closed in a momentary bout of self-pitying sadness, slid open once more in stoic tranquility. The slender, caramel-skinned Elf purposefully drew in a tepid breath of air as she surmounted the forested hillside, a sudden gust of unheralded wind prompting the bound fabric covering her form to flap for a brief moment. A clasped, elegant hand subtly gripped tighter the short, simple, but well fashioned spear in its grip, the she-elf keen not to lose her weapon as she cast her gaze upon what was, in reality, a rather small but picturesque lake. If what the rumours had said about this place were true, however, and a dark remnant of truly ancient evil had its dominion in this seemingly idyllic place, she would need this most reliable of tools, crafted in an age long gone. Still, Irrin was confident, but not so confident that she would lead her young people into such a malevolent nest of old terrors. It was to be her task alone. She was confident in the way a lion is confident that it can kill a foundling gazelle. It wasn’t arrogance, nor folly, just factual lethality, the degree of killing edge that only a thousand and more years of hard experience and constant practice could bestow. The kind of unrequited self-assurance derived only from the hardest of work, the most tumultuous of lives and unfavourable of beginnings. Irrin Sirame, spear in one hand, tenderly cast her unlooked for but not unwelcome avian companion back into the safety of the densely needled pines from whence it had come with the other. With that and another graceful breath besides, she girded herself to face a nightmare from a time that broke the world. Silently scanning the forest-enricled lake and its environs from a sheaf of long grass and shrubbery in the shadow of a small tree, Irrin narrowed a pair of suspicious eyes. Just a simple, quaint expanse of water feeding a gently rushing waterfall on the far side, somewhere to the Elven predator’s right. Exhaling a breath that could’ve been mistaken as a restless sigh, she thrust her spear into the earth as makeshift storage and then sat cross-legged, retrieving a beautifully carved composite bow from her back. She rested the marvelous work of woodcarving in her lap, ready to grasp at any time, and then waited. No evil of the old time could resist cowering in the shadows forever. It would try to belch itself out eventually. Short minutes went by first, followed by long hours. The tired sun dipped behind the wind-stricken trees and dark fell, plunging Irrin into still, soundless darkness penetrated only by the occasional chirping of a lakeside cricket or two. Time had little impact on the millennia-old being sat in open-eyed meditation among the inconspicuous shrubs, and so it seemed like no time at all had passed when the hitherto undisturbed waters at the lake’s centre, brightened by lunar luminescence, began roiling. Irrin’s eyes, trained with iron discipline for hours upon the apparently harmless lake, focused in an undisturbed instant. In predatory instinct, the Elfess took up her bow by the grip, reached over her shoulder and slowly threaded a serrated arrow from the quiver on her back. Nock. The arrow, held between index and middle finger, made its way almost without the owner’s thinking to the precisely correct spot between string and limbs. Irrin was too busy keeping an eye on the fleshy, barely lit tentacle-hand fusion floating ominously over to the shore on her side of the water, though it wasn’t too close. Draw. Irrin uncrossed her legs, braced with one bent knee and then pulled the bowstring back with a slight groaning of tension-strained string. The horror - an otherworldly slave of the unspeakable destroyer and remnant of the war for creation, as Irrin understood it to be, dragged its malignant, surprisingly wiry form fully onto the shore, dripping and wrapped in lake-weeds. Suddenly, all life went silent, fled from the unnatural, profane creation. It wasn’t meant to be a water-dweller, that much was for sure, but half-made stigmata had augmented the demon in the millennia since its breaching of the world. Brutal arms were mixed with squid-imitating tentacles. Most gruesomely, its ‘eyes’ had been scoured from its face, leaving only a slab-like, noseless mass interrupted only by a razor-sharp, fly-trap-toothed mouth possessing three predatory tongues. Loose. Irrin Sirame unleashed her first arrow. Without waiting to see the shot land, as she knew it would, Irrin immediately ripped her spear from the earth and stood tall once more, coolly weaving her way through the undergrowth and around friendly heartwoods. The she-elf was no longer present when the amphibious demonic monster, its long, thin tentacle-limb torn half off by the brilliantly aimed shot, bellowed forth a pained, gurgled slurry of bile and lakewater. Perceiving the direction from which the arrow had come, its slablike, water-rotted visage turned toward the Elf’s initial hiding place, and then loomed towards it. Grinning internally from her new position, Irrin impaled the spear once more and replaced it with a straight, thin stick, scavenged from the ground. Pulling back her ultimately small, but still leanly muscled arm, she javelined the stick past the demon’s pitiful excuse for a head, where it audibly struck the trunk of a thicker tree just further on from the initial patch of grass. The blind malevolence followed in idiotic ignorance, sensing a path toward its mysterious prey but in fact moving further away. Not so clever. Irrin considered with keen, scornful focus, before checking her own arrogance. It has survived, hunted, for longer than I have lived.. With that hubris-banishing thought, the woman prepared her bow once more. Nock. Draw. Her ooze-exuding foe prowled slowly, the unharmed tentacle arm coiling its way around one of the trees. Loose. A second arrow trod its deadly path through the night air before burying itself in the thick, carapace-like plating on the being’s left leg. It roared once more, this time more in anger than agony, turned in Irrin’s direction with incredible swiftness and uncurled its tendril from the tree. Irrin narrowed her verdant eyes once more and gritted her teeth. Armoured flesh. With just enough time to replace her bow with the glaive-bladed spear, which she yanked from the ground and bore with practiced efficiency, the creature of nightmare charged, its feigned reactions far swifter than when it reacted to the first arrow. Wily thing. Irrin thought, suddenly grateful for the melee weapon she’d been so hesitantly convinced to bring. Amid the fatherly trees and the fabulous moonbeams permitted to reach the wooded floor by their beneficence, a great Elf of elder days, trained by the first one himself, clashed with a beast from a time when the sky turned into black flame and the earth screamed in torment. Irrin kept that in her mind. How many of her people had this thing killed, maimed or devoured during that great war? Had it been something more in ages past, something of great intelligence devolved over the centuries? A stubby, half-severed tentacle lashing in Irrin’s direction caused her to banish the questions. Spear in hand, the warrior sprang back to dodge the malformed limb, which left a small, shaped crater in the earth. She backed up against the trunk of a tree. Perfect. Propelling her slim form onward, with the tree’s help, in an explosion of movement, Irrin skipped into range, evaded another tentacle whip and then jabbed once, twice, three times into the dark beast’s repugnant head. The roar of fury-tinted agony was more of a bestial howl this time, a sound which made its Elven tormentor smell blood, figuratively and literally. Its flat face was leaking the odourous filth, and Irrin found herself less concerned for her own safety and more for the pitiable land onto which it was bleeding. Before the demon could get another attempt off, the spear-bearing paragon quietened her breath, softened her tread and quietly dashed behind a nearby tree, unseen and unsensed. Focus. It’s slow, injured now too.. If I do that again though, it’ll react more swiftly. A thought quickly came to her once more, prompting the woman to crouch and grasp a handful of forest floor debris - chunks of bark, a few rocks and short, damp sticks. Leaning to the left, Irrin tossed the grapeshot of apparently useless refuse around the tree, their din prompting the resurgent, devolved creature to turn. It’s vulnerable. Peeling then to the other side, Irrin swiftly ghosted across the loamy earth with barely a sound. The despoiling thing only realised when it was too late. She leapt forth fleet of foot. using one of its stigmata growths as a foothold to jump once more. The spear’s airborne owner drew back to gain momentum and then thrust forth with deadly precision “Cernunnos!” came a passionate, but still measured exultation, the steel of Irrin’s spear cannoning straight into the weakened demon’s razored ‘mouth’ and out the back of its head. One more diminished gurgle and the things collapsed backward with a thud. The horror was dead before it landed. Irrin, whose spear, anchored through its head had kept her steady during its fall, yanked the weapon free and then dismounted it, watching as the form and corruption alike dissolved into nothingness. Back into the darkness with you. Through the fading darkness of a new dawn, the triumphant Elf strode down the forested hillside and into the valley below, where she had left the vanguard of her exiled people behind. Approaching the area in which she knew them to be residing, Irrin was not surprised to see them stood waiting for her, in their nervous dozens and hundreds. Audible relief overtook that the moment she was seen, and they came to her in aid that she didn’t need. “Let us move onto the lake. It requires healing, and will make a good home in turn, for the time being. Do not quail, the abomination is gone.”

im in

Avius sighed. It was all so tiresome, after all.

⏐REASONS TO HATE⏐ Avius Csarathaire, although his name was really Adessius unbeknownst to the vast majority of his comrades and companions, strode up the path from Amaethea’s great Orocarnë gate with more than a few beads of sweat making their leisurely way down his forehead. The warrior, thoroughly decked out with a recently-sheathed sword known reverently as ‘Eldarian’ sat still at his waist, expelled the moisture from his form with a brief, backhand stroke. To deal with the source of the distasteful bodily fluid before coming into contact with any others, he threaded a firm handful of fingers through the damp, flowing, but still mostly controlled head of dull brown atop his head, ringing it dry. That mane really ought to be trimmed soon, Avius considered with the irate warrior’s customary hint of irritation. So much more convenient for engaging in fluid swordplay. Fighting in general, really. Slowly approaching the Amaethean central hearth, the phoenix-dawbed Elf performed his usual ritual of stalking around the periphery first, appearing like some kind of grumpy big cat. He did it to establish who exactly was there before committing to a seat, and thereby a conversation. Everyone else? Those idiots just thought it was ‘creepy’, in their own words. Some familiar faces milled about, speaking and relaxing; a certain friendly, redheaded former ‘thill speaking to the ‘bear’ with whom he’d fallen in love. Another, one of his ‘ame comrades who just wouldn’t stop bitching about how his damned eye was destroyed, eagerly preached to one of his seed-kin, one whom Avius reviled utterly. Such feelings were far from rare, admittedly. Even so, their respective presences alone were enough to justify sitting down for a while to recover. Others inhabited the area as well though, others that he wasn’t so fond of. On the far side of the fire, engaged in idle mongrel chatter in its barbarous, mongrel tongue, was a grey Orc. Alone, weaponless and without any form of proper protection, the creature clearly presented no immediately threat whatsoever, not to him or any of his people. In a physical manner, at least. Despite that obvious fact, Avius felt the side of his mouth crumple into an expression of growing, but still barely discernible disdain. Narrowing eyes joined the Elf’s lips in their expression of fervent revulsion, and Avius felt the usual pot of latent, poisonous anger simmering within him. Providing the searing heat for this boiling process, which would inevitably end in violence, were lightning memories, personal and racial, fresh and old. For untold centuries, these malignant, verminous creatures had kidnapped, enslaved and killed his people without a seconds’ worth of hesitation. Honour, this Orcish race was meant to possess. Laughable. Never once had he been challenged to a ‘klomp’ by one of these barbarous dregs. He had, as a mark of immense restraint, always killed them by necessity, cutting the filthy monsters off of unarmed civilians who could not defend themselves, or swarming an ambushed, lone warrior with no chance of resisting overwhelming numbers. He hadn’t been able to stop them on some of those occasions, and it was those occasions that provided the most heat to his ever-blazing memorial fury. These beasts were not honourable, they were filth to a man. Existence would be a less agonising thing if they were all tossed mercilessly into the cold void. The nerve, then, that this mutt felt it could sit in the city of Malin’s descendants, with some of the same Mali that its kin had butchered. The sheer gall of it. Avius didn’t pull Eldarian, despite desperately wanting to. And then there was the valah, the human woman who had so often been speaking to the ever-softening blonde prince next to her. Did they really think everyone that blind? Anyway.. To their credit, the Wood Elf considered, at least the humans had the capability to create a civilisation, however backwards and poisonous it was in reality, however irreverent of the world around them. Unusually complimentary thoughts, but they disappeared with predictable alacrity. Thoughts came forth, overwhelming ones. The massacres of three centuries before had left a dreadful, permanent scar onto the consciousness of almost all Malin’s people, but particularly on his family. In an usually poetic flourish of thought, Avius considered how his somewhat vicious Csarathaire tree had grown due to being watered by the blood of his own people. In many ways, the near-unspeakable atrocities perpetrated by the Kaedrini White Rose order gave him birth, indirectly anyway. However, that great bloodletting was a long time ago, far before his birth. Avius Csarathaire had many other, more personal reasons to despise humanity. Despite what the others said, Irrinor in its best days was always the product of his youthful will, his and perhaps that of the long-gone Artimec. Conniving with the equally pernicious pale-ones, these short-lived wretches had waged a lacklustre war on the enclave he’d brought from nothing and eventually forced it to send him away. Eighteen years of exile, alone in the western mountains of Arcas, near two decades’ worth of time in which he’d festered and diminished, growing in his hatred of those who had done him and his people wrong. And what had he done, killed some meaningless human rat who was meant to possess some level of importance? Pitiful. Come to the door of Malin’s people armed and with ultimatum in hand, expect to accomplish only your own death. Still, that was done now. Suddenly, a pang of guilt smacked Avius in the face from a source wreathed in shadow. He thought of it, and then remembered the valah girl with whom he’d been close, how he’d stealthed his way dangerously close to the empire in order to see her. That was a long time ago now. He couldn’t even remember her name. It had been a long time ago, and she was a human, after all. They’d killed her, and he’d seethed for a long time, he remembered that. Despite utter revulsion at the crime he’d been willing but unable to commit against his own kind, that killing left a permanent scar across his soul. It joined all the others. Those lingering echos of feeling might've been the reason he was so lenient with the prince and his friend. Only a few seconds after Avius had started scanning those around the fire, he suddenly didn't feel like taking a seat anymore. He skulked away, finding less painful company in Eldarian. He trained alone with the familial weapon for another few hours longer, a waterfall's calming trickle in his ear the whole time. How he wished for a shorter memory, sometimes.

⏐ARLETH OF ILLAWYN⏐ “I really don’t want to fight. Thinking about it frightens me. But I love our beautiful towers, how the falling sun backlights them in the evening. I love ambling through a glade and looking aside to see some squirrel climbing spirally up a tree in pursuit of its mate. I love the feeling of my eyes drifting open in the morning after a wandering dream, and slowly realising that I still live, that I still live here, with my loving father, you, and my companions… I think of losing these things, shed a tear and realise that I must fight, or the murderous darkness will destroy it all. I must fight.” A gentle girl with an innocent soul, plunged unexpectedly into a nightmarish struggle which forces her to become something she was not born to be. It is a tale as old as time, and it was the tale of Arleth of Illawyn, an inspiring story which you may, at your leisure, believe to be only part historical, and even more part romantic myth. You may not believe it at all. It does not matter either way. The fearsome courage and goodheartedness of this girl of Elvenblood is infectious like the most virulent of plagues, a benevolent contagion which seeps into the heart of other daughters of Malin, as well as the hearts of his many sons also. Let it do the same to you also, for your life will be infinitely enriched by it, truth or fiction. Arleth was an irrelevant daughter originating from an all-but-irrelevant highborn dynasty within the Great Father Malin’s most ancient and greatest of Elven realms. The ‘irrelevance’ of this ‘Illawyn’ line, as high grandees and lofty magnates of the royal court would scornfully phrase it, was only political. These were dismissive verbal jabs to honour and prestige that did not affect the scions of Illawyn even a bit. Not only could they not care less about the barbed words of some influence-hungry grasper, but hardly any of them even desired to partake in the ever-lethal, ever-labyrinthine game of King Malin’s palace halls and backrooms to begin with. The barely noted family, notorious only for their unusual crimson hair, would stay ever faithful to their perfect monarch, always, but otherwise they would keep to their own quiet company, living well, but not too well, and living their idyllic life as it was meant to be lived. Carefree, warm-hearted and keen-eyed in observation of the world’s beauty, Arleth Illawyn sleepwalked the whole kingdom in her impassive irrelevance for close to a half century since the time of her unnoticed birth. She sleepwalked happily until, in her fifty-third cycle of the stars, a mere three years since the ceremonies of adulthood had confirmed her maturity, not to mention her eligibility, the news came, and the nightmares together with it. Arleth had been wandering absentmindedly across the expanse of High Tavule’s magnificently terraced Vycal trading quarter, half-full basket of fruits and other pleasantries in hand, when she heard the first dark whisper from across one of the thoroughfares. As the girl looked about, she considered how the entire area would seem from a robin’s view as though some great colossus had taken a step-pyramid, turned it upside down and then shoved it point-down into the ground before the structure vanished. Nature had then reclaimed the crater. But it hadn’t come into being like that, it needn’t have done. The market was a true masterwork of Elven nature-engineering, the practice of threading earth, trees, plants and all the products of the organic world with stone and other mortal-crafted things, to form a perfect symbiosis. Those prideful thoughts of her people’s brilliant artistry were drowned out instantly when Arleth heard a series of quietly whispered portents on the wind, coming from the crowds somewhere close by as she continued walking. “...Did you hear? There are monsters coming down from the north.” came the first scrap from somewhere Arleth could not designate. “...The shipments of fur have just.. stopped, something isn’t right, Thel.” entoned an indignant provincial trader to one of his Tavule-based commerce clade associates. “...I saw Valken’s lot rushing out of the city yesterday. The immortal himself was with them. Never witnessed anything like it. Whatever is going on, Syllan, it bodes ill for us.” spoke a brutish looking Elf who might’ve been a low captain of the royal army, or a wastral of the riverine harbour, the passing redhead could not tell. Having strolled into the populated, but still tolerably quiet agoran plazas that day with her customary cheer, Arleth of Illawyn departed for home long before she otherwise would have, the petit elflady’s basket still half empty. It was then, as the noble just-turned-adult passed with newfound trepidation through the ornate, vaguely intimidating archway between the Vycal and High Tavule’s main promenade, that she witnessed the beginning of the end. It was the advent of twilight not only on the grand, near-perfect civilisation she had been groomed to see as home, but the waning of her hard-protected innocence. It began with what Arleth thought was a quaking of the earth. Instead, the pointed ears of the crimson-headed woman discerned hooves, many, many sets of them in fact, on stone. She recognised the war-stags and armour of the warriors as soon as the first rider trotted past, composite bow slung across his waist. Her perceptive eyes could see that although the veteran warrior, wreathed in lavish but light-looking panoply, was making the best possible attempt at keeping his head aloft and proud for the quickly gathering crowd, he was verging dangerously close to failure. The bulky Valken outrider, for that is whom he clearly was even to the uneducated Illawyn wallflower, seemed by his faltering demeanor to be worn and tired, a sense only exaggerated by the poor creature on which he was mounted. Even it looked dejected, plodding along with a ponderous lack of speed or grace. Breaking discipline for the briefest of moments, the unknown mounted archer gazed down on Arleth, on her flowing red hair, feeble frame and half-empty basket. It was an obscured look that said, to her rumour-addled mind anyway, “I am sorry, for what you will have to see.” His compatriots passed after, rank by rank, some obviously bearing injuries to the arm, leg or head, more even than that covered in dried vitae. The crowd waited for the famously courageous Immortal to follow his brave riders into Tavule, first in and last out of danger as he always was. But the Eternal-king’s third great defender - Marethun Valkenyre, esteemed lord of the Valken outrider war-host and most formidable warrior in the entire world, as Arleth had been schooled, never returned. Not a single denizen of Tavule went unaffected by the events of that day, a day which Arleth had the distinct impression would be remembered for hundreds of years regardless of what happened next. She did, however, hope word of it hadn’t reached her family just yet, so a final long evening could be spent in blissful ignorance. But that vain hope disappeared from her mind with uncomfortable haste when the intentionally lethargic walk home she’d been overthinking her way through was interrupted by the jarring sight of a familiar leatherbound chest. She saw the familiar, slightly-toothed and slightly charming smile on the sweat-gleamed face upon craning her head up slightly a moment later, and then heard the even more familiar voice. “Lady-..” began young Thravian; distant relative and dynastic protector of the Illawyn, only to stop speaking a mere second after he’d begun. Whether that was because of the exhausted state the guardian was currently in due to such a diligent pursuit, or because he knew just how much Arleth reviled being called lady, she wasn’t sure. To his credit, he quickly adjusted. “Arleth.” he corrected, some disquiet in his tone. “You’re being asked to come home, but your father has instructed me not to force the issue if you say no.” Thravian’s explanation slowly seemed to crystallise into half-practiced formality the more he went on, but Arleth couldn’t help with grin just a little at the thought of the greenhorn guard trying his hardest to be a good protector. He was the best one so far, she knew that already, dutiful and yet not a complete bore, amiable enough that even she could speak to him without anxiety. Still, a bit of harmless goading wouldn’t go amiss, she considered, smirking internally with blistering cheekiness. “Before leaving, Thravian, I keenly remember telling father not to send you chasing after me again. Multiple times actually.” her voice meekly chided with customary gentleness, so that it was clear to the family retainer that he wasn’t really in any form of trouble. He seemed to get the jist, returning his charge’s mischievousness with a degree of his own. “He sent me anyway though, and I know you of all people wouldn’t make me walk back alone.” With a clearly exaggerated sigh, she tilted her head in the direction of the family’s residence, and was led off the shellshocked streets of Tavule. The unusual pair made their way to the Illawyn’s modest estate slowly, conversing about many things but crucially evading the real breaking news of the day, which still hadn’t really sunk in yet. Arleth found herself unsurprisingly hesitant to mention Triarch Marethun’s death, and the breaking of his outriders to Thravian, or speculate on exactly what had caused it. Although timidity was second nature to her at the best of times, she really did think evasion was best in this situation. Even to a dainty civilian like her, Marethun had been a vaunted monarch among warriors, the best of them, and he had never returned. If such a champion could be felled, any of the Elvenking’s martial servants could, and Arleth got the impression that Thravian was greatly burdened by that thought. She was right, of course, as she usually was with matters of the soul, and the young greenhorn was filled with gratitude. He didn’t want to think about what could’ve cut down a Triarch if he didn’t have to, and for now, thanks to Arleth’s knowing mercy, he wasn’t required to. After a long, distracting conversation about nothing in particular, the Elves reached the Illawyn estate on Tavule’s quiet frontier. It was always a grand sight: a series of individual, nature-forged tower structures residing in an ornate, verdant garden which Arleth had spent a good amount of her childhood exploring every last inch of. From time to time, she had quietly joked that if required, she could take a perfect inventory of every single grass-straw, flower petal, stone and regular inhabitant of the garden. It was a joke that never really went down well humour wise, but that got the point across well enough. Dad had been and still was an overprotective parent, and she knew the garden like the back of her hand because of it. When the door into the prime tower was finally opened and Thravian peeled away to rest off his trevails, Arleth found herself face to face with dear father. She smiled a shallow smile, leading parent and child to embrace in the mutually loving manner to which they had both become accustomed. “Rosepetal.” dynast Rathian Illawyn greeted, his voice an affection-tinged variant of his typically authoritative, patriarchal tone. He might’ve been overprotective, but the wiry Elven lord loved his only daughter to an incredible degree. For all the Illawyn’s apparent irrelevance, Arleth always thought her brilliant, fire-crowned father could take on all the conceited pricks marring their glorious Eternal king’s presence, but was just too intelligent to get involved in such nonsense. “Father-” she began shakily, still enjoying the paternal bulwark of a hug in which she found herself able to show fear without shame “-what is happening out there? Things aren’t as they should be, and I’m frightened. Thank you for sending Thray to get me.” And so after a fair quantity of persistent urging, supplemented by the occasional piece of lighthearted emotional blackmail, Arleth’s father told his curious daughter, with protective hesitance, exactly what he knew about the things coming down from the north. It wasn’t everything, but the influence of even a supposedly irrelevant dynastic chief such as Rathian Illawyn stretched far and wide, such was the renowned power of Malin’s royal domain. The knowledge clearly unnerved the patriarch, as became clear when he spoke of it. Armies of countless dead men, women and children, risen out of blighted earth by unspeakable sorceries and bearing murderous intent, were shambling down from the sparsely-traversed, ice-sheathed northern expanses. That was the meat of it, but Rathian spoke more quietly, eyes peering aside in conspiratorial nervousness as he went on. “I have been told of nefarious magus-covens walking among the dead things, enacting vicious rituals and summoning horrors through dark rifts ripped in thin air. Colossal half-skeletal titan-corpses of a race long forgotten by us, used as unliving siegeworks to rend walls into dust.” … There followed a deathly, echoing silence which made the comfortable surroundings feel cold and unwelcoming. It was motivated by a fusion of Arleth’s near disbelieving horror at the words coming from her father’s mouth, and the naive girl’s bewilderment that he was actually telling her. Why was he telling her? As though astutely divining the pertinent question swimming through his dear progeny’s tumultuous mind, dynast Rathian remarked with some sorrow “This, dear Rosepetal, is partly why I sent dutiful Thravian to bring you home to me. I have doted over you, perhaps too much-” the centuries’ old elder said, dipping his head to the side in contrition. “-so that you would be protected from this world’s venal side…” the man stopped, hesitantly to continue as though considering a decision that might affect an entire world. He did, eventually, continue after exhaling his reluctance in a solemn sigh. “This terror of which I have spoken, the warcourt believes it is coming for us as well. Our sovereign, great Malin-” Rathian entoned, closing his eyes in a brief display of sincere reverence “-has wisely decreed that all be prepared, that all be informed and not shrouded from the frightful truth.” The dynast nodded with magisterial dignity, likely in response to the pointed look of realisation suddenly coating Arleth’s face. He again divined the thought swirling through her head. “That is why the riders, half-dead and deprived of their brave Marethun, were permitted back into High Tavule, despite the terrible shadow their dire return cast over the city. Deceit is this foe’s sharpened sword, and betrayal its invisible dagger. We brace ourselves now on our own terms, rather than being forced to later.” To Arleth, who took a moment to disentangle her left arm from around her father’s back and use the freed index finger to maneuver a lock of red hair away from her right eye, it seemed as though her father had been reciting words he’d heard somewhere else, rather than ones drawn from the no doubt bottomless reservoirs of his own intellect. She could see the conflict in his stoic expression, and so did what she knew how to do. She gave her father a comforting, drawn out hug. Everything would be alright if she did that, it always was. The evil dreams began that night all throughout the world of the Elves, as if the breaking wave of doom infected the realm with a perverse sort of plague. The simple word ‘Nightmare’ didn’t do the sleeping visions justice. A ‘nightmare’ is unnerving, embarrassing sometimes, perhaps even terrifying in its own fleeting way, but ultimately easily forgotten and unintentional. In the opinion of everyone who experienced them, these new mental apparitions were deliberate, foreboding and tailored to ones own particular niche of terror, that one little secret in the back of a mind which set the hairs of ones neck on end. To Arleth, they took the form of soul-chilling screams, sounds only issued from mortal throats when death was being inflicted in a painful way. Sometimes they were distant, sometimes right next to her ear, sometimes both at once. But she could never see who the pained cacophony was coming from, for her vision was fixed onto the Illawyn gardens, and the dynasty’s towers aflame, backlit by a rising moon. All things considered, the redheaded Elven girl considered her own sleeping terrors to be quite mild, especially when compared to some truly shocking experiences reported by others. Some fortunates among the population of Tavule were spared the horrors, those strong of will such as the king and his Immortals foremost among them. But to Arleth’s surprise and unexpected sadness, Thravian was also utterly unaffected. She admired him for that strength and fortitude, but also felt herself disconnecting from him as the post-nightmares became the in topic of conversation everywhere. Everything in Malin’s dominion became slightly worse after that point, Arleth and Thravian agreed. Day by day, the affected were minutely more irritable, swifter to anger and easier to be provoked into violence. Commerce slowed, the markets emptied, melodic singing was no longer heard throughout the streets. It was just worse. But Arleth found herself considering the words of her father, who was also predictably unaffected, more seriously. The great king had been right. However terrible the unwaking plagues were, they would’ve been far worse if truth and openness had not been the order of the day, if the Elven people could not share the burden with one another. She found herself looking up to Malin, whom she had heretofore been totally ambivalent to, a great degree more. That was how the war against the shadow things began, and it was how it stayed for civilians like Arleth Illawyn. Mercifully, the nightmares in Tavule ceased almost as soon as the real fighting started, whichever malignant warlock had conjured them now being far too occupied desecrating the warriors of the living to waste its time terrifying their helpless kin at home. Weeks, months and then years went by like that, and the situation only became worse. Rumours spread that other realms had already fallen to the darkness and Malin alone remained standing among the great lords, a single bulwark against this sudden encirclement of night. That one wasn’t true but it circulated nonetheless, deepening fear and causing a feeling of claustrophobia within the crown territories even though the fighting was some distance away. Many thousand-strong armies that had departed Tavule returned months later, but they returned decimated and the soldiers forever affected by what they had seen. Like the dead Valkenyre Triarch, many never returned, annihilated utterly by a foe most of the Elves had no idea existed just a short time before… The apocalyptic struggle went on and on, and on, until Arleth returned home one day with a newfound vigour which hit Thravian like the metaphorical ton of bricks. When asked by the restless protector, who was now also her closest friend, what exactly had caused this barely appropriate barrage of energy, the response was a half-legible stream of heart-thudding consciousness from a girl whose voice almost sounded like one of grief and guilt. It was as if she needed to urgently get the feelings off of her chest, and the warrior whom Arleth affectionately called ‘Thray’ was only too happy to function as an emotional receptacle. “It’s just not fair Thray-” she continued on in righteous petulance and paced restlessly, in a manner which Thravian found some private amusement in. “-Why are we still sitting here uselessly while others suffer for us? We can do more than this and we have to.” Just as he’d kept the previous bout of amusement to himself, Thravian now also kept the mild feeling of insult to himself. The warrior understood, of course. Arleth, his friend, was used to his company, accustomed to the constant protection and desensitised to it. Moreover, she almost definitely hadn’t meant any insult, and had no idea how much her guardian yearned to abandon his post and fight for survival with the others. Unbeknownst to her, the lady’s belligerent cacophony had attracted attention, as Rathian Illawyn entered the room behind her. Thravian, still listening to Arleth’s patriotic tirade, reflexively went to stand in respect for the dynast. He was immediately put back to rest by a domineering hand movement from the patriarch before even lifting his leg. The dynast clearly desired to hear his daughter speak freely, and with such passion as he had never before seen from the outwardly shy girl. Of all her deeds in this, the ‘first realm war’ against malevolence incarnate, the forthcoming actions of Arleth Illawyn alone would truly elevate the pure Elfmaiden’s name and future title to near legendary status throughout the guttering torch of Malin’s kingdom. That was true enough. Her perfect words at this very moment, however, beheld only by a loving father, who smiled in a manner both sad and proud, and by a near-stunned, hapless household sentinel, were among the most poignant and sincere words ever spoken by any of the fair Elves of old. Beautiful were they not only for the clear love Arleth bore for both the natural world and the ordered world of Malin’s people, but for their simplicity, innocence, purity and grace. As a testament to their sanctity and the magnificence the words inspire, they shall be repeated a second time here, despite their presence at the crown of this work: “I really don’t want to fight. Thinking about it frightens me. But I love our beautiful towers, how the falling sun backlights them in the evening. I love ambling through a glade and looking aside to see some squirrel climbing spirally up a tree in pursuit of its mate. I love the feeling of my eyes drifting open in the morning after a wandering dream, and slowly realising that I still live, that I still live here, with my loving father, you, and my companions… I think of losing these things, shed a tear and realise that I must fight, or the murderous darkness will destroy it all. I must fight.” Young Thravian’s situation was hopeless, bless him, frozen there in that uncomfortable position by Arleth’s words and Rathian’s gesture as though locked in place by a magi’s art. So it was left to the august dynast to break the silence by clearing his throat, though he did it in a courtly, polite manner which retained the man’s well-earned dignity in its entirety. That stalwart defence against the weakness of seeming affected did not avail Rathian Illawyn over much though. Like a besieged fortress whose defenders concentrate their forces at one gate only to be stormed from the other, Thravian could see, as Arleth snapped her head around in a fresh bout of shock, that the girl’s father, a centuries’ old kingpin of Tavule society, an Elf who had likely seen things that relative youths such as Thravian could barely even comprehend, was actually crying. More than any nightmarish creation coming to kill his entire way of life, those tears were truly spine-chilling. The instant after her makeshift oration had completed and the girl span to see her stealthy father standing there, her ascendant demeanor collapsed utterly, regret painted all across her face as though simply speaking such a deadly desire was a punishable crime in and of itself. What repudiation she expected Rathian to deliver is impossible to know, but it didn’t come. Instead, like the truly good father he was, the patriarch glided forward to cup his daughter’s cheek in hand and asked with a silky, low voice“My heart bids me deny this reckless desire of yours, delicate Rosepetal. But these times are foul, and our people need light in a time of such blackness. I also sense that even if I acted to prevent your leaving, you would simply go anyway, and resent me for the attempt.” The analysis was a sound one, Thravian admitted to himself from his spectator’s cradle. Before Arleth could send off a response, Rathian silenced his daughter with a raised hand and added “But if this is to be done, it is to be done properly. So, you will take our Thray with you. I can see he is getting fidgety here anyway.” Both men looked at one another and nodded with simple understanding. It led Thravian, excited at this new purposeful task, to sigh internally. ‘Another peerless analysis, Lord…’ he thought, suddenly experiencing a crippling bout of self consciousness. And so without further delay, Arleth’s doting father summoned one of an entire legion’s worth of menial aides. He verbally fired off a list of strange components straight from memory, at such a speed that the unfortunate note-taker was barely able to keep up, struggle indicated by gritted teeth and a panicked expression. But a grateful smile from the dynast put the young clerk at ease, and a further command sent him off to convey what had been written. “Equipment. Simple spear, medium-sized square shield and plain armour, mixed chainmail and leather, stronger than it sounded.” Thravian discerned from his understanding of the components, seams of information from his unfinished schooling at the war-court skipping through his mind. Weeks later, the same sentinel and his hawk-eyed master were in the same living quarters, gazing with admiration at Arleth Illawyn, armed in a full panoply of war. Thravian thought the entire getup looked vaguely ridiculous on her, almost entirely because he’d never imagined that Arleth would have donned armour, or held a weapon, not in a million years. He kept that particular thought private, once again, unwilling to be slapped hard across the face by his self-conscious charge or stared daggers into by her father. Struggling past the sensation of instinctual wrongness, Thravian could recognise the dignity exuded by the armoured girl. “WELL?!” she exclaimed unbecomingly, her voice a burst of vulnerable anger expressed in that single word. The two men looked at one another in a start, expressions appearing as though a mutual, dark secret of theirs had been uncovered. Suddenly, both were aware that they’d been embarrassingly silent ever since Arleth had re-entered the room. Thravian stifled a chuckle at the thought, which made the girl focus all of her childlike ire onto him. “OH I see-” she began, but was mercifully halted by the intervention of her father, which Thravian was oh so grateful for. It gave the younger Elf time to save himself. “Arleth-” he composed himself by speaking the name, taking in a breath as a man who had just avoided falling from a sheer cliff. “It looks perfect on you.” was all he said, iron discipline and Rathian’s presence precluding any further elaboration except for a genuine smile. Its protection would be fantastic and the weight not so burdensome, better and more convenient even than the armour worn by highborn Thravian. Such was the craftsmanship and artisanal genius of the ancient days that higher levels of defence did not always come at the cost of terrible weight. It was when Arleth removed the angular-form helmet, however, that her true majesty came to light, scarlet hair flowing from the metal prison as though it were a vibrant rose opening its petals at accelerated speed. The ire of a few moments ago dissipated, Arleth Illawyn smiled warmly at her protector and her friend for the compliment he’d given. The smile was returned. It had to be if Thravian was to escape the room without receiving a less than friendly slap, which was a threat which he seemed to be considering a lot today, but his gesture was somewhat insincere. He was too busy thinking of what would come next. When all the T’s had been crossed and the i’s dotted by the meticulous will of Illawyn’s ancient overlord, the time to depart home, as well as its accompanying safety, security and comfort, finally hove into view. Across all dividing lines of racial origin, royal allegiance and tribal loyalty throughout time, nobility has always had its perks. Whether the elevated individual in question was the prime warrior-advisor of a barbarian clan’s high chief, the second, responsibility-deprived son of a monarchy’s grandest magnate or, in this case, the coddled daughter of a somewhat mercurial Elven dynast, higher-ups have a penchant for obtaining conveniences that others don’t have access to. This mortal phenomenon was elucidated upon with blinding clarity when Arleth Illawyn and her sidekick, or Thravian and his sidekick depending on which one you asked, came to the crowded mustering pavilion of Tavule’s royal war-court. The haggard Elf in charge of primary volunteer registration; a wounded, dissatisfied cohort commander who’d been sent home from the war months ago, looked upon the two with a skeptical eye when they approached in the wake of another candidate. In a vague recognition which was shown by the distinct widening of his tired eyes, the soldier then stood unaided with some unease, successfully fighting with the wound he’d suffered to do so before gesturing a signal of respect to the two. He was visibly pained by the effort. Before Thravian even got a chance to open his mouth, Arleth wrapped around his rear with sympathy induced swiftness and came to the struggling elder figure behind his ornately carved royal desk, crimson hair flicking from side to side with each footfall. With uncharacteristically unshy hands and wearing a gentle guise, Arleth carefully took on the apparently grateful soldier’s burden, weaving a hand underneath his shoulder and lowering him into the seat once more. “If we could stand any taller in honour of your valour, and your sacrifice-” she said melodically, her actions drawing some silent attention from nearby would-be volunteers “-we would do so without hesitation. Rest, and know that your duty is more than done.” Thravian’s jaw was on the floor, but as he looked around at the admiring faces of Elvenkind who had witnessed the act of aristocratic humbleness, he’d never been more proud of Arleth Illawyn. Two main things were noted by the pair as they continued their journey onward. Firstly, the veteran-cum-administrator whom Arleth’s compassion had directly touched worked with renewed vigour, his previously exhausted demeanor straightened and righted. Secondly, the other spectators to her act of kindness were obviously speaking words of approval, both quietly and loudly. There were shouted words of defiance as well, but they were defiant words directed at the cruel enemy they all faced, the enemy whose bottomless malice was so anathema to purity of will and generosity. Arleth leaned in towards Thravian, who inclined his head in turn. “I do not know why I did that, Thray.” she said at a whisper, suddenly conscious of where she was again, but displaying a radiant, toothless smile nonetheless. The forgettable drudgeries and unforgettable comradeships of military life began for Arleth that day, and for Thravian continued as though they’d never gone away in the first place. Within hours of and precisely because encouraged by former’s increasingly well-known treatment of the wounded soldier, the fondly regarded duo came to be part of a larger group of eight Elven warriors in total, themselves part of a larger unit. Yylar Auxni in particular was an older, highborne woman possessing dynastic prestige far in excess of the Illawyn, although to Arleth’s great joy, she didn’t make a point of emphasizing it. More importantly, she was also an elder nature-weaver, a druii, as they are commonly known, and quickly came to be seen by Arleth as a mix of good friend and older sister. Whilst Thravian mostly kept quiet during the days’ long march from Tavule, considering the future in silent contemplation and occasionally speaking to his marching partner, his greatest friend and woman whom he was oathed to protect was having an absolute whale of a time. From what the increasingly bored soldier was able to discern, Arleth and Yylar were, for the most part, exchanging plentiful conversation about some of the arcane intricacies of druii lore and the abilities able to be called forth with the Aspects’ power. Such things didn’t interest him in the slightest, he just wanted to get to the fight and protect Arleth. She, however, was completely absorbed in the Aspectist knowledge being spoken by Yylar, natural enthusiasm which made Thravian smile passively as he tuned in to hear the most interesting part of their conversation. “Yylar-” Arleth began, her voice echoing a cadence that implied slight disbelief. “-you’re saying that we will actually get to see one of these ‘forestwalkers’?” Thravian hadn’t caught the previous part of the conversation, and didn’t know what ‘forestwalkers’ were, but the all-too-familiar awe in Arleth’s voice, which he had always found to be supremely adorable, suggested that he ought to be interested in them. Yylar grinned, amused at the naive wonder displayed by the cloistered Illawyn lady, and returned teasingly “I know that we’ll get to see one. In fact, it’ll be in our section of the camp, a fellow soldier of Malin, a fellow warrior under the aspects. You might even get to meet it.” Arleth wasn’t a child anymore, and didn’t consider herself to be an immature woman in any sense, but that exciting fact did elicit from her an expression reminiscent of her true youth, when her father gave her a gift she’d been after for a while. She was going to meet a creature of the gods, a creature of gods. And who was she to receive such an honour? She considered, but quickly discarded the toxic thought in defiance. Arleth Illawyn was a warrior now, a warrior in defence of her realm and her people. There was no time for doubt. “I was looking forward to that reaction.” Yylar Auxni commented, unwittingly interrupting Arleth’s brief trance with an immensely satisfied tone, supplemented by a widened smirk. Column by column, the Elven reinforcement army marched forth through forest, plain and hill, their destination unknown to all except its enigmatic general. Eventually, after what seemed like weeks of march, drill, sleep, march, drill, sleep, march, drill, sleep, march, Arleth, her companions and the force of which she was but a tiny part reached the greater royal muster of war, tantalisingly close to the active front among the trees of a dense forest. Illawyn’s crimson-headed angel had witnessed her enlightened race’s singular equivalent to what other peoples would call a ‘camp’ many times before by this point on their journey, but not on this scale, far from it. Boasting a seamless fusion of earthen weaving and masterful masonry which polymerised to create the most unique, and beautiful architectural style in the entire world, the ‘camp’, as Arleth’s relatively limited vocabulary deemed she call it, stretched out left and right in front of her, barely distinguishable until one was incredibly close to its boundary. To the naked eye, there didn’t seem to be any viable way to get beyond the upraised, gnarled and entangled tree roots that served as the boundary barricade, and indeed there wasn’t. However, Arleth kept marching in simple lock-step with her comrades in the direction of the root-wall anyway, fully aware what would happen. When the column’s vanguard of which she, Thravian and her other companions formed a part, came about one-hundred metres from the twisted roots, a huge, roughly semicircular section of their mass began un-weaving, the roots withdrawing from the coming Elves as though in fear of them. Looking up about the area, Arleth and Thravian could see, not that they needed to, that this fear did not exist. Four of Yylar Auxni’s nature moulding druid comrades, each clad in a mixture of light armour and wrappings, were channeling their link with the world and the aspects. Two stood proudly on sections of the opening barrier, roots obediently carrying them aside from the intentional breach. Two more, outside of the boundary and on each side of the marching column, called the thick, upper branches of nearby trees their home. Ethereal mist of a colour unique to the soul of each adept seeped from their eyes, concentration and focus allowing them to wrench open what lesser civilisations might call a ‘gate’, in the impenetrable tangle. With the subsequent sounding of an optimistic trumpet hoot, the latest three-thousand strong reinforcement contingent from Tavule reached the enigmatic war that had raged for the last eight years, invisible to the eyes but not the senses of the great capital city. Speaking over her shoulder to Thravian whilst never ripping her awe-stricken eyes from the unprecedented scene, Arleth quietly and simply entoned “This is.. magnificent.”, she voiced, the magnitude of the occasion rendering any emotion in her voice into nothing. Following the expulsion of a quiet, amused scoff, Thravian grumbled a response ripe with anticipation, eyes looking beyond and slightly to the other side of the woman to whom he was speaking. “Look to your right.” Arleth did as she was told. All of a sudden the proclamations of Yylar, whom she swore sideglanced her with an ‘I told you so’ type of grin, did not seem so farfetched after all. In the imperfect focus of Arleth’s peripheral vision, the form had registered to her keen Elven senses as nothing but a regular tree. Oh how wrong she was. Attention diverted in its rightward direction by Thravian’s call from behind, the once-highborne dynastic scion, now regular soldier in Malin’s valiant armies gazed with full clarity on a hulking, humanoid construct of flora and bark-wreathed wood. It stood there, peering down from the pinnacle of its full fifteen-foot height with what Arleth presumed were eyes, really just green fae-flares bursting out from vaguely eye-like grooves in its head. Unnervingly to any unfamiliar onlooker present, the forestwalker wasn’t moving in the slightest, standing to attention equally still as the mere tree it had initially been mistaken for. The only difference was that, in comparison to those mere trees, this weighted colossus would never be moved even an inch by the most terrible of storm-winds, let alone the pale breeze that was cooling Arleth’s mildly tan features at that moment. When the momentary shock wore off, the woman found she was still marching, able with her better view to observe the creation’s form more completely. The giant sentinel’s humanoid body was simple enough. Thick trunk legs ended in near-hoof like feet, in the protected shadow of which bloomed a supernatural variety of plants and other forms of woodland life. An even thicker torso and shoulders held aloft two powerful arms, the ‘hands’ of which were, seemingly by default, balled into pummelling fists. Its cervid head was another story entirely. Rather than mimicking the vaguely pointed ears and simple shape of Elvendom, the forestwalker possessed one pair of wood wrought horns pointing forwards from the uppermost section of its forehead. Supplementing that fearsome array were four twisted antlers angled back about forty-five degrees, like the uneven, wooden head of a strange stag whose ears were antlers instead. In short, it was majestic. Then, with a mild sound like the echoing of a thousand wooden planks splitting at once, it actually moved, filing in between Arleth’s segment of the column and the one just behind. Thravian scoffed in disbelief but carried on marching. Arleth did the same, but it took every single iota of the young woman’s willpower not to glance over her shoulder every couple of seconds to ensure the ground-vibrating thuds of the forestwalker’s treads weren’t coming too close. A thought occurred to her then, which unmercifully but briefly took her attention away. If this friendly giant was here with them, what by all that is good was it expected to fight? She discarded the uncomfortable consideration gladly. Sooner than Arleth would’ve thought in such a massive muster of Malin’s warriors, her own group came to a stop at the appointed place quite quickly. The forestwalker stopped with them and, to the amazement of literally every single Elf present including the druid Yylar Auxni, crossed its chunky legs and carefully sat down as though it was the most ordinary thing in the world. The being’s sycophantic court of wildlife skittered and hopped to take new refuge around the area its wooden-rear was now contacting the blessed forest floor. The forestwalker clearly exuded some kind of power, but Arleth had the impression that the power wasn’t directed, but an intrinsic, uncontrolled and life giving energy integral to the creature’s existence. It was merely bountiful to the flora and fauna of her world as a welcome side effect. “VUL.” it resounded deeply, timber voice cracking as if the nearby trees were bending almost too much for their structure to take. A name. Sitting and scanning the three-hundred-and-sixty degrees around her, except for the spot inhabited by a giant, tree-like, humanoid obstacle, Arleth realised with difficulty that the entire area was divided into series of roughly square sections of about fifteen by fifteen metres. Each was enclosed by the several tents appointed for the benefit of their respective soldier-occupiers and were connected to eachother and the main thoroughfare by specially opened connection paths. She could also, with no little feeling of amazement, make out several other, even larger forestwalkers in several of the other divisions, apparently spread at random. Arleth was brought back from her distant reverie by what sounded like a baritonal grumble to her right which possessed an undertone of distantly collapsing evergreens. To her cheek-reddening embarrassment, the unfamiliar sound, which she instantly realised had come from the being known as Vul, elicited a short, sharp, incredibly feminine yelp from the dainty aristocratic girl whose armour still seemed faintly ridiculous. The amused but ultimately harmless laughter of the comrades around Arleth did nothing but intensify the hot feeling in her face. The laughter of Thravian, immediately to her left, was loudest and longest of all, prompting a glance in that direction which, while she attempted a hostile impression, couldn’t help but grin goodheartedly. Fortunately for her, the rest of their curious attentions were redirected to Vul, whose name Arleth could now only think of in his unnatural voice, with merciful alacrity. As though preternaturally sensing Arleth’s jumpy unease towards him and the wider situation, Vul lifted his massive left fist into the air before gently bringing it down on the ground immediately at the woman’s side, so close that she could touch it without reaching. Thravian’s protector instincts were briefly sparked into life by the unlikely prospect of his friend and mistress’ potential harm, his heart upping its rhythm slightly, but he quickly shunted them away. Initially daunted by the woodland titan’s new movement, Arleth shrank away from the fist, which she deemed capable of incredible destruction. However, the being’s enigmatic, bountiful essence rapidly spread on the area of ground, attracting a number of forest critters favourable to the young lady, particularly rabbits and even one or two of her all-time favourite; squirrels. As Thravian watched with a small smile and the remainder of their small cohort spoke among themselves, Arleth Illawyn rested her tender hand on the static forestwalker’s great, destructive fist. The vulnerable girl seemed comforted, flashing a perfect smile in her protector’s direction which the top-knotted warrior only reciprocated after too long a delay. Thravian was still thinking ahead, his mind absent from the close circle of unlikely comrades. The fact of Arleth’s present safety and distraction allowed his relaxed mind to wander to all the worst places, to really wander, considering everything he knew about the wider conflict. Everything that Arleth, everything that big Vul over there, everything that most of the other volunteers and amateur warriors didn’t know, or couldn’t piece together from the pinpricks of tactical detail they’d witnessed. A small rising of inherent, loyal anger lightning-bolted its way through Thravian’s body at the first thought; that of the traitor autarch. He had been one of the most beloved companions of Malin himself. But with his mind strained to the point of collapse by the course of their apocalyptic war, this forsaken lord had scorned the eternal king for his merciless methods, turned whole swathes against his own people and then, in the face of inevitable defeat, desperately defected to the great nightmare he had lost his mind fighting. That perfidious cur was still out there now, hundreds or thousands of miles away, leading his misled disciples and oblivion only knew what other darkspawned horrors on a ferocious drive to Tavule. The turncoat would fail of course, the king was out there facing him. Thravian had the distinct impression that it didn’t matter. The formidable Elven host in whose ‘camp’ he now sat was badly understrength due to the betrayal, many of its oldblood units sapped and shipped away to fight on other, more urgent fronts. They’d only been replaced by the recruitment of untrained greenhorns such as Yylar, poor Arleth and to a lesser extent, himself. The recruits had been trained each day after concluding their allotted march, and Arleth in particular had surprised Thravian with just how eagerly she took to it. However, a few days of training does not a soldier make, and a massive part of the army were newbloods like her. How would they react in the terrifying din of battle? How would she, his charge, his closest friend, react? How would he react? Realising with guilt that he’d been arrogantly considering himself above those with whom he sat because of the modest position he held in the high war-court, Thravian forgot for a moment that he, in reality, had never fought a battle either. How would he react? That wasn’t important, he considered after a fleeting moment of weakness. Arleth had to be kept safe, and that was simply that. The warrior would not betray by failure the oath he’d sworn to master Rathian before their departure, the oath that had been consecrated by the dynast’s grieving tears and that had been mercifully hidden from Arleth herself. As though considering his friend internally attracted her attention on the outside, Thravian’s deep, melancholic pondering was interrupted by the tender touch of a hand on his knee. The dour nature of his thoughts must have resounded through his expression as well, because when Thravian blinked to see Arleth right in front of his face, she looked worried. “Thray?” she hesitantly repeated for the second time, her tone a gentle fingertip caressing the warrior’s aching soul with heartfelt concern. He forced a smile, again. As light fled and the group broke its odd circle to move on to the tents, both Arleth and Thravian found themselves asking eachother much the same thing in hushed tones, the humour of which served as some degree of ointment to the latter’s mind. “Thray.” Arleth whispered with a voice that was barely a breath, casting a brief glance back over his shoulder to the hulking but friendly creature she’d come to know. “Rose.” the warrior acknowledged in return, taking enjoyment in using the hated nickname segment used by her father. “D-do you think Vul has a tent as well?” she asked with the hesitant curiosity of a student reluctant to display their own inexperienced ignorance, eyebrows furrowed in a manner which tickled Thravian’s humours. “Don’t think so, he’ll probably just.. stay in the centre there.. If he even needs rest.” he said with uncertainty, voice trailing off into a nothingness that betrayed a desire to ask many questions of the massive forested meathead. Arleth shrugged nonchalantly and reached a left hand out to grab Thravian’s wrist, dragging him the final few metres into the space of their simple, two-person tent. It was simple enough for the male to remove the outermost segments of his panoply and then simply rest in the underclothing, laying on his back on one of the tent’s two accompanying mat-like beds. They were more comfortable than either of them had been expecting. A brief, concise debate concerning which area along their line of march had been the most beautiful ended abruptly when prudish Arleth, clothed in less than anything Thravian had ever seen before in their decades of friendship; that is, with exposed shoulders and lower legs, gave him a familiar expression indicating embarrassment. He did as he always did in that situation and shut his eyes. Arleth was comfortable then and continued the conversation uninterrupted. “Your stupid hill only looked nice because the sun was shining mirages on it! It was ordinary really.” she exclaimed, not loudly enough to breach the sanctity of their mutual hideaway. Arleth was so comfortable because she knew Thravian would never betray her trust, never sneak a single solitary glance at the nevertheless alluring forbidden fruit that lay beneath. He wouldn’t, of course. Much to the warrior’s shame, however, he had been tempted once or twice to do just that over the years. There would be no consequence, no retribution by anyone in existence except for that dished out by his own conscience. Still, Thravian never looked, it would feel too filthy, too base. Not that he reserved such lofty ideals for all members of his race’s fairer sex, but Arleth was a special case. “Okay Thray, it’s alright now. Thank you.” the object of his thoughts clarified with typical gratitude, having already come to rest on her own makeshift bed by the time his eyes opened. Barely anything more was said and, before either of them knew it, the sweet respite of sleep came. As it stricken by a bolt from another world, Arleth awoke alone amid near silent darkness, permeated only by the faint sound of wind rushing through the canopy far above. Too restless a girl to simply remain staring at the fabric which served as her ceiling, even in the midst of an army prepared for war, she got to her feet with a lightness of foot that would’ve astounded Thravian if he’d been awake to not hear it. She looked over at his sleeping form then, smiling fondly on one side of her mouth as she beheld her protector’s right arm stretched rather comedically behind himself. He’d always slept rather oddly, even in their younger days together. When they got home.. If they got home, she hoped to tell Thravian just how much he meant to her. Rather than joining herself forever to some prick suggested by dear father, perhaps Arleth Illawyn could join with Thravian. He was a distant relative, but so distant that it would be far from unprecedented. The heartwarming thought was interrupted by a sound which led Arleth’s skin to crawl and her gaze to snap onto the closed entrance to their tent. It was a throaty noise, one the not-overly tired maiden thought she could probably make herself if she gargled for too long on an overly generous swig of water. But it was harsher, drier, more vicious. Drawn by the unnerving sirensong, Arleth padded forwards with near soundless steps, parting the flap and then closing it behind her. A giant figure, obviously Vul, sat like an exhausted statue in the centre of the tent-square,backlit by a ray of moonlight shimmering through the trees above. The verdant green of its ‘eyes’ were seemingly extinguished. “Strange.” thought Arleth with a furrowed brow. “Vul sleeps?” He didn’t, Yylar had told her that days ago. The noise came again, louder on the outside. This time Arleth, with narrowed eyes and enhanced perception that was so typical of the Elves, witnessed where it had come from. His form shadowed by the giant creation he was stood next to, was one of the other members of her small habitation group. She’d glanced him briefly during the brief bout of socialising before everyone had retreated to their two-person tents, looking rather sullen and talking only sparingly to one other person - Yylar, whose tent he shared. Coming closer to get a better look, Arleth was then, all of a sudden, struck with the horrified, perplexed realisation that the stranger was actually biting Vul, his unnaturally rotten teeth locked onto the forestwalker’s left torso like those of a rabid dog, unwilling to let go of its latest catch. A moment after this realisation, Arleth saw the vulnerable being attempt to lift its lightless, bowed head with considerable difficulty before surrendering to the weakness, its head falling into the same position once again. Was he.. Paralysed? The onlooking woman considered this thought silently for a second or two longer before returning her gaze to the stranger. To her immediate shock he seemed to be, in an supernatural manner which was hard to look on, leaking rotten flesh into the nature-construct’s form, the skin and viscera sloughing off his form in a slow, but corrupting tide to reveal some dark simulacrum beneath. In a moment of striking clarity did Arleth realise, on an instinctive level if not a comprehensive one, what her oversized new comrade was actually enduring. The ear-serrating but surprisingly dignified scream she emitted in that moment didn’t do anything to distract the corpse-thing from its malignant goal of sabotaging the forestwalker, but it did wake Thravian up, in addition to between several hundred and several thousand other Elven warriors. Most of the awakened were rank amateurs, unable to coordinate significantly enough to respond. However, the remaining professionals and night sentries immediately rose from their positions and began systematically combing the rough area for the sound’s source. None of them got there quick enough. As it turned out, they didn’t have to. Following Arleth’s terrible shriek, the woman briefly considered returning to her tent to fetch Thravian as well as the spear that father armed her with, but discarded the idea in her rush. So instead, to the titanic shock of everyone who enquired about the event thereafter, she sprinted at the malevolent intruder unarmoured, unarmed and unprepared. It was far too distracted injecting Vul with its foul essence to react when Arleth wrapped her arms around its still flesh covered waist and pulled with all the might she could muster in that petit body of hers. With gritted teeth and a fierce roar of fury coming from her mouth, she pulled, yanked and tugged, but without success. Frustrated, she petulantly kicked the back of the living corpse’s leg and then re-wrapped her arms around a section of its repugnant, partially decomposing chest for better leverage. A second pull, a second attempt and this time a triumph. After a sickening crack of diseased teeth ripping from defiled gums, the rotting cadaver-killer went flying back along with the woman who had foiled it, dislodging from the forestwalker’s side with a burbling hiss. She could hear faint shouting now, friends closing in, but she had the rest of her own battle to win yet. In the failure induced fury of its malicious almost-intelligence, the sorcerous polluter carcass climbed atop Arleth, pinning her with a one-handed vice-grip around the throat. The other came across only a moment later in a fierce punch which, fortunately for its victim, only glanced her cheek. Arleth sounded yet another ear-splitting cry, but this time it was one of defiance, rather than outrage. She desperately kicked with both legs, trying without restraint to force the thing off her. She shut her eyes and reached out with both hands, grabbing something, anything, and pushing it away, slapping, punching. All the while Arleth’s breaths became shorter, more panicked, tinged with terrified yelps, the electric breaths of a woman struggling to prevent the most terrible of deaths. “Father.”, came the unhelpful, painful memory of the parent she’d abandoned to come here. Arleth pictured him in that moment with tears in those amber eyes, confronted by a failed defender and told that the daughter he cherished, that the one true apple of his eye, was gone forever. Dead, not as an esteemed part of some greater deed or victory, but butchered alone in the churned up mud with no companion to render comfort in those terminal seconds. In that final moment before inevitable death, Arleth wondered a strange thing; had she destroyed its teeth? Wou-.. she perceived the nightmare thought sticking hard in her mind. Would the creature be able to, in savage spite, devour her face? What kind of horrifying, mutilated remains would Thravian find? The prospect sickened her, but the moment of totality never came. In a movement that seemingly distorted the air-choked girl’s reality, the corpse’s talon was ripped from her neck and it flew back, leading Arleth’s limp arm to flap aground. For a moment a sliver of thought told her it was over, that the misperceived ‘descent’ was some kind of journey into another world beyond death. Arleth was though, miraculously by her accounting, able to sit up. And with hazy amazement she saw her definitely not paralysed savior, Vul, furiously ragdoll the thing in its colossal wooden hand, swing it in a vicious arc and then piledrive it into the ground, all with the usual sound of creaking timber. It was already still, the nefarious assassin, all animation smashed out of it three times over, but the forestwalker raised his hoof and crushed the remainder for good measure, annihilating the malignant being that had threatened to kill him with a squelchy thud. Safe from harm, Arleth felt familiar hands seizing her shoulder and heard a familiar voice as blackness took her. From silent beginning to silent end, the entire life and death melee had lasted less than a minute. The serene eyes of the crimson-headed Elflady wearily drifted open again only several long hours later. “A good night’s sleep.” she thought hazily, occupying that fleeting, foggy moment between sleep and true wakefulness by peering up at the tent canopy and attempting to establish its realness, or not. The lingering presence of sleep evaporated like a sole droplet of water thrown into a blacksmith’s roaring forge as her eyes registered that she was still alive. Panicked hands suddenly raised, pawing and grasping with dreadful anxiety at a face that their owner briefly believed wasn’t there, taken by the nightmare vision that had almost won. Her tentative right thumb felt the bridge of an unspoiled nose, her left palm a silken-skinned cheek. Reaching up, movement and heartbeat slowing with the realisation of miraculous, intact survival, Arleth took a handful of her own iconic hair and considered, strange as it might have been, how her entire face might’ve been insignificant to her if only the damned hair survived. As though to crown the jubilant thought, she ran the fingernails of an entire hand through the scarlet garden atop her head, enjoying the feeling of a head scratch as bonus. She deserved it, after all. “You are unharmed but for a slight bruising of the throat and a slight graze across your temple. Healers said so.” confirmed Thravian with relieved finality, his on-edge tone and expression turning into a restrained smile when Arleth rolled her head on her small pillow to look over at him. “But they’re on us, Rose-” the revelation of fresh danger perked the woman up, forcefully shunted the final guttering embers of tiredness away and made her rise from the bed with a start. “Where?” she queried, already going for the spear she hadn’t retrieved the previous night. “Not now, not now.” the protector retracted with considerable swiftness, taking back his warning with raised hands which pleaded for mercy that was certain to come. Arleth narrowed her eyes at him, grumbling under slow breaths. To dispel the somewhat uncomfortable, stare-laden silence that followed before it got a chance to properly begin, Thravian continued on as though doing so would make Arleth’s mild and oh so cutting ire go away. “They’re not here yet-” the warrior clarified, even though he almost definitely didn’t need to. “-but they’re coming. There is difficult terrain on either side of where the princes intend to fight, so they’re coming straight at us. The attacks last night were an attempt to deprive us of needed assets.” A momentary silence followed before Arleth scoffed in amusement, coming face to face with Thravian and judging him up and down, as though to ask where the real guardian was. That was the very first time he’d spoken to her in that dull, analytical tactician’s drawl. She liked it, came an involuntary, niggling thought. “It’s time then.” Arleth said aloud, mild dread lacing her tone throughout as she stubbornly attempted to veer her own mind off course. “I’d hoped for a bit longer as well.” was the somber reply she got. Fully armed and armoured to play their part in a war in which one of them had no rightful place, Arleth, followed by her faithful shield, laboriously lifted back the heavy entrance fold of their tent only to reveal the majority of their forty-eight strong habitation group milling just outside, just as heavily clad in armour. Adding a peculiarly clownish air to the whole scene was Vul, who was very much ok despite the attempt on his life the previous night. Standing just behind the main line of mixed helmeted and bare-headed greenhorns, the giant forestwalker was bending forwards with his massive wooden hands on his massive wooden thighs, as though the deep wilds titan was just a regular sized being doing his best to get a good look at a particularly enthralling insect. The restored sea-green life energy emanating from Vul’s deer-like imitation of a head, which coincidentally also served as its eyes, had clearly been trained on the closed tent for a fair amount of time. The moment Arleth emerged, however, the construct reared up to its full height and let out a bark-crunch noise that seemed to Thravian like a sigh of relief and a cry of triumph together, although he couldn’t be sure. Just as the brave survivor was about to grin up at the being that was also definitely now her unlikely friend, she was somewhat comedically tackled by a figure who emerged from the milling crowd, a figure who then kept ahold of Arleth like an overly enthusiastic limpet for about thirty seconds. After a few moments of sheer confusion, shared between Thravian and the tackle’s beleaguered recipient with a mutually raised eyebrow, both established that it was, in fact, Yylar. The realisation of that fact brought yet another scream from Arleth’s throat, a sound which Thravian was becoming a little too familiar with for his taste. Mercifully, and thank the throne, this one was actually more of a girlish squeal rather than the usual full-scale assault on the ears, which resulted in a shared embrace between the two friends. The creature thing had been cohabiting Yylar’s tent, and Arleth was without doubt that the druii had been killed in a grisly manner. She hadn’t wanted to question it, so the grand reveal of her friend’s survival came as a wholesome surprise. Still, none of the group forgot where they were, and why they were there. Five minutes following the initial emergence, the forty-seven Elven men and women, in addition to one especially friendly natural construct, had filed out in relatively organised ranks to join the remainder of the army which was already in the process of departing the ‘camp’. The fact that the master wildweavers didn’t have time to take down the temporary fortress indicated the hurry. The enemy really was coming. Headed by one of Malin’s high generals, the illustrious identity of whom neither Arleth or Thravian had bothered enquiring, a multitude of weaving serpents streamed from the fleeting comfort of their forest haven via at least a dozen separate druii-wrought openings in the root barricade, each consisting of several thousand disparate Elven warriors. With a seamless precision that appeared to Arleth’s untrained, civilian eyes like some kind of organisational sorcery, the officers coordinated with hand signals and the occasional shout in order to order the marching column how they wished. Some prefects slowed the lines under their command subtly, with purposeful but almost indistinguishable direction, allowing one of their colleagues and their columns to pass in front before falling in behind them. Others, almost certainly the army’s remaining professional contingent, paced double time up both flanks of the slowly coalescing column in order to reach the van. The whole thing was elegant in its execution, Arleth considered, still possessing absolutely zero conception of how such acute levels of precision were possible at all when handling such a quantity of people, all from such a quantity of places. It suddenly dawned on the erstwhile noble that she wasn't just watching the masterful orchestration anymore, as she had in her youth, but was actually a part of it, still marching on. Newly conscious of the role she was playing, Arleth’s previously impeccable steps faltered ever so slightly, but he recovered with commendable grace before anyone noticed. Well, not anyone. Much to her consternation, she heard Thravian barely manage to stifle a laugh at her expense, and then herself barely resisted jabbing an elbow back into his chest. That might’ve really thrown the prefects off their stroke. Immune to such bouts of distracted indiscipline were the striders to the right. Said grizzled veterans, outpacing their amateur comrades by several degrees, were entirely uniform with only a few intentional exceptions. Armed especially for that day’s battle in brutally thick, bronze-trimmed plate designed to resist whatever dregs were coming at them, Arleth got the clear impression that the success or failure of the day would probably rest, to a greater or lesser extent, on their sturdy shoulders. Curiously, as she flicked covert glances across at the onward-marching veterans and listened to the rhythmic tandem clank clank clank echo of many sabatons, Arleth’s odd mind noticed a certain pattern of four. While three of the true-soldiers hoisted a large, square shield in one hand and a comparatively small, curve-bladed Tavulian axe in the other, a fourth was equally well armoured, but entirely lacking a shield. Instead, these physically bulkier cousins bore a savage looking, enlarged halberd-axe weapon which Arleth correctly believed would be terribly uncomfortable to suffer a hit from. As the last of the veteran column marched beyond her intentionally stymied column and out of view, Arleth felt herself growing increasingly reassured. Surely, surely nothing could break those practiced killers. A few surprisingly brief hours and several leagues of near-silent marching later, the force finally arrived at its enigmatic destination. It was, to be sure, a relatively impressive stage for a final battle. Just as the northernmost treeline of the Valkyrnian Forests gave way to barer areas of landscape beyond; plains, gently rolling hills and the like, the terrain took a sharp nosedive which rendered all of the unforested region at a drastically lower elevation. The entire woodland boundary was like a vast, natural, overhanging cliff with deep gorges and chasms below, all but impassable. One sloping exception was located right at the spot Arleth, Thravian and the entire Elven host emerged from the forest, a single choke point through which the enemy would have to come if they were to truly breach the domain of the Elves on this front. The nightmare wretch-hordes of darkness incarnate, Malin’s faithful warriors were told, would be looking and charging uphill, funnelled onto a precarious, narrow corridor of ascent from which the dreg mass could be repelled with relative ease. The feature had, in years gone by, been a lynchpin of trade between realms, but all that seemed a long time ago now… When one of the beautifully mailed, impeccably succinct war-court prefects nearest Arleth’s column shouted aloud “Arriving here before the scum did was the real battle, and it is a battle that you have won admirably.”, the novice soldier found herself strangely disappointed. She and Thray had come all this way after all, it’d be a shame if they didn’t at least get to fight for their people, ruler and land at least once. Unbeknownst to Arleth or Thravian at the time, the unconventional nature of the enemy and of the terrain forced their royal commander to adopt a thoroughly unconventional formation. At the apex of the thin ramp, where the gruelling climb up its expanse finally levelled out, were placed 3,000 of the super heavy infantry Arleth had been peering at earlier. A thousand-strong division in four lines of battle formed the vanguard unit. They’d be right in the thick of it when the time came, the best of the best, but Thravian nevertheless hadn’t been sure whom exactly they were. The armour was unconventional, plain and practical, and the rough weapons specifically crafted for a battle like this. They weren’t a traditionally Elven unit, but adaptation had been given a crown that was the equal of Malin’s. “This war made the greatest of us change.” the warrior had thought to himself after observing the veterans hours earlier. Four smaller units of 500 of the same troop type stood as a reserve in orbit of the main body; one to the left, one to the right, which could be seen by Arleth and Thravian, and two behind. They would tag in if chunks of the first block began to buckle for any reason. 15,000 of the 30,000 volunteer amateurs, mainly mailed and armed with spear or sword, were packed in a single rank behind the professionals, just in case. The remaining 15,000 were split in three and arrayed facing outwards to the left, right and rear, as though protecting the perimeter like a giant hedgehog. Arleth and Thravian found themselves almost on the extremity of the right side. Vul was there as well, along with his forestwalker companions, but he was somewhat behind Arleth and was bidden to face the ramp. Alongside each of the constructs was a hastily improvised ‘ammunition’ heap, made up of broken slabs of masonry, hunks of dead tree, boulders and other detritus. However improvised it was, Thravian considered, such heavy refuse would serve the same purpose when lobbed by massively strong, fifteen foot colossi. Within the glades and groves of wildweaving druii clades throughout the Everking’s realm, a common albeit esoteric saying spread concerning the character of apocalypse, the final hours of creation before its ultimate extinguishing. It grimly proclaimed that the thrumming, agonised chorus that made up the end of the all things would be heard by the ears of the living in nature’s torment, before its cataclysm was witnessed by their eyes. By Arleth’s firsthand reckoning, those archpriests of forest and fern, some of them her tutors from years past, were wrong, so terribly wrong. For on that day, when Arleth of Illawyn gazed with a slack jaw from the high cliff just beyond the Valkyrnia, she saw the end flowing towards her and the remainder of her hell-beset race in a near-endless, silent tsunami of roiling dark grey. Like and also far beyond the cherished memories of an entire life flashing before a dying man’s eyes, Arleth recalled not only her own scant time breathing, but the learned histories of the illustrious people to whom she belonged. It seemed fitting enough, in that moment of inexorable terminality, to remember the birth cradle where the First of the Elves had come into being so long before, to remember the beginning of graceful Tavule and all its myriad wonders, to remember for one last time each and every myth, legend, love and hate. It would all be gone soon, because they were all going to die. Thray, father, Yylar, that injured warrior-clerk at the war-court, the merchant whom she didn’t know and from whose stray voice she had first learned a whisper of the great enemy, even herself, all dead. What would happen to the wor- Suddenly, the comfortably firm grip of a hand around Arleth’s shaking, spear-bearing right wrist. “Thray.” she whispered with dreadful desperation through the near silence, turning a helmeted head to regard the protector who always seemed to know just when she needed protecting from a mind with a penchant for delving into the dark. He subtly tightened that grip on Arleth’s wrist and stared into her eyes intensely, and with dutiful intent. “I’m with you.” she thought it meant, finding herself at once free of fear again as the dark swarm buzzed ever closer. With clarity, Arleth optimistically considered that looking down on an enemy was scary precisely because you could see everything. That was, of course, a good thing, better knowledge of the enemy… or something. To reassure a troubled mind even more, the Illawyn lady looked over her shoulder to the great behemoth who had already saved her life once already. Amusingly, Vul was more than ready, hoisting aloft a massive chunk of angular rock as the first volley in his giant cannonade. Then, in a moment that coerced a note of disquiet from all those rookies who stood witness to it, the flood of living dead that should not be began its ascent. Only then did the profane chant begin, this world’s thrumming, agonised chorus. The infernal noise started as a disjointed, rasping hiss sounded by ten thousand, a hundred thousand or more desiccated, mutilated mouths which by all rights should not be able to speak at all. It was only as the torrential horde of undeath swept past the ascent ramp’s half-way point, uncaringly spilling a waterfall of unfortunate corpses from each flank of the increasingly deadly heights as they did, that the spine-chilling, low hiss morphed, fused and formed into a single hungering, nefarious proclamation. “Malin.” Arleth squinted in an attempt at steeling her focus, putting every speck of unused effort into discerning what the coming monsters were so apparently hesitant to tell them. “MALIN.” she heard, resonated by a unified, ravening voice that sounded to her as though each of the ‘speakers’, or whatever horrifying malignance was speaking through them, had already had devoured a piece of him, and were salivating for more. To Arleth’s immense relief, it became blatantly obvious within an instant, given the cacophony of unsteady groaning around her immediately thereafter, that she wasn’t the only one hearing the enemy’s one demand. At that, seething defiance set within Arleth like scalding molten iron hardening into the keen edge of newly-forged sword, defiance against the faltering courage of her comrades in the untested ranks, defiance shown to a faceless foe who would not be allowed to push even an inch further. “Begone!” came a melodic, forceful cry from somewhere in Arleth’s vicinity, and it was only with immediate hindsight that the fire-headed woman realised that the rebuke had actually come from her lips. It felt awkward, right away it felt awkward, but she was in the thick of it now, for better or worse. Comrades looked down the line, even Thravian balked a tad, but Arleth strode forth from her assigned half-metre in the line of battle and ascended to a small mound just a bare few metres away. Ripping the blade-crested helmet from atop her head and after letting the icon of her family’s crimson fall loose, she crashed her father’s spear against the shield in her other hand with a resounding clang and cried ever more fervently “Begone-”. The first time, Illawyn’s daughter bellowed alone into the hostile air, making her spirits and her voice flag just the slightest bit. “Begone!” Perhaps motivated by the solitary struggle of their brave red angel or wishing to drown their enemy’s siren-song out with spite of their own, more shouts echoed that of Arleth, more and more every second. “Begone. Begone, Begone!” it resounded louder each iteration, permeating the entire reverse-U circuit of untrained militia. The grim veterans facing downhill didn’t bother aping their lesser comrades in that same, relatively crude manner. Instead, as the nightmare cascade made its final approach and the red angel returned to the ranks, each hardened slayer of their vanguard legion clashed a tightly-gripped shield against their soon-to-be bloodied weapons and spoke their king’s name aloud in unison, as though it truly was theirs to say. It was. Arleth heard a shout from somewhere behind her which made shields clack and crunch into place. All of once, she felt her heart racing, it couldn’t be more than twenty, thirty seconds at most. This was real and it was happening right now. Looking upon the overflowing mass of charging dead, she attempted to calm her rabid breaths, only for the very next breath to be snuffed out before it even came to life. Shadows cast from above, emerging from beyond the treeline. Powerful, weighted wingbeats, both made almost every single Elven warrior peer to the skies with their jaws once again locked open. “Gryphons...” Thravian purred in quiet disbelief. “Hah, shocked for once.” Arleth couldn’t help but think with a smarmy, metal-obscured grin. But she was as well. To the sound of a near deafening, but still orderly roaring salute from the aground champions facing the bulging, bloated mass, fully seven of the massive, dove-hued airborne goliaths dipped their heads in concert and plummeted in at a terrifying angle, spearing directly for the breaking wave of malicious force cannoning its way up the slope towards their earthbound comrades. Arleth let out a drawling, awe-struck curse at the sight of not only the flying creatures, each of which was near enough a match for a lesser dragon in size, but the ironclad figures mounted on their backs who, even where Arleth was fortunate enough to stand, could each be seen wielding a sweeping glaive. A hundred metres or so before that tidal wave finally broke against the cliffs of Elven steel arrayed before tem, the first and largest of the gryphons pulled up slightly from its terminal plunge and viciously impacted against the semi-rocky ground, and a truly vast score of living corpses, with a sickening cacophony of cracking, hissing and shouting. The shock of the impact flung a further score from the each side of the cliff edge like an explosion of arcane sorcery, and sent them to join the soulless and broken cadavers of their unfortunately overflown kindred in the gorges far below. Each of the other six skyrunners and their majestic creatures followed their master, made similarly cataclysmic landfall at equal intervals down the slope and began carving into the seething tide. There was no moment of pause. After the initial moment of undying shock, the screeching dead were on them, around them. Each gryphon pummelled, swept, crushed and barrelled with their legs, body or even their giant beak, swinging and swaying from side to side in an effort to keep any unwelcome revenge away. Arleth shouldn’t have been looking, neither should the rest of her comrades, they had duties of their own, but the scene was deliciously, destructively irresistible to the eye. Undaunted by the uneven swaying and jerking of their great beasts, the mounted champions swung their glaives with ferocious precision, scything down corpses five-a-swing and executing those swings once every second or two. Past just being unaffected, Arleth believed that these unnamed demigods of battle were actually acting in perfect concert with the creatures on whose backs they rode, using the momentum-granting spats of movement to bless their reaving slashes with greater power. And it worked like a dream, Arleth thought, mouth still agape, or a nightmare if you were one of said flailing corpses. The sprinting horde buckled with the blockage, rippling backwards in a further spray of bodies flung off the precipice. But the riders’ time was already up, the benefit of surprise expired. They had to leave, or they would be swarmed and slain with ease. As though reacting to Arleth’s concerned thoughts, the master thrust his glaive to the skies and his creature called to its kindred, before taking flight once more unhindered. Five of the others successfully tailed their leader into the forested skies, but the sixth, momentarily too late in his reaction, had the front-right talon of his gryphon snared by at least twenty undead thralls, some of whom grabbed onto their fellows in order to increase the burden. The desperate warrior attempted to ascend anyway, but his beast was unbalanced by the mass hanging onto it and tipped over, throwing its companion and crashing hard onto the sharp rock below, before tumbling from the cliff in an uncorrectable tailspin. Arleth gasped, as did many of the others around her. To her, and Thravian’s utter, audible amazement, however, the stalwart paragon got to his feet, glaive in hand, and struck out once more in a horizontal slash, shearing the fragile heads off three more near-skeletal attackers. It would never be enough. Other wretches approaching from his off-side, one of them quite large, knocked the glaive from his hands, clawing at the warrior’s helmet to get at the living, beating Elf inside. Still he didn’t let the enemy kill him, and threw a final, defiant, armoured punch which smashed clean through a snarling skull. Only then, with a royal salute raised to the heavens along with a call to his king was the champion brought to his knees and overcome by the tide. A loss. But the tide was now diminished, interrupted, stymied. It was now a charge, just a charge, and the best warriors in Elvendom could halt that. When the diminished carcass-charge finally made contact, it made contact with the infantry formation’s equivalent of an immovable citadel. All across the lip of the gateway slope, an unfaltering wall of ironwood-steel shields buckled just a little upon receiving the initial shock, but recovered with brilliant composure, shoving back with resolute discipline. Behind the first line was a second, whose troops provided a well-ordered brace with their own bodies and panoply, and behind them a third. Behind them, still more. Ancient, brittle and skeletal claws joined with half-decomposed, recently deceased hands to scrape and lash at the masterworked shields, making little headway once the initial blunted onslaught was corralled. Occasionally, Arleth heard the faint sound of a war chant from the ranks of her beset, but infinitely resilient kinsmen, a war signal. From the fifth rank forwards, they would subtly push forwards in a ripple until the front rank jerked forwards as one, sending dozens of keening undead flying from the cliffs into the unseen darkness below. Playing no small part in this repulse were Vul and his nine or so forestwalker comrades, who all appeared to be taking immense pleasure in launching their makeshift detritus-artillery across the ramp. Briefly glancing to her recently-gained friend, Arleth even witnessed the wood-wrought giant send a long, bulky tree trunk down the ramp as though it were a terrifying variant of sycamore seed. It span at a sickening, diagonal velocity through the throng, destroying a small company’s worth of running bodies before toppling from the side, lessening the pressure on the forward line’s guardians for the scantest of moments. As things stood, even Arleth, untested as she was in the tactical disciplines, knew that the cadaver army could not make any progress against this veritable fortress of Malin’s greatest soldiers. However relatively small in number they might have been, the- she stopped, trying to dredge up the arcane term Thravian had taught her. The force multiplier, that was it. The terrain functioned as a force multiplier which rendered all the enemy’s vast numbers almost useless. Then, as though to spite her optimistic prediction, things changed for the worse. It began with a reverberation which initially struck Arleth with a memory of the Valken outriders’ doom-heralding return years before, but there were no friendly hooves to be seen, just a continuing sequence of dull, slow thuds which seemed to be approaching some enigmatic crescendo. ...Thud, thud, thud. Thud, thud, thud. Thud. Accustomed to the oddly satisfying rhythm, Arleth’s mind failed for a moment when it stopped, expecting to hear the next bass note in the strange song but instead hearing nothing. Nothing for a moment anyway. “Eyes front!” the shout went up with trance-breaking urgency, snapping Arleth from her daydream and prompting her to attempt a sidelong look at Thravian. She couldn’t see him, her peripheral vision obscured by the protective envelope of her helmet. The prefects and other officers supervising the Elven enlistee formations were frantic now, urging readiness the priming of weapons. What had happened? Arleth’s gaze flicked around the bald area of tree-deprived brush and grass between the main forest boundary and the daunting cliff beyond, seeing nothing. She was missing something, the officers had clearly discerned something invisible to her. Naturally, she loathed the feeling, that feeling as though there was a dagger at her throat that she couldn’t even see, just waiting to slice. Thravian nudged her from the right, noticing her disquiet, and shoved his left index finger, wreathed in a gauntlet, towards the cliff. Following the gesture with her gaze, Arleth looked and, with instinctive terror, took in a sharp breath. One single hand, desperately grasping the level earth in an attempt to mantle. Somewhat further along the rim, another ragged hand dug its gnarled fingers into the loamy soil, followed by another and another. “Three. Four. Five, six. Seven.” Thravian counted under his breath, the low voice muffled by his own helmet. On seven, as if the coming foe was using his numerical ascent as a countdown, or countup, the closest hand tensed and pressed more deeply into the earth in a climactic push. What abhorrently rolled onto the pre-cliff grassland at that moment was a true horror, wreathed all over in other, lesser horrors. The outer skin sloughed away, outer skin which was in fact made up of similar undead creatures to those who comprised the horde facing Thravian’s veteran kindred. But these unliving enemies were clearly of a different class. They were all armed with cruel looking weapons, plated in thick armour and possessing enough remnant intelligence not to charge immediately upon standing. They simply stood and waited, orbiting the colossal, malignant carriers that had ferried them like stripling ducks around their mother. “Lock your adversary’s swiping claws and snarling fangs in fruitless struggle-” Thravian recited in his thoughts, breaths swift and heavy in cold understanding. “-Then when the way is clear, thrust your keen-pointed spear into their weak underbelly, and their claws and teeth will mean nothing.” The thought concluded, and he mouthed one single word as the remaining six deceptively spindly but forestwalker-sized abominations mantled the cliff and shook off their arcana-animated cargo.“****.”... “First line; ten strides forward, second; eight, third; six, fourth; four, fifth; two.” the nearest officer cried out the instinctive command in panicked overhaste. To their credit the greenhorns, although almost entirely absent any battle experience, performed the simple instruction with admirable speed, un-stiffening the formation’s vanguard and rendering it more flexible in case of any breakthrough. Arleth and Thravian took those ten, horrifically unintuitive steps toward their enemy’s keen-pointed spear, their throats dry with anxiety. Then, when all of the grotesquely-faced climber titans were stood, hunched and ready, they and the undead knights sprinted directly at them. This was it, thought both Thravian and the delicate woman he was meant to be protecting. It was time for death. “Stay with me, alright?” The words escaped the Illawyn protector’s mouth with defined, pure intention, and within a mere second seemed to him like a hollow, pointless lie. A glance to the left. His Rose was already gone. Barely an instant passed. Before Thravian even got a chance to process what was happening, one of the repugnant ogres lashed out one of its disconcertingly strong arms, bowled over a contingent of his comrades with a teeth-grinding crunch and, on the vicious backswing, unintentionally clipped the unsuspecting warrior. Even the glancing blow sent him flying five metres off to the side like a battered stray. This, though, was a relatively gentle fate compared to those unfortunates struck by its full force of the charging titan’s wrath, their breastplates caved in and their vital organs with it. Winded by the strike, Thravian groaned in a brief moment of airless discomfort and rolled the back of his head left along the grass. With that dire new perspective, he witnessed an armoured Elf, clearly injured with his or her arm outstretched in a vain hope of mercy. Before Thravian could even think the thought to consider saving his fellow, the novice soldier was mercilessly executed with a blow to the face, delivered by a ragged, armour-bulked corpse wielding a giant, rusted axe. “Was that Arleth?” the darkest fulcrum of his soul asked him. Had he already failed? Grabbing his spear and using the haft as an aid to get up, the protector shook his head in defiance of the question that had been posed by his own mind, only to see the executioner-corpse’s vile intelligence snap to him with unnerving swiftness. His first fight, his first fight to rescue Arleth, if she wasn’t already dead. Taking a second to orient himself, Thravian could vaguely see the main line, badly crumped but unbroken, over his left shoulder. It was beset by the small giant-led attack force which was savagely carving its way towards the ramp-holding veterans. No time to see any more. No Arleth anywhere. Hope died like the sand running from an hourglass. As the hulking dead axeman strode forward steadily but inexorably, Thravian went to meet it with spear in one hand and shield in the other, as well as premature vengeance sharpening his soul. To the protector’s initial surprise, a massive, twisted hand reached for him, intending to wrap around the warrior’s throat and spitefully throttle the living Elf without the need for a single axe blow. There was no elegance in the grab. Easily discerning its path, Thravian pivoted left and bashed the undead’s reaching claw aside with his shield, staggering it. Following up before the lumbering executioner could react, he drove the ironwood warspear through the corpse’s visor with surgical precision and pulped its corrupted brain. Because the dead weight of its form didn’t go down immediately, Thravian fluidly retracted the weapon, aimed it against and lanced it through the creatures neck. “Textbook.” he thought, as his first kill went down. There were a hundred other duels, a hundred other engagements like his, some won, some lost. Thravian couldn’t assist his people win any of them, he had another to save. All of a sudden, a reward. A yelp from his back left, slightly closer to the main clash. Two downed comrades, each with a leg or arm broken, had attracted the attention of one of the enemy heavies. As the nightmare spawned creature spat a snarling hiss at its soon-to-be victims and raised its bludgeon of a hand, a third, smaller Elf emerged seemingly from nowhere. With absolutely unhesitating valour, the warrior whose armour Thravian recognised, with a mix of joy and terror, as Arleth’s, let out a dignified war cry and jabbed her own spear into the backside of the titan’s left leg. It roared, distracted, and flung its arm around in a defensive slam which sent Arleth barreling, rolling to a stop in a harsh manner which made Thravian cringe involuntarily. “No.” came an equally involuntary utterance, as the malevolent monster diverted its attention to, and advanced on his childhood friend. “Too far.” his mind chimed in, again unhelpful in its perennial pessimism. The warrior sprinted as swiftly as his armoured form could, but the hulking and spidly behemoth was faster, much faster. It reached the reeling, back-bound girl as Thravian came within twenty metres and, without stopping to stare or prepare its murder, made to rampantly dive on the heroine who had grazed it whilst emitting a heartrending combination of roar and screech. The mix of earsplitting din and equally the sight of Arleth’s final, terrible moment occurring directly in front of his eyes forced Thravian’s stomach to lurch. At the last possible instant of reprieve, the deafening battle-noise of a century-old oak collapsing in hurricane wind heralded a friendlier form stampeding in Arleth’s direction with unnatural speed from the cliff. Vul ran with careless abandon, bounding with earthshaking footfalls and crashing into its dark cousin before the creature could end its cowering, crimson-haired victim. The titans went rolling together as though embracing, their unified ball of death crushing undead and Elves alike into the earth if said creatures were unfortunate enough to get in the way. With a divine rage only to be inspired by the near-death of a loved one, Vul briefly pinned his ravenous opponent to the ground and repeatedly cannoned his powerful, nature-made fist four times into its terrible mask of a face. The undead giant lolled in place for a moment, apparently dead. Vul triumphantly made to rise with a resonation of splitting timber, but the deceptive entity sprang to life once more. Getting ahold of the unaware forestwalker’s left leg, the creature ripped it at an abnormal angle and, with its massive strength, sheared Vul’s limb from his body in a momentary pulse of green light. Crying out in his own furious, deep forest-like manner, Vul dragged himself back onto his tormentor and pummelled heavy, incensed fists into its face, torso and limbs. Now a fourfold corpse which was more in the ground than on it, the climber giant ceased to move, and ceased to kill. His way miraculously clear and a one-legged forestwalker protecting him, Thravian jubilantly ran for Arleth, out of breath and near collapsing in exhaustion even before he got there. It didn’t matter. Pessimistic thoughts had been proven wrong. By Malin’s grace and the grace of the powers of the wild he’d made it. Life could go on, even in the midst of this nightmare. But when a near-delirious family guardian reached the injured Arleth of Illawyn and saw a trickle of red seeping out from his savior-angel’s trembling lips, the bright thoughts all went away. More closely, he could see the lacerating gashes staining Arleth’s throat, almost concealed by a reflexively raised hand. He could see the central section of her armour caved in, bent by the giant’s savage blow. Thravian knelt before her, grief painted over every inch of his handsome, battle-dirtied face. Arleth, wincing in pain, slowly and gingerly rolled her head on the increasingly bloodstained ground beneath, looking up at her Thray with dim, amber eyes. “Just hug me Thray, please.” the girl begged in a gentle, hoarse whisper, pitifully attempting to stretch her powerless arms up to the friend she’d always known would become her love. He didn’t even get the chance. Before Thravian, body thrumming with shock and eyes close to blinded by tears, moved to comfort the dying girl, her little arms gracefully made contact with the ground and her beautiful eyes closed for the last time unsatisfied, forever deprived of their final embrace. The failed protector hugged Arleth of Illawyn anyway, ignorant of the storm of war going on around him. He was content to die with her there. Unanswerable questions are a terrible itch on the back one can never reach, constantly plaguing the mind until one goes insane. Did the father-king’s elder subjects ultimately succeed in repelling the assault of the destroyer’s enthralled servants? Did the brilliant forestwalker-champion Vul survive and regrow after its leg was amputated? Most curiously to me, did the valiant knight Thravian live to see his Rose buried? Did he survive the war, returning to Tavule only to have the dubious honour of informing a horrified Rathian of his failure? To my joy, I believe I am able to scratch at least one of those dreadful curiosity itches. I cannot claim credit for this tale, for its apocalyptic events occurred decades or even centuries before I drew my first breath. I am merely its humble scribe, its accountant, tasked with putting quill to parchment for posterity. Many years ago, I found myself relaxing in a high garden, looking out with longing desire onto a red sunset that never seemed to satisfy me. All of a sudden, I was joined in my melancholic state by a tall, disheveled and sorrowful stranger who asked me if I wished to chronicle something of great import. Naturally, in my unquenchable thirst for lore and knowledge I accepted the offer. For the next three nights at around the same time, the mysterious Elf would meet me in the same picturesque spot, relating the details of this very story to me in a very rough but comprehensive form. It was up to me, he said, to weave the truth into a compelling history of events that ought never to have happened. I did just that, for him and myself. The moment my forced companion abruptly concluded the tale at Arleth of Illawyn‘s tragic death, the enigmatic loner got to his feet, bid me a final farewell and went on his way. I never saw him again, not once. His words and his face, his demeanor and his untold stories kept me up at night, as do the questions I didn’t manage to ask him. But I dubiously hypothesize that this peculiar, troubled storyteller was, in fact, the Thravian of his own story, having survived since our darkest ages. What proof do I have of this? What proof do I have that any of his story was true in the slightest? The answer is precisely the same; absolutely none. But for a few moments in your life, kindred, disregard truth and immerse yourself in the story of an imperfect, feeble but kind and brave woman whose story deserved telling. Unknown

I hope you'll remember the Setherien days fondly, sir, however vague those memories become