Qapla - 1st Harvestwatch 1383
Great Tifan Wall, Trifectorate Confederacy
"Beyond Duskmere's eastern horizon lies a hunger without number. The chittering tides of chitin, fang, and claw that the gods abandoned when they tired of forging nightmares. Against that unending night rises our Great Tifan Wall... It is our vow hammered into the world: here the monsters break, or the wall itself must."
- High General Aveline in a speech to Granitehold Troops
My sword should not have been rising, yet habit dragged it up one more time. The edge screeched across chitin, splitting the armor plate belly of the spider perched on the merlon beside me, and I felt its weight slump against my pauldron.
Black ichor spattered my visor, hissing where it touched the steel. I tasted iron at the back of my throat. Whether that was from the blood or the three days without enough water, I could not tell.
My mission was simple, and impossible. Cross two hundred yards of open terrace to deliver the last case of stimulant draughts to the orcish captain holding the eastern landing. Two hundred yards. An eternity.
I braced my boots against flagstones polished by ten thousand desperate footsteps and leaned forward over the gunwale of the second terrace. Below, the first tier, our proud outer bastion, one hundred feet of master-mason craft and four hundred years of enchantment, had become an uneven island of rubble.
It crawled. Not metaphorically, not in the way a city bustles. It crawled: waves of obsidian ants the length of hounds, carapaces lacquered in war paint of green acid; silver spined centipedes wider than wine casks; and spiders, endless spiders, each glossy abdomen webbed with the reflections of our burning cannon emplacements.
Farther out, the plain seethed like a cauldron at full boil. Swarms of dusk moths eclipsed the dawn, their whispering wings crackling with static. When the brighter bolts lanced downward, they illuminated the rocs: titanic birds with plumage black as a moonless midwinter sea, each feather tipped in living sparks.
They dove in flocks, talons carrying the charge of thunderstorms, smashing beasts and fortifications alike. Two hours ago, I watched a roc seize an entire cannon, the crew still clinging to their gear, and hurl it through the western bastion. My ears were still ringing from the aftermath.
Seventy hours. A hellish number counted in cycles of fatigue. Numbness, then nausea, then that hour of false clarity when everything tastes of ozone, then the slow grind into stupor again. The case attached to my back, heavy as granit, was our last answer to that stupor. Forty vials of liquid adrenaline that would buy soldiers another hour. An hour was a lifetime.
I kept moving, boots sliding on grit and ichor. The auto-fire launchers on the parapet behind me detonated continuously until their brass cradles glowed white. The engineers finally quenched them with summoned tidewater; the steam rose in columns, highlighting their cooldown that the rocs took advantage of and dove.
I rounded the corner of a collapsed watchtower and saw Kriv. A goblin engineer who'd bragged last week that nothing scared him save an empty wallet, he was now pressing a glowing rune charge against a breached portcullis, hands shaking so badly the rune sizzled against his own fingertips.
"Kriv, get back! It's set!" I shouted, my voice a rasp.
He laughed, a brittle, too-high sound. "Won't hold 'less I'm on it, soldier! Go! Get back to the fight!" He didn't look at me. His fingertips were blistering, but he held. The sigil flared, sealing the gap in a burst of molten force glass that would hold the beasts back.
He slumped, spent. I wanted to stop, to drag him back, but two medics were already there, their faces grim. They weren't running. Kriv was gone.
I spat the taste of iron and Kriv's sacrifice from my mouth and ran. Below, I watched the ants pile upon each other, making living ramps. Fire poured from holes, but the creatures had learned; the uppermost ants curled their bodies, a sacrificial crust, letting the hidden ranks scuttle up the mound unharmed.
They crested the lip of the collapsed first tier and spilled onto the narrow service stair that wound up to us. The stairs' runes pulsed with repulsion, but they guttered like dying hearth embers. I felt the throb of the ward stone beneath my boots lose another heartbeat.
A horn blared: three descending notes. Brace, flyers incoming.
I tilted my head back, neck joints popping, and saw a fresh squadron of lightning rocs eclipse the high sun, silhouettes rimmed in blue fire. Their shrieks slashed through the sky, and my teeth ached.
Ballista's tracked them; great iron-armed engines of war, thrumming with stored power. Nets, heavy as anchors and woven with hardening enchantments, snapped outward. The rocs were prepared. They sheared through half the nets, thunder sheeting from their wings vaporizing chain links mid-flight, but the sky was too crowded. One roc, larger than the rest, failed to juke the volley from Tower Six. The net snapped taut, the links flaring with a blue, binding light.
It fell like a demolished tower.
I dove behind a shattered merlon, cradling the case of draughts against my breastplate as the impact shook the very foundations of the wall. The roc struck the ant-mound below, a splash of crackling feathers and vaporized chitin.
I dove behind a shattered merlon, cradling the case of draughts against my breastplate as the impact shook the very foundations of the wall. The roc struck the ant-mound below, a splash of crackling feathers and vaporized chitin.
For a heartbeat, the siege-engine of insect meat stalled, confused by the sudden mountain of electrified carrion. Then mandibles carved a tunnel straight through the avian ruin, and the tide resumed its climb.
I pushed myself up, my arms aching, my knuckles white on the case handle. Seventy-five yards to go. The air smelled of burnt feathers and the sharp, metallic tang of Kriv's final, molten handprint. A debt. I ran, leaping a fissure that hadn't been there a minute ago.
To my left, a mixed-species squad of reserves was holding a breach. Orcs, goblins, kobolds, standing shoulder to shoulder with aetherlings whose skin flared with the elements that birthed them, and half-giants who towered above all.
In another life, I would have spoken of treaties and old grudges; here on the wall, we were simply the weary, and the weary shared everything: water skins, spells, curses. They were all that stood between the stairs and the inner bastion. They were also my path.