But his voice trailed off as he looked past me. His gaze was fixed on the plain, his one good eye wide, the false clarity of the stimulant draught lending him a terrifying prescience. He saw it before I did.
I followed his gaze, wiping grit from my visor. And I heard it.
It was not a roar, but a roar's foundation: the sound of a million, million hard things rubbing together, a dry, tectonic shiver that climbed from the bedrock of the world into my teeth.
The plain itself lifted.
It was not earth. It was a mound, a living ramp built from the interlocked bodies of insects, a mountain of gargantuan, synergistic spite. They had built it twice the height of the first wall's ruin, a dark, churning wave of chitin poised to crash against us. And upon its crest, they marched.
Beetles. Beetles the size of siege towers, their shells carved not by nature, but by a hateful intelligence. Sigils that mocked our own. Cruel, jagged parodies were etched into their carapaces, lit from within by a stolen, greenish witchlight. They were not beasts. They were engines.
They advanced toward the second wall's face, slow and inevitable as a glacier. Their great, split mandibles opened like portcullises. From each maw spilled a fresh torrent of smaller creatures, a dark river that splashed against our runic stones, searching for purchase, for any crack in our defense.
I looked at the centipede I had helped slay, this monster that had seemed like the end of all things, and felt a cold, bitter laugh well in my chest. It was just a scout. A vanguard. This… this was the true tide. The captain's draught-fueled strength seemed to fade, his massive shoulders slumping. We hadn't held. We had just bought ourselves a better view of the end.
A single, shuddering cough vibrated through the stone beneath my boots.
It was not an impact. It was the ward stone, the heart of the second tier, buried deep in the granite foundations. After seventy hours of ceaseless, thrumming life, it had just lost its rhythm.
I felt it like a hand leaving my shoulder. The runes along the parapet, the faint, turquoise lines of power that had been our second sun, guttered out. They died in a ripple, one after another, like a string of tavern lights in a gale. Natural daylight, achingly dim and grey, was all that remained.
A sudden, unnatural cold swept the terrace. The wall itself seemed to exhale, its lifeblood draining away.
"No, no, no..." I heard an engineer scream. Shouts converged into one vast alarm. Men raced to dump bags of quicksilver into the auxiliary sigil-grooves, a desperate, last ditch effort to jump start the system. But they were seconds too late.
With the wards extinguished, the living ramp struck.
The lead siege beetle, its witchlight sigils flaring with triumph, rammed the stone. The impact sent a shockwave that threw me from my knees. Cracks spider-webbed outward. A fitting, terrible word, since real spiders were already swarming the joints, injecting an anchoring silk that gave the next wave of ants purchase.
The terrace groaned, a deep, bowel-loosening sound of tormented masonry. My knees buckled as the floor itself shifted half a foot downward. Somewhere to my right, the great sun cannon, dead since the kobold's final, heroic shot, slid from its broken mount.
It toppled over the edge like a discarded toy, vanishing without a sound into the ant-ocean. Another debt, erased and unpaid.
Another impact. Stones leapt upward from the floor, scattering like dice. The ramparts between two towers sheared off completely, a curtain of granite falling away.
The troops stationed there: orcs, humans, the last of the aetherlings all tumbled in a wriggling avalanche into the enemy mass. Spell-fire flared where mages attempted mid-fall retaliation, but then the insect forms closed over the glows, snuffing them like candle flames.
I reached for the captain, but he was already gone, bellowing for a retreat to the third tier. "To the crown! Evacuate! To the crown!" He shoved me, hard, toward the inner stairs. "Go, soldier! That debt's not paid on this terrace!"
I backpedaled, my movement sluggish, as if the very air had thickened to mud. I reached the inner stairs to the third tier, only twenty yards away, but a fresh wave of ants, survivors from the barricade blast, surged over the lip ahead of us, cutting the path. Their mandibles dripped acid; steam curled from the gouges where it landed.
I wheeled left, shouting the captain's name, but he was already swallowed by the their charge, his iron voice lost in the chitinous scream. I ran toward Tower Nine, hoping its interior lift still functioned. I sprinted across the rubble that the second bastion was rapidly becoming and looked up.
Tower Nine was already lost. The great iron-bound doors hung twisted from their hinges, and inside I glimpsed rocs, landed, tearing at support beams. Lightning, raw and untamed, flashed between the iron reinforcements until the ancient wood burst into flame. A gust of charred feathers whipped past me, scorching my cheek.
The terrace bucked a final, violent time. With a sound like the rending of the world's crust, a whole hundred-foot section collapsed inward. I dropped, arms over my head, as masonry exploded upward and then fell into the dark. Through the new, gaping canyon, I saw the first tier's wreckage far below, boiling with the victory cries of claw and fang.
Dust, thick as wool, blanketed everything. My ears rang with a high, piercing whine. I pushed up onto blistered palms and looked across the ruin. The second tier was gone, no longer a wall but a graveyard of its own defenders.
The orc captain, the engineers, the sergeant who had helped me with the bombs. All of them gone. I was alive by the gods' grace, or perhaps their cruel indifference.
Monsters already scrambled over the debris, a living tide pouring toward what remained of the final parapet, the crown, high above.
Somewhere overhead, a single horn attempted one clear note—fall back, final defense—but it wavered, broken, and the wind swallowed the rest.
I found another staircase, this one carved into the inner face, meant for runners. The climb to the crown of the wall felt like a dream half-remembered, for all was smothered in grey dust and the shrieking of the rocs. My gauntlets slipped on rails slick with frost-bomb residue and blood.
At last, I hauled myself onto the final parapet. It was fifty feet wide, broad as a palace avenue and strewn with the husks of giant spell batteries, their crystal cores cracked and dark.
Dawn, the real dawn, smoldered beyond the eastern horizon, a thin, reluctant orange rind cracking over banks of storm-clouds. The air up here was sharp and, for a moment, strangely, terribly clean, as though this height had left the stench of death and acid far below.
For one heartbeat, the entire frontline seemed to pause. The storm-birds wheeled but did not scream. The insect tide, swarming the ruins of the second tier, paused in uncanny, collective silence, their billion antennae lifted as if scenting some new, approaching god.
I did not understand. I wiped the dust from my visor and looked directly into the sunrise.
There, framed by the newborn light, hovered a silhouette.
Feminine, yes. Slender limbs, the curve of hips, hair streaming behind her like comet tails. She was unclothed but more than naked: her skin seemed forged of morning itself, bronze where the sun touched, deep night-shadow where it did not.
Wings unfurled from her shoulders—not of feather, but membranous, vast, and geometric, like a dragonfly's, each vein catching the dawn so fiercely they blazed with transparent, liquid gold. Her left hand ended not in fingers, but in long, graceful talons of what looked like molten glass. In her right, she cradled a sphere no larger than a child's marble.
It burned white-hot, a miniature sun held as gently as a pearl.
I was too tired to pray, yet some ancient, broken reflex bent my knees. Around me, every soldier—orc, goblin, kobold, half-giant—dropped into a stunned crouch or stood petrified, weapons slipping from numb fingers.
Even the rocs faltered mid-wheel, the thunder lost from their pinions, their animal-cunning recognizing a predator that hunted gods, not men.
A thought, cold and clear as the air, cut through my exhaustion: This is what the insects were running from. No. Not running from. They were being herded. We were not fighting an army. We were trapped between the flock and the shepherd.
The silhouette in the sky raised her clawed hand. The sun-pearl in her other brightened, collapsing all shadows until only she and the wall existed in a world of blinding white.
Then, with a gesture of infinite, casual grace, she flicked it.
The world winked.
A line of light, thinner than a spider's thread, lanced through the air faster than thought. It met the parapet three towers to my right. It did not explode. It was simply erased.
There was no roar, no thunder. Stone, runes, cannonry, men, monsters, three hundred feet of history and magic, flashed into incandescent, silent vapor.
The shockwave followed a breath later, too immense for sound. It was a physical fist of force that lifted me, all of us, from the deck. Time slowed. I recalled, absurdly, my mother pulling clean sheets from a line in a high wind. We were cloth. We snapped.
I hit the stones twenty yards back, my breastplate denting in, my helm ringing like a struck bell. Silence devoured everything but that ringing, a single, crystalline note that seemed to originate inside my skull. I tasted blood and stone dust. My vision was a white glare rimmed with black, pulsing petals.
When sight crawled back, the dawn was brighter. Its source was the chasm where three towers and the adjoining parapet had stood. The edges of the melted granite glowed cherry-red, weeping thick rivulets of slag that hissed as they poured down onto the tiers below. Beyond the gap, I could see clean through the wall, a curtain parted onto the distant, untouched hills where more armies still gathered.
The insect horde nearest the breach lay strewn like dropped grain, legs curling, wings twitching. Even the rocs tumbled from the sky, feathers on fire, their stolen thunder finally, truly, gone.
The silhouette in the sky watched, her head cocked, as though curious whether insects or mortals flinched more prettily.
Something ancient in my marrow, deeper than thought, whispered run.
I obeyed. I staggered, slipped on a carpet of shattered sigils that had once been a ward, and sprinted, not looking back, toward the inner ramp that led down into the heart of the third bastion.
The angel of dawn, for what else could she be, drifted nearer. I felt a building heat on my back, like a midsummer noon, though the sun was barely risen. Rubble slid from tower rims, raining sparks and dust.
A lantern, guttering in its cage, illuminated a sigil carved above an archway: the spiral rune for MEDICA. I followed it, not from any hope of healing, but because it was forward, and forward was not into the abyss.
At the mouth of the teleportation corridor stood an orcish matron. Once she might have been grand: her tusks were capped in brass, her remaining braids threaded with unit beads.
Now, she leaned on a length of rusted piping lashed to her thigh stump. Her other arm ended at the elbow, a ragged, cauterized wound. Lightning burns, fresh and blue, laced one cheek; new blood matted her tunic. Yet her single remaining eye ruled the hallway, brighter and fiercer than any rune.
"Inside, cubs!" she barked, her voice raw. Goblin medics hustled stretchers past her; kobold runners shepherded shell-shocked soldiers whose eyes were wide and empty. She shouldered each one through as if she were whole-bodied.
When I stumbled toward her, she planted the pipe, barring my path. Her eye bored into me, assessing.
"Can you walk without falling?"
"Yes," I lied. My knees were buckling.
She saw the lie, but she saw the will behind it, too. A flicker of... not approval, but recognition. She grunted. "Then you're a crutch. Get in. Hold one."
She hauled me by the collar through the arch and shoved me toward a human sergeant whose bandaged eyes wept blood through the linen.
The teleport chamber was a vault of polished obsidian shot through with copper inlay, once serene, now smeared in blood-prints and filth. Concentric circles of rune-metal formed a dais wide as a ballroom; bodies packed it shoulder to shoulder.
I looped my arm around the sergeant, holding him upright as he shook. Above us, a massive crystal keystone hovered in its housing, flickering, its inner glow weak, its drainage lines cracked. It looked like it had maybe one, maybe two, jumps left before it burned out forever.
The matron limped to the control plinth. From a pouch at her belt, she drew an arcane stone: multifaceted, whisky-amber, and throbbing with stored sigils. A crystal like that could purchase an entire town. Her hands shook from exhaustion and blood loss, but her eye was steady.
"Pack tighter!" she shouted. "You let daylight between you, you lose a leg in the bleed!" We obeyed, crushing together in a miserable, terrified mass. The sergeant's pauldrons bit into my ribs.
Outside, the wall convulsed. Dust billowed down the hall; the last torches died, plunging us into the dim glow of the failing keystone. A low, grinding moan unspooled through the masonry. Like a colossus realizing its spine was broken.
The matron placed the stone upon the plinth. The copper lines in the floor raced alight, crawling toward the keystone like sunrise through canyon cracks. She spared us all one final glance: fierce pride, and a weariness older than empires.
"No heroes left here," she murmured, almost to herself. "Just debts carried forward." Her gaze found mine in the dim light. "See them paid."
Then she slammed her makeshift crutch onto the activation rune.
The world folded. Light became spearpoints. Sound became a reversed thunderclap. My stomach and heart traded places. For one unbearable breath, I was nowhere, only a bead of will strung on a wire of intense pain.
When reality snapped back, chilly air filled my lungs, pine-scented and damp. I collapsed onto blood soaked cobblestones beneath a sky untouched by smoke. The others spilled around me, groaning, counting limbs. Above the new dais, the local keystone flickered once, then shattered into cooling, worthless embers. The portal circle dimmed forever.
Of the orcish matron, there was no sign.
Behind us, on the far horizon, the Great Tifan Wall glowed faintly red, like a candle guttering its last. As we watched, a second, silent flash silhouetted the mountains. The wall's crown crumbled inward, and the dawn was swallowed by rising dust.
I lay on my back, tracing the shockwave's ripples across the high, cold clouds, and realized the ringing in my ears had at last faded.
What replaced it was worse: a hush vast as the distance between here and ruin, filled only by the question of who that sunrise angel had been, and how we were meant to stand against something that could erase fortresses with a gesture.
But the matron's charge still echoed in my skull. See them paid. Kriv. The kobold artillerist. The orc captain. The matron herself.
Exhausted or not, I knew one thing. Debts do not forgive themselves.