***The Immortal***

In all my years, I’ve never seen things get this out of control, Corvos thought as he brushed past another startled page trimming the hedges.

An army approaching the capital, cutting it’s way through the heartland of their country. It shouldn’t be possible.

Isn’t there…logistics and shit they have to do? That wasn’t The Immortal’s job, so he didn’t know exactly what was going on, but he knew that army of Vith should be surrounded on all sides because they’d pushed far too deep. They should be harried and tired, torn to shreds bit by bit from attacks in every direction…but they acted like they were on a pleasure walk.

They were outpacing word of their presence. That was the only thing Corvos could think of. Which should have been impossible. Both the Omnipresent and Omniscient specialized in information and fast reaction speed.

Something was going on, and Corvos had a nagging feeling it had something to do with that boy…who shouldn’t exist.

His face was En’hol, but his bone structure…the shape of his shoulder-blades, hips and ribcage…

Corvos shook his head.

NOPE.

Sometimes it was better not to think about things…especially around En’hols. No one had proven whether or not they could read minds, and the family themselves would neither confirm nor deny it. It was best to assume they were in your head.

Corvos arrived at the door to the main En’hol manor and raised his hand to the knocker.

Before his fingers made contact with the door, it was hauled open, revealing Marida En’hol, her cheeks sunken, bags under her eyes.

“Yes, we are aware of the threat to the north, however there is a more existential threat to the south that the En’hol are dealing with. As far as we are concerned, Kinzena can get off their asses and deal with a simple army of Vith. Perhaps Vendrith should take the step he refused to do twenty years ago and kill his traitor son.”

Corvos took a breath.

Marida cocked her head.

“He’s here? The creature’s father is here? Why didn’t we see that!?”

Corvos frowned.

“No, we’re not giving it BACK! What if that makes it worse!? That baby is the only leverage we have over ALL of our problems. What’s to stop them from simply continuing their campaign against us as soon as -”

Corvos twitched.

“Oh, shut up, you old fool.” Marida said, slamming the door in his face.

Because they’re not the same as you, Corvos’s response to Marida’s last words bubbled to the surface.

Corvos pursed his lips. I have officially now seen it all. A panicked En’hol admitting they don’t know something.

He’d never heard the words ‘what if’ uttered by one of their spawn in his entire life. Their entire shtick was that they already knew the answer to that question.

Is that boy a cloud that obscures their vision?

“Well, that was about as productive as I expected it to be.”

What would be the most effective way to defuse the situation? Corvos thought. If the boy truly does obscure their vision, then perhaps I could disguise him and the two of us could-

The door ripped open.

“Don’t you fucking dare!” Marida said, holding a finger under his nose. “I might not be able to punish you, but I can put that prodigy grand-daughter of yours in the dirt!”

Damnit.

“Niece,” he muttered.

“That’s the problem with living forever, isn’t it, you vainglorious cock?” Marida said. ‘It’s both!’ and if you don’t want her to know exactly how gnarled your family tree is, you keep your ‘clever’ plans to yourself!”

It was three generations removed, that’s hardly problematic.

“I would think,” Corvos said. “That in a situation where an En’hol cannot see the future, they might trust the instincts of someone who’s been blind their entire life. Rather than panicking.”

Marida’s eyes widened, her face deepening to a dark red. An instant later she slammed the door in Corvos’ face. Again.

Well…time to visit the Kinzena.

***Later***

“I assure you, the situation is perfectly under control.” Vendrith said, his fingers laced together across the hardwood desk.

Corvos cocked his head to the side. Vendrith dealt with stress much better than Marida En’hol, simply because the kid was more used to not knowing what the fuck he was doing.

“Are you sure about that?” Corvos asked.

“There are five thousand Vith, including the women and children, only a thousand or so actual warriors. The other represent a minimal threat. We have deliberately allowed them to overextend their advance, and they are now being surrounded on every side by the armies that patrol our borders. Forty thousand troops, including no less than five thousand Alia from our vassal families.

“In a matter of days, they’ll be ground down to nothing by the might of our empire,” Vendrith continued.

Corvos cocked his head.

“What happened at Burrok castle?” Corvos asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Burrok castle. You drafted nearly a third of my people, then returned them a few days later and declared the battle won.”

“And yet…” Corvos waved his hand. “The Vith are at our front door. I was under the impression the numbers we had there were similar to the numbers you just quoted me. How did they get past the siege of Burrok castle?”

“A fluke. They created a distraction and escaped the encirclement like thieves in the night, abandoning the castle.”

“So those troops will create a wall at the beginning of the Dinamore stretch, preventing them from retreating?” Corvos asked.

“Indeed,” Vendrith said.

“And how do you intend to deal with the Greater Wratz’got leading them?”

Vendrith shrugged. “One Outsider cannot alone, make a difference in a scale as large as –“

“And the Outsider’s En’hol master? how do you intend to deal with that?”

“What?” Vendrith asked, paling.

“About twenty years old. Highly motivated. From a place called…Earth?”

Corvos enjoyed watching the prick sweat for a minute as he tried to come up with an excuse.

“You know, I’ve been considering where my loyalties lie, because while this young man’s face is very typical for an En’hol, the bone structure in his torso reminds me of-“

Vendrith leapt out of his seat, hand extended, tapping into his Well faster than Corvos could respond.

The air of the office was instantly replaced with a bitingly cold arctic wind. The lamplight was replaced with fading sunlight reflecting off white snow.

“Fuck!” Corvos shouted as he fell through the bitingly cold air, tumbling wildly for a moment beside his hardwood chair before he stabilized his fall. He was heading for the bare, jagged stone slopes of The Forest of Giants, fixing to make a piece of abstract art.

***Sasha Honnuken***

It’s been five days since uncle said he was going to go ‘talk to someone about it’

Given her uncle’s propensity for shirking responsibility, there was a small change he’d decided it was hopeless and taken a vacation among the barbarians to the east until the dust settled.

Or something bad happened to him…

In either case, Sasha couldn’t wait any longer. She had to do something. The Vith were howling outside the walls of the city every night, loud enough that she heard them through the walls of her bedroom. It made it impossible to sleep. To think.

I have to do something. But what? Sasha had no idea what she could do that would make any difference in the defense of the city.

Do your job. Every day that she huddled in the manor, not healing the wounded, was a day she failed as a Honnuken.

It was simple, and it allowed her to shed the heavy burden of the guilt with one simple decision.

Sasha slipped on her underarmor, chain, then her tabard with the symbol of her house, marking her as a battlefield healer.

Then she headed out the door to the frontlines to do her job.

***Tom Graves***

There they are, Tom thought, peering through the spyglass they’d looted on the way in.

Armies from the corners of the Deraan Empire were closing in from every direction, intent on crushing the Vith between a rock and a hard place.

Tom glanced at the ‘hard place’.

It was just a bit hopeless…

The sheer scale of the city walls laid out before them boggled Tom’s mind. They were over sixty feet tall, surrounding the entire city in multiple layers that got higher the closer to the center of the city they got.

If every Vith warrior joined hands and stood at the base of the wall, they’d cover…maybe a fifteenth of the distance? It just wasn’t something that a thousand people could take, let alone navigate.

The tops of the walls were filled with soldiers and Alia, dozens of times their number, thick enough to fill the walls with a forest of spears and standards, glowering down at them menacingly.

Tom spotted a Honnuken standard and noted their position.

Never hurt to have some shiny trading cards.

Tom spotted some new standards in the approaching army that he’d never seen before.

“Alakesh the Bountiful,” Carol said, pointing them out when he asked. Their standard was a tree bowed by it’s own fruit. “Their primary force is muggles, as their power lends itself more towards farming and making a ton of money than battle. Not a threat, save for their sheer numbers.”

“That’s the one you’ve gotta watch out for,” Carol said, pointing at another standard that looked like a fist clenched around a thorny rose, blood dribbling out of it.

“Morkel the Spiteful.” They were actually the smallest section of the army, maybe a couple hundred people at most, compared to Alakesh and their tens of thousands.

“The cursemongers have more ways to make your life hell than there are stars in the sky. Their power is comparable to one of the great houses, but nobody likes them, so they fail at politics.”

“How do we deal with them?” Tom asked.

“Luckily for us, they don’t like anyone either. If the other groups are crushed, they’ll run away with their tails tucked between their legs. The trick is to avoid combat with them until their morale is broken. Once they break we can exterminate them in the night while they have no targets for their retaliatory curses.”

Tom turned to look at Carol.

“You’ve thought about this a lot, haven’t you?”

Carol grinned back at him. “It’s what my species – what I live for.”

“Babysitting must have been hell for you.”

“Babysitting Ella is like defiling the corpse of a king in front of his people.”

“That’s…good?”

Carol shuddered. “Oh, yes.”

I think Lily Baby-proofed Carol’s brain somehow, Tom mused as he scanned their ‘army’.

The warriors were leaning on their steel spears, watching the approaching armies impassively, forming a living wall between the enemy and their loved ones.

Women were jabbing solid steel arrows into the ground in front of them, creating a tiny forest of glittering metal. They bore the fifty-pound steel compound bows like they were kid’s toys. Each and every one of them had the power of a mounted ballista.

Children were winding up the ‘howlers’ Carol had added to the shopping list, which were waist high machines with cranks that made haunting howling sounds that were highly directional, creating a morale-draining effect on the people in the city.

If anyone would know how to drain morale, it would be Carol, Tom thought drily.

The old took over logistics, cooking and cleaning in bulk with verve, their eyes glittering with determination as they ordered the teens around.

“Why didn’t I just buy a bunch of machine guns?” Tom asked to himself. It wasn’t like the Outsiders had international trade laws. They didn’t give a shit.

“Cuz’ you’re a dumbass.” Carol responded.

“Why didn’t you?” Tom demanded.

“Because I like seeing the fear in people’s eyes before I kill them. Guns are…impersonal and bland. I’ve always liked that era just before industrialized warfare.”

Tom rolled his eyes before glancing at Suzie. The Ilspeth had Tom’s soul engine in one hand, her fingertips touching the edge of a massive, fifty-foot summoning circle, protected by a hastily created stone wall and lined with Keth’zar to discourage teleporters from attempting to smudge it.

Her eyes were closed in concentration, ready to inject soul pulses straight into the circle.

“Well, given the situation, I think industrialized spellcraft is the only way we’re gonna be winning this thing,” Tom said.

“It’s a bit sad, but I like winning just a bit more than I like carnage.” Carol said, nodding.

“Alright, you bitches!” Carol shouted at the top of her lungs. “Shoot these weak fuckers!”

She pointed at the Alakesh troops. A thousand steel arrows followed her finger, arcing high over the Vith warriors and descending down on the army, so far away that it was difficult to make out individuals, shredding everything and everyone they hit.

The casualties were minimal. There were only a thousand arrows, and maybe one in ten actually hit anyone, and of those, few actually resulted in an instant kill.

But it was enough to get the ball rolling.

As volley after volley of arrows tore into the approaching army, the fifty-foot circle lit up like a Christmas tree, and spirits began to trickle out of it, seeking corpses to inhabit.

Soon enough, they would outnumber their enemies.

A soulmonger can only profit from war.

We just might be able to pull this off.

Tom felt a ripple behind him.

Tom whipped around and covered his face with his hand, running his magic through the recently bought platinum Ring of Protection.

Three fucking million do-

Suddenly Raze stood in front of him, the veins in his arms pulsing as he tried to force a thick dagger through the invisible field of force between the two of them.

“Good senses,” The giant’s muffled voice carried no hint of the strain as his limbs tried to murder Tom.

“I thought you wanted the Houses to be destroyed? Why try to kill me?” Tom demanded as Carol lunged forward, whiffing as raze vanished.

Tom hissed in pain as a dagger pricked the flesh above his kidneys, the ring catching the strike like a non-newtonian fluid just before it dealt permanent damage.

Tom whipped a backhand at the teleporter and nearly lost his hand as a Keth’zar whipped past, its claws whistling through empty air.

“We’ve all got our orders.” Raze’s voice echoed from everywhere at once.

“Yeah, well, you’re gonna have a harder time taking me down than you did before!” Tom was surrounded on all sides by Keth’zar and Carol, leaving no gap that the teleporter could approach from.

“Is that what you think?” Raze’s voice emanated directly above him, and Tom felt the giant’s hands seize his head.

And then Tom was weightless.

His breath was violently drawn from his lungs in a spray of boiling blood as the vacuum of space assaulted him.