Calvin Descroix looked through a spyglass at the refugee encampment. Practically a fort already, he thought, despite less than a quarter of a day to dig in. Angled trenches marred the direct upslope approach, the only one workable for his forces. Splitting to either side of the fortifications would expose them to withering fire from the Battlemaster’s mages and archers. Worse, the clearer terrain and broad, comparatively shallow slope would make an excellent killing field for his corps of Lancers.

Even from this distance, the steady pounding of drums drifted from the center of the compound, their source a small, childlike figure standing on the largest wagon. As far away as Calvin was, he couldn’t make out more than outlines, but the outline beating its drum was too small to be one of the soldiers. Several days ago, the fleeing refugees had suddenly began marching much faster, and with the bard in sight, the reason was clear. She’s so young, he thought, closing his eyes against the sudden twinge in his chest. But, I can’t change the Empire, and she’ll be collared with the rest of the survivors.... A heartbeat later, he opened his eyes again. That is, if she survives. Mercy was not a virtue often afforded to the Empire’s commanders, but in the chaos of a pitched battle, perhaps an “accident” could be arranged to spare the child a much grimmer fate in the breeding pens of Nouveau Deskra. Bards were rare enough as it was; one with added military skills would be put to use in attempts to create more.

Moreover, this bard appeared to have skills beyond even the military; with every beat of her drum, the clouds overhead darkened. The air began to cool, and shadows deepened all along the rise where the refugees had dug their defenses.

He shook himself out of his thoughts, watching in silence as nearly two thousand Luparan Gendarmes entered formation at the bottom of the distant slope. He turned to the hulking Panthren awaiting orders next to him, the massive leonine form of the Shackled beast-man standing almost as tall as Calvin’s horse. “I don’t see another way around it, Commandant Golthen. We need your battalion to break their lines before we can commit the Hoplites.”

The beast-man rolled his shoulders, the golden glint around his neck just peeking out when the curls of his light brown mane shifted. “It’s why we were sent.” The words were almost a snarl, bitten off around oversized canines, with only half-human lips to refine the shape of the sound

“The one on the wagon seems to be calling up this storm,” he said as thunder rumbled ominously above. “Some form of bard or mage. Take them out and it should be a demoralizing blow, Commandant. As soon as your Gendarmes clear a path, the Hoplites will follow. You know better than I just how bloody this will be…”

“By the Emperor’s command,” replied the half-lion with a savage grin, seemingly eager for the bloodshed. Golthen loped forward to join his soldiers, tightening his heavy clawed gauntlets before securing his helm. As if by unspoken agreement, the rains began just as the Gendarmes began their charge.

=========================================

Millie Thatcher struck her drum, and the blast of thunder stilled the wind and caused every soldier and civilian on the rise to freeze for one single moment. The growing storm above had cast dark shadows across their position, but as the lightning flared, stark white light momentarily drove them back. The lightning dimmed, but stayed, dancing around her chainmail and gauntlet in jagged blue-white arcs, and buzzing around the metal pieces of the wagon and the gleaming head of Hett’s axe. Her baton beat a stuttering tremolo against the stretched hide of the drum, a rapid flickering drumroll before she slid the metal baton along the iron rim. The sparks stretched out between the baton and the edge of the instrument when her hand withdrew, and similar tracings of energy began to arc along the armor and weapons of every Soldier under the Battlemaster’s banner.

The Deskren Gendarmes, uncowed by the dramatic display, rolled up the slope, the wolfmen surging forward in an unstoppable tide of tooth and claw. Rains lashed against the encampment as the storm broke free, but the defenders were unmoved. The soldiers set down their tools and took up their weapons, waiting for orders. Millie kept her drumbeats light and steady, though her cadence had quickened: still three heartbeats to a strike, but that heartbeat had started to race.

When less than a third of the distance between the attackers and the first row of spiked trees remained, the Battlemaster spoke, and at his word, Millie struck the drum once more, then held the baton against the head, arm quivering.

“Now.”

Over a hundred Deskren crossbows let go with one collective snap, and the front line of Gendarmes crumpled just a hundred paces shy of the defenses. Taken when the Lancers had surprised an enemy supply convoy, the General had insisted all of the Soldiers practice with the weapons regardless of class or existing skills. Now that insistence paid off; very few of the projectiles missed. As the bolts struck the wolfmen, they exploded in lightning and thudding rumbles of thunder borrowed from Millie’s drum. The first line of Gendarmes fell and died, and those behind howled in a fury that drove back the rain. Then they reached the makeshift barricades and trenches, and the battle devolved to a grand melee of shield, and spear and axe and sword.

========================================

Jenna Tillersen stood up and wiped the sweat from her brow, back aching from stooping down at her age. As a [Water Witch] she had never gone adventuring, spending her years helping the villages in the southern region of Weldtir. Between finding water, drawing it up, and a spat of healing skills, she always had worthwhile work to do. She even helped with delivering babies from time to time. All those things, together with the fact that she never really felt the urge to fight, had yielded a life filled mostly with peace and comfort until the Deskren came. She’d certainly never thought she’d be running from a war, let alone actually fighting in one. Yet here she was, another page turned in her Story as she did her part in the preparations for unleashing destruction on a scale that turned her stomach.

“That’s the last section, Miss Erin,” she said, turning to glance at the Worldwalker. “Davin and the others have set the Earthbreaker Runes, and when they go off, my magic will freeze the water that seeps in.”

The General’s Wife looked out over the levee that held back the River Weldt, a weary expression on her face. Jenna and every other able body with a speck of magical talent that could be spared had been sent, and even then the [Hand of Solace] had been obliged to refresh their magical reserves in order to engrave so many hundreds of runes across the base of the levee. She led them back to high ground, then turned to face them.

“Now we wait for the signal.”

“It won’t matter,” said a smooth and shadowy voice. A man on horseback melted out of the treeline, flanked by dozens of Luparan Gendarmes. From the distant encampment, thunder rolled across the shallow valley, where storm clouds had darkened a section of the horizon to near pitch blackness. The man spoke again as lightning flashed from within. “Whatever his game was, it ends here.”

“You’re free to think that,” said the Worldwalker, raising her hand to stop Jenna and the other mages from readying their magic. She could feel Erin’s mana rise to the surface, but only in a small current, too weak for her to discern her intent, beyond that it was Life magic.

“I’m Excruciator Selunj,” rasped the thin man with the harsh face. “I’m going to break you personally, then share you with my Gendarmes. Once you have learned true obedience, I’ll send you after your own husband. If he survives the battle.” He laughed, a dark, cruel sound.

Erin’s face didn’t even flicker at the man’s pronouncement, even delivered as it was with all the certainty of the headsman’s ax. “Hm. It’s lucky for you then, that I am far more merciful than he.”

Suddenly, Selunj made a choking noise. Jenna gasped as the [Hand of Solace]’s magic flared and she ripped the life out of almost a hundred foes at once without changing expression. Blood poured from the Gendarmes’ snouts, and as one, they collapsed, weapons thumping to the dirt after falling from nerveless hands. There, on the ground, the bodies looked almost pristine and untouched, save for the reddened ground beneath them.

“Wha-” gasped the Deskren overseer, before sliding off his horse with blood pouring from his nose and down his face.

“The human body -- any living body, really -- is an amazing thing,” said Erin Ward, lowering her hand as the Excruciator gasped his last breath. “We can survive terrible trauma, lose an entire limb and recover, or we can die from something as simple as a nosebleed, if it’s bad enough.”

“You call that merciful?” asked Jenna, as a bright light rose over the distant trees, a flare to illuminate the countryside for miles.

“Indeed it was merciful. Had Jacob heard what he said, the man would have been days in the dying. Ask my husband about Vlad Tepes sometime when he isn’t busy.” The Worldwalker looked up at the signal flare with a smile, then turned and, with a pulse of power, activated the runes on the levee.

“Vlad Tepes? Is that a place? Or a name?” the [Water Witch] responded as magic surged and the bottom of the levee began to crack apart, flash-frozen water ruthlessly widening the gaps opened by the earth magic.

A new thunder rose. The ground beneath their feet began to tremble, with larger chunks of stone tumbling down, pushed out from the wall by the incomprehensible pressures locked behind them. The runes did their work, and as the entire structure gave way to unleash a wall of water over ten feet high and almost a mile wide, the Worldwalker smiled.

“He was a man. A much kinder one than Jacob, should he ever find reason to be truly angry.”

========================================

Millie Thatcher beat her drum with all her might, heart pounding with fear-tinged exhilaration. This was a new kind of fear, however: before, she would have huddled in the wagons and only fought when bandits tried to climb inside. Now this fear galvanized her, steadying her mind and arm as she called down thunderbolts with every strike.

The first line of sharpened pikes in the ground had merely slowed the Gendarmes, and they had learned quickly that it was the girl on the wagon calling down the lightning instead of mages in the back lines. The Battlemaster had swung around with a dozen Lancers and trampled one group of wolf-men who had broken through and charged her position. The reprieve was brief, for a massive Panthren Lion had taken a small number of beastkin lucky enough to survive the initial assault right through their lines. The lion-man roared, pushing her storm back long enough for the wolves to close.

Their advance met its end at the head of old man Hett’s axe, the man cackling with sadistic glee as the broad, cruelly sharp blade flashed down, splitting one wolf from helm to groin. The mules, eager to prove themselves, pulled their weight, bucking the Gendarmes away. With an equine scream of rage, one even took hold of an unfortunate Gendarme by the shoulder, shaking it like a bulldog would a rabbit, its strained howls tapering off to squeals and barely-audible whimpers as it died.

One Gendarme rose over the side of the wagon, finding his feet before advancing on her, a triumphant gleam in his eye as he raised his weapon. Without thinking or even missing a beat, Millie struck her drum and, on the backstroke, lashed out to strike the oncoming foe’s chestplate. At the moment of contact, Millie felt her Mana reserves drain precipitously, but she certainly couldn’t argue with the effect: immediately, the wolfman seemed to liquefy, blowing out the gaps in his chestplate. A pair of armored legs toppled away from the wagon, joined by his very messy upper half.

She actually did miss a beat after that, unprepared for the awe-inspiring nature of her attack and its disgusting results. After the wolf’s remains fell to the ground, she felt something new:

You have gained the Skill [Battle Beats]! Shock and awe, and force unrelenting! Devastate your enemies with solid waves of sound itself!

Still somewhat shaken, she glanced down at Hett, still laughing as he corralled his mules. Smiling, the [Battle-Bard] started playing again as the brassy note of Deskren war horns sounded the charge of the Hoplite reserves. The captain of the Gendarmes, seeing his troops fail, roared once more and charged the wagon.

His charge met its end at the tip of the Battlemaster’s lance. After his earlier sally, he had picked up a lance from somewhere and circled back on the wagon, the blackened, blunted end making devastating contact with the panthren’s chestplate. The lance shattered under the force, and both the captain and Battlemaster fell away. Suddenly absent its rider, his charger committed itself to the fray as Jacob rose to his feet. Millie redoubled her efforts, fighting down a sudden wave of panic: his sword was still attached to his saddle, now a world away.

The lion-man stalked forward. One armored foot lashed out, and Millie’s heart stopped as abruptly as that foot did: Jacob’s steel-clad hand had clamped itself around the warrior’s shin, crushing the armor into his leg with a sickening crunch.

There the Battlemaster stood, steady as a mountain in the face of the enemy. “Mister Hett!” he called. “They’ve committed their reserves; the signal, if you would!”

As Hett reached into his coat to withdraw a small rune-covered rod, the Deskren captain roared again, this time in surprise and panic as the Battlemaster heaved, his face twisting as the captain rose into the air, then smashed back to the ground, crushing a Luparan soldier under his weight. Hett pointed the rod to the sky, and with a pulse of magic, a ball of light shot upward, through and past the storm clouds to detonate in a brilliant false dawn, chasing away the shadows and casting the Battlemaster in terrible relief.

He strode for the front lines, where the fighting was the thickest, dragging his impromptu hammer behind him, still protesting his treatment. “Soldiers!” he roared, and now he did sound angry. Watching from the comparative safety of the wagon, Millie thought it was an even more terrifying prospect than the entire battle up to this point had been.

“I said!” He swung the lion again, in a vicious horizontal arc, sending three Gendarmes tumbling away.

“We hold!” Raising his foe to the sky, the Battlemaster broke the captain's shoulder against another knot of Deskren.

“This line!”

Thus did the Battlemaster stand among his troops, beating the enemy to death with their own commander.

===================================

Calvin watched through his spyglass, disbelief playing across his face. Captain Golthen had almost closed with the bard on the wagon, only for his entire elite unit save himself to be wiped out -- the last falling to the one-armed bard. The thought was barely credible -- but not, he forced himself to admit, outside the realm of possibility. His forces had been chasing and harrying the refugee caravan for months, and just as his own army gained levels and experience, it was inevitable that survivors among the enemy would grow stronger as well.

It would not be enough, though. Even with the drummer calling thunderbolts from the sky, numbers would drag them down in the end. It would be a costlier battle than even his most pessimistic estimates, but even with his losses, the Gendarmes still outnumbered the defenders over three to one. He nodded to a messenger, and the signal went up to commit the Hoplites, shifting those numbers even more in his favor. He raised the spyglass once again as a bright flare of light lit the battlefield.

The Hoplite reserves charged into the fray. The Gendarmes had pushed up the slope and broken through the defenders’ ranks, and there were now gaps in the enemy lines. Their grim banner still stood, looming ominously over the one-armed form playing the drum from the back of the wagon. Golthen, standing alone after the old man and his mules savaged his force, rushed the wagon, his furious roar carrying above the din of battle. Calvin swung his spyglass down to observe the Hoplites’ advance before returning his focus to Golthen and the bard.

Where he had felt disbelief before, now abject shock held him frozen. The enemy commander was no longer on horseback. Instead the man, clad in mismatched heavy armor, stood shrouded in power as he swung Golthen like a sack of potatoes. Holding onto the Captain’s leg, the Battlemaster lay about with enraged abandon. Where he struck with his makeshift weapon, Gendarmes were broken and smashed, and his Soldiers fought with similar fervor, spurred by their leader’s example.

The thunder seemed to intensify, the bard on the wagon wreathed in more and more dread lightning gifted from the sky itself. Bolts of it began to rain down among his soldiers, and even the iron resolve of the enslaved-from-birth Gendarmes began to waver. It took Calvin several heartbeats to realize not all the thunder came from the storm. His horse stumbled as the ground began to shake.

Earthquake? No, a storm-bard doesn’t have that power…

Then the thunder rose to a roaring crescendo, a continuous rushing sound, and Calvin realized it wasn’t coming from the sky or the ground, but rather from the trees to the north. The bard-summoned storm above made it hard to see, but the flashes of lightning illuminated the swaying of the taller trees just before many of them began to fall.

Calvin Descroix had just enough time to activate his enchanted shield pendant before the wall of water arrived, tumbling boulders and trees and mud ahead of itself.

=========================================

Millie Thatcher leaned against the side-boards of Hett’s wagon, too exhausted to even turn and unstrap her drum to find a place to sit. She looked out over what remained of the battlefield, nose numbed to the stink. Instead of a broad flattened valley, all she could see below the sloping rise was a frothing muddy lake. Over ten thousand Deskren had been washed away in one fell swoop, and her faith that the Battlemaster had a plan was vindicated though she had no words to give voice to that satisfaction. Hett had actually fallen asleep on the front bench of his own wagon after the battle finally ended. A rooster stood beside him, obviously having gotten loose during the battle. It clucked its annoyance at the noise Hett made, and was pecking him to no avail. Millie giggled at the display, the most sound she was capable of making.

The Battlemaster had allowed the Soldiers no rest after the battle ended. The Luparan Gendarmes had stopped fighting once their masters were gone, and simply knelt on the field to await their fate. She found the sight disturbing at first, as troops still caught in the battle fury had kept killing their now-defenseless foes until the General had ordered them to desist. Instead, the surviving Deskren -- a few hundred Hoplites and nearly a thousand wolf-men -- had been corralled in ranks on the rise some distance apart from the refugee wagons. Disarmed and docile, they awaited the Worldwalker’s judgement.

“Who speaks for you?” he asked from the back of his horse.

Hett sat up, suddenly awake, and answered. “Iffen the overseers were washed away, none do. They’ll sit like that til they die iffen ye don’t feed ‘em.”

“Overseers?” asked Jacob.

“Holds the leashes. They use the kill command when they’ve lost. Seems they must all be gone now, or these’uns’d all be dead already.” The old man’s drawling accent was difficult for Millie to grasp sometimes, but she understood the gist of it. Without their masters the Deskren slaves had no idea what to do.

The Battlemaster paced his horse along the line of kneeling Deskren, his face grim and thoughtful. He ordered soldiers through the lines with tools, cutting the black collars from around the prisoners’ necks. Finally, one of the older Luparan mustered enough courage to speak, after the collar fell away.

“There is nothing for us now. The Empire holds our kin,” he growled. “And our northern brethren would never take us in. We have never known the ways of the Tribes.”

"I cannot promise to free your kin," he began, as his gaze settled on the self-appointed spokesman. "But if it's in my power, I will make it happen."

“All we know is battle,” said another wolfkin, this one with a softer voice. Millie was sure it was a woman even though her form was every bit as large and muscled as the others. “Kill us or command us, we are as the dead either way.” The voice was bitter and mournful. “Our children are already the same as dead, left in the Empire’s lands.”

“You would serve, even alongside those who were just killing you?” The Battlemaster’s tone held no judgment, only curiosity.

“In peacetime, the Emperor pits us against each other in battles to the death as spectacle, even against our own families and children. How would fighting alongside these soldiers be worse?” growled the male again.

Jacob nodded at that remark. “I see. The Empire keeps weighing down the scales of judgment with every fact I learn about them.” His horse pranced in place with a snort. “I’ll force no-one to swear to the banner. I’m marching these civilian refugees to Possibility to take shelter in the City of Prophets. Then I intend to destroy your old empire. If you march with me you may die.” He let his mount pace slowly in front of the line of kneeling soldiers.

“All I can promise is that, if you die under my banner, it will be to accomplish the mission, and not on the whims of some worthless crown.” He stopped to let his gaze pass across the entire line. “Those who don’t swear to the banner? I won’t kill you, but you’ll be left here without weapons, and we’re taking the food. The choice is yours.”

There was no hesitation, merely the span of a single heartbeat for the wolfmen to understand what the Worldwalker offered. One howl ripped forth from nearly a thousand throats, and in it, Millie heard the death of an Empire.