Lyfress and her father had been deep in conversation with the Mind Angel Simel when the freakish tempest opened up over that portion of the line. While Cesord, Lyfress, and a number of other clerics took cover inside a nearby farmhouse, Simel floated out into the storm and allowed his black hair to become drenched as he absorbed the tempest. His dark green robes flapped violently in the howling winds.

"We have seen this before," he spoke in her mind. "Myrvaness has unleashed this unnatural squall upon us. And it is a prelude to slaughter."

She slumped where she stood near a small table by the window. Lyfress closed her eyes and glanced down at her hands, seeing them briefly soaked in blood again and her pristine white robes stained from the viscera of countless soldiers brought to her for aid.

Why is it this way? she thought. Why do we all suffer so?

"And this is what I admire deeply about you, Lyfress," Simel continued speaking within her mind. "Willingly, you chose this tragic burden. There is not a single thing, not one, that could be of greater aid to the mortal world and at the same time would weigh on you more heavily than this. And yet you do it, fully aware of its horror, its seeming futility, but also knowing that anything else would be less than the utmost you could do. I wish I could tell you that there is an easy road through this calamity, but none exists. Not for mortals or angels."

Her face twitched in multiple conflicting ways at the same time. Even with her father and many of the other clerics present, she wanted to scream. Letting out all that she felt, tearing into the still air of that small farmhouse, seemed like the only option to her. The thought of having to endure ceaseless amounts of what she saw the prior year left her with naught but a sense of utter uselessness in the face of the tide of doom.

Cesord's hands lightly gripped her shoulders and he leaned forward to whisper into her ear, likely so as not to draw more attention from their comrades while they remained focused on the building tempest.

"Are you alright? You look like you've taken ill," he asked.

"No, I'm fine. Or fine in the way you mean it," she whimpered.

He breathed deeply and dropped his hands from her shoulders.

"But not in the most important way," he said, coughing. "I'm not sure I know what you're thinking right now, but I can guess."

A horrid rumble of thunder shook the earth just after he spoke.

"You shouldn't be afraid of failure," he continued once the roars of thunder quieted down. "Failure tempers us like flame does a steel blade."

"No one has seen anything like this before," she cried, recalling those dozens, no, hundreds of lives that had slipped away in front of her during the battle for Eynond. Lyfress wiped away her tears again and again, but more took their place. Her eyes ached remembering it all. "Facing it again and again... without any sign it's getting better."

Cesord turned her around and embraced her, patting her back. She noticed just how much more rapidly he was aging with the stresses of the war, his left hand having a tremor she never felt before. While never heavy, his body was so much frailer than it ever had been before.

"I wish that you'd been born in an easier time," he said to her as they continued to hug. "All we can do now is everything possible to help this world endure. Not one of us may live to see it, but fighting for it is all that matters."

She kept trying to assure herself of that. However, when the thunder was overtaken by the horrible howls of innumerable beasts over the eastern horizon, all Lyfress could think of was the wave of death about to hit them.

~

"Aberos!" Cyrona called out, springing over a patch of forest toward the Angel of the Wastes. Aberos had just sent forward more of the beasts he called "Bronts" toward the front lines to confront the anticipated surged of Jagreth's creations. He fondly observed their advance while virtually ignoring Cyrona. "Have you sent everything forward?"

His dark gray stony face frowned slightly and his deep green eyes drifted lower.

"Mostly," he said, his mouth only barely moving. "I make no promises that I can match what Jagreth has created. This was always more his domain than mine."

Another wave of Aberos's creations, this a series of massive scaled reptilian creatures, as long as two mortals from head to tail and with a peculiar six legs instead of four accompanying their unusual size. Numbering in the hundreds, they pressed forward as a group, hissing and snarling at the two angels and the small number of Emperor Rohmhelt's soldiers nearby.

"You could have created them with better manners," Cyrona said in jest, drawing a playfully hostile smile from Aberos. Her mood then turned somber. "I took the liberty of seeing what Jagreth has to offer. Twisted abominations the whole way up and down the line and beyond my ability to count on top of that."

Aberos gritted his teeth and wiggled the fingers of his right hand over and over. His eyes unreadably scanned the horizon even though they were many miles from Jagreth's hordes.

"I can hear them," he said somberly. "Even this far away, I can hear them."

Cyrona squinted at him in disbelief. At this distance she could hear nothing at all from those crippling roars. Myrvaness's thunder was more than enough to drown it out for her.

"I cannot even begin to understand what made him do this," Aberos continued. "This is as shocking to me as it would be if Tathyk poisoned his precious crops. I..."

"You need not tell me this, Aberos. He and I together created many of the creatures in my rivers and oceans, some of the ones I am most fond of," the Water Angel hastily spoke over Aberos. "Try not to reason with it. This is pure madness and none of it makes any sense at all."

With a sigh, Aberos shook his head and placed his hands on either hip as his brown robes blew in the stiff wind along with his sandy hair.

"Of all those who turned against Forynda, Jagreth was the one I thought would be able to be brought back into the fold," his voice wistfully rumbled. "How wrong I must have been."

"At least you recognize you made a mistake. Vorlan? I shudder to think what would make him realize how wrong he is," Cyrona forced a painful laugh. "Whatever it is, it must be beyond my imagination."

Aberos rolled his eyes and groaned before he began to float forward toward the east, motioning slightly with either hand. Cyrona at first squinted at his gesture and wondered if he meant for her to follow him. The ground below her shook and quaked, causing her to spring high into the air atop a pillar of water. Just as she expected something to burst from the ground, whatever it was below the soil just continued eastward submerged in the earth.

"What are those?!" she blurted toward Aberos.

Not breaking his languid pace or turning back to engage, he simply bellowed, "You shall see."

Cyrona's curiosity nearly got the better of her. She strongly considered lifting the ground off above one of these mysterious dirt-dwelling creations of the Angel of the Wastes, but she elected to be as surprised as everyone else instead.

Even we have to retain some sense of wonder, she mused and sprang eastward with a jet of water.

~

"Marshal Kordov!" Rohmhelt's voice cracked trying to cut above the deafening thunder cracks above them. He ignored the few chunks of hail that cut into his skin. They were so cold and sharp that they felt like tiny hot pieces of metal. Kordov was similarly unmoved by the inconvenience, though the hail pelting against his plate armor made the most annoying racket. "I want you taking command of the southern flank. It looks like a big group of... whatever those are mean to envelop us."

"Yes, Your Imperial Majesty. Right away. I promise I won't fail you," Kordov dutifully answered, bowing. He then immediately sprinted to his horse and his close command staff and set off, struggling through the muddy path to the south.

Rohmhelt squinted through the rain and hail, using his right hand to block some of it from falling into his face. He watched the indistinguishable mass of Jagreth's roaring beasts arcing both north and south in seemingly equal numbers. They resembled a gigantic crescent that continually widened.

"This is maddening," Agrehn gruffly commented. "We can't retreat with those things meaning to hunt us down and this damn storm makes it impossible to fight here properly."

"Properly or not, it's what we'll have to do," Rohmhelt spat and looked to either side. "Vorlan! Where are you?!"

Before he could call for Vorlan again, a whir of verdant light manifested directly before him. Vorlan's hair and dark brown and green robes blew just as violently as anyone else's in Myrvaness's storm, but he was unbothered by it.

"I presume that this is a request to thwart this deluge," the Earth Angel said.

"Yes!" Rohmhelt screamed in exasperation. "At once!"

"I shall do what I can," Vorlan bowed.

Between the clusters of Rohmhelt's troops that had arranged in squares to thwart charges of Jagreth's beasts, the Earth Angel floated forward and raised his hands high into the air. A faint pulse of yellow expanded throughout the air and a staggering gust of wind blew from the west, pushing the rain and hail skyward back into the clouds.

It was quiet. For a moment. A louder crack of thunder than any Rohmhelt had ever heard split the sky above, shattering the hope for an end to Myrvaness's terror. Before the rains and hail hit the soldiers below again, Vorlan loosed another pulse, this time sustained, that kept all of it suspended high above the ground. Rohmhelt and his command staff gazed in awe at the sight of so much rain and ice being kept aloft across the span of more than a mile in either direction.

"YOU THINK THAT WILL WORK, VORLAN?" Myrvaness's booming voice carried across the vast distance between them. It pierced into Rohmhelt's mind like a thousand needles, causing him to claw at his head. Many of his commanders and soldiers did the same, save for Grand Marshal Agrehn. Agrehn, for his part, merely winced. "YOU CANNOT HOLD THAT FOREVER!"

The Earth Angel sighed so heavily that the Emperor could feel it hundreds of feet away. It was as much of a concession as Vorlan would likely give. Indeed, the waters built against his barrier of wind, a great flood that would pour forth seemingly any second. Vorlan strained to keep it above Rohmhelt's soldiers, summoning what facility he had with Myrvaness's own Aura.

"BUT HE WILL NOT HAVE TO!" Cyrona's own blaring voice, a far less offensive tone than Myrvaness's, swept in from the west as she sprang down to float alongside Vorlan. "I will relieve you of this burden."

Cheers went up across the lines at Cyrona's arrival. She proved worthy of their devotion. With a heavy azure pulse, she seized control of the waters that had been building above the lines and hurled it all as a wave toward Duronaht's lines. Most of it fell short of even the skirmish lines in front of the main body of troops. Rohmhelt surmised that even the Water Angel was limited in just how much she could hurl that far. After all, she showed no compunction about taking life before.

With two more swipes her hands, as watery and shimmering as the rest of her body, she utterly parted the clouds above. The sun beat down on the entire field for the first time in days. Again, the soldiers cheered wildly, repeating her name several times in unison. "Cyrona! Cyrona! Cyrona!" they all shouted.

Satisfying though it was, it occurred to Rohmhelt that he now had two angels and over one hundred thousand soldiers that had been fed into the middle of the battlefield and his flanks had been left in their weakened state during this distraction.

"Something's wrong," the Emperor commented. "Where are his other angels? Parlon. Gorondos. Omonrel. Jagreth. We only see Myrvaness. What is this?"

And soon, even the Tempest Angel seemed to be gone as well. His panic was shared by Cyrona and Vorlan, who exchanged worried glances and then sped off to the south and north, respectively. Meanwhile, his brother's center massed with great siege engines operated by mages preparing to loose a volley of destruction upon him.

He's hitting us on every front again, Rohmhelt fumed. And again we'll have to answer.

~

Duronaht looked to the brightening skies of that now lovely spring day while the mages readied their shots into the siege engines. Those skilled in the Wind Aura wound up tight glowing yellow orbs to hurl various augmented projectiles into Rohmhelt's lines. Flaming orbs bursting with the Fire Aura, shots filled with dangerous icy shards, and horrifying electrified bolts were all about to be set loose. He had some two hundred siege engines that were deployed for this barrage, a force he knew his brother couldn't match.

"Grand Marshal Vildrious," he called out, tilting back and forth with anticipation. "Please begin."

Vildrious made a silent chopping motion with his hand toward one of the commanders with the siege engine batteries just in front of Duronaht. Drummers from behind beat their instruments mercilessly in an escalating crescendo that built right up to the moment the first order was given.

"LOOSE!"

At once, the wooshes of his siege engines all sounded out at once. The burning orange, twinkling blue, and crackling yellow shots all sailed across into Rohmhelt's lines. They crashed into those poor men with terrible effect. Ice shards skewered many where they stood. Fiery gel engulfed some dozens. Many more were electrocuted inside their own armor from the lightning-imbued bolts striking the heavily wet ground around them.

Trumpets blared from his brother's lines to move the forward positions back. As the ranks of spearmen and pikemen engaged in their limited retreat, the scale of how many were killed by the opening barrage became clearer. It was far more than even Duronaht had hoped.

"Considering he'll only let us hit him once, it was a nice opening shot," the Emperor commented to Vildrious.

"I agree, Your Imperial Majesty," Vildrious proudly concurred. What had been just an experiment last year was now perfected. "The central attack is ready."

"I think speed is our friend here, yes?" Duronaht inquired.

"Right, again, we hit them on all fronts so that they break. It's clear to me that they weren't ready for battle," Vildrious added, nervously rubbing his balding head. "We won't have a better opportunity than right now."

"Very good. Have one of our mages send the message to Jagreth. I want to see what my brother's troops do," the Emperor smirked.

A mage shot a single blazing red fireball high into the air so that it could be seen by Jagreth, who was commanding his beasts from a perch the better part of a mile away. Almost instantly, the mass of Slohknoas stationed behind his Duronaht's central forces screamed into the sky and started lumbering forth.

Duronaht had seen them at a distance as they branched north and south for the flanking movements, but this was the first time he saw them up close. His initial response was to wonder how much rage Jagreth must have harbored to craft such an abominable thing. As large as four horses, they had eight highly muscular pointed legs that carried red and black scaly bodies. Their heads were massive with mouths much as eight feet wide on the larger specimens. They had teeth that looked like barbed swords and hundreds of them. Worst of all, to feed into those mouths, they had a mix of tentacles and pincers branching off their bodies, clicking and writhing for victims to consume.

As the Slohknoas pushed past Duronaht's command post, he watched in entranced horror and their speedy and unnatural movements. That such gargantuan creatures could move so quickly seemed like something out of a nightmare. Vildrious and other commanders clustered together as far away from the passing monstrosities as they could. Once the Slohknoas had passed, the commanders all shouted at one another to relay their horrified reactions.

I'm glad it wasn't just me who was shocked by what they looked like in the flesh, Duronaht laughed to himself.

Vildrious, breathing heavily and stumbling a bit while walked, took up alongside Duronaht and monitored these twisted creatures close the distance with Rohmhelt's lines.

"I... I don't know what to say," he said. "Them... Aberos's creatures... It'll be a battle of abominations."

"I'm fairly sure we have more and better abominations, so I like our chances," the Emperor laughed while a fresh set of Bladewings descended from the sky to aid in the Slohknoas' advance. "I like our chances a great deal."

~

A nearby mage created a floating lens to allow Rohmhelt and his command staff a better look at the incoming monsters. It was a courtesy that the Emperor soon wished he hadn't been given. While Marshal Kordov described these Slohknoas accurately, words alone didn't do them justice. So horrid were they to behold that Rohmhelt viewed the descending two dozen or so Bladewings as a mere afterthought.

Indeed, his archers were well-prepared for that possibility. Now they were equipped with longer range bows as well as deep piercing arrows to get through stronger parts of the birds' armor. His lines also were more dispersed to avoid creating the same risks as before where hundreds could be sliced in half in an instant.

As a constant stream of arrows helped keep the giant Bladewings off his men, the Slohknoas accelerated their advance. Rohmhelt's skirmish lines, consisting of light spear troops, tried to give an honorable fight against the massive malformed horrors. They tried parrying the Slohknoas' attacks. They made every effort to pierce the monstrosities' eyes and mouths. They struggled their utmost, but soon they were all overrun, the horrific beasts grasping them with pincers or tentacles and heaving the hapless soldiers into their unfathomable maws.

"We're not equipped for fighting these things," Agrehn mumbled dispassionately. "I hope Aberos's creations are up to the challenge."

"We'll soon find out," Rohmhelt said, pointing toward a line of the towering gray-skinned Bronts moving forward at the Slohknoas.

With loud grunts, more Bronts made their presences known to the north, this time numbering in what must have been the low thousands. It was a veritable forest of the brutes, most holding large stones, logs, and other improvised weapons. They slowly advanced, the ground shaking with each step as they did.

"This is insanity," the Emperor gasped, glancing between the oncoming horde of Jagreth's Slohknoas and Aberos's Bronts. Two Bladewings were shot out of the sky just then to add to the baffling scenes before him. "Absolutely mad."

Not a second later, the ground behind him heaved up and down over a wide swath. He stood in place while his commanders, other than Agrehn, scattered. The oscillating earth passed under him, causing his feet to shift. His soldiers were too preoccupied bracing for the assault of the Slohknoas to notice as the ground warped and twisted below them. Once the phenomenon moved into the ground in front of Rohmhelt's troops, the earth exploded.

Chunks of wet dirt and rock flew outward in every direction. Gargantuan brown rock beasts, at least thirty feet high, emerged from the holes they made in the ground. They seemed to have almost no heads at all, but Rohmhelt could see that they had small protrusions that likely housed whatever minds they hand.

Together with the Bronts, they engaged the Slohknoas in battle. The Slohknoas struggled against the Bronts, being far closer to the ground and unable to match their leverage, but their vast mouths allowed many to latch onto the arms and legs of the Bronts, tearing into their flesh and biting off the hands and feet of Aberos's colossal creations. Many more, however, were crushed by the rocks and trees the Bronts carried with them.

Against whatever the new rock creatures were, however, the Slohknoas had no ready answer. They leapt and climbed upon the rock creatures, but their teeth were unable to penetrate the impervious bodies. Their tentacles and pincers sought any weak points, but the giant stone creatures would pluck the Slohknoas off before they could make any progress.

However, Jagreth apparently had anticipated this problem and had yet another new creation: Strange muscular beings slightly taller than a man with sharp picks for arms. They were red and silver and covered in fur, shaped almost like a man, but yet distorted. These creatures pushed through the mass of Slohknoas to Aberos's giant rock titans and began to push their blades into the stone. In some cases, they were able to pry off the heads of the stone beats as they swarmed around them. Others were plucked off and crushed, just as the Slohknoas had been.

The Angel of the Wastes, Aberos, suddenly appeared next to Emperor Rohmhelt and silently observed the battle, keeping one hand at his waist and another clenched and outstretched. His dark gray stone face and emerald eyes betrayed no emotion while he scanned the battlefield. The noises were so terrible that even if one had tried to shout over the cacophony of roars, clanking, and screams it would've been in vain.

"I have known Jagreth since I was created," Aberos said during the briefest of lulls. "It surprises me not at all that he had a countermeasure. He knew what I would do and he prepared for it."

The various abominations of both angels fell thickly upon the ground, creating a veritable wall between Rohmhelt's and Duronaht's forces as they continued to fight. Stone, leathery flesh, and whatever was the mangled nonsense of the slain Slohknoas piled up higher and higher. Rohmhelt wondered if the flanks, well out of sight, were similarly prepared for the Slohknoas, but he was so shocked by what he saw that he couldn't ask Aberos the question. He did have one in mind, however.

"Do you think you can keep up with him, at least enough to let us have a chance?" the Emperor queried the Angel of the Wastes.

Aberos sighed and locked his eyes upon Rohmhelt.

"I wish I could promise you more than nothing, but that is the most I can offer.”