Empress Evinda rode down from Bendhelt to the southern front as soon as she heard the assault had begun. She left Lohs behind with a simple instruction: Begin withdrawing all the forces not yet committed and head toward Karmand. She added that she and the Emperor would join them all later once the time was ripe.

She had with her a retinue of a few dozen clerics and mages, most trained under Simel himself, as well as a detachment of twenty Solnahtern in their excessively gaudy armor. Evinda had been advised by a messenger from the Emperor that Jagreth's beasts were so numerous it was likely they would slip around Rohmhelt's defenses and raid far into the rear. Traveling without a heavy escort was "tantamount to suicide" as the messenger conveyed the advice.

Alright, let's see what these monstrosities are made of, she thought, clenching her jaw.

Sounds of horns and drums carried over the air to the south along with countless muffled screams and roars. As many times as she had heard the noises of battle, it never stopped putting a twisted knot in her stomach. She knew the measure of Jagreth's beasts. She'd fought them before. New creations or not, she'd prevail again.

Whatever confidence she worked up in her own mind wasn't shared by the captain of the Solnahtern who rode alongside her. She watched the captain tighten the reins on his horse and stiffen his posture while they rode through a patch of wooded hills.

"Your Imperial Majesty, this won't be safe," his deep voice echoed inside his ornamental plumed helmet. "I can't guarantee-"

"I'm not asking for a guarantee and I don't expect one," Evinda firmly spoke over him. "I'm not doing this because it's safe. I'm doing this because duty demands it of the Empress."

"If the front destabilizes, we will have to go back," the captain protested, though his voice was weaker this time. "I won't allow harm to come to you."

"You will follow my orders," she riposted. "I promise you that I don't intend suicide today, if that makes you feel better."

Before he could say anything else, a loud series of crashes came from the woods to their left. With the road sunken between the hills, they couldn't see beyond the lip of the line of trees in that direction. The whole column halted, except for the other Solnahtern, who galloped up around the Empress and drew their gem-encrusted swords. Crashing and cracking continued from the woods. And heavy, unnaturally heavy, steps. Evinda's heart beat fast and light. She grasped her amulet, feeling the Ceunan Aura flow through her.

I'll blow a hole through theses things' heads just as I did before. Forynda's light be my shield, she vowed. I fear nothing.

The heavy steps and snaps of branches came closer. And closer. Otherworldly grunts and snarls followed. She'd never heard anything like them. They sounded as though they echoed up from a deep canyon, even though they were close. So very close now. Evinda recalled what she had heard these Slohknoas looked like and dozens of jumbled images conjured in her mind, all of them horrifying.

Yet, when they emerged, they were far more abominable than she could ever have pictured in even her very worst nightmares. The writhing tentacles and snapping pincers at their sides, their impossibly wide mouths filled with rows of hundreds of serrated teeth, and their haunting red and yellow eyes. It was beyond comprehension. And there were five of them, all preparing to pounce on her and her column.

RAWRORGH! they all screamed in a deafening roar that shook the air, viscous spittle flying forward. RAWRORGHAH!

Taking advantage of the shock in their prey, the lead beast lunged down at the nearest Solnahtern. Its mouth opened wide and consumed the whole head of the horse, causing the horse's body to collapse and send the Solnahtern man to the ground. Before he could rise to his feet, two of the beast's tentacles were on him, crushing his gilded armor and peeling it off. He screamed briefly, but was silenced by being hurled whole into the Slohknoa's infinitely deep maw.

Two of the other Slohknoas charged at other Solnahtern, both of whom managed to get their horses out of the way just in time. The remaining two Slohknoas attacked the clerics and mages, all of whom scattered before turning about to unleash their fury upon Jagreth's abominations. Flaming bolts crashed into the beasts' skin, but had no effect. They just sizzled and popped. Lances of ice, however, did penetrate their skin, at least to an extent. Clerics loosed a round of crackling beams of the Ceunan Aura. Those did burn off parts of the creatures' armor, but nothing like what Evinda hoped.

One of the beasts engaged with the clerics and mages lunged at a young Caylanchan mage, knocking him from his horse and swiftly decapitating him with a clip of one of its pincers. His blue-skinned head, splattered in his own blood, rolled down the road toward Evinda, his yellow eyes frozen in that last moment of abject terror. Another round of blasts from the mage's comrades, however, soon felled the beast, boring a deep enough hole in its flat head to get to whatever brain it possessed.

Nearer to her, the Solnahtern, swarmed over the first of the Slohknoas and stabbed at all parts of its body. One of them cut off a peripheral tentacle, which then writhed on the ground, mindlessly seeking to grasp whatever it could. An especially brave man charged straight toward the Slohknoa and deflected a pincer with his shield before plunging his sword straight into the space above the beast's nose. If he had hoped it would be a fatal wound, he was soon proven wrong. The Slohknoa roared and sent two of its pincers at the man's head, slicing through his armor and skull. Pieces of blood, brains, and bone splattered as he slumped off his horse and hit the ground.

That man's death gave the wounded beast a relatively clear line of attack on the Empress herself. Wasting no time, it lunged forward, covering most of the distance in a split second. Evinda sighed and breathed deeply, welling up within all the power that Forynda could grant her. Screaming, she loosed a beam of sizzling white light that nearly blinded her to behold. When the glare subsided, the Slohknoa still stood, but with a hole a few feet wide above its mouth that had burned away its nose, eyes, and so much more. It collapsed to the ground, everything going limp.

She was far too drained after that to further support the Solnahtern, though they seemed emboldened enough by her display to redouble their efforts on the other two they engaged. Another six guards fell victim to the beasts, two being engulfed entirely. The captain, however, was able to slay one by throwing his sword right into its eye and piercing deep into its brain. Another fell as one of the Solnahtern jumped on its back and stabbed at the rear of its head, safe from most of the beast's horrid weaponry.

The final Slohknoa met its end from a concerted blast of the clerics' Ceunan Aura, but not before cutting one of the clerics in half and knocking another from their horse before crushing their head with one of its monstrous feet.

There were no cheers when the last of them fell. Only staggered shock. A fifth of her column had died in seconds to these beasts. Bad as it was, a few unlucky breaks and it could've been far worse.

The captain of what remained of the Solnahtern detachment tried to shake off the strange and foul goo that now caked his previously pristine blade before sheathing it. He rode up to the Empress and bowed.

"Your orders?" he asked tersely.

She glanced at the shaken clerics and mages as well as the surviving Solnahtern and let out a grieving sigh. Horrible as it all was, they had to go forward.

"We're almost to our lines. It's safest to go forward at this point," she said. "If we go back now, we'll be almost alone. If we encounter more of these, I don't know that we'll survive."

And so they went on, this time riding their horses at an even faster pace until they arrived at the scene of the chaotic battle to the south near a series of farms. More of Jagreth's beasts, both Slohknoas and countless other twisted creations of the Beast Angel, engaged with a variety of the angel Aberos's own monstrosities. A more conventional battle unfolded nearer the center of the field between Duronaht's regular troops and Rohmhelt's men, led by Marshal Kordov. Kordov commanded the battle from near a small farmhouse atop a rocky hillock, giving frenzied orders.

Meanwhile, in the sky to the south, Cyrona and Gorondos furiously hurled their respective auras at one another, creating giant clouds of steam and smoke. The two jolted about, as blue and red blurs, clashing from place to place trying to exhaust one another. Tathyk and Omonrel, too, were engaged in a fierce clash behind Duronaht's lines as the soldiers simply tried to avoid the duel between the two angels.

"Marshal Kordov!" Evinda announced her presence as she rode up to him.

He spun around, a look of immeasurable surprise on his face.

"Your Imperial Majesty?!" he shouted and bowed. "I'm glad you're safe, but why are you here?"

"At this point it's safer than taking the road back to Bendhelt," she strained to be heard over the clamor of battle. "Those Slohknoas broke through and attacked my party."

"What?!" Kordov gasped. "How many?"

"We encountered five, but I'm sure there are so many more," Evinda said. She had nothing firm upon which to base that assertion, but it felt right. "I think we're being outmaneuvered and the longer we fight here, the bigger the risk we get cut off without knowing it."

Not a few hundred feet away, a Slohknoa lunged at the head of one of Aberos's hulking gray Bronts. The Slohknoa got its mouth around the Bront's head and squeezed, but the Bront crushed the beast's body in its hands at the same time. Both abominations fell dead to the ground as others clashed all around them. A swarm of the six-legged reptilian creatures Aberos created helped to plug some gaps as they engaged with the Slohknoas. While they were ill-matched in many regards, those reptilian creatures managed to hold their own, but they were badly outnumbered by the Slohknoas. Defeat for them was only a matter of time.

"I agree, but what do you propose?" Kordov asked.

"Fall back to the Cersomin River and let Cyrona use the river to her advantage. If we have our backs against the river, no one can get around us," Evinda explained even as she had more or less made up the plan as she spoke. "It's the best of bad options."

"I'll have 31st Division make an assault to cover us," he concurred and turned to one of his junior officers, snapping his fingers. "Tell Commander Kegrehnd to send the 31st forward. Hook south to southeast and await further instruction."

"Yes, sir!" the younger commander acknowledged before riding his horse around the farmhouse and off to wherever the said Commander Kegrehnd was.

"I'll send this plan along to Grand Marshal Agrehn. I think he was assuming we were going to have to do something like this," Kordov increasingly struggled to get his voice to break above that deafening clash. "Not this soon and not this desperately, though."

"We have no choice," Evinda said. "We're going to have to retreat to save the army, again."

~

Lyfress and Cesord joined other healers in treating the rapidly increasing number of injuries as battle was joined on the northern front. The wounds from enemy weapons were far less severe than those from the bites and scratches from Jagreth's creatures that rampaged all over the line and often threatened to reach behind Rohmhelt's position. Lyfress tried to put that all out of her mind, however. She would trust in her commanders and the angels to worry about those problems.

For her, the immediate concern was the toxic nature of the bites from some of Jagreth's creatures. She noticed it in a few of the bites early on where there was something other than the normal balance of auras at work. Whatever the vile presence was, it made closing wounds virtually impossible.

"I don't understand," she bemoaned over the agony of the wounded soldier on the bed below her. "This is all wrong. This shouldn't be happening."

"I know," Cesord grumbled working at the bed opposite of her. "I think I've got something, though. Focus on feeling for what shouldn't be there. Latch onto that and extract it before closing the wounds."

His instruction was far harder to get right than it sounded. Feeling for the presence of an aura or a grouping of the Auras that could be at work in this case required her to have such clarity in her mind in order to sort out what was part of the man's body and what was a foreign substance. It was like running one's fingers through sand to find a tiny shard of glass in the dark. At last, however, she found a sickly green glow that had blended with the man's flesh. Like cutting a loose thread, she excised it and was able to finally close the wound. The man was passed out from his horrible pains, but he would live.

Lyfress turned around to see her father administering his glowing hands over the wounds of yet another new patient. She would thank him later. For now, she returned to her own new patient, who had taken a grievous stab in his abdomen.

Just as she began to heal his wound, she heard a song in the distance that cut above the battle's clamor nearby. At first she had no idea what it could've been, but then a terrible realization took hold. Parlon. His dissonant notes were unmistakable and no other could sing with such force. In an instant, his song went from a distant hum to a roar, shaking the air around Lyfress and her fellow healers. The blood pooled inside her patient's wound vibrated from the force as that both lovely and loathsome voice scratched at the inside of her skull.

Dark thoughts, fouler and more deranged than any that had ever before occupied her mind, even briefly, now ruled. It was as though she was imprisoned as an observer within her own head. Without ever intending to do so, she found herself grabbing for a nearby knife with only a single thought overriding all others: Kill Cesord. Kill her father.

She turned around to see her father grasping at his skull, struggling to fend off his own torment while the other healers began to stab or strangle their patients. She was both horrified and pleased to see it, which only compounded her sense of encroaching madness. All the while, Parlon's notes danced in her head, caressing her mind and guiding her hand forward. Her father opened his eyes in horror and started screaming at her, waving his hands frantically. Lyfress could hear nothing, though. She realized that Parlon must have intentionally spared Cesord of the delusions so that he would die knowing that he was slain by his own child. That thought delighted her.

"PARLON, I WILL NOT PERMIT THIS!" Simel screamed over the entire battlefield, releasing a dull pulse of white and gray light. "YOUR EVIL WILL NOT WIN THIS DAY!"

All of those crazed thoughts dissipated at once. She remembered all of it, however. And how she had been powerless to stop it. She dropped the knife and cried, rushing to embrace her father. The other healers, realizing what they had done while Parlon twisted their minds, now sobbed relentlessly.

"SIMEL, WHERE IS YOUR SENSE OF FUN?" Parlon lyrically mocked the Mind Angel. "YOU CANNOT KEEP ME AT BAY FOREVER."

Having been firmly in the Music Angel's grasp and a mere second away from killing her own father, Lyfress feared that Parlon was right. Whatever malice moved him was too strong to contain in perpetuity. Its relentlessness, its manic passion, was too much. For the moment, however, she was thankful for what Simel had been able to do. For the first time since the destruction of Zarmand, Lyfress earnestly prayed to Forynda.

Forynda, we need you. Now.

~

"The army will retreat to the Cersomin River," Rohmhelt declared to Grand Marshal Agrehn and his lower commanders present near the center of the line as Aberos's beasts fought Jagreth's abominations nearby. "Cyrona will be able to harness the river to save us before we retreat westward."

"A wise idea," Aberos chimed in as he floated nearby, one hand on his hip and the other forward lightly clenched with a finger pointing forward to the ongoing battle. "This is a losing fight for us. We were outmatched before it began. Cyrona will probably be our only hope for the moment."

Rohmhelt saw a Bront have both of its hands ripped off by a pair of two Slohknoas that then ravenously feasted on the poor creature's corpse. The last of the rock giants he had summoned now fell under sustained fire from Duronaht's siege engines and those strange red and silver furred beasts that so readily jumped up onto their heads.

"Understood, Your Imperial Majesty," Agrehn gruffly acknowledged and motioned to the commands behind him. "The army will withdraw to the Cerosmin River immediately! Sound the retreat!"

With blasts of trumpets and the beats of drums, Rohmhelt's unengaged formations swiftly turned about and marched westward toward the river. He looked to the mangled piles of countless thousands of Aberos's and Jagreth's abominations in the center of the field.

"What a damn waste," he grumbled. "And nothing gained."

~

"Ha! He's retreating!" Duronaht laughed. "Vildrious, will you be so good as to have our men pursue him?"

"Again, Your Imperial Majesty, I fear they're trying to suck us in," his Grand Marshal cautioned, his voice cracking and squeaking. "I've heard that the Water Angel is far stronger than she was at Eynond. If they mean to get us near the river, I..."

"Surely we're not scared of Cyrona," Duronaht protested. "Come now, Vildrious. This is too good to pass up."

Vildrious nervously nodded and gave the order for a pursuit. Reserves of Jagreth's beasts sprang forward from the ground behind them to aid in the hunt.

"And so what if it fails?" Duronaht calmly asked aloud to Vildrious and numerous other commanders nearby. "We have him so badly on numbers, we'll do it again and again and again until he finally breaks."

~

Cyrona had broken off from Gorondos, leaving Tathyk to try to fend off both him and Omonrel, while she surged back toward the Cersomin River. She floated high above it, being greeted by the cheers of the tens of thousands of Emperor Rohmhelt's soldiers that regrouped.

"I will protect you, worry not!" she shouted, smirking. The Water Angel felt renewed by the powers of the mighty river, which put the Walsan River she battled along at Eynond to shame. And with the powers granted by her strengthened connection to the Water Aura, she relished the opportunity to prove how outmatched her adversaries were.

A horde of Slohknoas, some two-thousand of them, came in through a gap between Rohmhelt's central and southern fronts, charging headlong toward the troops gathering along the river. Cyrona effortlessly raised a wall of water and conjured it into icy spikes, each at least as long as the heights of two men. As the Slohknoas mindlessly stampeded forward, she released a fearsome volley.

The beasts fell in the hundreds, skewered right through their bodies. When those behind the front ranks tried to lunge forward over the mounting bodies, she repeated the devastating attack again and again. The whole horde was slain within seconds, to the delight of Rohmhelt's soldiers. Further to the south, a group of Duronaht's soldiers had pursued Rohmhelt's men to the riverbank in a misguided attempt to flank Rohmhelt's position. She swiftly shot through the river and rose before them with another ferocious wall of icy spikes. As the Slohknoas before them had been, the men, whether they wore plate, chain, or leather, were skewered were they stood to the immeasurable delight of Rohmhelt's reforming lines.

The process repeated over and over while Rohmhelt's armies consolidated along with what remained of Aberos's beasts. Vorlan, Simel, Tathyk, and Aberos all converged on her position as the last of Rohmhelt's army took up with its back to the river. Now, however, Duronaht's forces were wary of getting within reach of the Cyrona's power. Even the angels allied with Duronaht avoided approaching the river until, at last, Omonrel floated high above the center of Duronaht's lines and deferentially bowed to the Water Angel.

"I concede, Cyrona, that I am not ready to deal with you just yet," the Sculptor Angel graciously offered, his voice booming above the tensely arrayed ranks. "Until next time."

"You never will be ready, Omonrel!" she scoffed. "Do not pretend you are a match for me."

Omonrel raised his eyebrows and silently smirked before withdrawing.

Rohmhelt's men uproariously cheered toward Cyrona up and down the line as far as she could see. Hundreds of thousands of weary soldiers had gotten a desperate reprieve and she could not have been happier to have provided it.