The sky was no longer blue.
It was a choked and boiling black, a veil of ash and smoke, a smothering sky born of fire and screams. The heavens themselves seemed scorched, weeping no rain but soot and flakes of burnt flesh. The battlefield below crawled with death.
Tents lay gutted, their canvases dripping with blood and bile. Altars stood shattered, desecrated by steel and flame. Bones protruded from the earth like pale fingers clawing at the living. Limbs twitched without bodies. A charred skull cracked beneath Kael's heel.
Where once there had been drums and chants, now there was only the wet thud of axes meeting flesh, the gurgle of pierced throats, and the endless shrieking of the dying.
The horde was collapsing.
And the Stormguard advanced, unrelenting and unmerciful.
Kael stood atop a mound of the slain, where the enemy's drumline had once thundered its war cadence. Now only splinters and broken ribcages remained. His armor, blackened and dented, was soaked in viscera. Clots of flesh clung to his vambraces. One blade dripped steadily from its serrated edge. The other hummed, whispering death with each pulse.
His warwolf limped nearby, muzzle matted with gore, dragging a half-eaten orc by the neck. The beast's eyes were glassy, but still full of murder.
Kael watched the horde tear itself apart. Orcs shoved goblins aside. Shamans clawed their own faces, lost in visions turned to madness. Clans that had stood united now butchered each other in blind retreat.
"They're breaking," rasped Ryoku. His voice was a hollow rasp, throat raw from hours of blood-soaked screaming. His helmet was gone. A deep gash split his scalp. His left eye twitched from dried blood.
Kael said nothing for a moment.
"No drums. No chants. No signals. Only noise. Only panic."
He lifted his blade and pointed.
"Collapse the flank. Drive them into the gorge."
Ryoku nodded and vanished into the smoke, his warband slipping into the chaos like silent phantoms armed with blades of judgment. They moved with unnatural grace, shadows slicing through the flicker of firelight. Where they passed, orcs crumpled. Throats opened in silence. Spines were severed in the blink of an eye. There was no glory, no flourish. Only death, precise, merciless, and unseen.
To the west, the storm had a name.
Nyzekh.
He moved through the field like a spirit of vengeance, untouched by fire or fear. Smoke curled around him but never clung. Arrows missed as if the wind itself defied them. His armor bore no banner, no sigil, only the dark stains of slaughter and the ash of the fallen. In his hands, twin sabers danced with ritualistic precision, each stroke cold and deliberate, like part of an unspoken rite.
Around him, the bodies of shamans lay in ruin. Their glyphs bled into the soil, powerless. Fetishes and totems burst into flame without spark, curling into ash as he passed. One goblin, half-gutted and trembling, stared up at him through bloodied eyes. It didn't know who or what he was. It only knew something had come. Something sent. As it choked on its own blood, it whispered a question to the smoke, wondering if their gods had grown angry and dispatched a punishment to lead them to their deaths.
The figure said nothing. He moved on. The whisper fell silent.
Nyzekh approached the last great altar. The pyre still burned with clan symbols, bones etched in blood, towering over the battlefield.
He said nothing.
With one swift, horizontal strike, he severed the banner pole.
The skull atop it burst against the altar stone like rotten fruit. The flames faltered. The wind groaned.
And the will of the orc clans began to shatter.
Wen Tu arrived limping. His robes, once verdant and pure, were dark with sweat and spattered blood. His staff was split at one end and slick at the other. An orc came at him from the mist, its mace raised high. Wen Tu ducked low, pivoted, and smashed the creature's kneecap in one strike. As it collapsed, screaming, he drove the staff into its throat, crushing cartilage and silencing breath.
"They're bottlenecked on the west edge," he gasped, eyes wild.
Nyzekh answered only with a nod.
Wen Tu raised one trembling hand. Not from weakness, but reverence. He inhaled deeply, grounding himself in the pulse beneath his feet. The language he spoke was not one for war cries or shouted commands. It was older than empires, older than bones. It was a living root beneath the world, whispering back through him.
He began to chant. Slowly. Purposefully. Each line spoken in the ancient tongue of the Verdant Root, learned in solitude beneath the chasm's library chamber.
"Vur'asha tal'nein…
Thrae'vyn no kael'an…
Eshuth na ruun'shara…
Vel'maruuth…bloom from below."
The words flowed like a prayer, but it was no prayer of mercy. It was a summoning. A binding. A command to the forgotten green gods sleeping beneath the world.
The ground screamed.
It tore open with a guttural cry, as if the land itself had awakened in rage. From its depths came roots, gnarled and jagged like blades, slick with sap that stank of blood and old earth. They rose in swarms, writhing through the air like tendrils of judgment.
Behind the retreating goblins and orcs, the roots surged forward. They struck with instinct, impaling the slow, wrapping around the desperate, dragging bodies backward into the torn soil. Screams rang out, but they were brief. One by one, the dying were swallowed.
These roots did not simply pierce. They drank.
They pulsed as they fed.
They hungered for warmth, for marrow, for the twitch of nerves.
The vines coiled tighter, crushing ribs, breaking spines, pulling armor into twisted shapes as it collapsed under the weight of nature's wrath. Blood geysered high into the mist. Limbs vanished. Eyes widened in final terror before being consumed.
And the mist followed.
Not gentle. Not healing.
A veil of rot and suffocation.
It slithered over the corpses, thick and clinging, curling around throats, drowning breath in silence.
The laughter began, mad and shrill, as minds unraveled.
Others fell to their knees, blind, sobbing prayers to gods they no longer believed in.
Some simply dropped, twitching, forgotten by the sky.
Wen Tu did not move.
The chant still echoed, deep and low, in his bones.
He had mastered the words in darkness.
He had fed the root with his blood.
And now it answered.
It crept across the field like a living thing, thick and low, curling between bodies and roots, swallowing sound and light. The air grew heavy, damp with rot. Breathing became a burden. Vision blurred. Direction dissolved. Warriors stumbled into the fog and did not return. Some began to laugh, wild and shrill, driven mad by unseen whispers. Others clawed at their own faces, trying to rip away the veil that clouded their minds. Most simply collapsed, choking on the wet air, mouths open in silent screams.
Then the earth itself stirred. Vines slithered through the mist, slow at first, then seizing with sudden strength. Roots, thick and gnarled, erupted from the soil, coiling around legs and torsos. They dragged orcs down into the muck, snapping bones as they tightened. Goblins shrieked as clawed roots pierced their bellies and pulled them into the earth. The ground drank deep. Mud bubbled with blood.
It was as if nature had turned against them, not indifferent but ravenous, as though the trees and soil had waited long for a feast of flesh.
Then a sound split the madness.
A horn. Low. Broken. Crooked.
It wasn't a call to arms.
It was the sound of surrender. Or worse, a last scream of lunacy.
The orcs gathered. What remained. Scars and warpaint and shattered minds.
And they charged.
Hundreds. Screaming. Foaming. Wild-eyed.
From the southern breach, Bruga saw them coming.
He grunted. Shifted his axe to his left. Slammed his gauntlet to his chest and bellowed with the full force of his lungs:
"Form wall!"
The Stormguard responded in perfect unison. Shields locked. Spears set. Teeth clenched. Wolves behind them snarled with hunger, their mouths frothing with the scent of slaughter.
Then Bruga stepped forward.
Alone.
He met the charge head-on.
The first orc slammed into him. Bruga caught its weapon with his axe, twisted, and buried the steel in its belly. The second aimed for his neck. He ducked low, cracked its shin, then brought his fist up beneath its chin, snapping the jaw sideways.
Blood poured.
Bones crunched.
He moved like a boulder given hate.
Behind him, the line held. Arrows hissed overhead. Wolves pounced on fallen enemies, ripping throats with joy. The Qorjin-Ke slipped into the melee, silent and grinning, twin daggers slicing from behind.
Kael came down the slope like a hammer. His warband followed, blades flashing. The air rang with steel on bone. Flesh split like cloth. Arterial spray painted the dead.
Kael found a war-chief in bone armor, thrice the size of a man. It roared as it swung a greataxe the size of a door.
Kael ducked beneath, drove both blades up in a rising arc, from hip to throat. The orc staggered, clutching its ribs as they tore open. The creature collapsed, twitching, disemboweled.
Kael stood over it.
"Collapse," he whispered.
Not an order.
A certainty.
And the horde broke.
Banners fell. Goblins flung weapons aside and sprinted blindly. Orcs turned only to find death waiting. Some knelt, pleading in tongues no one cared to understand.
Stormguard gave no quarter.
One stroke for cowards. Two for liars. No second chances.
The battlefield pulsed like a dying heart. Every beat slower. Every cry more distant.
Nyzekh stood atop the final ridge, sabers at his side. Still. Silent.
"Is it done?" someone asked.
He didn't look back.
"Soon."
Bruga stood amid a heap of corpses, his axe barely holding together. He panted. His beard was soaked with blood not his own.
He pointed toward a clutch of orcs staggering for the gorge.
Kael raised his hand.
"Let them run."
Ryoku emerged from the haze, bruised, bloodied, but breathing.
"And if they return?"
Kael scanned the ruins. The wolf, bleeding but alive. Wen Tu, tending to the wounded with shaking hands. Bruga, exhausted but unbroken. Nyzekh, still as death.
"They won't."
The silence that followed was heavier than steel.
Then Bruga muttered,
"I'll need a bigger axe."
Someone laughed at that.
A raw, cracked sound, born more of exhaustion than humor.
The fire circle shattered. The brute-chief buried beneath gore and bone. The drums silenced forever.
A squire sobbed quietly, his shoulders trembling with the weight of surviving what others had not. Nearby, another turned away and vomited, unable to stomach the carnage sprawled across the field. Some dropped to their knees beside the fallen, grasping cold, lifeless hands in stunned silence. Others stood where they were, eyes hollow and unfocused, too tired or broken to speak, caught somewhere between relief and disbelief.
Far away, atop a blackened ridge, Altan stood beside Stormwake.
"They did it," Stormwake whispered.
Altan's eyes narrowed.
"Not without cost."
"They never do."
Then a shadow.
A bird fell from the sky. Not flying. Falling. A raven, wings torn, chest bleeding.
Stormwake caught it and unwrapped the scroll tied to its leg.
His face went pale as he read.
"Scouts report a second wave. Ten thousand strong. Half a day's march."
Altan turned toward the battlefield.
"Send word to the reserve Stormguards," he said. "Tell them to ride with haste. Tell them to rescue the cohort."
Stormwake hesitated. "They're a full day out."
Altan paused. The wind tore through the silence.
"Then I will fight beside them myself."
And as the fire behind them dimmed, a new fire rose ahead.
The Stormguard would bleed again.
But the forge was not yet cold.