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savrenim · 7 years ago

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Of Wolves And Ravens: As Told By Three Letters Sent From Cloudfall Fort

For those of you have been following gay murder elf bachelorette campaign (In Their Footsteps We Shall Follow), we recently finished Book 2: Of Wolves And Ravens, and I have A Lot Of Feelings about it. Because I am Extremely Extra, I tend to write in-character letters to NPCs that I then send to my DM. The three letters written for this book tell a complete and self-contained story--at this point, nearly a novella--and it’s not quite fanfiction, as it is canon in-universe; certainly not my own work, as all of the brilliance behind it was written by Jeremy, I just lived it and was moving around one little pawn; but together these letters been far more than just a game to me. so after checking with Jeremy, I decided to post them here. If you are a fan of my writing and want a window into the world that is right now one of the stories that I care about the most, well, here is what I have been doing with my heart and with my time. No prior knowledge is necessary and actually I’m not sure how you would have prior knowledge what are you doing listening to my skype calls?

Iria Stell, the author of the letters, is a 17-year-old soldier of the Caedic army; writing first to a scientist Vennikus Callo whom she had encountered a few months prior who gave her a potion to test with only the instructions of “it will be useful in a fight, just like the previous one”; second to Maldai Varricon, her mentor and commanding officer since she joined the army at age 14; and third to Arcadia Dominus, her rival-turned-crush-turned-maybe-girlfriend, whom she left behind at the Surrian front when Varricon sent her and Talvus back to the Capital to take the Trials in the hopes that they would climb to higher military or public office. It is perhaps significant to mention that Talvus is also barely more than a kid, being only about 22 himself, and became Iria’s first and arguably only friend, ever since she arrived in Varricon’s unit, he was delighted he was no longer the youngest, and immediately nicknamed her ‘Stoneface Junior’, and thus began their unbreakable friendship. All other characters are new to this book, and will be introduced as they appear. Iria Strell is played by me. Corporal Dante Maxim is played by my brother, Eddie, who was a guest PC in this arc. Everyone else is played by Jeremy. A number of the cool descriptions are Jeremy. And all the gorgeous battle descriptions are all Jeremy. He’s really damn good at fight choreography.

It is worth noting: this is a story about war. Told from the side of the bad guys, who are kind of brutal. Trigger warnings of violence and death. There is not really any gore outright described in detail, although there are a few times that rather nasty wounds are received and reported clinically. If that sort of thing bothers you, I would not recommend reading!

Otherwise, with no further ado, presenting, Of Wolves And Ravens: As Told By Three Letters Sent From Cloudfall Fort.

____________________

To Vennikus Callo, Black Lotus Labs, Insul

I have made use of the potion that you left me with, and am writing to report the results.

I took it at the beginning of a fight against Highland Rat Clan orcs. The potion kicked in instantaneously, and it lasted a substantial amount of time: the entire duration of the fight, and a few minutes afterwards as well. I would estimate about four minutes total.

The effect to my vision was by far the most noticeable. I immediately began to see lines in the periphery of my sight, patterns of footwork from weight distribution and momentum of my enemies, which allowed me to move more quickly than I would normally in a fight, and allowed me to perform maneuvers that I would not otherwise attempt, as I could instinctively predict—literally see faster than I could have calculated on my own—the locations in which their stances were weak. Secondly, there was a dramatic increase in my strength. I would say that easily under the influence of the potion my strength doubled, and when I concentrated to push to fight at my full capacity, I was striking at thrice what my normal abilities would allow. I was able to kill three Rat Clan orcs and one Salamander Clan elf, holding off an ambush party of over a dozen with only one companion, before Caedic reinforcements arrived.

However, when I took it, I felt hunger beyond any hunger I have felt before in my life; I would describe it as starving to the point of pain equal to that of taking an indirect but substantial wound. Past the initial shock and blow of it, it did not affect my ability to fight nor was it a severe distraction; however, I would caution you that I have trained to ignore pain and exhaustion during a fight, and if you hope to eventually release this potion for wide-scale consumption, this might be a considerable drawback. The hunger did not go away as the other effects of the potion wore off, and it took rations equal to about two and a half standard meals, eaten in under five minutes, before I felt normal again. There were no other persisting effects to the best of my knowledge in the hours or days that followed.

I am sixty-seven inches tall and a little over nine stone, and seventeen years seven months aged, so I do not have the proportions of an adult soldier; you can discard this if the information is useless to you, but perhaps the relative body mass to the potency of the potion could have caused the side effects to emerge. I did not take it on an empty stomach; I had eaten standard issue hard biscuit rations but ten minutes before. I believe the composition of those is primarily flour and water; the exact recipe should not be hard to look up if mundane chemical interactions are a consideration. I had no active spells or enchantments on me at the time of consumption, nor do I make regular use of such things; I have not been poisoned or sickened recently, nor have I taken a potion, either magical or alchemical, since a standard issue healing potion during a battle at the Surrian front a month ago, and the one you gave me at the Fae font before that.

If there is any information that I have unwittingly omitted, please write immediately that I might rectify this. I am currently en route to the Capital to take the Trials and attempt to join the clergy, so any letter addressed to me ought to be sent to the Strell family estate there.

With sincerity, Iria Strell

____________________

Sergeant Major Maldai Varricon, Specialist Unit c.Varricon The 3rd Legion, Serae

Dear Maldai,

I am writing, as a friend, because I could gravely use your guidance right now. It has been a trying week; I have nearly died multiple times, I have watched a unit of good Caedic soldiers slaughtered before my eyes, helpless, and I am full of doubts about things I had previously considered certain. Second Lieutenant Vitan of the 8th has submitted a full official report about the incidents that transpired, but I am not sure that any report could capture…could capture what I am to write below.

The journey to the Capital was fairly uneventful until about half a day’s march from Cloudfall fort. We had made good time in the prior month; I’d kept up practicing my forms every morning and evening, which meant that Talvus and I tired at about the same time every day, and I managed to persuade him to teach me basic arcane theory as we walked so that if I am ever consulted for tactical planning, I might have more insight into what a single mage or an arcane unit can and cannot do.

(Managed to persuade. More like we ran out of conversation topics about banal matters by the end of the third day, and Talvus leapt at the opportunity to talk about something even marginally related to his research projects. I think I’ve picked up the basics acceptably; I was able to keep up with him. He is a fine teacher, although he spoke very fast, and I only had so much time at night to write down notes and attempt to memorize the shapes of needles. Ample practical demonstrations, though. Including one in particular with exploding biscuits. He lost biscuit privileges after that. Regardless, I hope to reach the level where I can actually contribute to the things he is trying to do someday, as I appreciate it all the more now that I know some of the theory behind it.)

We were ambushed by a group of Rat Clan orcs, and an Owl Clan elf, who had been waiting off the main road, presumably for Caedic troops to pass. The two of us were vastly outnumbered—there must have been at least a dozen of them—and I managed to strike down four before they were in turn ambushed by a Caedic patrol that had been tracking them. I suppose that was the first time my life was saved by the pure luck of coincidence, although I did not consider this at the time, as I had not taken any overly threatening wounds during the fight.

Second Lieutenant Venus Tarquin, who had led the patrol, informed us of the situation as we made our way back towards the camp of the 8th—the Unbroken. In recent months, rebel activity in Altae had increased dramatically, to the point in which our journey would be interrupted by more than just an ambush. Shortly past Cloudfall, there was a pass spanned by a single bridge, which had recently been destroyed by Salamander Clan rebels. The journey around the pass would take more than a week, and repairs would be about finished in that timeframe. We were welcome to spend our time waiting at Cloudfall, or we could speak with Captain Piso about whether or not the 8th could use two extra pairs of hands for the interim. I was eager to volunteer my services, and Talvus agreed, and so we settled in with the Unbroken in the converted Raven village in which they had made their camp.

I delivered the papers that you had left us with to Captain Piso, and Second Lieutenant Tarquin informed him of our situation. Talvus and I offered our services, and Captain Piso said that the unit could always use another two good soldiers, especially a mage. Then he dismissed Talvus, but asked me to stay. He looked at the papers again. Then he said: “Strell. Your family had some sort of connection to the recent heresy, is that correct?”

I told him yes, that I had been close friends with one of the daughters of the main family.

He said that he had very little access to information, to that sort of news from the Capital, and that he would like to know any details, if I had them. There was not much I could say; I told him that I did not know any details until the night that the Tandus family planned to escape.

“To break out the one that was imprisoned, is that correct?” he said.

It was, yet I knew only where to find Peia because we’d hidden in alleyways together all throughout our childhood. I told him such.

“Do you know anything more about the original heresy that initiated the situation?” he asked. “Anything more about what was actually found to incriminate Scaevola Tandus? Before the whole…breakout situation?”

“I knew that he was convicted of necromancy,” I said.

And there Captain Piso’s interest seemed to end. “I imagine you’ve had to deal with quite an uphill climb with that mark on your record,” he said.

“I am loyal to the Empire and I have always been willing to spill the blood of our enemies to prove it,” I told him. “I have spent the last two and a half years fighting beside those who have understood that.”

He dismissed me.

I was immediately folded into the roster of watches and patrols, and had patrol with Corporal Dante Maxim and Corporal Specialist Marcus Tyrol the next morning. Corporal Maxim was also fairly new to the 8th, being the sole survivor of an ambush by the Heretic Raven that wiped out the 22nd only a few months prior, but he and Corporal Tyrol were already fast friends, so I followed behind them and did not interject myself in their banter. The patrol proceeded uneventfully until we stumbled across the still-warm corpse of a Caedic guard. Corporal Maxim was the one who put it together in the moments that followed: the wounds of the guard were too eccentric to belong to warriors of any one clan, and we were near the route of a supply wagon that was expected to arrive today. In fact, the route had been changed, in secret, at the last minute, as prior supply trains had been ambushed, yet somehow the Heretic Raven and their company had no trouble finding it.

Fearing the numbers of the enemy, we sent Corporal Tyrol to run to the nearby Stag Clan warcamp to muster the Stag Clan loyalists, while Maxim and I vaulted over the slope and into the battle to buy time. Sure enough, the Caedic guards were outnumbered: eight of them to ten of the Heretic Raven’s warriors. It was not just numbers determining this battle; the guards were vastly outclassed, from what could be gathered of the smoke and screams. Corporal Maxim and I charged towards the fray. A woman-elf with pale skin, dark hair, and a large scythe, Anye the Huntress of the Wolf Clan, called out something to alert the others of our presence, then disappeared into the smoke. Another elf, blonde, his face covered in black warpaint—the Black Stag, a traitor of the Stag Clan—turned to hold us off while Anye tried to attack us from behind. Their mage was throwing fireballs around; one of which hit me, another that I dodged. Corporal Maxim and I held the two warriors with relative ease. Then the moment the fight seemed to be turning, the Anye the Huntress disappeared back into the smoke, and the Heretic Raven themselves, distinguished by the scar across their forehead and the left arm of a Caedic uniform jacket sewn into their Highland war garb, stepped forward to take her place.

They were a formidable foe; combining both Caedic footwork with Highland two-bladed style. Corporal Maxim and I fought them together, as Corporal Tyrol and the Stag Clan forces appeared over the hill and charged into the melee. The Heretic Raven wasn’t fighting to kill, they were fighting defensively, covering the retreat of their people. The Stag Clan loyalists turned the tide of the engagement, as the rebels were then vastly outnumbered; although they focused on the traitor of their tribe, killing him and allowing the others to escape. The Heretic Raven slit Corporal Maxim’s throat before retreating, and I stayed back to stop the bleeding and stabilize him rather than continue the fight into the woods. The supply train was not damaged, so we loaded the wounded onto the wagon and proceeded as quickly as possible back to camp, where proper healing could be distributed. Corporal Tyrol and I delivered the report, as Maxim was mostly unconscious, and then I spent the rest of the afternoon with the Stag Clan warriors, attempting to learn more about their fighting style and seeing what I could pick up of their language. The question of how the Heretic Raven managed to find the new supply route was unanswered and thus somewhat upsetting to the camp, but the supplies had been properly delivered, so it was not dwelled upon.

Next came the animal attacks. A patrol came back attacked by wolves; and a bear wandered into the center of our camp during breakfast and attacked myself, Corporal Maxim, and Lieutenant Sorus as we exited the dining building. Upon killing the bear, its conjured nature was revealed. Recalling ravens that I had seen both during the initial ambush along the road as well as at the outskirts of camp two days prior, I suggested that conjured animals might be spying on us, which could perhaps explain how the new supply route was known to the Heretic Raven. As such, Corporal Tyrol, Corporal Maxim, and I decided to stop during our patrol at the Stag Clan camp, to ask War-Leader Tairn of the Stag Clan if Highland Shamans had such abilities. Tairn was neither able to confirm nor refute my theory, so we decided to bring it up to the arcanists when we returned to Unbroken, as this was still the best explanation we had for the increasing ambushes. We continued on the patrol. Tyrol spotted some rabbits, and proposed we pause for some fun: he’d been taught basic augury before he dropped out of the academy, and offered to read our fortunes. He read mine first: in the entrails, a troubled event from my childhood, and death in the past; nothing that I didn’t already know. In the heart, fragile, which turned frustratingly accurate, as I ended up unconscious for one reason or another (most often that reason the injury from the foundry acting up) in or after every fight I engaged in since. Success, power, and upward climb for the future, not that I put much stake in it. For Maxim: in the past, humble origins, high ambitions; in the present, strong, powerful, respected among peers, and oh, owes Tyrol twelve silvers from when he lost that bet; and then the rabbit had no liver. There was no future. Maybe you just found a fucked up rabbit, Dante said.

We did not have much time to dwell, as we were immediately attacked by wolves. Luckily, I had been fighting wolves of the conjured variety for nearly a month, as I had grown bored with merely repeating my forms, and had convinced Talvus to materialize various fighting companions in the evenings of our travels. We found most interesting the fact that the corpses of these wolves did not disappear, which meant that if this was a planned attack and not unfortunate happenstance, it was by those who could control animals, not merely create magical constructs of them. We hurried back to camp to report the incident.

That had been the first clue. The biggest one. And I missed it.

When we returned, the camp was abuzz with the news that Caedic forces had discovered the hideaway of Rat Clan, one of the largest remaining holdouts of rebels. Captain Piso, with knowledge of my prior experience, engaged me to design the plan of assault; Corporal Maxim was to assist with the planning and the assignment of men; and Second Lieutenant Tarquin was to oversee the both of us and provide guidance if necessary, and make all final calls. I immediately had the following idea, for I had been working with Talvus to reverse-engineer the arcanum cannons from the battle at the Surrian front: he had been stuck upon the fact that the the burned out cartridges with a repeating rune pattern would have contained more magical energy than is stable to force into an object, and I suggested that perhaps the design was not to contain then release the energy into a spell, but only to contain, then a physical destruction of the runic pattern could release all of the energy at once, as an explosive. As such, Talvus was able to develop a delayed explosive stick, one which contained power comparable to the fireballs that had been shot, which would be released within about six or seven seconds of the destruction of the runes. The plan that I submitted to Second Lieutenant Tarquin was the tactical usage of these delayed explosives, sent in on invisible runners to the barracks of the hideaway as the Rat Clan warriors slept, then with our Caedic forces waiting by the entranceways to slaughter the disoriented survivors as they were smoked out.

Our planning was cut short by an attack on the camp of animals of many shapes and sizes; this time, both controlled and conjured. Corporal Maxim and I handily took care of a boar, then I began picking off wolves with arrows as Maxim rushed to the aid of Captain Piso, who was on the ground, poisoned by a giant scorpion. When Maxim went to summon Second Lieutenant Vitan, he saw that the back of the medical building had been blown out, and Second Lieutenant Vitan was nowhere to be seen. He sought the assistance of myself, as I was a known tracker in the camp, and Second Lieutenant Tarquin, to follow the trail that we might return with Vitan before the Captain died. The tracks of the attackers were not particularly hidden, and there were marks as if someone struggling had been dragged off, which indicated that Second Lieutenant Vitan had been taken alive. We began pursuit, first encountering a blindfolded Wolf Clan orc with two bestial wolves, whom we dispatched of, then further along the main road a blindfolded Wolf Clan druid dragging the bound Second Lieutenant away. We were also able to prevail in this fight, although it was far more severe: a summoned leopard bit a sizable chunk from my side and nearly took down Second Lieutenant Tarquin, and Corporal Maxim had trouble piecing the druid’s defensive spells until he thought to free Second Lieutenant Vitan, who stared at the orc directly, rage in her eyes, then brought a dagger across her own throat; and the same cut opened up on his neck, blood pouring down in sheets, as Corporal Maxim dealt the final blow.

We were able to return to the camp in time for Second Lieutenant Vitan to treat Captain Piso. The rest of the animals had been fended off, upon their deaths revealing about of half of them conjured and half of them real. The entire setup—from the fact that Lieutenant Vitan was just dragged off, not killed, and her attackers did not cover their tracks, to how there were no casualties on our end, to how both the warrior-orc and the druid were blindfolded—I could not make sense of it. As we were still preparing in earnest for the assault on the Rat Clan hideaway, I’m not sure if anyone bothered to make sense of it.

Development of the delayed explosives proceeded faster and more successfully than expected; Talvus spearheaded the project, and I helped where I could, mostly just checking his diagrams in places. He and Lieutenant Sorus were able to make the first prototype within two days, and we carefully warded a field against any divination and ensured that there were no small animals nearby before we set up the delayed explosive stick on one side, and from forty feet away, Second Lieutenant Tarquin speared it with an arrow. The explosion was a bit sooner than planned—five seconds, not seven—but its size and intensity were as desired. Talvus and Lieutenant Sorus turned to producing the explosives that we planned to use in the attack, and Second Lieutenant Tarquin and I returned to planning a scouting mission, that we might better know where to deploy these explosives.

The scouting mission was to proceed as follows: Second Lieutenant Tarquin, Lieutenant Sorus, Talvus, Corporal Tyrol, and another scout of the Unbroken, Private Specialist First Class Kia Passienus, and myself were to make our way to the edge of the woods in the heart of night under the cover of mist, to the hideaway of the Rat Clan. There Lieutenant Sorus would prepare four focus-stones for Corporal Tyrol and I to take, and Talvus would cast invisibility on myself, Tyrol, and Private Passienus. We would have a little more than five minutes to run to the tunnels of the hideaway, Tyrol taking the northern side and myself to enter on the southern side, while Private Passienus stayed closer to the outskirts both to keep watch and to investigate lightly the entrances on the upper levels of the hill. If we did not find the barracks ourselves, the focus-stones would allow Lieutenant Sorus a direct line to scry within the hideaway. The night came. The six of us left. Lieutenant Sorus gave us the foci, and Talvus turned us invisible.

I encountered no one until I found what appeared to be their main war room, with a number of orcs, including War-Chief Black Eye Sadbh, gathered around a map on a central table and discussing plans. I debated whether or not to sneak through to room to one of the adjacent tunnels, as I had not yet found any sleep-chambers, or to go back are try some of the side passageways that had been barred with closed doors; I decided that I was both quiet enough, and the room was large enough, for me to drop a scrying stone in the room then sneak through to one of the open passageways.

The moment I set foot into the room, an orc mage who had been watching the door shouted and yanked a rope, a large wooden cover fell across the entrance to the passageway I had come through, and Rat Clan warriors leapt into action, closing and barring all of the doors. I was unarmed, save for a single dagger; I decided to make best use of my remaining time of invisibility by hiding the dagger in my boot then making an appropriate scuffle such as to seem that I had nothing up my sleeve. I tried to open the doors to no avail; there were simply too many warriors in the room, blocking the passageways bodily, and before long I was pinned. I saved my breath rather than struggle as the invisibility wore off.

I was beaten, which was expected; bound, which was expected; then I was taken to a small room, tied to a post, and rubble and stones were carefully piled around me. Black Eye Sadbh watched, smiling, the entire time. Small piles of tinder were built up around the room. I was prepared to be tortured: I was prepared first not to crack, then second, that my final acts might be more useful if I fed the Rat Clan misinformation instead of just defiance. No questioning came. I tried whispering it was a trap, that they knew we were coming, over and over—so that if Talvus were to try to scry me, the Unbroken would be warned—and I was gagged for my trouble.

They lit the fires a little before dawn.

Captain Piso, leading the same team that he had been allocated in the original plan, burst into the room where I had been left just as the heat was enough to threaten me with unconsciousness. I was freed, despite the precious time it wasted, and given a spare scimitar, and we moved as a unit to cut off a tunnel where Black-Eye Sadbh was escaping with her warriors. She put up a significant fight, single-handedly holding the tunnel while her warriors ran from sight. I maneuvered such that I was behind her, cutting off her own escape, but when she deemed she had stalled long enough, she turned to me and brought first her fist, then the hilt of her weapon, to strike me directly in my old injury. She met my eyes and smiled as she did, for she knew something that we—that I—did not. I awoke to a combat medic standing over me, and the news that a chase had occurred. I ran as fast as I could to the end of the tunnel; and Captain Piso was fighting against Black-Eye Sadbh as his men cut down her remaining warriors. I was able to strike Black-Eye Sadbh from behind her flank, still angry that I had previously allowed her to escape, and I struck true: she spat blood then she died.

Corporal Maxim and I reported to Captain Piso the final results of the attack, as a combat medic saw to his wounds; and I learned that Private Passienus had been buried similarly to myself in a small storage room to the top of the hideaway, and Corporal Maxim had put out the fires around her and left her with a potion before continuing past to the shrine of the Rat Clan, where he had killed all four of the clan shamans before they could make their escape. Corporal Tyrol had been bound to a post rigged to trigger a cave-in, and Second Lieutenant Vitan and her team had been trapped trying to release him. Some of the Rat Clan warriors had been killed, but many had escaped, as had all the noncombatants. All boxes in the storerooms that might have contained supplies were decoys, filled with dust.

Captain Piso said that killing the war-chief and shamans of the Rat Clan was like cutting off the head of a snake; that we had severely crippled all resistance that the Rat Clan might be able to put up in the future; that this was a major victory. It did not feel like one. Then we found a letter on Black-Eye Sadbh’s body. It was written in orcish, of a dialect Tairn did not know, but one thing was abundantly clear: there was an exact replication of the runes of the delayed explosives in the letter, the ones that Talvus and I had developed. We had done all of our research inside, under Divination wards; and the only ones who had seen those runes were myself, Talvus, Corporal Maxim, Second Lieutenant Tarquin, Lieutenant Sorus, and Captain Piso.

I could think of no means or motive of any of those listed above to have betrayed the Caedic forces; but worse, while the repeating pattern in the middle was fairly simple, the capping runes were complex and subtle. I could produce them exactly. Talvus and Lieutenant Sorus, who had manufactured the explosives, would also have been able to draw them in the detail that they were depicted. As for the others, I heavily suspected that they would not have been able to freehand the runes as such they had appeared, but would have needed to copy them down. At that point, it seemed more likely that the Highland orcs had the same idea of sending invisible runners as we had to copy the runes in the dead of night, than any of those officers might betray us.

In order to better understand the situation unfolding around us, the command at Cloudfall deigned to send the Traitor, a Bear Clan orc loyal to the Caedic forces who served as a linguist for them, to translate the letter. Captain Piso was about as happy with this decision as you were when Captain Galseii summoned us to fight in the battle of the guns, as the Highland rebels had been trying to kill the Traitor for years, and recent ambushes had been increasing in frequency and efficacy: there was little chance that the Heretic Raven and their allies would not attempt to kill the Traitor. Captain Piso ordered the 8th to begin march immediately, and split us into three groups: one to search for ambushes to the left of the road, the other to the right, and the final to reinforce the Caedic soldiers from Cloudfall who would be escorting the Traitor. I was assigned to the group to the right, led by Second Lieutenant Tarquin, as was Corporal Maxim. I suggested that we not leave the four delayed explosives sitting around in our empty camp, and Captain Piso agreed, distributing them to myself, Corporal Maxim, Talvus, and Second Lieutenant Tarquin.

We indeed found the expected ambush—in a thickly wooded area, with the slope leading up to the road, all in all a fairly terrible place to wait in ambush. The enemy forces appeared surprised at our presence, but the Heretic Raven, amongst them, let out a war cry to which they rallied, and the fighting began in earnest. I moved to kill the Heretic Raven’s Rat Clan shaman, but was diverted as Anye the Huntress dropped from a tree and brought her scythe down on my shoulder, shattering my collarbone. I exchanged blows back and forth with her until I noticed that the Heretic Raven had stepped forward to fill break in the rebel line, and was fighting Corporal Maxim. I moved forward to support Maxim, but my wounds were severe enough that I was knocked out of the fight. While I was unconscious, the Caedic soldiers successfully cut down the Wolf Clan orcs, and the majority of the Heretic Raven’s warriors fled. Yet the Heretic Raven and one more remained, and made towards the slope, just as the Traitor and two Caedic soldiers burst panicked through the trees from the road. Corporal Maxim rushed to the Traitor’s defense, and tackled the Heretic Raven to the ground. I awoke to a combat medic patching me back together, and to see the Heretic Raven break free from the convergence of Caedic soldiers, sprinting past everyone else into the woods.

I knew that in all the years that the Heretic Raven had been fighting, the Caedic Empire had never come so close to bringing them down. So I sprinted after them.

I was able to keep pace with the Heretic Raven, but it was several hundred feet, well out of sight of the rest of the unit, before they stumbled and I was able to make my move. I leapt forward but they sidestepped, pivoting on one leg to throw me over their hip.

What followed, I am not proud of.

“You made the wrong call, chasing me alone with those injuries,” they said.

“I was prepared to die for the Caedic Empire since the day I joined,” I said, and I cracked the delayed explosive. They recognized it instantly, and they kicked it from my hand.

“Then do,” they said, and their blade stabbed downwards.

I rolled out of the way, but not fast enough; the blade grazed my good shoulder, opening up a wound that, while it would not slow me, still bled heavily. I forced myself to my feet, and drew my blades, for the Heretic Raven was injured as well, and I had prevailed in fights with similar odds; and even if I were the fool, even if I were to die, I would not go down without making them pay for their victory.

The Heretic Raven met my eyes as I glared at them. Something unreadable passed across their face. Then faster than I could move, they brought their knee to my gut and as I doubled over, their elbow to the back of my head, and all went black.

I awoke to Second Lieutenant Vitan standing over me. The moment she determined I was in no immediate danger of dying, she hastened to return I assume to treat injuries amongst the rest of the 8th, leaving me alone on the ground.

I still do not know why the Heretic Raven did not simply kill me then and there, or what—if anything—they realized when they saw my face that gave them pause. Whatever it was, it did not hold them back in our subsequent encounters. I have very little doubt that they would come to regret it, considering that I would be directly involved in both their death, the death of two of their companions, and the downfall of the Wolf Clan. I owe my life to some passing fancy they were struck by, and I do not know what it was. I realize now, of course, that I was perhaps overzealous in chasing them, that such a risk would have only been worth it if I had been in slightly better fighting shape at the start instead of injured and barely clinging to consciousness, I had just—I had wanted to do something, to make up for my failures during the assault on the Rat Clan hideaway.

The Caedic forces had taken heavy losses during this ambush. While our company has killed Cú, the Heretic Raven’s warrior who had remained, and a number of Wolf Clan orcs, the group that had gone to the left had been ambushed by Wolf Clan forces waiting even further left and had taken many casualties, and those along the road had also been ambushed. Lieutenant Vindix, the leader of the 10th, had been killed, along with all remaining members of the 10th who had joined us. Talvus told me of another of the blindfolded Wolf Clan warrior; this one managed to take down eight Caedic soldiers alone, and retreated without taking a single blow. We had walked straight into a trap, one that Second Lieutenant Tarquin’s squadron alone was able to avoid.

The Traitor translated the letter, as was the ultimate goal of this whole endeavor. And it was far, far worse than we had imagined.

As suspected, the letter warned that Caedic forces would be attacking, and that we had developed a new weapon, a stick of wind and fire that would detonate when cracked. It warned that we planned to use the delayed explosives to collapse tunnels in on them in their sleep, but that if they captured our spies, we would fear to send more in the same fashion. They knew we were coming twice—first magically concealed from sight on the second night of the new moon. That was why they were waiting for us. They knew what tunnels our forces had knowledge of, and which ones they could escape from. The letter predicted, rightly, that Captain Piso would order to assault to be pushed up immediately to the morning after the scouts were captured. It described all of the notable warriors and their assignments in detail: Tyrol’s ability to transform partially into a snake, and the difficulties they would face holding him, that Captain Piso was quick and agile, Second Lieutenant Vitan could draw rivers of blood from foes just as easily as she could heal, that Talvus was skilled well beyond his years in magic and that they would know him by his unbuttoned coat, it spoke of the spells favored by Lieutenant Sorus, and the ambush planned by Second Lieutenant Tarquin over the tunnels to the west, so their best chance of escape was to head to the eastern side of the hideaway to exits which we did not know. Of myself, ‘the woman spy with the two blades will fight with great fierceness, enough to rival any Highland warrior: Strike her just right of the center of her chest and she will fall to an old injury,’ which was how Black-Eye Sadbh escaped past me through the tunnel.

They knew everything of any worth pertaining to the assault in nauseating detail. It was signed by The Wolf of Ears Eyes and Hands.

My collarbone had been shattered severely enough that it required surgery before any magical healing could be applied. It was not pleasant to lie still on the table while Second Lieutenant Vitan cut open my upper chest and shoulder to dig out the bits of bone, but I did not break. The pain was irrelevant, there was too much else on my mind; the only thing that mattered was discovering how the Wolf of Ears Eyes and Hands had stolen the information from us. I cannot emphasize enough how upset the fact that they had the runes of our delayed explosives made me: if Highland casters could make such delayed explosives themselves, Talvus and I in our brief tenure here would have handed the insurgent forces on a silver platter a weapon they could use to cause great devastation to supply trains or patrols with minimum danger to their own warriors. I did not know how I would live with myself, if my greatest contribution in the Highlands had been supplying enemies of the Empire with a tool that could expedite the deaths of many good Caedic soldiers. I asked Talvus whether or not he thought one might be able to recreate the delayed explosives with just the runes, if they were unfamiliar with Caedic casting, and he said he did not know. I did not sleep easy that night.

The next day, Talvus caught me in a private corner of camp. “Do you know how you look?” he demanded, and I knew that I was still bruised from the fight and healing from the surgery, but I did not think I looked so beat-up as to justify the intensity with which he spoke, and told him such. “No,” he said. “You do realize—if there’s a spy within our ranks, it’s you.”

His words sunk in even as he began to explain. “We’re the two outsiders. You were involved in all the planning, and you knew how to make the explosives. They’re—“ He gestured, scratching out a needle that exploded into white sparks that floated around us before fading. “I don’t like being watched. Captain Piso’s been having Sleepy” (Lieutenant Sorus, and for once this was not a flattering nickname that Talvus had bestowed upon a superior officer, but rather what Lieutenant Sorus was colloquially known as around camp) “keep tabs on us, but there’s no Divination magic around us now.”

The purpose of the sparks, I realized.

“There’s something else,” he said. “I’m pretty sure that Sleepy is higher-ranked in the clergy than he’s been letting on.” Which, in conjunction with the fact that Captain Piso was, well, a Captain, yet only in command of a single unit, was strange.

“Why are we even still here, if they think we are spies?” I asked.

“Probably because the ambushes were going on long before we got here, that’s the only thing we’ve got going for us,” Talvus said. “And we are being watched.”

Then an even more chilling thought struck me. “Could I be the spy?” I asked. “Could—could the Rat Clan or the Wolf Clan have put some sort of spell on me that allows them to see through my eyes? Hear through my ears?”

Talvus shook his head. “It would have shown up in my Divination detection,” he said, and he appeared confident, but I was not convinced, as the enemy clearly had some method of knowing our every move that was beyond our ability to detect, and perhaps there was a deeper magic, some sort of Highland spirit magic, at play. After all, at the center of the camp of the Unbroken was a sealed Raven shrine, from before the clan joined the Empire and was sent to the west as Raven Legion. As I was not particularly inclined to go marching around camp spouting far-fetched theories that contradicted the conclusions of our arcanists, when I was already suspected of treason, I deemed that the best thing I could do was to stay as much out of the way as I could, so that if they were seeing through my eyes, I would cause no more harm than I already had. I am aware now that this course of action was not spurred by logic, and I know this is no excuse, but I was—I was hurt, and exhausted, and shaken by how disastrously my plans for the assault on Rat Clan had fallen apart, unsure as to why I was alive, and frustrated over how perfectly the events of the past week had framed me for a treason I would never willingly commit.

There was another ambush by the Heretic Raven.

It was on a larger supply train, near Cloudfall, and while the Heretic Raven was long gone by the time the news reached us, Captain Piso saw it as his chance. There were three trackers in the unit and at his disposal—myself, Tyrol, and Second Lieutenant Tarquin—and working together, we might finally be able to find the Heretic Raven’s hideaway where any one of us could not, and gain the upper hand. The trail was not easy to follow; it doubled back on itself, went through streams, across rocks, and it took all of our skills combined to follow it to its end. The sun was setting over a gathering mist as we reached a hillside with a large opening, perhaps twenty feet wide, with a fairly shallow overhang. Within it there was a large pair of doors, carved from stone, worn down but the images of wolves and ravens evident upon it. The trail led through the doors, which appeared to have been opened recently, and Second Lieutenant Tarquin gathered us to return to Captain Piso with the news that we believed we had found the hideaway of the Heretic Raven.

We returned and reported, and Captain Piso ordered the entirety of the Unbroken to prepare to move out first thing the next morning; and I did not voice my concerns, that we still did not know how they were getting their information on us, we could be walking into just as much of a trap as we had—as I had—in the assault we had planned against the Rat Clan; but everyone except me had viewed the assault against Rat Clan as a rousing victory, and I was alone in my doubts. I was nothing, just a Private, and one under suspicion of treason at that, and no one wanted to lose the chance of ending the threat presented by the Heretic Raven for once and for all, so I did not speak.

We marched to what we assumed to be the hideaway of the Heretic Raven. There was no one guard posted outside the entrance of the cave. Captain Piso sent a few soldiers in advance to check the doors, and they opened inwards and were not locked. Beyond the doors was a long hallway with writing on the walls, iconography, carved stone ravens and wolves both. We came to a spiraled staircase that we could only climb one by one, and we did, carefully, but the antechamber above was empty. Here natural light shone in through windows cut from thin stone walls on one side of what must have been a hill we were beneath, and huge stone doors with intricate carvings barred our way further into what was now clear to be an old temple of the Wolf and Raven Clans. Captain Piso, Lieutenant Sorus, and Talvus began discussions on whether or not the six delayed explosives we had would get us through the stone doors. Our other option would be to send a team through a side passage, who would have to navigate a series of challenges devised to test the worthiness of Wolf and Raven Clan warriors in a coming-of-age ceremony. I was called over by Talvus to offer my opinion, as I had seen the delayed explosives detonate twice. I was utterly useless in this task, as I could not deduce the thickness of the doors nor had I seen the explosives act against stone, and I did not wish to give a false answer solely to appear more intelligent. Unable to offer anything else, I suggested that a team be sent through the smaller door, then if the team failed to prove themselves capable of the same feats as worthy Wolf-or-Raven Clan warriors, the explosives be used as a second resort.

Captain Piso agreed, and appointed Corporal Tyrol to lead the team for his knowledge of traps, Corporal Maxim for his cleverness and the strength of his shield, Talvus for his expertise and arcane mastery, and myself I suspect because I am small, fast, and good at climbing things, despite my status within the unit. He gave us explicit instructions to turn around if we encountered any dangers severe enough to threaten our lives. I was rather grateful that the composition of the group was one with a rather narrow definition of ‘severe enough to threaten our lives,’ thus we proceeded through the door and down a small, roughly stone-hewn corridor to face the challenges.

The first room was a corridor perhaps thirty feet long with tiled floor, the tiles about a foot square, with orcish writing in black and white on each of them. Corporal Tyrol carefully put pressure on one in the first row, and a spear shot out of a hole in the wall. Upon closer inspection, the walls were covered in these holes. As none of us spoke or read orcish, there was little hope of us solving the puzzle in a reasonable amount of time, so Corporal Tyrol took off running across the floor, dodging what traps he triggered. I ran after him, using as much as I could from his run to plot my own path. Corporal Maxim made use of the strength of his shield. Talvus cast a protecting spell on himself, closed his eyes, and ran as fast as he could straight down the center.

The second room contained a single ornate set of scales aligned against the back wall, which Talvus identified as having some sort of magic on them, and an inscription in orcish above them, which once more did us no good. There was a locked door beside the scales. Talvus noted that he had a delayed explosive on him, and suggested it as a way to get through the door and circumvent the puzzle entirely, but I cautioned against this plan, as if we failed the challenges, Captain Piso may have had need of all six explosives to get through the stone doors. After a moment’s inspection of the scales, Talvus said that he could remove the magic, but that there was a mechanical aspect to the contraption; so Corporal Maxim and I smashed through the wall behind and I fiddled with some of the gears there, grateful for my experience fixing the mill of Stonemill Keep as you had assigned me to for familiarizing me with such workings, and Corporal Tyrol and Corporal Maxim were able to pry open the door.

The third room consisted of a giant pit, with spiked stone at the bottom, perhaps forty feet across, thirty feet wide, and a little more than thirty feet to the bottom. I threw down a rock, but it triggered no traps. We had a single rope between all of us, just long enough to reach the floor of the pit, and started arguing as to whether or not we should simply climb down and up the sides, trusting the ability of one to stand and hold the rope each way, or if we should turn back and admit defeat. This argument was just starting to get heated when I asked Talvus whether or not he knew the needle for the feather-fall effect, and he said something along the lines of “huh, I do,” and cast it on all of us, and we jumped down safely.

We indeed triggered no traps and picked our way across the floor without difficulty, as the stone spikes were only particularly dangerous to anyone falling. On the other side, Corporal Maxim pointed out a handhold that he spotted—perhaps a remnant of the mechanism meant to solve this challenge instead of literally resorting to scaling the walls—but lo and behold, I had absolutely no trouble literally scaling the wall. Supporting Corporal Maxim’s weight on the rope was a bit more of a challenge, but after a failed attempt I asked Talvus if he might be able to make me heavier, that I could be a better counterbalance, and he summoned me an ape. This worked to get Corporal Maxim up. It did not work to get Talvus up, although the problem was not on our end, to phrase it generously. I asked Talvus if he would like to simply tie himself to the rope and have Dante and I haul him up, and he readily agreed to this offer; he was quite lucky that while this had been a joke, it had not been a bluff about the combined strength of Corporal Maxim and myself. Tyrol climbed the rope like a normal person.

We proceeded through the door at the end of the room and discovered that we had completed all of the challenges, we were officially worthy adult warriors or whatever that was supposed to be a test of for the Wolf and Raven clans, and more importantly, we could now open the barred stone doors from within. Before making our way into what was clear now to be a second antechamber, I requested that the others wait out of sight and Talvus turn me invisible first, lest the Heretic Raven had set anyone to watch the entrance of their hideaway. None stopped me as I lifted the thick stone bars from the doors. Captain Piso and the rest of the Unbroken filed into the room, then there was a final set of doors before what I assumed had to be the ancient temple proper. Talvus and Lieutenant Sorus checked the doors for magical traps and found none; then I volunteered to open the doors in case there was an ambush waiting on the other side, as I was still invisible.

No ambush awaited us, at least none that I could see, although the chamber was large, cavernous even, and the only lighting was what spilled through the doors from behind me. The darkness towards the edges and to where the ceiling tapered in the back could not have hidden any significant force, which I reported back to Captain Piso. “Then we move,” he said.

As the Unbroken filtered into the room, they brought torches, and light revealed what the darkness had hidden. There were large pillars in what was indeed the back of the cavern, perhaps twenty-five feet tall, with great statues of a wolf and a raven perched atop them. There were religious ornamentations upon the walls, some metal and silverwork instead of just stone. There was a figure sitting at the foot of the two pillars, and she turned and pushed to her feet with slow movements that bespoke a confidence: Anye the Huntress, the foster child of the Raven Clan raised within the Wolf Clan, and daughter of both, covered in warpaint across her face and her bared arms and holding the scythe which had caused me such injury.

The moment she saw us she charged us, screaming; and she targeted Captain Piso in particular. I sidestepped her charge and took a flanking position behind her as the one last advantage my invisibility could offer, then in the resulting melee I delivered first a blow to the base of her spine which brought her to her knees, her back sliced open to the point in which bone was showing, yet she did not let up in her assault on Captain Piso.

So I beheaded her, screaming, as she knelt before me. Then there was silence.

We turned back to the rest of the room to see if perhaps there were any more members of the Heretic Raven’s company that might have an opinion on what had just transpired, but we were alone in the room. I caught it first, a glint of light, a faint greenish blue that flickered to red, from the eyes of the statue of the Raven, then of the Wolf. Then there was a surge of light and motion, a torrent of glowing blue-gray from burst like a waterfall from each of the pillars and wove around one another before striking the ground. I had just enough time to realize that this was perhaps the most obvious trap we could have walked into, that there was almost certainly some sort of spirit-curse on this place against spilling Wolf or Raven Clan blood in the temple of the Wolf and the Raven, when the ancient spirit-curse on the temple of the Wolf and the Raven roared fully to life, a strong wind began to blow seemingly from nowhere, mist poured from the back wall, and a massive Wolf, seven feet to the shoulder composed of the mist and the glowing gray light, stepped forward, and a Raven of similar form, perhaps three times the size of a normal bird, landed next to it.

The Unbroken readied their blades as the mist steadily advanced across the room towards us, some holding their positions defensively, and some (Dante. Just Dante.) already leaping forward into a charge. I caught Talvus’s eye. “Let’s see if they burn,” I shouted. He understood immediately, and cracked one of the delayed explosives, and threw it deep into the mist. Heat and sound rolled over us as it detonated, and the mist was pushed back, and with it the Wolf, bits of smoke whipping from it as the force rolled over it. There was a growl, seemingly emanating from the entirety of the mist and echoing across the high-ceilinged chamber, and I buckled at the knees. Then the Raven took flight, and the mist pushed forward again, continuing to spread until it filled the room.

I ignored the manifestations of the Wolf and the Raven, and ran straight for the pillars across the temple. I tried to climb one, and got about halfway up before the stone was too smooth to continue. I shimmied down and shouted for Talvus, then the Raven cawed and the world went black. I could still feel the pillar behind me, and hear the clashing of weapons against stone and metal and the screams of Caedic soldiers echoing throughout the room, so I held my position and waited. In a few moments, I blinked and could suddenly see again, not that it did me much good: the entire room was so full of mist that I could not perceive anything more than six or seven feet ahead of me. Talvus must have heard my shouts, because he appeared, and I asked him to cast the same spell he had prepared for Salo and Corporal Laenas to scale the walls during the assault on Stonemill Keep. With the help of his magic, I was able to reach the top of the pillar easily, and found myself face to face with a stone carving of a raven. There were no gemstones in its eyes, as I had initially assumed when I had seen the gleam of light from across the room, but I nonetheless brought the hilt of my dagger down across it. The Raven-spirit screeched, and I could feel the wind of its wings across my back, the press of its mind into my own, then I could only think one thing, my body moving in obedience of its own accord: to fall.

I landed on my back and it knocked the wind out of me, but nothing seemed to be broken. I shouted for Talvus, because it was clear that the Raven did not want me to harm its effigy, and Talvus had delayed explosives on him that would do a bit more damage than the hilt of a dagger; but he did not appear from the mist. Captain Piso shouted for all of the Unbroken to retreat, but I could not give up, I scaled the pillar a second time and I smashed my dagger one more time into the crack, widening it. This time teeth materialized from the mist and latched around one of my ankles and I was pulled from the pillar, hurled once more to the ground. As it was evident that I would not be able to destroy the thing with my dagger alone before the spirits in the mist killed me, I retreated, joining the rest of the Unbroken in the second antechamber.

The mist was nowhere near as strong, and I caught sight of Captain Piso immediately. I rushed over to him, and begged him to give me a delayed explosive, to let me run back and destroy the pillars and end this. He told me not to make assumptions that would cause troops to die. I protested that none of his troops would be at risk, that only I need return, but with fury in his voice he snapped “Yes,” then pushed past me in clear dismissal.

I was—I had been right, we would later see the Raven’s eye was cracked just as I had cracked the stone, we were right there, we could have destroyed those statues, and then—it doesn’t matter, it didn’t matter, I would have never made it to the statues or even if I had it wouldn’t have helped what came next because if anything I did could have mattered we wouldn’t have been in the situation in the first place, but—but I had been right. I could have ended them. I can run fast and I’m good at climbing and that’s all we needed. I could have tried.

There were teeth within the mist, snapping at us as we retreated to the first antechamber, then I could see nothing at all as the Raven-spirit pushed once more into my mind. First I was suspended in a memory of you shouting at me for losing my head in a fight, then it shifted, and I was suspended in the moment of my—in the moment I received my injury, back at the foundry, except instead of blacking out as I did then, the pain stretched on as I stared at the blade sticking out of my torso, burning through my back and my lungs as did the knowledge that I had failed our mission, failed Arcadia—but it snapped me back to something closer to myself, as I knew you had trained me to be stronger than this, better than this, and with pain came clarity. I pushed through the pressure of the false despair to open my eyes once more. The mist was pouring closer to the second antechamber, and the line of soldiers to my left and right covering the retreat of the rest were doing little better than I had been moments prior. In a burst of both inspiration and strength, I leapt forward and pulled the massive stone doors closed. My injury flared from the exertion, and I blacked out.

When I came to perhaps a few seconds later, it was to shouts from the single spiral staircase that one by one the 8th had begun evacuating down: there were enemy troops lying in wait, cutting off our only exit. In the desperation, I forgot my rank, and shouted out of turn at Talvus to throw one of the delayed explosives down the stairwell, cutting off our enemies below, and another on the wall of sheet-thin stone, to give us a new method of escape—but I suppose protocol was not on Captain Piso’s mind as he helped the last of the soldiers clear the stairwell, then motioned at Talvus to do as I said. We gathered as far from the opposite wall as we could, set up another near the thinnest stone, and it detonated, but it was not quite enough to open a route of escape. Lieutenant Sorus did not hesitate, he cracked and threw another, and with that the entire wall blew out. The mist was starting to breach through the stone doors, so the moment that the smoke cleared to reveal a gaping hole into the ravine outside, the entire unit sprang forward, and ran out.

They descended on us like a jaguar from its perch onto its prey, they were waiting for us in the hills above, forty Wolf Clan orcs, perhaps more, and the Heretic Raven and their entire remaining crew of warriors. It all happened so fast, we were outnumbered, outflanked. I could barely see what befell the others, as I was cornered against one of the stony walls by two Wolf Clan orcs, both blindfolded. They slipped past my initial blows, dodging almost as if by accident, as their footing was uncertain from the charge down the hillside, then one buried their axe in my shoulder and the other swung past me, embedding his axe in a chunk of rock behind me; and when pulling it loose, slammed the rock into my other shoulder, opening a gash and jolting the bone that had been shattered mere days prior, nearly causing me to drop my weapon. I swung once more, but I could not for the life of me hit them, and despite employing the best defenses I knew, one after another after another their blows hit me.

The rest of the Unbroken were doing little better. It was chaos, but I caught what little was happening near me. Tyrol was frozen in place by magical means, trembling as the Heretic Raven’s Rat Clan shaman held a single hand to his chest, slowly rotting his very flesh. Lieutenant Sorus was sketching one needle after another into the air, but every time he would try to thread it, the Heretic Raven’s Salamander Clan mage would snap her fingers, and the needle would collapse. Second Lieutenant Vitan was being buried in vines by the Heretic Raven’s witch. And Talvus—the Heretic Raven’s Bear Clan orc, called just the Bear, as in his war-garb, there seemed to be very little difference—was holding him up, several feet off the ground, by his throat alone. He had ceased struggling.

It all—it all happened so fast. Corporal Maxim charged the Rat Clan shaman, who lost his concentration, freeing Tyrol. Tyrol threw a knife, which hit one of the blindfolded orcs, who let out a shout, then like a spell had been broken, all of my attacks were hitting. They both blindly swung, and blindly missed.

I didn’t pause to think, I didn’t—I tore through them, straight towards Talvus. I know that I—I threw myself at the Bear, I think that Tyrol was attacking him too somewhere in there, I don’t—I think I might have gotten hit, I remember blacking out for a few moments, I think that I was on the ground, I have the vaguest memory of a medic standing over me, or maybe I got back up on my own, I just know that I threw myself at the Bear again and this time caught him under the arm, ripping open and up through his side and forcing him to drop Talvus, I slipped under the blow that he returned, and as he turned to—Tyrol must have been there, because he turned to hit Tyrol, I cut once through his gut, another across the back of both of his legs, ripping tendons, dropping him to his knees, and a final slash across his throat, and he collapsed.

Talvus was breathing. He was still breathing. He had no wounds on his person, it had just been—he had only been choked, but he was still breathing. I reached into his pocket, the one on the left side, because he always keeps a healing potion on his person, and sure enough it was there. I hesitated for perhaps half a second—across the field, Second Lieutenant Tarquin was bleeding from a severe wound to the gut, cornered by three heavily armed Wolf Clan orcs, her bow snapped in two; Lieutenant Sorus was trapped in a cage of the Salamander Clan mage’s fire, burning alive; Captain Piso was holding off the spirits of the Wolf and the Raven alone behind us all, and he was bleeding heavily—to any one of them, it could have been the difference between life and death, or I could have taken the potion myself and re-entered the fight—but they were far from me, and to leave Talvus’s side would have been to risk his life, and all I could think of was not here, not today, I could not lose Talvus, not like this, no, no no.

I poured the potion into his mouth, and he coughed himself awake. The battle was practically over, Wolf Clan forces were mopping up the last of us. Lieutenant Sorus was still alive, although barely, Second Lieutenant Tarquin was still alive, Captain Piso was still alive, and Corporal Maxim, Corporal Tyrol, Corporal Doraius, and Second Lieutenant Vitan had rallied and were fighting still—but Talvus was—there was a weak point in the chaos, as even as Talvus indicated it to me, I was running forward, clearing the way as he kept close behind me. I caught sight of one or two other Caedic soldiers ahead of us fleeing as well, but they were cut down by Wolf Clan warriors waiting past the treeline. Still, we ran.

Perhaps twenty feet from the battle, and into the woods, Corporal Maxim, Corporal Tyrol, Corporal Doraius, and Second Lieutenant Vitan had begun their own retreat, and we attached ourselves to their party. We ran, we all ran, with no direction in mind but the single directive: to get as far from the battle as possible. To run was to survive. And even when we could run no longer we kept going, as fast as we could, we kept going until our wounds caught up with us and we were forced to stop in a clearing for breath.

I…I think I must have been babbling at that point, to Talvus, that we needed—we needed to keep moving, we needed to cover our tracks, we needed to go back to the camp of the Unbroken because Talvus had left his research there, and I know I said at least that part out loud because Talvus tapped his forehead, said his research was all in there, but it wasn’t enough because he had written notes that could have fallen into enemy hands, or if—if Captain Piso kept notes or orders from Cloudfall or just—I didn’t—I couldn’t think. I think I fell silent eventually, or maybe none of this had been happening out loud, but I know that—I’ll never forget how we all just sat there, speechless, staring blankly into space, as it all sunk in. We were the last of the Unbroken. We were all that was left.

Eventually, Second Lieutenant Vitan addressed the rest of us: “Alright. The Private’s right. We need to keep moving, cover our tracks. Right now, it doesn’t matter where we’re going, we need to get further away from here. They’re going to be looking for us.”

I…I spoke again, even though it was out of turn, that if we were looking for a place to spend the night, the two obvious places we would head to would be to Cloudfall, because it was safe, we could find shelter and food and medical supplies and other Caedic forces, or our own abandoned camp if only because we still had the food and medical supplies there as well as the Stag Clan war camp nearby, which means that those are the two places that they would search for us along the trails out so perhaps we’d want to head in some other direction.

We would travel over land, we’ll head for Cloudfall, Second Lieutenant Vitan said. That we needed to make a report as soon as possible, although for the moment, the most important thing was putting more distance between us and them.

In which I…I didn’t stop talking, I said I still thought that Cloudfall was a bad idea, that it was the logical place for Wolf Clan to go to cut us off, and even as Vitan said that there were too many routes through the woods, nowhere reliable that they could could cut us off as long as we kept away from the main roads, that it didn’t matter, we needed to start moving—I tried to say that we didn’t know how they’d been tracking us and it took her shouting “PRIVATE, SHUT UP” for me to finally….to finally just stop and do my job.

Tyrol and I looped back and covered the tracks leading up to the clearing where we’d been sitting, while everyone else gathered themselves; Corporal Maxim had been bleeding fairly severely to a wound to his foot, and it was bound so that he could both keep walking, and would travel without leaving a trail. Then we all set out, Tyrol in the lead and plotting the path as I obscured what evidence we left from behind.

Talvus lingered towards the back of the party, and after a minute of collecting his thoughts, spoke: that he did not understand, although he was down for most of the fight, how the enemy forces were able to bring down Lieutenant Sorus.

Their Salamander Clan mage was counterspelling him, I told Talvus, spell for spell, he would drawn the needle and she would snap her fingers and destroy it, which is—which should have been impossible, from what Talvus had taught me so far about arcane interactions, and I expressed such. Talvus confirmed that counterspelling was exactly as difficult as I had assumed it to be: either she would have to know exactly the needle that Lieutenant Sorus was casting as he was casting it to know where it was most vulnerable to disruption, or she could have been trying to employ more general counterspelling tactics, but against a caster of the caliber of Lieutenant Sorus they would have failed entirely.

And she was doing it from across the hill, I said.

And she doesn’t know Caedic casting, Talvus said.

We both paused in silence for a minute.

Then Talvus realized what we all should have realized days prior, as all the little details had been adding up: they had not been spying on us. They had not needed to, they had never needed to, they did not merely know our actions, but knew the decisions that we had not yet even known—in the assault on the Rat Clan hideaway, that Piso would move the attack to the next morning; in the ambush against the Traitor, that Piso would bring the 8th to flank on both sides of the road, and precisely where the Traitor would flee down the hill, that the Heretic Raven might lie properly in wait; and in the fight we had just fled from, that we would think to blow out the thinnest wall and escape through the hillside. There was prophecy at play, not divination; true foresight of the future, the sort of thing beyond mere spellcasting. An exception to the rule. Even the blindfolded warriors—everything went exactly their way, Talvus said, that if someone had perfect foreknowledge, if they could arrange the situation down to the second, down to every last blow, they could just run the chances. Adjust it to precisely the one they wanted, just put on the trajectory such that everything goes exactly their way.

I know that this all sounds so—far fetched, like the madness of desperation, but it—it made sense, so much sense, as Talvus and I went back and forth, listing the growing evidence, filling in bits and pieces and gaps that had frustrated us so much but this—this could actually explain what—what had befallen us. The only question that remained was how were we alive, how did we make it out when no one else did? The other Caedic soldiers, the ones that made it away from the battle, they were cut down by Wolf Clan orcs, waiting in the woods for precisely where they would run. And when Talvus didn’t speak immediately, I continued, that I had fought two of those blindfolded orcs before I got over to him, and it was impossible to hit them, and they kept—that one of them, their weapon, went past my head, embedded itself in rock, and then the rock hit me, how readily they should have taken me down. To strike and not be struck, kill and not be killed, yet I was still standing.

“What did stop it?” Talvus asked. “You were fighting them, you said—“

Tyrol’s knife, I told him, and Tyrol had been in a sticky situation of his own, the Rat shaman of the Heretic Raven’s group had him in magical hold until…until Dante rushed over. And then I realized, again too late. These attacks on the Highland Caedic units that have been going on for the last six or so months, the final one would usually wipe down the unit to the very last man.

It sounds like it’s happened a couple of times, Talvus said.

Except for the ambush on Dante’s unit, in which, they were wiped down to Dante, I said. That the first patrol, on the first day, Dante, Tyrol, and myself had gone out, the supply train had just changed routes and we found a dead Caedic guard and Tyrol and for Stag Clan backup and Dante and I held the Heretic Raven and their warriors off long enough but it was—

“If you hadn’t been there,” Talvus said.

“Not only would the supply train wouldn’t have arrived — but also when Piso split us up into three groups, it was just the group that I was in, which was the group that Dante was in, that surprised the waiting orcs, and Dante wasn’t in the translation of the letter from the Rat Clan. Every single one of the leaders of the groups, every single notable warrior was listed out, as well as what group they were going to be in and their positioning, but Dante wasn’t in that letter.”

“Dante, what… when that fight started, the ambush, just now, what happened? Where were you?” Talvus said, as Dante had started to lag behind towards us.

“I was behind everyone, I came out of the hideout and saw everyone in their various struggles,” the Corporal said.

“But there was nothing waiting for you,” Talvus pressed.

And then I realized the final thing, the first thing, that I had missed. “The augury. With Tyrol, remember? The liver was missing from the rabbit.”

“I thought that was just a fucked-up rabbit,” Dante said, true to his original observation.

“Or, there’s something about your future that makes it impossible to see,” I said.

“Why me?” Dante asked.

“I don’t know,” Talvus said, “and right now, I don’t know if it matters, but it means that we might have a chance to do something about this. We can’t go back to Cloudfall.”

“It doesn’t work when there are big enough groups of people,” I said, echoing Talvus’s logic. “You couldn’t have shielded an entire unit—“

“But if there’s just a few people—“ Talvus said.

I quickly did the math. “There were thirteen soldiers besides you in the ambush where we surprised the Heretic Raven,” I said. “That has to be it, this has to be some kind of actual prophecy, and Dante can protect the people around him as long as it’s a small enough group of people.”

“Then why didn’t I protect my unit? The 22nd?” Dante asked.

I decided to excuse him for not keeping up, as Talvus and I had been speaking very fast, and over one another in our excitement. “Too many people,” we said simultaneously.

“Just like the ambush on the Unbroken,” Talvus finished.

“So why did you survive?” Dante asked.

“It would have been just you, except that then you interfered, with all of their perfect plans,” Talvus said.

“You helped Tyrol,” I said. “Who helped me, and it started a domino effect, because the things that are disrupted can disrupt further things. The effect has to stop somewhere and somewhen, or else we all would have been safe—but the people directly around you are shielded by it. Which means that even if we make it back safely to Cloudfall, they’d be able to see us there.”

“We have an opportunity here,” Talvus said. “We need to take it while they’re still dark, before they—it’s only a matter of time before they come to understand all this as well.”

“The Heretic Raven was there for both of the times Dante messed up their plans,” I pointed out. “The second one, the ambush against the Traitor, Dante grappled with them for nearly a minute before they got away, they certainly know his face.”

“They’re starting to figure it out then,” Talvus said.

“They would be stupid not to,” I said.

At this point, Second Lieutenant Vitan stopped walking, although she did not turn towards us. “Prophet, huh,” she said.

“Sounds like it might be,” Talvus said.

“Corporal Maxim, do you have any idea why they might not be able to see you? Anything that might have happened, anything that has—anything about your existence that might render you hidden?” she asked.

“I’m just a soldier in the Highlands, there’s nothing special about me,” Dante said. ��

“Then we use the tool that we have,” the Second Lieutenant said. “Sergeant Zhale, I agree with you. We go back to Cloudfall, we may be giving up the small advantage that we’ve managed to gain for ourselves out of this disaster. We need to regroup, by ourselves, find a place to stay, and figure out what we’re going to do next. The worst case scenario is that they find us, they figure out what is going on, that they can locate us using conventional methods before we can take advantage of the situation. That means, Private, I agree with your earlier assessment, we need to prioritize keeping away from locations where they might be looking for us.”

The Rat Clan hideaway, I suggested. It was empty, there were beds there, it was defensible, and there were traps that we had disabled that we could set up again to make it safer.

Easy to stay hidden on the approach, too, Second Lieutenant Vitan said, and so we changed our course.

It was less than an hour’s hike to the abandoned Rat Clan hideaway. Tyrol and I continued to cover our tracks most carefully, and prayed that would be enough. We found a room that was defensible. We set up what we could for a funeral. Stones, marking what would be graves for all who fell. Fires lit over tapers. Second Lieutenant Vitan spoke the prayer, then we cleaned it up, moved the stones back to where they were, so that no one would know we were there. We set a watch schedule. Second Lieutenant Vitan and Corporal Doraius healed what they could of the more critical wounds, then we went to sleep.

I dreamed. I only report it here because the ending was noteworthy. It was a familiar scene. From when I was fourteen, in the weeks after—after Peia. I was holed up in my room, it was late, but—but neither my parents nor my grandmother were worried about keeping their voices lowered, so I could overhear it all. The shouting that had become so much of a staple in my house, my grandmother that I should be sent to the army, and my parents that I wasn’t old enough. Except then—mist began to pour under my door, interrupting the memory, and I was woken for my watch just before it overtook me.

There was nothing of note in the hours I stood watch, and I fell into a dreamless sleep afterwards, then a little before dawn, Corporal Tyrol shook us awake: for he had seen a scout of the Wolf Clan nearby, and though they had not approached the hill directly, it was clear that we were no longer safe here. We arranged the room such that no trace of us remained, then we set out.

A low mist hung in the air as we made our way away from the Rat Clan hideaway and through the woods, once more moving just to be moving; and while the mist itself was not abnormal, as the climate in the Highlands lent itself to morning fog, the sun did not burn it away. There was a strange whistling of the wind, then solid smoke jaws manifested in thin air and clamped down on Dante’s arm, as the Wolf-spirit and Raven-spirit had found us, and the fighting began in full. I shouted to Talvus that he might try to dispel the mist with wind, but it was too heavy, so we resorted to hitting them with swords until they went away. Towards the very end, the Raven-spirit once more entered my mind and moved my arms and my body, took from my pouch one of the two remaining delayed explosives that Talvus had trusted me with, and forced me to detonate it. Dante rushed over and kicked it from me before it could injure any of us, but the explosion was large enough to undoubtedly attract attention. We rallied together and finished off the Wolf and Raven spirits both, and the mist dissipated—at least temporarily. We were not so foolish to think that it would be so easy to break a blood-vengeance curse.

We started moving immediately; between the explosion and the howling of the Wolf, any scouts nearby would be alerted of our position. But the fight had given me hope: for across the Raven’s eye had been a large crack, the precise crack I had made in the stone of the statue, which indicated that there was a way to strike them at their core. I relayed this to the others, even as it was evident that it would be sure death to return to the original temple, as they were at their greatest power there. Corporal Doraius spoke, for he had studied Highland spirits, that they were all one, so that any effigy powerful enough of a Wolf and a Raven would do to destroy. We would need to locate alternative effigies; and we knew, at the very least, where we might find our first one.

It took us but an hour to get back to the camp of the Unbroken. We entered it somberly, as it was silent, untouched, everything precisely where it had been left the day prior by those who would never return. As the camp was situated in an abandoned Raven Clan village, there was a small building in the center, their shrine, which had remained sealed for the duration that the Unbroken had occupied the area. Talvus had one delayed explosive left; there was a brief discussion as to whether or not the speed of using such a device was worth the potential attention an explosion would draw, if Wolf Clan warriors were combing the woods nearby searching for us. As we had little other in alternatives for getting the door open, we placed the explosive at its foot, and piled rubble from the blown-out back of the medical building atop it to muffle the sound and flash, then Talvus triggered the explosive remotely. It worked as planned: the explosion was neither loud nor bright, yet the door was blasted open.

The building was fifteen, perhaps twenty feet across, and it was octagonal. The walls were decorated with small woodcarven objects, and there was a light breeze whirling throughout the room. There was a chain hanging down from the ceiling connected to what seemed fairly obviously to be a trap door, and Tyrol but walked to it and grabbed it before he started shaking and spasming, fell to the ground screaming, and scurried to the corner, pupils dilated and knife out. Talvus examined the chain without touching it and determined that there was a curse or spell of sorts, and that the more people who grabbed the chain at once, the more the load would be distributed and more likely all would be to resist it. Knowing that we could not risk Dante, the other four of us grabbed the chain and pulled together, and were able to successfully open the trapdoor and pull down the rope ladder without being effected so. We left Tyrol cowering in the corner, and we climbed.

The next chamber once more octagonal, but larger than the first, though it should not have been, as the building had tapered from outside. There was a heavy wind whirling throughout it, another hatch in the ceiling, six rectangular holes surrounding the hatch, and six stone ravens precisely the size necessary to be placed in the holes. Putting two and two together, we moved to place the statuettes in the holes above. Some provided more trouble than others: one started flying, although Corporal Maxim quickly stopped it from flying by throwing an axe at it. Corporal Doraius picked up what turned out to be an unnaturally heavy one. I spent a while chasing around one which had turned invisible, tossing sand in the wind until I could catch hints of where it was. Talvus worked steadily on one that had fallen to pieces on the ground, fitting the bits together as a puzzle. Second Lieutenant Vital held one up unflinchingly, even as her hand turned to stone. We finally had five of the six in the ceiling, despite a few mishaps along the way, but the sixth would invoke the one who picked it up to attack their nearest companion, as Corporal Doraius had discovered at the hands of Corporal Maxim the hard way. So I placed all of my weapons on the other side of the room, picked it up, and ignoring the telltale push into my brain as it had nothing to latch onto, placed it in the final slot.

The third room was the largest, it must have been twenty-five feet across, impossibly sized for the building we were in, and the wind here roared in nearly a cyclone. Small ritual objects had been lifted from their shelves in the windstorm, dangerous at the speed with which they could pelt us. There was a detailed carving in wood, perhaps two feet high, against one wall, and we knew that this was the effigy we sought. It was confirmed as the Raven-spirit screeched and dug into our minds; I saw blood trailing from Dante’s ears, and reached to feel a similar wetness along my own. Dante and I fought against the wind to make it to the statue. Corporal Doraius had instructed us precisely what to do: first, the effigy would need to be anointed with the blood of three Caedists, then cut with eleven strokes from ritual knives, and finally destroyed in a cleansing fire. Dante managed to get his blood on the effigy, then I mine; Talvus was pushed up against another wall, unable to make his way through the wind; as Second Lieutenant Vitan entered the room, the Raven-spirit manifested and swooped at her, cutting into her face, but she pushed past it, reached the wooden statue, and wiped one hand across her forehead then smeared it on the thing, completing the first step. We began to cut at it with ritual knives, and the manifestation of the Raven, seeing as it was not foiling our efforts, dove into the statue, and at once, the thing began to move. Talvus, having finally made his way across the room despite the wind, was standing nearest to it with his ritual knife; it mauled his back as it took off and began flying. I took the knife from Talvus and through the combined efforts of Dante and myself, we began to strike the thing, over and over, until Dante delivered the final blow and Talvus immediately shot a fire-spell from across the room saying, “alright, we’re doing this the fast way,” and as promised, the thing exploded into chunks of charcoal. The wind vanished instantly, the ritual objects that had been flying through the air clattered to the ground, and there was ringing silence.

The Raven was gone.

When we came down, Corporal Tyrol had recovered. We knew we had to leave quickly, as the original explosion, despite its muffling, had made noise. Upon my suggestion, as it would already be clear that we had entered this camp from the lack of door on the Raven’s temple, we grabbed water, and rations, for we had not eaten since the morning of the day prior, and bandaged the worst of the injuries we had sustained with supplies from the medical building. We ate as we walked. Second Lieutenant Vitan knew of an abandoned Wolf Clan settlement, one of their initial homes before the Caedic Empire began expanding into the Highlands, and directed us, as we had no other places to start, that we begin to march towards it. We checked carefully upon entering the village for scouts, and found none, a sign that the Wolf Clan had not yet caught wind of what we were doing; a sign that we might still have a chance. There was a shrine in the center which appeared small enough that the Wolf’s manifestation inside might not kill us immediately, but large enough to contain an effigy suited to our purposes. We paused a moment as we realized that we did not have any more delayed explosives for the door; then Second Lieutenant Vitan simply wrenched them open, discovering that they were not locked. The shrine was one story, squat, and square. Inside, small carved objects lined the walls once more, and in the center, there was an intricately carved wolf’s mouth with sharp teeth and hinges and joints upon the thing, placed directly over a trap door. Having learned from our previous attempt in the Raven’s shrine, Talvus checked it for magic, and found none: this test was entirely physical in nature. I attempted to jam the mechanisms while Corporal Doraius reached into its mouth to pull the handle, and yet he could not budge it against the locked gears. I determined that the contraption would open only if the jaws were allowed to snap closed; so we tied a rope to the handle, and pulled upwards, sparing any of our party from being forced to sacrifice a hand that we might go forwards.

The second chamber I assumed was larger, although we could not quite make out the walls in the slowly drifting mist. In the center, there was another rectangular hatch, this one with four large levers built into its base, each perhaps two feet tall and with large metal rings looped through the top. We explored the room and quickly found the walls: at the center were large hooks attached to a chain that disappeared into the base of platforms atop which were life-sized stone statues of wolves. Considering the prior challenges we had faced, and the fact that we were not fighting the stone wolves right then, I hypothesized aloud that the statues would come alive and attack us when the levers were pulled, and the entrance to the next chamber would only open when all four were down. Second Lieutenant Vitan agreed, and asked Corporal Doraius to stand guard by the furthest statue while Corporal Maxim and I together hauled the hook next to it. It took us significant effort to drag the hook across the room, and the moment we attached it to the lever, the lever was pulled down by the pressure, and the stone wolf indeed came to life. Talvus and Second Lieutenant Vitan attempted to pull one of the other chains, and it became evident that they did not have the strength to do so, so Corporal Maxim and I took care of the remaining three chains together as fast as we could rather than waste time engaging with the wolves, while the others protected themselves. As soon as the fourth lever was pulled, the wolves froze, and the trapdoor opened, and so we descended.

The third chamber was filled with a mist so thick we could not see but a few inches from our faces. The floor was dirt, and there was a howl that echoed through the air almost as if we were outside. I suggested that we split into three groups, walk until we hit a wall, and proceed to all walk sunwise, that we might methodically search our surroundings. As the attacks of the Wolf so far had been physically skewed, we broke such that one heavy warrior was in each of the three teams: Corporal Doraius with Talvus, Corporal Maxim with Corporal Tyrol, and myself with Second Lieutenant Vitan, with the three ritual daggers distributed evenly amongst us. Then we all set out in our separate directions to search the room. Second Lieutenant Vitan and I reached a wall after perhaps thirty feet, and even as we began to walk along it, we heard a resounding howl and a shout. We circled faster, and soon enough, we came across Corporal Maxim and Corporal Tyrol, fighting a manifestation of the Wolf, and behind them was a statue of a wolf carved out of bones that had been bound together, and on it already stains of both Corporal Maxim’s and Corporal Tyrol’s blood. I ran forward, dagger in hand, to add my own blood to the mix. We began to cut the thing as quickly as we could, even as Corporal Maxim stood strong to hold off the Wolf, but it did not leap into the statue, and as we were not forced to chase a moving target, we were able to swiftly finish delivering the final blows. Yet Talvus and Corporal Doraius did not appear from the mist, leaving us no sorcerous manner to set the thing on fire. Corporal Tyrol was trying to get at it with flint and steel, but it would not light; I suggested he pull out his rope, wrap it around the base, and see if he could get that to catch. The manifestation of the Wolf had pinned Corporal Maxim to the ground, and Second Lieutenant Vitan was trying desperately to get it off one him; I threw myself into the fight, protecting Corporal Tyrol’s actions, and the Wolf bit deeply into my leg for my trouble. It roared and we all fell prone to the ground, but I forced myself up once more, as Corporal Tyrol had not get gotten the thing to catch.

We fought, and we fought, and we fought, Second Lieutenant Vitan barely keeping us all standing, until there was the light of fire from behind us. I turned, and the effigy was burning, then the Wolf lunged at the Second Lieutenant and brought her to the ground and I could wait no longer, I swung both my blades into the bone and it splintered beneath my blow, a great howl echoed across the expanse and dozens of jaws and teeth erupted out of the mist at all of us, and then it all abruptly disappeared. We were in a small underground chamber, and Corporal Doraius and Talvus were wandering, confused, at the other end of it. They quickly hurried over, Corporal Doraius to offer us all his healing abilities, as the fight with the Wolf had gone long and bloody. I am not sure how we all remained standing at that point, just that desperation had long since sharpened the pain into something that could keep me on my feet.

We climbed back to the ground floor, and Dante and I immediately caught sight of movement before we exited the temple. There was an orc, in Wolf Clan shaman garb, walking across the village with scrolls in his arms, who appeared the be alone. We had not yet been seen. We quietly pointed him out to Second Lieutenant Vitan, and she told us “Take him, keep him alive.” We needed no more direction to spring into action, and we moved, two as one: I swept out the orc’s legs with one of my blades, Dante slammed the flat of his axe’s blade across his face, I brought the hilt of my other scimitar up to break his nose, and Dante slammed him with his shield directly in the face, undoubtedly breaking his cheekbone and knocking him from his knees to the ground, unconscious. Second Lieutenant Vitan stalked forward, radiating a combination of fury and satisfaction. Dante and I moved to each shoulder of the fallen shaman, pinning him, as Second Lieutenant Vitan took Corporal Doraius’s waterskin and splashed its contents across his face, forcing him back into consciousness. The Second Lieutenant grinned. “I have something I would like to try, that I’ve been working on,” she said. And then brought both hands down, glowing with a dark red energy, one to his forehead and another over his heart, and they began to sink within the skin, the energy gathering and shifting and shapes began to flicker in the red mist that had formed above where she had reached into him, shapes that Second Lieutenant Vitan’s eyes followed even as ours could not. Then she released both of her hands, pulled her ritual knife, and sunk it straight into his heart, and he sputtered and died.

She turned and stood, facing the woods. “We have them. This way. The current Wolf Clan camp,” she said.

“Do we want to get Stag Clan backup? Or Caedic backup?” I asked. After all, we knew Dante could shield up to thirteen besides himself, and there were only five of us.

“No, too big of a group,” Second Lieutenant Vitan said. “We press our advantage. We’re ending this.”

We began to walk, swiftly, quietly, and I was grateful for it, grateful that we were not going to seek help, because I was clinging to the last dregs of my own energy, and I needed to move to stay on my feet. Talvus moved next to me. “She—she ripped his bloodline out of his blood and looked at it,” he said. “She found his next of kin.” He looked equal parts impressed and terrified.

Another game-changer for the war in the Highlands, if we were to survive.

We kept walking.

The location that Second Lieutenant Vitan had discerned was not terribly far away, and we reached it close to when the sun was falling, the deep orange illuminating everything and the shadows cast long. There was a wooded ridge looking down upon it, and we remained hidden within the treeline, looking down. It was clearly a nomadic camp, consisting mostly of tents, although there were some other constructed temporary structures. The most notable of these structures was a sod building, with a pair of orcs standing guard outside its doors. There were three other orcs visible sitting around a campfire on the other end of the camp, although undoubtedly more within. Considering that we had but one chance, and this building seemed most likely to hold what we sought, we moved with speed and with silence: Corporal Tyrol and myself approached the two guards from behind, and killed them before they could make noise. We dragged their bodies from sight, and entered the building.

The first room appeared to be some sort of antechamber, or perhaps a waiting room, with a small hallway and door that opened on the other side. We had gotten but a foot into the room when the door opposite to us opened, and for a moment I caught sight of greens and browns and perhaps what looked like a person sitting inside, before the Heretic Raven stepped out, looking just as surprised as we were to suddenly run into them, before their face schooled into a deadly determination. They kicked the door closed behind them even as I was leaping into action, desperately trying to get to them before they could make a noise, but they let forth a great whooping battle cry that must have rang like an alarm through the entire camp, dropped the cloth covering their double-ended sword, and planted their feet. When they spoke, they spoke in Caedic,

“I won’t let you through.”

“Then die,” I spat back at them. Corporal Doraius, Corporal Tyrol, Second Lieutenant Vitan, and Talvus took to the door to hold off what would now be the entire camp of Wolf Clan warriors, and Dante and I stepped forward to face the Heretic Raven for the last time.

I drew first blood, drawing my blade down their left arm, through the remnant stolen Caedic sleeve that they still wore in spite. Dante followed quickly behind me with his axe. The Heretic Raven swung at both of us, but we held our ground. There were two of us, one of them, we could win this fight if we fought carefully, smartly. And then their footwork changed, their grip on their blade changed, they threw their arms open and snarled, “Come and get me,” leaving themselves fully undefended as they launched the most ferocious offense I have ever witnessed.

I slipped behind them, opening huge cuts across their front and their back as I secured myself in a flanking position, but took a deep cut into my side from their suicidal counterattack. Dante slammed into them with his shield and must have broken one of their ribs from the force of the blow, following it by driving his axe into their gut, and took a sharp strike as well for his trouble. It was clear at this point that the Heretic Raven was not fighting to win, they were fighting to take us down with them by any means necessary.

From behind us, Talvus wove something into the air, and pushed power through the needle and into our weapons. Never once did our concentration falter, as the stakes of what we were fighting for was ever apparent: those behind us would only be able to hold off Wolf Clan for so long, and if we could not prevail and kill the Wolf of Ears Eyes and Hands before they fell, all would be lost. I launched myself forward into an attack, and one of ends of their blade caught me in the side, cutting through deeply. Dante swung down with his axe, cutting their off-arm through clearly at the elbow, but they were already driving the other end of their blade through the center of his torso, impaling him, and ripping it out. Blood and viscera began to spill from the wound, and I alone remained standing even as I screamed, whipped one scimitar across their upper torso, and drove the other straight through their heart.

I kicked them to the ground as I drew my sword from their chest, and they laid there, in a pool of their own blood.

Thus fell Thrang, deserter of Raven Legion, traitor to the Empire and bane of the Highlands. They fought relentlessly and furiously to the very end; never once did they hesitate, never once did the fear of death enter their eyes. I feel a great respect for them, for that; that I do not feel shame of. They fought as I would have fought, they died as I would have died, had our places been reversed. Their blood has been spilled for glory of Empire, and so they are gone.

I shouted for healing, and Corporal Doraius ran towards us, pressing his hands against Dante’s wound even as exhausted as he was, and warned us that he may not be able to cast again. Still, Dante began to stir, then he stood. We had both survived. “Let’s see if we can end this,” I said.

Talvus, Dante and I pushed through the door and into the next room. It was furnished like a bedroom, a small cot, a table, cloth in dark greens and browns. There was velum scattered across the table and pinned to the wall above it, and drawings in charcoal, and a woman-orc sitting calmly, facing us. She was young, or at least she wasn’t old, in her thirties, perhaps her early forties. She crossed her arms and stood as she looked at us, and her eyes focused in on Dante first.

“You,” she said. “You’re the hole, the piece that is missing. I—I see now, you are the one who will bring it down on us, the servant of the servant, born from death, born from death!”

Then she looked at myself and Talvus, and her expression shifted from disgust to pity to horror.

“Y—you,” she said. “What is this future that…you—you want it? You seek it? What kind of—no, no, get away!”

She pulled out a small knife. I pulled forth my scimitars and leapt forward. “Get away, anyone but you,” she said, her last words as I drew both blades across her throat and blood rained down, soaking through the entire top of her shirt. The knife slipped from her hand, and she collapsed to the floor.

I turned to Talvus, and I told him to grab the papers on the walls and on her desk. If we survived this, they could be useful to the Caedic forces, so I believed. Then I returned through the door to support the others, and fight to the death if we so needed to, for at least our mission had been accomplished and the prophetess was dead. I was met with the sight: Second Lieutenant Vitan, knife in hand, fell upon a Wolf Clan orc, and stabbed them over, and over, and over, blood splattering against her face. Corporal Doraius was frantically bandaging Corporal Tyrol in a corner. And then there were just—eight corpses of Wolf Clan warriors on the ground, and none standing.

“Is it done?” Second Lieutenant Vitan asked.

“Whatever prophet they had, we killed her,” I told her. “Talvus is gathering all the pages with writing on them now.”

She nodded. “Then it’s done. Let’s get back to Cloudfall, and report what happened.”

I saluted and then I passed out face first on the ground.

I came to not much longer afterwards, as Corporal Doraius was still bandaging Tyrol on the ground, and I pushed myself up, despite what strain fighting had placed on my injury that I had not realized, or the new injuries that still bled. It was not an easy march back to Cloudfall, not when Tyrol could barely walk. We arrived well past when the sun had set. Second Lieutenant Vitan gave her report immediately. Talvus, Dante, and I gave a short report of finding the orc prophetess and killing her. We received medical attention from the infirmary at Cloudfall. And then it was over, we were given cots, and told to try to sleep.

There are many thoughts—too many thoughts—that tear through my mind. What the prophetess said, what she saw—Talvus and I had the chance to glance over the papers what we gathered before we handed them in at Cloudfall. There were many to be expected—of blindfolded orcs; of the large wooden cover of the door and trap that I walked into in the Rat Clan hideaway; the runes of the delayed explosive; the animals attacking the camp of the Unbroken; and of the Traitor fleeing down the hill from the road directly into the ambush. Some that I didn’t understand: a woman with a tattoo on her jaw; a severed finger and three severed ears, two human and one elf, on a string; a head that looked like a circle had been cut clean through and around it, then stitched back together; a strange symbol almost like an eye, but abstractified; cockroaches crawling everywhere, one top of one another, in a great pile; someone in full armor with flames emanating from behind them; three hearts woven together in the veins above, dripping blood. There was one of—it looked like a map of the Caedic Empire, but as if a good portion of Serae was swallowed by the sea. Then there was—another symbol, this one like a triangle, but it curled inwards, or perhaps outwards. It was in four of the charcoal drawings total, some of them—darker, like the implement was driven into the paper, one in shadow and smudged such that it almost looked like a great serpent rising from the mist. I have attached a sketch of the original symbol, and it—I had seen it a single place before in her drawings. After the death of Black-Eye Sadbh, Captain Piso had taken a fairly severe cut to his back, and was being seen to by a medic, and I noticed upon his left shoulder what was…not a tattoo, but certainly not a scar or a brand, of precisely the same symbol, such that its outermost edge and point was directed towards his spine. I don’t know what it means, I don’t—I don’t know who to ask. I do not wish to disrespect one who lived and died in service of the Empire as Captain Piso did. We handed the papers over with no comment on any of this.

There is more. More that I almost fear to write. Four drawings in particular that were amongst those that we collected. One was of a cup, of carefully burnished gold with mosaic-like patterns carved into it, filled nearly to the brim with—with what I knew was supposed to be blood, bright and glowing; and two of a man, the same man, with sharp but wide features, dark hair, and burning golden eyes—the only color in any of the drawings was the gold of his eyes. I had seen both the chalice and the man before, in a dream, months ago. I did not—I do not believe that these drawings need be specific to me, it was—the dream was a strange one, one that I had when I was very near death, and I am not sure if it was meant for me to see at all. The final picture was unmistakable, though. An explosion, a column of fire through the sharp shadows of the trees cast, the last and only thing I had caught sight of between being struck down at the foundry, as I was being dragged off by the Surrian guards, before I fell fully unconscious. Arcadia was already unconscious at the time, and the four Surrian guards are dead, I am the only one left alive who could have seen that sight, and perhaps the only one who saw it in the first place, as its perspective matched exactly that of my memories. That vision was mine, and mine alone, yet it was pinned to the prophetess’s wall with all the rest.

I do not know that these images mean, or why, amongst all the things the prophetess could have seen and drawn, there were four that would pertain directly to me. I can only feel, considering both the pictures and her reaction to me when we faced her, that if she had known who I was, that I had been in the Highlands from the beginning, this—this is one more reason that I should have been dead. I have not spoken to anyone of any of this, for I have a—a feeling, one that I cannot shake. I do not know what I fear, only that I fear it. I do not want to—I do not know what series of events speaking of the dreams or images might bring, or if it might trigger such a thing at all, but there are forces well beyond my present comprehension at play here and I hesitate to make a move in a game in which I understand neither the rules nor the consequences. I—I sound as if I have gone mad, I know I sound as if I have gone mad, but we have spent the last week and a half fighting against an enemy who knew our every move before we made it, before we even thought it, and I cannot stop looking over my shoulder, I cannot—I cannot convince myself it is over. I cannot—I cannot sleep, I keep seeing mist, and the faces of the Unbroken, of Anye’s head hitting the ground before I called down the curse on all of us, of Talvus hanging in the air, choking, of—of the bodies lying lifeless on the ground as we just ran. The Wolf of Ears Eyes and Hands is dead, the Heretic Raven is dead, the spirits are gone, Rat Clan and Wolf Clan are scattered and still I cannot sleep.

The question of what the orc prophetess said also plagues me, although to a lesser degree than the drawings on her walls. I worry for Dante, ‘the one who will bring it down upon us’; perhaps she spoke of the destruction of the Wolf Clan and Caedic victory in the Highlands, but what would that have to do with ‘servant of the servant, born from Death’? And when she faced myself and Talvus, what did she see that disgusted her so thoroughly? We want what future, that we seek it out? I know that there are—there are plans that Talvus and I have discussed, weapons that could be designed both arcane and otherwise that I will not document here, ones that take advantage of inherent Caedic strengths and could be used against all of our enemies, but they are simply thought experiments, nothing has come of them as yet. I do not know if she spoke of one of these—perhaps one going right, and raining wretchedness and destruction to enemies of the Empire, or perhaps one going wrong, backfiring on us, and bringing down the rest of the world with us. I do not know whether Talvus and I should stop pursuing these avenues of thought—why would you seek it—or if to allow ourselves to be struck with fear and hesitance would be the last great act of resistance that the prophetess could cripple the Empire with. Or maybe she wasn’t speaking of that which Talvus and I have been developing at all, maybe there is something else that we will encounter, some new idea that will take root in our heads and I know that I’m thinking circles around myself but I cannot stop the torrent, what if this means that—could it have been related to the drawings, the symbol, the man with the golden eyes and the foundry, or it—what if what we’ll do, what we’ll seek, is heresy?

I have—more unanswered questions, concrete ones, ones that might actually have answers. Directly after I gave him our papers, as I have written, Captain Piso recognized my name. That he would so immediately associate Strell with the Tandus heresy, I—I wondered at first if it was a bigger incident than I had known when I had left for the front, but I now am not so sure. Salo had a conversation with me shortly before the assault on Stonemill Keep that indicated that he only learned of my involvement after he submitted and requested reports about the ghoul and the sickness during our two weeks with the 33rd. Perhaps as Altae is closer to the Capital, Captain Piso was more informed of the day-to-day news, but he said he had little access to that when he was asking me for anything that I knew of the heresy. And he did not seem to care about my connection to it; the moment that he learned that I knew nothing of Scaevola, he dismissed me. He never brought it up again, nor did he treat me unfavorably for it; in fact, he allowed me to take point in planning the assault on the Rat Clan hideaway, and he both watched and advised Dante and myself sparring, and demonstrated practically what he meant against us, just as you might have.

I’m not sure what it could mean, that he was interested in Scaevola Tandus. There were rumors amongst the troops that the reason why he led only a single unit as a Captain was because he had been adjacent to some heresy scandal himself, but I find that so difficult to believe, they were just rumors passed around by bored soldiers and they speak so contrary to everything that I saw and that I knew of the Captain. Corporal Doraius said that Captain Piso remained a unit commander because he refused transfer, even after his promotion. I worry that somehow—combined with Talvus’s suspicions about Lieutenant Sorus being of far greater rank in the Church and far more powerful than would be expected for a unit’s arcanist—perhaps there was something important in this area in particular that required close attention. I cannot help but wonder if it had anything to do with the mark on his back, or if the mark is connected to any of the other drawings of the prophetess, or the dreams. Or if the knowledge of what was of such utmost importance that he stay there be lost with his death.

Second Lieutenant Vitan put in a recommendation for both myself and Corporal Maxim to receive promotion at the end of all of it. I feel as if of all those who survived, I am the one who deserves it the least, because she—she saw the moments when I was of use, perhaps, the observations I was able to voice that helped Talvus figure out we were dealing with prophecy, or how when all else failed, your blades did not fail me; but she did not see how quickly—how quickly I left her and all of my other superior officers to die the moment that I saw that orc’s hand around Talvus’s throat, how—Corporal Maxim went back for Captain Piso. If I had gone back as well, instead of immediately running with Talvus, perhaps seven would have survived that battle instead of six. But I did not. I did not even look back. She could not have seen, she could not know, because how could she see me as worthy of the stripes on my shoulders if she had.

I do not think that I will pass the Trials, not after this. I am not—I am not nearly the soldier nor the strategist that I thought I was. Perhaps there was never a chance of doing anything different than exactly what I did, that everything was so perfectly orchestrated that I would never have done better than the manner with which I conducted myself, but that responsibility must remain solely on my shoulders. I fundamentally failed, and if left to my own devices, I would have failed everyone. I do not know what to expect in the Trials, if there are tests of strength or of knowledge, perhaps I could bluff my way through those, but if there is a test of character, I know that I will be found lacking. I doubt that my family would want me to remain with them in the Capital if I do not pass, they made their position on that clear enough three years ago. Besides, my blades never failed me, only my heart; I can always re-enlist. Even with my injury, I’m still good for fighting. If you will have me back at the Surrian front, or think that I could contribute there, I would gladly return; but there is a hole within me that sings that I have unfinished business in the Highlands, that even with the blow that we struck against Wolf Clan and the Heretic Raven, we still bleed from the blow they struck first, that I owe it to those I left behind to hunt down every last one of the Heretic Raven’s fighters and the Wolf Clan orcs and the Rat Clan warriors we let escape and every other rebel—every other rebel that there are now thirty less good Caedic soldiers to stand against.

If this at all appears disordered or if my thoughts seem contradictory, I apologize sincerely; I began writing immediately after we returned to Cloudfall. I fear that if I had not said everything now, I would be too conflicted to speak it; too ashamed to disclose any of the parts which testify of my failures to adhere to the standards you taught me. I know the importance of presenting myself with confidence and showing not my throat bare when I reach the Capital; for I know the world that I am returning to. These words, the trust of my doubts, are for you and you alone.

May that you be well, and until we meet next, Iria

____________________

Private Arcadia Dominus, Specialist Unit c.Varricon The 3rd Legion, Serae

Dear Arcadia,

There has been a lot of excitement since the last letter I've managed to send. Probably too much excitement, but I made it out alive, and that's what counts. I know I said I'd write when I reached Cloudfall, and that was supposed to be a week ago, but Talvus and I were ambushed by Rat Clan orcs on the road, enlisted into the 8th for a week while the main bridge just past Cloudfall was being fixed, and then inadvertently took part in a series of escalating battles until we finally managed to help kill The Heretic Raven and destroy the means that Wolf Clan was using to gain advantage in ambushes, which means that hopefully we've done our part for the war effort in the Highlands.

If you ever have a chance to come here, Altae is a very interesting place. I would warn you about fighting the Highland Clan rebels—they are remarkably good at completely ignoring all wounds they might take, and fighting just as fiercely even with fatal injuries until they draw their last breath—but you tend to deal the sort of devastating blows that your enemies can't get up from, so perhaps you wouldn't have that problem. It's cold here, and always wet, so not a particularly fun place to make camp in the woods. The trees are different, darker green than the ones at home. I think perhaps I’ve finally gotten used to it all, which is a pity, as Talvus and I will be leaving as soon as the bridge is fixed.

Joining the Unbroken for a week—it was nothing like our time with 33rd. There were all the usual watches and patrols and a couple of wolf ambushes, both by the animals and the Wolf Clan orcs, which I suppose either way was better than being ambushed by a ghoul or any of that getting sick nonsense. A few days in we got word of where the Rat Clan’s hideaway was, and Captain Piso let me help plan the assault. It was a thorough success, we took out their warchief, Black Eye Sadbh, a number of their warriors, and Corporal Dante Maxim—you’d love him, he has a shield and he uses it to charge people more than he does for blocking things—he killed all four of their shamans. If I must be entirely honest, there was a slight blip in the plan where I got caught behind enemy lines. Again. This one really wasn’t my fault, it was a scouting mission because we were going to plant explosives before the assault and it shouldn’t have been able to go wrong, I was literally invisible courtesy of Talvus, but they’d been tipped off invisible scouts were coming so I got to twiddle my thumbs for a night waiting for rescue in the form of the assault still happening as planned, sans the exploding part. I had a dagger hidden in my boot and everything and they buried me in a pile of rocks, so little use that was to me. Still, the attack went perfectly without me and I did get to kill Black Eye Sadbh myself, so I wasn’t entirely useless.

It got a bit rough. The Unbroken, only about thirty of us, ended up in an all-out battle against the Heretic Raven’s whole band—the Heretic Raven being a rather famous nuisance in these parts, the single defector from Raven Legion far out to the west, who had returned to their home in the Highlands and pulled together an assorted group of rebel fighters—as well as upwards of thirty, maybe forty Wolf Clan orcs. We took heavy casualties, although Talvus and I are still kicking. In the end, I killed Anye the Huntress, and the Bear of the Heretic Raven’s warriors, Dante and I killed the Heretic Raven together, then I killed the strategist of the Wolf Clan that they were protecting; and a number of other warriors fell beneath my blades or arrows in that and other conflicts, perhaps half a dozen in the week and a half I’ve been here. It’s hard to say that we won, because so many of the Unbroken died, but the tide of the war has turned against our enemies. At the end of it all, they have been scattered, and their leaders are dead, and we survived. So all in all, everything has been far more exciting than the letter I was expecting to send you on our great adventures hiking every day, in which the height of the dangers we faced was Talvus managing to set water on fire on his first and only turn to cook.

I've had time to give a bit of thought to what might happen if I don't make it through the Trials; I know I want to return to the army, but now I have unfinished business in the Highlands as much as I do on the Surrian front. You'd love it here. Every fight is a worthy contest, it's not just plowing through mountains of soldiers who aren't worth the skill that went into the forging of their blades. The Highland Clans are strong, and they have spirit. They could use a soldier like you here; there's been a bit of a dearth of soldiers recently, as a lot of good units were killed trying to take down the Wolf Clan and their strategist. Even after our victories, even without their leaders, the Highland warriors are tenacious, and I know you would kill many for glory and for Empire. There are five more left alive from the Heretic Raven's group who are particularly troublesome—a witch, a Rat shaman, a pair of twin rogue fighters, and a Salamander Clan mage—and Bear Clan, Owl Clan, Salamander Clan, and some scattered Wolf Clan and Rat Clan warriors still await you, so it's not like the hobgoblins, there are plenty of fierce enemies to go around. Perhaps we can avenge the fallen and secure the power of the Empire in this province together, if I do not remain in the Capital.

Pass my regards to Varricon and Gorai, and the hopes that they are healing well. I hope for you that your blade remains sharp. I would love to hear how life has been going for you, although I do not think I will receive any letters before I reach home.

Until I can write next, Iria Stell

#my writing #my life #gay murder elf bachelorette #in their footsteps we shall follow #Iria Strell #the heretic raven chose not to kill Iria Strell because uh they were one of the good guys #what they saw in her face was that she was fuckin seventeen #a *child*#and they could not bring themselves to kill a child in cold blood #not that it did them much good #welcome to all of my feelings all of them #even though I'm pretty sure approximately two of you are going to read this #I really hope that you enjoy

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