The city wall continues to crumble as the first of the erebus pour through it into the streets, huge chunks of sandy stone cascading down. People scream and run away down the road at the base of the wall. Some of the demons keep going, following the fleeing people deeper into the city, but many of them stop at the base of the wall and start climbing the tower closest to the breach, leading to the top, to where we are.
Captain Dmaris leads a group down the tower. His soldiers fill it and block the erebus from coming up. “Drive them down to the ground!” he shouts as the two sides clash together with a crash of steel weapons. Then he descends out of my sight.
“Fire as fast as you can. Watch your fellows!” Blaize says to her group of archers.
The remaining city guards on the top of the wall nock another volley of arrows. They rain down into the erebus crowding the street. With the demons closer, the arrows strike truer and harder, but only a few go down.
Blaize’s arrow hits a red demon in the throat. She’s nocked and fired a second then a third before most of the rest of the archers fire their second. Each arrow strikes a vital spot, one in a demon’s eye.
But many of the demons wear heavy black, sharp-ridged armor that completely covers them, like the erebus I saw in the cellar when Northend was attacked. The arrows don’t affect them. They fall away after pinging and screeching against their armor.
The armored demons don’t fall easily to blades either. The swords of the city guards find few flaws in the armor. Three or four soldiers of Phiur fight each armored demon, but one swing of its giant sword or axe and the brave men and women were falling in great numbers.
“Aim for the belial, not the vaelfar!” Blaize shouts over the noise of weapons and the screams of the fallen.
She must refer to the red demons. Most have no armor, but some have random pieces–one wears a breastplate that looks stolen from a man smaller than it, another has a single leather vambrace and one shinguard.
The archers find better targets in the belial, but the demons still outnumber us four to one.
I feel useless standing on the wall, watching, holding my broadsword like I will attack, but there’s nothing up here to attack. Captain Dmaris’ group holds the tower stairs, for now. I can’t see them in the tower, so I don’t know how outnumbered they are, but I know it’s by a lot.
Hax throws ice daggers like the archers fire arrows, some hit vital areas, but many hit and shatter on armor or weapons in the chaos of fighting.
Rent has his hands full with healing. The naberius injured many.
Jilli looks at a loss, like me. Her strength and huge blade seek a battle, but on the wall there is none. She looks hesitant to leave Blaize’s side, but the elf is still firing arrows as quickly as she can ready them and hardly pays any attention to us.
As I stand there, wondering what to do and secretly glad I’m not in the tower or down on the street, the wall rumbles beneath my feet.
It’s only a slight rumble, and I seem to be the only one who notices.
Bam. Bam. Bam. The rumbles vibrate up my legs.
I look down into the street, and I don’t see anything colliding with the wall. I look down the opposite side, where erebus mill in the scrubby meadow outside the city, trampling what little grass can grow there in the sand, and the three moraxus stand before the hole in the wall. They each ram their meaty fists into the wall, rumbling it beneath our feet.
Everyone else is too occupied with the erebus inside the walls to notice the ones pounding outside it.
“Jilli! The moraxus!” I point.
As she looks, the wall shudders more violently, and she has to grab the battlement to keep from pitching over it.
The moraxus are coordinated. They strike as one.
“Not good.”
Before she can turn back to me, the next set of punches widen the hole in the wall, bricks crumbling to dust beneath their assault. It undermines the integrity of the wall beneath the feet of Blaize’s archers. Blaize turns, and the bricks she stands on begin to vibrate apart, their mortar deteriorating in an instant.
Jilli grabs the elf and pulls her toward us. Blaize loses her bow, and it tumbles down with the top of the wall.
“Get out of there! Down the tower!” Blaize commands, straining against Jilli’s hold.
The other archers don’t have time to respond. The bricks are just dust beneath them, and they fall toward the waiting moraxus.
The wall is still rumbling. It’s not done yet.
Jilli picks me up facing backwards and runs to the next closest tower. I press Mieklo to my chest and watch as Hax grabs Rent and pulls him away from a man moaning in pain. The older man protests, though unable to form clear words, as he stumbles backwards with his brother’s insistent tugging.
There’s no saving the injured city guards. They tumble away next, several not even conscious of their impending demise.
The wall shudders with waves of energy.
“Get to the tower!” Jilli shouts at the two brothers.
They’re already heading in that direction with us.
Jilli doesn’t set Blaize or me down when we reach the top of the tower. She takes the spiraling steps two at a time.
The tower shakes around us. The sound of rumbling, disintegrating bricks is like thunder in my ears, and we’re in the center of the storm.
I gasp and hold my breath as mortar rains down on us. The sandy bricks forming the tower go next. I squeeze my eyes shut. I brace myself for it all to come down on us.
The rumbling stops, and I’m still bouncing in Jilli’s arms. I open my eyes to see only half of the tower has fallen. The whole side facing the hole in the wall is gone along with it.
The stairway before us is gone too. A gap bigger than Gnuf is between us and the bottom of the tower.
“Damn.” Jilli’s curse is low and breathless as she assesses. She sets Blaize and me down.
Blaize quickly smooths herself, flustered by being carried away. I can see the pain in her eyes over the losses.
The moraxus start to move down the wall, toward us. They see us and growl unknown words to each other. They seem slow, but their steps cover the ground between us too fast.
“I have an idea,” Hax says.
“Just do it.” Jilli watches the moraxus as Hax steps past her, to the jagged edge of the staircase.
With some intricate waving of his hands, Hax forms ice. He shapes it from the edge of the crumbling stairs, forming a ramp, a giant spiraling slide.
“Me first.” Though he’s panting from the spell’s exertion, Hax is grinning. He drops to his butt and slides away, I can’t tell whether his shout is elation or terror.
Rent is grim as he wordlessly follows.
“Go, Lo, go,” Blaize urges me.
The icy slide is cold. I try not to touch it with my hands, afraid they’ll stick.
I don’t get much preparation before I start going down. It’s smooth and slick, and suddenly I’m falling faster and faster. I loop around the spirals of the stairs, unhindered. There’s nothing to grab onto, so I bring my arms in tight to me, shielding Mieklo from whatever waits for us at the bottom. It grows dark as I get below the hole in the tower.
The icy slide goes on and on.
Then I crash into Rent’s legs as he tries to catch me. He goes down, and we end up in a tangle of legs and arms. Mieklo skitters away from us, but not too far. He chitters with annoyance, chastising us.
“I tried to warn him that was a bad idea,” Hax says. “Watch out. Incoming.”
I don’t catch his meaning. I’m too busy trying to figure out what direction is up and how my limbs work.
Blaize adds to our pile of confusion.
“Uh oh.”
I want to give Hax a dirty look, but then Jilli joins us.
“Oof, I bet that hurt.”
“Thanks for stating the obvious,” Blaize groans. “No offense, Jilli, my darling, but please get off us.”
Since she’s on top of the pile, she’s able to extricate herself. Then she helps the rest of us back up.
“What a ride, eh?” Hax asks. He waggles his eyebrows.
Jilli steps past him without a reply, peeking around the doorway of the tower.
There’s no door, just an arch, leading out into the sunlight. It looks peaceful, but I can hear the discordant clang of weapons without.
“Gods! Out of the tower. Hurry, hurry,” Jilli says, motioning emphatically to us. She ushers us out and comes last.
The moment we’re all out, one of the moraxus puts its fist through what remains of the tower, and it explodes into sand and rubble.
The moraxus gives us a hideous grin around it curved tusks and stomps closer. It looms almost as tall as what remains of the wall, and now that it's closer, I see its legs are thicker than the tower it just brought down. One of its ummuth-like feet would crush us all at once.
Jilli has her sword out, but the moraxus is more likely to pick its teeth with the weapon. I hold my broadsword before me, for all of the good it will do.
“Any ideas?” Blaize asks. She looks at Hax, expecting a smart comment.
“Pray to the gods?” is all he has to offer.
“Just what I was thinking,” Rent says. He begins a prayer.
The moraxus stomps its foot down.
I put my faith into Rent and his goddess, but I still raise my broadsword.
The moraxus’ foot bounces off his barrier, but the bubble around us holds. Rent’s hands glow with divine power, his face tight, his teeth clenched. He opens his eyes with some confusion when he realizes his barrier still holds.
The bubble muffles the sounds outside, but I swear I hear… a lute? The tune is jaunty and out of place.
I turn and see a man with deep umber skin, strumming a lute with a calm smile. He strolls along the rubble-strewn street toward us like he’s taking a pleasant walk. To either side of him are two women of the mountainfolk with more golden skin, dressed in matching light, linen robes. The only difference is the color of trim on each robe–one trimmed in dark blue and one in maroon. A paler woman with blonde hair and cheeks ruddy from exertion, runs past us with a shield and longsword.
She faces the moraxus without fear.
I feel oddly calm despite the dire moment. My fatigue lifts, and so do my spirits. My broadsword feels lighter.
The two robed mountainwomen begin to cast a spell. They move with a rhythmic practiced choreography that makes them look like mirror images of one another. I pull my gaze away to look at the moraxus, but no ice or fire or any other element flies at the towering demon.
It growls something in its rough-sounding language, confused, and then it roars in pain. It pumps its fists in the air, grabs for anything but finds nothing with the wall gone, and tries to lift its feet. I see that it’s sinking. The ground beneath it has turned to lava, and its weight sucks the massive demon down. It struggles, huge muscles flexing, shaking the ground as it claws for purchase. It’s not strong enough to fight against its own weight.
I can smell it cooking in the molten rock, and the smell makes me gag.
The moraxus sinks to its chin before it stops struggling. The lava swallows the rest of it.
Rent has dismissed the protective barrier, recovering from the spell, and I feel a chill breeze pass over us. It’s frosty and carries thick snowflakes that stick to my arms. The icy breeze cools the lava back to solid, leaving no sign the moraxus ever stood there except for the blackened, lumpy ground.
It all happens so quickly that we hardly have a chance to respond, and those responses are delayed further by our wonder.
“What a bunch of showoffs,” Hax says out of the side of his mouth to Blaize. “I could have done that.”
“No, you can’t. You’ve got no fire or earth.”
That shuts him up.
“No time for proper introductions and stories now, perhaps later over a celebratory meal when the rest of these erebus are properly dispatched, but I am Leito, Leito the bard,” the man with the lute says as he approaches us. He dips into a deep bow over his lute. “My beautiful companions here are Aleria,” he gestures to the woman with the shield as she lowers it and joins us with a curt nod. “And these two are Keahi and Noelani.” The two elementalists clutch hands and support each other after their massive elemental display. When they join us a moment later, Jilli is introducing our group.
I don’t hear much of anything after “Leito the bard.” I’m enthralled with the man and the beautiful lute he holds fondly to his chest.
~ * ~
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