Chapter 109: The Wendigor

"What is that...?"

No one answered him. In the vanguard, Jeanne, Flemming, and the front ranks had still not understood that they were being attacked from behind.

Every face was tilted toward Korven, toward the rampart now lost behind a vast sheet of green radiance, the Zenith Shield rolling across the sky in slow, luminous waves.

It was beautiful. It was also wrong, in the way a lullaby sung in an empty house is wrong.

Something about it took hold of the eye and would not let go. The world narrowed to that green glow. The thunder of hooves dulled. Screams from the rear faded to something like rain on a distant roof.

Lucian shouted again and again, until his throat burned.

"Sister Jeanne! Don’t look at it! The Dark Beasts are coming from behind!"

Nobody turned. Jeanne’s gaze stayed fixed on the wall, her lips slightly parted, her reins loose in her fist. Flemming rode rigid and unblinking beside her, as though nailed to his own saddle. Not one leader at the head of that army turned to look at the soldiers they were leading.

Why can’t they hear me? Why am I the only one who can?

At his side, Sonata hummed against his hip, a thin, steady vibration, and for the first time he noticed the faint pull the glow exerted on his own eyes, a tug he could ignore only because the sword kept pulling him back.

Then came a shriek like tearing canvas, high and rushing, from somewhere behind them.

THUD!!

The ground jumped. Something struck the left flank of the vanguard like a battering ram, and men and horses went flying together, a spray of bodies and dirt and screaming.

When the dust cleared, a tree lay at the center of the wreckage, roots torn out and trailing clots of earth, trunk thick as a barrel, branches splintered across the fallen.

Thrown. It was thrown. Whatever had done it stood a quarter of a kilometer behind them.

What kind of creature can throw a tree this far?

His heart hammered against his ribs. He twisted around once more, and what he saw turned his blood to cold water.

Dozens of trees climbed the sky behind the army, dark silhouettes against the brown dust, turning slowly end over end, tracing long arcs toward the heart of the column. The air itself thickened with their sound, a low, rushing whistle that swelled and swelled.

THUD!!

Six colossal trunks crashed down in front of the vanguard, so close to Flemming’s horse that the animal reared and nearly threw him. Splinters sprayed across breastplates. Dirt rained down. By luck, and only by luck, none of them struck the leaders directly.

"Damn it! What was I doing?!"

Flemming was the first to come back to himself. His head snapped around, his eyes clearing like a man surfacing from deep water, and a look of raw horror crossed his face as he realized that he had been sitting in the middle of a battlefield with his mind a thousand miles away.

One by one the others followed. Jeanne pressed a hand to her forehead and shook her head hard. Ulrich swore under his breath.

Elder Tervis blinked like a sleeper waking. The whole front rank was grabbing at their heads, staring about in dawning confusion, and discovering that their advance had been stopped dead by a wall of timber.

It took one glance over their shoulders to understand.

The Direwolves had already reached them.

They poured across the plain in a gray flood, low and silent, with a coordination no ordinary animal should have had, and they were tearing into the rear of the column before the rear had even drawn steel. Behind them came the rest.

Orcs thundered through the dust with scarred hides and clubs raised. Bone Crawlers skittered along the ground, joints bending the wrong way, slipping around the flanks.

Veilmoths drifted over the lines in their stiff, humanoid shapes, shrugging off the arrows and spells that struck them. Siphon Leeches rolled and slithered through the mud, leaving a trail of rot and iron.

The formation shattered.

Orders fell apart before they were finished.

Riders wheeled in circles, trying to find a commander who no longer had a view of them. Horses screamed, bolted, trampled their own. Spears pointed in four directions at once.

Men who had been proud of their ranks an hour ago now clung to whatever banner they could still see.

A force that had stood at well over a hundred thousand when it left camp was shrinking in front of Flemming’s eyes. Seventy percent.

Perhaps less. Every second of that confusion was a few hundred more people dead, or down, or abandoned.

Flemming gripped the reins so hard that his horse reared onto its back legs. He could not believe it. The wall of Korven rose barely a breath away.

His entire plan, every order he had given, depended on getting this army through the gate, and not fighting this horde in the open, where the Dark Beasts could use them as toys.

"Everyone, up!" he roared. "The mission has not changed! We ride for the fortress! Into Korven!"

His voice rolled back across the field. Soldiers who could still stand struggled to their feet. Soldiers who could still ride dragged their horses around.

"But what about the rear, Sir Flemming?" Eleonor demanded from behind him. "They’re fighting those things right now!"

"If we turn and fight in the open, we lose, Miss Eleonor! The formation is in pieces!"

"Then reform it! We can save more of them if we regroup now!"

"Damn it, do you think I haven’t thought of that?" Flemming rounded on her, eyes red-rimmed and blazing. "Look at us! If the vanguard goes down, there’s no hope left for Korven at all!"

They glared at each other for one breath. Neither was wrong. Neither could win.

It was Hugo who broke it.

He had been staring at one of the thrown trees, at a splintered branch lying near his horse’s hooves. A thick, viscous fluid was seeping from the broken end, thin and dark, and where it touched the ground the earth hissed and softened, melting, giving off a pale vapor that rose in a lazy curl.

The smell reached him a moment later, sharp and sweet and rotten.

His eyes went wide. His hand flew to his mouth.

"Cover your faces!" he shouted. "All of you! Cover your mouths! This is Miasma!"

Other trees were already breaking open. Pale, greasy smoke bled from their bark and began to spread, a slow, spreading fog that pooled in the low ground and crawled between the horses’ legs. The smell turned stomachs. Soldiers started to cough.

Some staggered, dizzy, clutching their heads. Miasma did worse than sicken. It broke the body’s own rhythm, thickening the blood in the veins, twisting the pulse out of true, and where it touched mana, it unraveled. The flow stopped.

A mage caught in that fog would find his power simply gone.

Across the battlefield, Miasma rose in curtains, and the whole wide plain began to disappear behind a sickly haze.

Flemming’s legs began to shake.

He knew this. He knew this smell. There was only one creature that had ever been known to smear Miasma into whole trees.

His head came around slowly, eyes drawn through the swirling vapor toward the distant tree line, and there, rising out of the fog, was a shape.

It was enormous. It stood on two legs. Its body seemed wrapped in knotted branches, but they were not branches, and the longer he looked the clearer it became that those thorny limbs were its own flesh, grown and twisted into the shape of wood.

Two red points burned where its eyes should have been. As it walked it swung one great arm in a slow, lazy circle, as if warming up for the next throw. In the soft ground behind it, each footprint gave off a faint, dark smoke.

It matched the reports from Korven word for word. A huge, strange thing seen in the dark by the townsfolk. Poison left wherever it stepped.

"Wendigor," Flemming whispered. Then he roared it. "Wendigor! This is the Wendigor’s doing! Everyone, run for the fortress! Now!"

If they did not reach the walls, they would not live. There was no mistaking it. The army was already struggling against ordinary Dark Beasts, and above them stood a monster that could make a Tier 8 Core warrior’s knees give way.

Through the haze, Jeanne could see more of her own soldiers going down, scattered across the churned ground. She forced her horse around in a tight circle, searching, her eyes raking the dust for one face.

"Lucian!" she shouted. "Lucian!"

There was no answer. He was the only one who was not at her side.

A cold knot tightened in her chest. Flemming’s words had confirmed it. The Wendigor was real, and it was here.

And she remembered Cassius’s warning, delivered with a seriousness that she had never heard from her father before: If you ever see that thing, do not fight it. Run.

"Lucian!"

Nothing. The roar of the field swallowed her voice. Ulrich pulled alongside, his face grim.

"Lady Jeanne, I believe he was separated from us by the Wendigor’s throw."

She turned her horse. She meant to go back.

A hand clamped on her bridle. Elder Tervis, white-faced, shook his head.

"Lady Jeanne, we must go forward. Into the fortress."

"You want me to leave him?"

"If we go back for him, the whole house will go with you. Our soldiers will be cut down looking. Even the Phantom unit cannot hold this ground." His voice cracked. "Please."

Jeanne said nothing. Every instinct in her body screamed against it. She wanted to wrench the horse free and ride into the fog.

"That is an order!"

Flemming’s voice cut across hers, savage and absolute. He had read her face in an instant.

"If you disobey, it will not be you alone who pays for it! Your whole family will be branded as defiant!"

It was the cruelest thing he could have said, and the only thing that could stop her. To be branded a defier of the Supreme Commander in the field was a stain on any Seven Pillar house, and a stain of that kind did not fall on a single head.

It fell on a family, and stayed.

Ulrich and Tervis both pressed her, almost pleading. Flemming’s voice dropped, rough but steady.

"The moment we are inside, I will put together a search unit for the missing. I swear it. But we must reach the walls first."

Jeanne’s jaw worked. Her knuckles whitened on the reins. Then, with a sound that was half sob and half snarl, she wheeled her horse toward Korven and drove her heels in.

Lucian lay on his side in the dirt.

The Phantom knight who had carried him lay a short distance away and did not move. His horse lay beside him, and so did its neighbors.

The fall had thrown them all across the ground like toys. Lucian pushed himself up onto his elbows, coughing, his ears ringing, grit between his teeth, and slowly got a hand under him.

Dust hung over everything. It stung his eyes. When it thinned, he saw bodies. Dozens of them, scattered across the earth in every posture of collapse, wearing uniforms of every house. A hand twitched in a gauntlet.

A banner lay trampled in the mud. And from somewhere in the haze, many voices were calling for help, rising and breaking and rising again as the Dark Beasts did their work.

"Jeanne!" he shouted. "Sister! Anyone!"

No one came.

Then a low, wet growl rolled over him.

The Direwolves had found him.

They came leaping out of the dust from every side, gray shapes with white-lit eyes, landing in a ring and closing it.

There were too many to count.

They lowered their heads and bared their teeth, and none of them rushed. They did not need to. They circled, and waited, and watched, with the dreadful patience of creatures that understood exactly how this would end.

Lucian bent low and drew Sonata with both hands, gripping it so hard his arms shook. Sweat ran down his temples and into his eyes.