The news of the relief force’s annihilation swept through Woodhall like a foul wind. Despair, cold and cloying, seeped into the fortress, chilling the already weary spirits of its defenders. The nightly assaults continued, each one more ferocious, as if the enemy sensed their flagging morale. Supplies dwindled. The wounded huddled in every sheltered corner, their incessant laments and the wailings of the bereaved vibrating through the already frayed nerves of the defenders.

  Echoes of such despair reverberated down in the cavernous dungeons below, and Sabine could bear the inaction no longer. The thrum of her amulet, the muffled roars of battle, their oppressive isolation… it all coiled within her, a spring wound too tight.

  "I just can't sit here anymore!" she erupted, startling Marta and causing even Monty to lift his head from his nap on a Keeper’s massive foot. "They’re dying up there! We have these… these giants… and we’re doing nothing!"

  Artholan, who had been attempting yet more fruitless arcane fidgeting on the Keepers, snorted. "My dear girl, 'doing nothing' is a rather simplistic assessment of complex thaumaturgic entreaties! These constructs require a precise frequency, a focused volitional catalyst, which, I regret to inform you, neither your youthful impatience nor good woman Marta’s rustic piety seems capable of providing!"

  "Then maybe they don't need 'thaumaturgic entreaties'!" Sabine retorted, chewing Artholan’s academic lingo with sarcasm, her eyes glaring. "Maybe they need… something else! Something real!" A desperate idea took root. "I'm going up there. If I’m going to die, I’ll die fighting, not cowering in a hole!" she said, flailing her long arms in broad, impatient gestures.

  "Sabine, no!" Marta scowled. "It’s too dangerous, girl! You’re not a soldier!"

  "I’m stronger than most soldiers, Auntie!" Sabine shot back, her jaw set with a stubbornness that brook no arguments. "And I’m tired of being useless!"

  Ignoring their protests, ignoring Artholan’s spluttered warnings, Sabine strode towards the dungeon exit. She didn't know what she would do, how she would fight, but the thought of remaining inactive while others sacrificed themselves was unbearable.

  She climbed in long strides, three or four steps at a time, occasionally steading herself with a hand on the railing or the wall, just as the first ominous horns of the evening’s assault began to echo through the fortress. Monty the cat darted past her, a black streak bounding up the stairs ahead.

  Sabine emerged into the chaotic courtyard, where soldiers were rushing to the battlements with stony expressions. The air was thick with the smell of smoke and vibrating with anticipation. The goblin horde was advancing, a sea of torches in the gathering gloom. Her heart froze for a bit, then accelerated. The axe in her hand looked about as real as the tin crown she used to wear in her games as a child.

  A stray goblin arrow arced high over the wall and whistled down into the bailey. Fate, or perhaps a more enigmatic force, guided its path. It struck Sabine’s arm, a searing pain, and the hot wet trickle of blood.

  She cried out and stumbled back wide-eyed, clutching her wounded arm. For a moment she thought she’d died. Then she turned to the arrow shaft, an incongruous new limb sprouting from her upper arm.

  Pain faded.

  So did sound.

  A haze floated up in her vision.

  The amulet around her neck, now stained with a smear of her own blood, pulsed with an intense, almost blinding light.

  * * *

  Down in the dungeons, the iron key in Marta’s trembling hand blazed with a corresponding heat. And the stone Keepers… moved.

  * * *

  The steps of the awakened Keepers resonated through Woodhall like an earthquake, a deep, primordial tremor that momentarily silenced the sound of battle. In the bailey, Sabine, clutching her bleeding arm, stared in stunned disbelief as the first stone giant, its obsidian axe held ready, emerged from the dungeon entrance, its glyphs blazing with unnatural light. Monty the cat, perched on a nearby stack of crates, let out a small, satisfied "mrrrp," his tail twitching, looking mighty pleased with himself.

  Myanaa ran up to Sabine, catching her breath, her gentle hands already assessing the wound. Snik, despite his own terror, scrabbled to help, tearing strips of cloth from his tattered tunic for a bandage. "Arrow… barbed," he croaked, his eyes wide as he watched the emerging behemoth. "Must pull clean." Sabine barely registered their ministrations, her gaze fixed on the spectacle unfolding before her. The amulet on her chest writhed like a coiled serpent, pulsing in time with the Keeper’s thundering footsteps.

  * * *

  Down in the dungeon, an astonished Artholan watched as Marta, pale as death, held her glowing iron key aloft. One by one, with that sound of grinding continents, the remaining five stone Keepers stirred. They lumbered out of their centuries-long slumber, following their awakened kin in a parade of earth-shaking might.

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  "By the swirling chaos of the Prime Mover!" Artholan gasped, stumbling back. "She’s… she’s controlling them! Or… or they are drawing from her!" Marta looked as if she were about to collapse, sweat beading on her brow, yet her eyes burned with a fierce, almost ecstatic, light.

  * * *

  The six stone Keepers moved through the bailey with a ponderous momentum, their sheer size parting the scrambling soldiers. A middle aged veteran jumped off the stairs, tumbling over a barrel and landing with a sickening bounce of his helmeted head just a moment before a Keeper’s foot cracked the step he’d been standing on.

  The first Keeper to reach the gate crouched low and leaped clear of the wall, burying cobblestones deep in his wake. It brought its colossal obsidian axe down in a devastating arc. The nearest ram, and the goblins manning it were reduced to splinters and gore. The other Keepers fanned out along the walls, ignoring the shrieks of the human defenders scrambling out of their way. A Keeper swatted a ladder, and half a dozen goblins shrieked in horror as they fell, a ram was crushed under the weight of the club wielding Keeper. The few goblins that had climbed the wall leaped off it in haste.

  But the enemy was not so easily cowed. The goblin shaman shrieked a command and the Stone-Skin lumbered forward, eyes burning with a focused, brutish rage. They met the Keepers head-on.

  It was a clash of titans. Stone and ancient magic against scaled hide and primordial fury. An ogre’s massive mace slammed into a Keeper’s stone arm, sending chips of rock flying, but the sentinel barely flinched, its own weapon – a jagged stone club – crashing down on the ogre’s shoulder with enough force to make the behemoth roar in pain and stumble back. Another Keeper, wielding a spear like a sharpened monolith, impaled an ogre through its thick chest, the creature letting out a deafening, gurgling shriek before collapsing.

  Yet, the ogres were resilient, their thick hides deflecting blows that would have annihilated any lesser creature. And there were still goblins and dead-walkers flooding towards the walls. Smaller breaches, wedges of wall caved in by the relentless nightly assault of catapults, were already seeing close-quarters fighting.

  * * *

  Ronigren and Gregan, with their breach reserve, found themselves constantly redeploying, racing from one threatened section to another. They fought with a determined despair, their awe at the Keepers’ power tempered by the terrifying realization that even these stone giants might not be enough. At one section of the western wall, where a crumbling bastion had allowed a flood of goblins to pour through, Ronigren found himself back-to-back with Gregan, their swords and axes a blur of motion.

  "There’s too many of them!" Gregan roared, cleaving a goblin in two. "They’re like maggots on a corpse!"

  "Hold the line, Gregan!" Ronigren yelled back, parrying a thrust from an undead soldier, its decaying face inches from his own. "We just have to hold!" He growled, unsheathing his rondel dagger, and pushing it up below the undead’s lower jaw with his other arm.

  The battle for Woodhall raged on, a relentless symphony of destruction. But a new, unexpected sound began to filter through the din – faint at first, then growing stronger: the distant, defiant cry of Argrenian war horns.

  From the southern road, where they had been shattered and scattered only the day before, came the tattered remnants of the King’s relief force. They were fewer now, their banners torn, their armor dented and bloodied, but their spirits, it seemed, had rallied for one last, desperate charge.

  A lump of awe and respect knotted in Ronigren’s throat. He had seen courage in Alderholt, in Woodhall's defenders, but this... this was something else. This was the courage of the damned, the defiance of men who had already been broken once and had chosen to charge back into the very hell that had shattered them.

  Goblins and dead-walkers, already hard-pressed by the Keepers and Woodhall’s defenders, now found themselves attacked from the rear. The shaman barked urgent commands, his voice vibrating unnaturally above the clangour and the thuds, trying to reorient his forces.

  One of the Keepers, its stone body already cracked and scarred from its duel with a massive ogre, took its chance. With a final, earth-shattering heave, it drove its monolithic stone spear through the ogre’s remaining good eye, deep into its brain. The dying behemoth let out a deafening, gurgling rattle. As the ogre fell, its still-flailing mace caught the Keeper in its midsection. With a sound like tearing rock, a huge fissure opened in the sentinel’s torso. It stumbled, its glyphs flickering erratically, then, with a slow, ponderous dignity, it toppled forward, shattering into a thousand pieces upon impact. One of the Earth’s Echoes was silenced.

  The loss was a blow, but the tide was turning. Another ogre found itself overwhelmed. One Keeper grappled its thick arms while the other brought its obsidian axe down on the creature’s scaled head, until it too fell, its skull a shattered ruin. The remaining Drinkers-of-Fear, seeing their brethren fall, began to show signs of actual fear, their brutish assaults becoming more frantic.

  The combination of the Keepers’ power, the desperate last stand of Woodhall’s defenders and the suicidal charge of Tyrell’s reconstituted relief force was breaking the back of the goblin horde at last. Their lines wavered, began to crumble. What had been an overwhelming tide was now a confused, panicked rabble, caught between multiple fronts of savage resistance.

  As the first true light of dawn began to paint the eastern sky, a new sound arose, one that silenced the screams of battle.

  A melody. A voice. Beautiful, ethereal, infused with icy authority. From everywhere and nowhere at once. In the air, in the stones, in the very bones. It spoke in the guttural clicking tongue of goblins, yet with tones as pure and clear as a winter stream.

  Climbing back up the stairs, Ronigren was startled to see Ruthiel frozen in shock, their ageless face paling as they listened to that eerie sound.

  The mellifluous voice had an immediate effect on the remaining goblins and their shaman. Their panic solidified into a disciplined obedience.

  The shaman, shoulders slumped in exhausted subservience, barked once more a series of sharp commands. The remaining ogres began to lumber back towards the northern woods. The goblins disengaged from the walls, dragging their wounded with them, their earlier ferocious assault fading into a fighting retreat, while dead-walkers collapsed where they stood, becoming true corpses once more.

  Within the hour, as the sun climbed fully into the sky, the vast, nightmarish army that had besieged Woodhall was gone, melting back into the blighted northern lands, leaving behind a scene of unimaginable devastation, but also, against all odds, a standing fortress.

  Ronigren, leaning on his sword, his armor dented and blood-splattered, watched the last of the enemy disappear. A bone-deep weariness settled over him, but beneath it, a flicker of grim triumph.