Chapter 20

  Reyn stepped out of the protective confines of his tent and inhaled the cold, biting air of the North. Before him, the land stretched out like a sleeping beast, waiting to devour anyone who entered without permission. Where the barren crags of the Iron Mountains merged into the endless sea of dark green, the hunting grounds of House Wolfsgrund began, and, even further south, the well-guarded resources of House Barwan.

  For any ordinary conqueror, this sight was a reason for despair. The Black Woods of Caleon were no ordinary forest; they were a living defense system. The trees stood so thick that no sunbeam ever touched the moldy ground, and their roots were so intertwined that any army attempting to traverse them would be demoralized and disoriented within hours. Those who did not possess the massive, forest-capable golems of the Caleon houses or the tunnel-boring machines of the dwarves were judged by nature itself before they ever saw the first fortress wall. Legends spoke of entire regiments that had vanished without a trace into the green, only to be found years later as pale skeletons in the treetops.

  But Reyn did not look upon this forest with fear. He looked upon it with the contempt of a man who knows that even the oldest tree can do nothing against the force of the elements.

  "Nature is a wall for those who crawl upon the earth," Reyn whispered, his voice carried away by the rising wind. "But the sky... the sky belongs to me."

  He strode toward a small rocky outcrop that offered a wide view over the valley. Behind him, his warriors held their breath. The Dragonfolk of the North, the barbarian tribes, and the handful of orcs felt the electrical tension that suddenly saturated the air. The hair on their arms stood up, and a metallic taste of ozone settled on their tongues.

  Reyn closed his eyes. He did not reach for the mana within his own body, but instead grasped for the currents high above him. He tapped into the unstable, gargantuan energies of the upper atmosphere—that untamed power usually released only in the worst storms of the century. He became a lightning rod for the wrath of the heavens.

  Slowly, he raised his arms. His simple robe fluttered wildly in the rising storm that seemed born out of nowhere. The clouds above the borderland began to rotate, bunching together into a sinister, violet-black mass that swallowed the remaining daylight. It was no natural weather phenomenon; it was a manifestation of his will.

  "Awaken," he commanded.

  At first, there was only a deep rumble, a tremor in the bowels of the earth. Then, with a suddenness that seemed to tear the world apart, the first wave discharged.

  A single, massive bolt of violet light shot down from the zenith. It struck a group of giant trees at the edge of the Wolfsgrund territories with such force that they did not merely break but exploded in a cloud of splinters and steam. But that was only the beginning.

  Reyn tore his hands apart as if shredding a curtain.

  Hundreds—no, thousands—of lightning bolts began to strike down simultaneously from the swirling clouds. It was a rain of liquid fury. The firmament over North Caleon became a flickering strobe light of doom. Every strike triggered a shockwave that set the undergrowth ablaze. The ancient wood of the Black Woods, normally damp and resistant to fire, stood no chance against this supernatural heat. The mana within the lightning boiled the sap inside the trunks in milliseconds until the bark peeled off like shrapnel.

  Reyn stood motionless on the ledge, his hood pulled low over his face, while the searing light bathed his gaunt features in a ghostly white. He conducted the chaos. He directed the lightning specifically into the thickest parts of the forest, where the golem paths of the Barwans ran and where the hidden outposts of House Wolfsgrund lay.

  Within minutes, the deep green of the forest transformed into a flaming inferno. Giant pillars of fire shot into the sky, and the thick black smoke mixed with the storm clouds into an apocalyptic blanket that turned day into night. The forest—the "greatest obstacle"—became a trap for its own defenders. The soldiers of the border fortresses, who had felt secure in their wooden palisades and stone towers, now saw their green wall becoming their funeral pyre.

  The heat could be felt even up on the rock, but Reyn savored it. It was the heat of purification.

  "Look at that," Corven murmured reverently behind him. The commander, who had fought many battles, seemed small and insignificant in the face of this god-like destructive power. "The forest is burning... the whole North is burning."

  "It is not a fire, Corven," Reyn corrected him softly, slowly lowering his arms. The lightning strikes became rarer, but the fire on the horizon had now developed its own momentum. "It is a way. A path of ash that leads us directly to Drymon."

  The inferno in the valley illuminated the faces of his army. The barbarians let out wild war cries, intoxicated by the power of their leader. The Dragonfolk struck their scaled armor together, a metallic rhythm that surpassed the thunder. They no longer saw an impassable wilderness before them. They saw a wounded land ready to be harvested.

  Reyn looked at his hands. They trembled slightly from exhaustion, but the energy still flowing through his veins felt exhilarating. He had put the nature of Caleon in its place. He had shown that no wall—whether of stone or wood—could withstand the Lord of the Storm.

  The smoke on the horizon formed bizarre shapes in the wind. To Reyn, it looked like the face of Thivan Sothar slowly dissolving in the heat. He knew that the mages in Drymon must have felt the tremor. He knew that the birds now fleeing south, screaming before the flames, would carry his message: The storm is here.

  A satisfied, almost gentle smile stole onto his face. The fact that he had burned thousands of innocent forest creatures and countless soldiers meant nothing to him. In his new order, there was no room for weakness, and pity was a luxury only the losers of history could afford.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  He turned to his army. Thousands of pairs of eyes stared at him expectantly. The alliance of the outcasts waited for the command they had yearned for for generations.

  "The obstacles are removed!" Reyn cried, his voice cutting through the crackling of the distant fire. "The forest will no longer stop us. The earth is soft with blood and the air is cleansed of the stench of the old order. Today, we do not march as refugees. Today, we march as the end of Caleon!"

  A bone-chilling roar answered him. The army set itself in motion. It was not an orderly march, but an unstoppable surge. The Dragonfolk formed the vanguard, followed by the massive half-giants and the swift barbarian warriors. They threw themselves down the slope, into the smoking field of ruins that had once been the pride of the Sothar.

  Reyn watched them for a moment before beginning the descent himself. He felt the heat of the burning North at his back and the goal in his heart. Drymon might shine, Drymon might celebrate—but he was bringing the darkness that no torch could dispel.

  -

  The rumbling on the northern horizon was no longer thunder. It was a rhythmic, titanic tearing of the heavens that made the air vibrate as if the firmament itself were being struck against an anvil. Thousands of violet lightning bolts fell like raindrops from a black wall, bathing the entire green horizon first in an unnatural light and then beginning to glow a searing red. The Black Woods, Caleon’s unconquerable pride, were ablaze.

  High up in the main fortress of House Wolfsgrund—a massive structure of gray granite perched like a sleeping predator atop a jagged rocky needle—Sk?ll Wolfsgrund sat, however, completely unfazed in his element. Sk?ll, the first son of Beowulf von Wolfsgrund and heir to a house that had tamed the wildest beasts of the North for generations, was in the cockpit of his wolf-golem, "Night-Howler."

  The golem's construction was a masterpiece of mechanics and aesthetics. While most golems of the Barwans or Sothars appeared as clunky, humanoid blocks, the Night-Howler was an homage to the house’s heraldic animal. The torso was stocky and low-slung, the limbs armed with massive wolf claws of hardened star-iron. The centerpiece, however, was the head: a fearsome mechanical wolf skull whose jaws could bite with hydraulic force and whose eyes glowed an aggressive orange.

  Inside the cockpit, there was an atmosphere that would have given any golem engineer in Drymon a heart attack. Sk?ll sat casually in the padded control straps, legs kicked up over a console, whistling cheerfully as he chewed on a tough, smoked piece of shadow-wolf meat. The fat from the roast dripped onto sensitive rune plates and spread as a greasy film over the view-screens. In training, they always said: "A pilot must be one with his machine, pure in spirit and disciplined in body." Sk?ll considered that nonsense. As long as his own stomach was full and his body functioned, the golem functioned. The psychic coupling of the core ignored the grease on the instruments; it only searched for the will of the wolf in Sk?ll’s blood.

  His general, whose golem—a bulky "Iron-Paw"—stood directly beside the Night-Howler on the platform, patched in via ether-radio. The general’s mechanical body language perfectly imitated his nervousness; the metal fists clenched and loosened every second.

  "My Lord Sk?ll, look at this! The fire will eat its way through the entire forest!" warned the general’s voice, echoing tinny inside the Night-Howler’s narrow cockpit. "This is no ordinary blaze. The mana readings are skyrocketing. If we don’t act, House Wolfsgrund will be nothing but a pile of ash by evening!"

  Sk?ll finished chewing with relish, swallowed the bite, and wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his leather jacket. He cast a fleeting glance at the burning horizon line, now dominated by black smoke clouds.

  "Oh, General, relax for a moment," Sk?ll replied, waving a hand dismissively, an action the Night-Howler mimicked with an almost arrogant toss of its wolf-skull head. "Do you really think the other lords will just let their treasuries burn down? House Barwan, House Iron-Fist and the Forst-Lords will already be rolling out their arcane shield domes. We just have to cover our sector and fill the gap. The fire can feast on our magical wall until it realizes it can't get past stone and mana. It’ll burn out before it even reaches the deeper reaches of Caleon. Clear enough?"

  The general hesitated briefly. He looked at the inferno moving toward them like a red avalanche, then at the calm, almost bored posture of his young master. House Wolfsgrund was not tyrannical; the loyalty of the men was based on trust and the unquestionable competence of the Wolfsgrund bloodline in battle. He finally nodded, convinced enough to pass the command for defensive formation.

  In the minutes that followed, the Wolfsgrund fortress transformed into a focal point of magical energy. All along the outer walls, mana-capacitors were powered up. Large crystalline lenses began to align, and with a deep hum that vibrated through one's bones, a transparent, light-blue dome formed. It arched in a massive radius over the entire Wolfsgrund territory—a shimmering protective shield that shut out the heat and the rain of sparks from the burning forest.

  Sk?ll leaned back and watched on his screens as the magic reacted. He felt the rapidly increasing mana intensity in the entire surroundings. It was a fascinating display of coordination: first, the border to the Barwans in the west lit up, then Iron-Fist in the east. Within minutes, the individual domes connected to form a giant, impenetrable barrier—a glassy rampart standing between the burning North and the still-untouched remainder of Caleon.

  The Wolfsgrund fortress itself was now the bulwark in the center of this line. It was dug deep into the mountain, its forecourts vast and offering space for hundreds of golems. On the battlements stood archers with fire arrows and mages in heavy protective robes, ready to smother any flame that might penetrate the shield. It was a picture of absolute security. Caleon was a fortress, and the North was just the front yard that one sacrificed if necessary.

  Sk?ll whistled a cheerful tune again and reached for the next piece of meat. "See, General? A little light show, a little heat, but in the end, we sit here dry and safe. The Sothars knew why they stationed us up here. We are the anvil upon which every storm breaks."

  He cast a final, mocking glance at the inferno beyond the blue dome. The lightning was now striking directly against the shield, resulting in magnificent blue discharges that bathed the cockpit in an artificial twilight. It looked like fireworks.

  "A beautiful spectacle, isn't it?" he muttered to himself. "Whoever is raging out there... he’s just wasting his energy. Nature may burn, but Caleon is made of metal and runes."

  He took a hearty bite of the meat; fat splattered against the console once more. He felt invincible. The Night-Howler beneath him hummed contentedly as the engines idled. The world outside might be ending, but here, behind fifteen meters of granite and an arcane dome fed by the realm’s best mages, everything was just a matter of patience.

  He was about to open a slit in the view-screen to let in some fresh, albeit smoky air, when he froze.

  The vibration he felt now did not come from the fire. It was not the roar of heat, nor the hum of the shields.

  Sk?ll put the meat down. His whistling melody broke off mid-beat. His gaze fixed on the sensors, which were suddenly swinging wild, chasing warning messages in blood-red runes across his screens. The mana signature beyond the wall was changing. It wasn't growing weaker against the shield’s resistance—it was concentrating. It was taking a form that was neither flame nor lightning.

  Then came the flood.