Chapter 948: Sudden Rain
"Kill them all! Show them no mercy!"
Dame Sybyll’s anguished order fell on Captain Ultrech’s ears like a clap of thunder echoing across the Stoney Moor of his birth. There was fury and pain in that order, and there wasn’t a single soldier among Ultrech’s men who didn’t share in the agony of a homeland that rejected them.
"Formation!" Ultrech shouted, raising his ax high as he stood before his soldiers. "Twin Tusks! Forward! Trample them down!"
In an instant, fifty men moved as one, arranging themselves into two columns two men wide with their strongest warrior at the point of each ’tusk.’ It was a movement of precision and focus that even the well-trained soldiers of the Temple Guard would struggle to match because it was born of far more than simple training.
The men under Ultrech’s command had once been the personal guard of Porst, Eldritch Lord of the Stoney Moor, and they had known each other for their entire lives. Fifty men shared just over a dozen mothers between them, and from birth, they suckled from the same teats, slept in the same hollows, even courted the same groups of sows.
It was the ’old way’, where each litter of squeakers received their lot in life from birth, to be nurtured and raised into their craft from their very youngest of years. The Stoney Moor wasn’t an easy place to live, and even the farmers and goatherders needed to be among the best of their trade if they wanted to give the people of the nation a chance to live lives that were better than mere survival.
For generations, men like Ultrech had lived side by side with their littermates in lives that were filled with purpose, and he had been born to serve his lord until he was either too old or too badly wounded to discharge his duties.
All of that had changed when a young hunter named Kirst challenged for the throne and put an end to the old order. The young people of the Stoney Moor wanted freedom in their lives. They wanted the right to choose their trade, to succeed or fail as individuals who weren’t bound to their littermates. They wanted a life like the lives lived by people in the High Fen, the Lake of Stars, and beyond.
Ultrech and his fellows were simple men. They marched where they were commanded, fought when they must, and would have defended Eldritch Lord Kirst to their dying breath, but the new Lord of the Stoney Moor didn’t see them that way. He saw them as the greatest personification of the ’old ways’, and worse, as the only force capable of producing a champion who could topple him from his newly won throne.
And so, rather than accept their service, he exiled every last one of them, along with their sows and any squeakers they were raising to follow in their iron-shod footsteps.
Ultrech’s fellows were soldiers. They had been soldiers all their lives. They knew how to survive in the wilderness on the march and how to construct crude camps for the harsh winters in the northern reaches. They refused to simply march to their deaths in exile. But the lives they could build on their own were meager ones, and no man wanted to see his sow sleeping in a soldier’s hut night after night.
When word reached them of an Eldritch Lord who was raising an army to fight against invaders from across the sea, Ultrech had taken the opportunity as salvation for his people and their families, decisively leading them south to join this vampire lady in the hopes of proving that he and his men still held value.
Thus far, the reception they’d received in the Vale of Mists had been both a vindication of his decision and an incomparably heavy burden of kindness that the veteran soldier doubted he could ever repay.
Lady Nyrielle demanded their service, their loyalty, and the best of their soldiers. In return, she offered them help in building a village of their own if they wished to live apart from others and keep to their old ways, or a chance to live alongside others in the Vale of Mists in the rapidly growing Vale City or one of the other villages.
Whether they wished to keep their old traditions or not was left entirely up to them. If Ultrech wished to become a village leader, Lady Nyrielle would have supported him. She even offered to send people from other villages to teach their next litters of squeakers how to farm the fertile soil of the Vale, hunt its lush forests, or fill in any of a dozen other gaps in their trades so that his people could have a future where they didn’t just live like soldiers in crude huts like an army on the march.
The offer was generous beyond words, and when Ultrech had questioned why an Eldritch Lady would be so kind to people she had only just met who had yet to prove their worth, she gave him the strangest reply.
"My darling Ashlynn would offer as much or more," the powerful vampire said. "So how could I offer any less? If I mistreat your people, I’m certain she would scold me fiercely, and I couldn’t bear it, so I could never bear to mistreat you or your kin."
He hadn’t understood what Her Eternity meant until he was invited to attend the banquet where she announced her betrothal to the Mother of Trees, but once he saw the famous witch and the way she looked at the ruler of the Vale of Mists, he began to understand why even a powerful vampire like the Harbinger of Death would yield to the woman she loved.
Now, as he marched across the west gate plaza at the head of two columns of his littermates and closest kin, he felt like he was finally repaying the kindness they had been shown since their arrival in the Vale of Mists. His heart was already filled with pride after seizing the watch tower and delivering the treasured bell to Dame Sybyll, but facing off against the neatly ordered ranks of the Temple Guard and the Lothian soldiers behind them, his heart thundered in his chest with more than just pride.
"Break their ranks!" Ultrech shouted as he rushed the line of soldiers, using his heavy iron shield like a battering ram to knock aside their spears before slamming his half-moon-shaped ax into their flimsy wood-and-leather shields.
-CRUNCH-
"Aaaaaa!"
"Lord of Light, save..."
"Stand together, stand together!"
"Die demon!"
The sounds of anguished wails and chaotic, shouted orders filled the air as the ’twin tusks’ of Ultrech’s formation bit into the solid ranks of the Temple Guard. His men weren’t just trying to pierce the enemy’s formation; they were turning the space between their two columns into a killing ground, surrounding the warriors of the Church and giving them no space to dodge or evade as the columns of Iron Tusked soldiers knocked them down and trampled them underfoot.
"Spears to the front! Hold the line, you fatherless sons of whores," a Lothian captain behind the Temple Guard shouted, lashing at his men with both words and the crop he used to whip his horse. "The Church has them mired, strike now before they turn their axes on you!"
’Mired’ was an apt descriptor of the situation that Ultrech found himself in. Their initial charge had shocked the temple guard with both its speed and the intensity of their collision, and the ’tusks’ of his formation bit deep into the Templar ranks. Now that the battle was joined, however, his men found the Temple Guard to be a harder nut to crack than they’d initially seemed.
While the axes of the Iron Tusk infantry made quick work of the human’s wood-and-leather shields, when they could get a good swing at them, the well trained soldiers of the Temple Guard quickly learned that their best hope of survival was to press as close to the boar demons as they could, standing shoulder to shoulder and thrusting with their swords while their wall of shields pressed directly up against the iron shields of their foes.
"Formation! Lower..."
Captain Ultrech’s voice cut off abruptly as the scene around him shifted. The world tipped sideways, and his vision was suddenly filled with the legs and feet of his littermates as his body crashed into the cobblestones below.
From his chest, a brilliant, luminous shaft of light glittered before fading away to reveal a hole the size of a human’s thumb, punched cleanly through the steel plate that should have protected his chest and splitting the mail and cloth beneath it. Blood began to flow from the wound, but Ultrech never noticed as his gaze was fixed on the stars high above him.
Countless stars moved and shifted, growing brighter and brighter as the twinkling motes of light transformed into a rain of radiant arrows, falling from the sky to pierce the bodies of Eldritch and human soldiers alike.
A Temple Guardsman fell limply across Ultrech’s body, blood and thicker things flowing from a hole in his brightly polished helm as the rain of light swept across the chaotic melee. Not every wound was lethal, and Ultrech’s ears were filled with pained grunts and squeals from his fellows as they raised their shields only to find their defenses useless against the arrows of light.
Perhaps the only blessing was that many arrows wasted themselves, falling on men who were already dead or embedding themselves harmlessly into the cobblestone plaza before fading away in a glittering mote of light.
"Fall Back!" Ultrech shouted with the last breath in his chest. "Fall back and save..." Save yourselves. Save your littermates. Save each other... save anyone you can. The final words he meant to say never passed his lips as the stars rained down from the sky and darkness filled his eyes.