City of Gab, a fortified jewel nestled within the Vale of Spires, had long served as House Zatack's mountain stronghold and key eastern command post. Its outer walls, built from dark basalt and reinforced with silver-threaded mana conductors, gleamed like a black tooth in the cold sun. From these towers, mana-cannons protruded like waiting fangs, ready to unleash their devastation.
To the north, over the snow-choked ridges, House Mitis advanced—not with desperation, but with unnerving purpose.
Fornos had sent the word ahead, a coded dispatch carried by relay crows embedded with fire-rune encryption. The final supply drop had reached the staging camp. All reserves green. All golems patched.
The army of Mitis, nearly 2000 strong, stood poised and freshly resupplied at a concealed ridge a few miles out. Their morale was not of a starving force—it was that of a predator well-fed.
Lord Gorvan Mitis stood at the front line, flanked by his elite command golem, Bastion-Wyrm, a heavily armored monstrosity built with interlocking plates and dual mana-furnaces in its chest. He stared through his spyglass at Gab's walls as low thunder rumbled.
Not from the sky.
From the mana-cannons.
Boom.
A blast erupted from the city's northeast tower, a beam of white-hot energy screaming across the snowfield and striking the slope fifty paces short of the Mitis formation.
"Probing fire," Gorvan muttered. "They're nervous."
"Want to make them more nervous?" one of his siege commanders asked, cocking an eyebrow.
Gorvan lowered the glass. "Light the field."
At his signal, Mitis siege golems moved into position—massive, slow creatures with turreted shoulders and broad, reinforced legs. From their frames, long mana-tubes extended, charged by swirling reservoirs embedded in their cores. Engineers rode on platforms behind them, adjusting dials and sigils like conductors orchestrating death.
The first volley came as a shimmer.
Then—
Boom. Boom. BOOM.
A thunderous triad of blue energy ripped through the air, crashing into Gab's outer bulwarks. Chunks of stone and glowing sigil-shards were sent cartwheeling into the air. Zatack's response was immediate. Mana-lances, aimed to burn through steel, surged from their towers.
The siege had begun.
While cannons roared and ice turned to steam under raw heat, Fornos watched from a quiet chamber, deep underground. His war was not waged with fire. It was fought with footsteps and maps.
The Ghost Roads—his secret underground network—continued operating without a trace. Runners and Architects confirmed the fourth backup path beneath the Vale had stayed untouched. Cache 7 had been successfully emptied and restocked.
More importantly, not a single Zatack scout had sniffed out a single path.
He leaned over a collection of intercepted Zatack reports. The scouts were in disarray.
"They must be using aerial drops."
"They're camouflaging merchant caravans as priests."
"I swear I saw them riding under the snow."
It amused him. They searched for logic. For surface paths. For physical routes to map and block.
But Fornos had weaponized history—routes abandoned since the last Relict attacks, old tunnels collapsed and secretly restored, old Dwarven passageways rewired with directional sigils. They weren't roads anymore. They were phantoms, stitched together by precision and memory.
"They're chasing fog," Fornos said quietly. "And we're already inside their lungs."
Back at Gab, the siege had entered its second day.
House Mitis had not only held their position but advanced into the kill zone—where most commanders would never dare to push. Mobile shield-golems, lumbering rectangular constructs, moved forward like walls on legs, absorbing mana fire with their rotating sigil-cages.
Behind them, smaller, more agile strike golems darted in, hurling explosive charges, spitting acid sprays, and pummeling guard towers with hydraulic fists.
At noon, a breach finally cracked open the western gate, when a dual-core battering golem—nicknamed Knock-Knock—burst through like a comet, shattering the enchantments lining the arch.
Gorvan rode in behind it with infantry, cutting through disoriented defenders.
The city fell before dusk.
In the quiet that followed, Mitis soldiers roamed the dark streets of Gab, securing what remained. Civilians had been evacuated earlier—Zatack had feared the siege might not hold, and in doing so, gave up a chance to use human shields.
Gorvan climbed to the top of the central tower, stepping over broken conduits and shattered glass to get a view of the entire valley. The air still sizzled faintly with mana residue. His commanders joined him, bloodied but intact.
"Two days," one said in disbelief. "I thought it would take a week at least."
"We moved like the gods were pushing us," another whispered.
Gorvan didn't correct them. He simply looked east.
"He's the reason," he said. "He made this possible. Every bolt we fired, every tank we filled, every golem patched—he made sure it was there. On time. No shortages. No rationing. The battle was over before it began."
Elsewhere, inside a cold tent in Zatack's forward command, a group of scouts huddled in frustration. Their maps were scattered with scribbled paths, circles of failure, reports denied by terrain.
"Gab's fallen," their captain said grimly. "And we still don't know how."
One of the younger scouts, eyes wild, slammed his hand on the table. "They're not using roads. They're using magic—ghosts. We've walked every valley, every pass. Nothing!"
"Then we go deeper," the captain replied. "We bring in the tunneling teams. We break rock if we have to. I don't care if they're walking underground with damn ghosts. We dig until we find them."
He paused.
"And when we do—we collapse everything they built."
But Fornos was already ten moves ahead.
He watched from another staging node, this one built inside the ribs of a collapsed iron giant—an ancient, rusted war golem from a forgotten war. A perfect disguise for a relay point.
He heard of the siege's end only hours later. Gab had fallen. Supplies were holding.
Still, he felt no pride. Only momentum. The war machine he had helped build was now in full motion. The blade was spinning.
And Zatack? They were still staring at shadows.