The demigod army never reached the walls.
It marched out of the northern haze at dawn in ten dense columns, ten thousand strong, every soldier tall and golden and terrible to look at. They were Level Five equivalents, bred in the dark by gods and raised for a single purpose, and they crossed the open plain with the bright, calm certainty of beings who had been told all their lives that they were chosen. Banners of eight pantheons snapped above them. War horns rolled across the grass.
Then the first rank crossed a line of pale wooden stakes that no one in the column had thought to question.
The plain lit up from underneath.
Freya's rune circles had been buried a week deep, hidden under sod and ash, and every one of them woke at once. Pillars of white fire climbed out of the earth in long, even rows, splitting the columns into ragged pieces. Soldiers who had been marching shoulder to shoulder were suddenly alone in a field of burning light, shouting for orders no one could hear.
On the northern wall, Riveria raised one hand.
"First volley."
Four hundred mages answered as one voice. The sky filled with chanting, then with fire, then with lightning and ice and wind sharpened to blades. The spells did not fall all at once. Each wave was timed so that the next began as the last landed, and the rhythm of it was merciless, a drumbeat of destruction that never once paused for breath. Gareth held the gate line with a wall of shields. Tiona and Tione tore out of the side postern at the head of their sortie and cut into the broken flank like two thrown axes.
Kali's contribution was quieter and worse. Her people had spent four nights digging trenches along the flanks of the plain, roofed with thin skins of turf and slick with tar and spikes. The demigods who tried to swing wide around the burning center found them with their feet.
Then the north gate opened, and the shadows came out.
There were five hundred of them. They walked. Humans in black plate with empty helms, minotaurs with horns tipped in dark flame, lizardmen, hellhounds, trolls, soldiers who had once been something else and were now only loyal. They carried no banners and made no cry. A demigod swung a spear and put it through the neck of the nearest, and the shadow dissolved into smoke and rose again from the ground behind him, already swinging. He killed it three times. It rose three times. It never looked afraid. It never looked anything at all.
By the second hour, the demigods had stopped counting their dead.
They were not cowards. Many of them fought on, bleeding, with the stubborn rage of the young. But every one of them had looked up, at some point in that long morning, at the vast black rectangle that hung in the sky above the battlefield. Their gods were in there. Their fathers and mothers, who had promised them a throne of Heaven and the end of Orario. It had been silent for hours.
At the third hour, it began to tremble.
A thin line of light ran along one edge. Then another. The soldiers on the walls felt the air pressure change, a low, wrong hum that rattled the stones under their boots. The shadow domain was an extension of Damien himself, and something had just gone through him. The black box gave a long, shuddering groan, and burst like a bubble.
The dead came down like rain.
They fell out of the broken sky from every height, tumbling and turning, and the battlefield went silent beneath them. A man in lacquered red armor hit the plain face first, a bow splinter jutting from his skull. A woman in a gown of black feathers drifted down with her eyes closed and her throat neatly opened, almost peaceful. A figure in an owl mask came apart in the air, a hundred snapped bones scattering across the grass. A man with a polished black disk on his chest, the disk now burnt to ash. A raw, red, skinless thing that had once worn a god's name. Then a falcon-headed body, tall and golden gone gray, with the dark bruised prints of a single hand around its neck.
A young demigod near the center of the field dropped her sword. She was looking at the red-armored corpse and the blood on its face. She had known that face. She had been raised in its shadow.
"Father?" she said.
Then the bodies began to burn.
One by one they flared with divine light, each one a different color. Bronze for the archer. Deep crimson for the woman in feathers. Gold bleeding to white for the falcon. Green and violet, silver and black, a sky full of funeral fires as every god who had died in the dark announced himself at once to the world. Twenty lights. Then twenty-two. The whole plain turned the colors of a dying rainbow.
The army broke.
It did not retreat. It ran. Weapons clattered into the grass, banners fell in the mud, and ten thousand children of gods fled north through the fire with their faces turned away from the sky. The shadows pursued them to the horizon without hurry and without mercy.
On the northern wall, no one cheered at first. They only stared.
Then the old sergeant who had wept when Poseidon fell filled his lungs and roared, and the whole wall followed him, a sound so vast that the stones themselves seemed to shake with it.
Freya did not join them. She stood at the battlements with her golden eyes narrowed and her arms folded, counting the lights in the sky.
"Twenty-two," she said quietly.
Loki glanced at her. "That is good."
"It is not enough. Where are Zeus and Odin?" Freya's gaze swept the plain. "There was no light for either of them."
"And where is Damien?"
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