Qapla – 1st Harvestwatch 1383
Great Tifan Wall, Trifectorate Confederation
"Beyond Duskmere's eastern horizon lies a hunger without number – the chittering tides of chitin, fang, and claw that the gods abandoned when they tired of forging nightmares. Against that unending night rises the Great Tifan Wall: three sheer curtains of rune-bound granite and star-forged iron, one hundred feet to a tier, each stone hand etched by archmagisters, each parapet bristling with thunder-cannon and balefire engines. It is less a bulwark than a vow hammered into the world: here the monsters break, or the wall itself must."
- High General Aveline in a speech to Granitehold Troops
My sword should not have been rising, yet habit dragged it up one more time. The edge screeched across chitin, splits the armor-plate belly of the spider perched on the merlon beside me, and I felt its weight slump against my pauldron before gravity claims it.
Black ichor spattered my visor, hissing where it touched the rune-etched steel. I tasted iron at the back of my throat—whether from the blood or the three days without enough water to wash the copper film from my tongue, I could not tell.
I braced my boots against flagstones polished by ten thousand desperate footsteps and leaned forward over the gunwale of the second terrace. Below, the first tier—our proud outer bastion, one hundred feet of master-mason craft and four hundred years of enchantment—has become an uneven island of rubble.
It crawled. Not metaphorically, not in the way a city bustles. It crawled: waves of obsidian ants the length of hounds, carapaces lacquered in war paint of green acid; silver-spined centipedes wider than wine casks; and spiders, endless spiders, each glossy abdomen webbed with the reflections of our burning cannon emplacements.
Even the gaps between stones writhed, filled by termites the size of daggers gnawing at mortar that once carried the sigils of eight archmagisters.
Farther out, the plain—if I could still call it that—seethes like a cauldron at full boil. Swarms of duskmoths eclipse the dawn, their whispering wings crackling with static that swelled into curtain lightning. When the brighter bolts lanced downward, they illuminate the rocs: titanic birds with plumage black as a moonless midwinter sea, each feather tipped in living sparks.
They dove in flocks of seven, talons carrying the charge of thunderstorms, smashing beasts and fortifications alike, heedless of which side bled. Two hours ago, I watched a roc seize an entire culverian cannon, the crew still clinging to their load-sled, and hurl it through the western bastion. The ringing in my ears had not faded.
Seventy hours. I counted them —numbness, then nausea, then that hour of false clarity when everything tastes of ozone, then the slow grind into stupor again. Spells had flown thicker than gnats in summer. Our evokers unspooled so much lightning that the dribbling molten metal down the drainage scuppers like tears.
The auto-fire launchers on the parapet behind me detonated continuously until their brass cradles glowed white and the tinder spirits inside were screaming, a sound audible only to mages and exhausted men who imagine too vividly. The engineers finally quenched them with summoned tidewater; the steam rose in columns that made false clouds, and the rocs mistook them for storm heads and dove. That bought us—what? —maybe ten minutes.
Orcs, goblins, kobolds—standing shoulder to shoulder with aetherlings whose skin flares with the elements that birthed them, half-giants who tower above all those around them, and changelings who flicker between bodies, indistinguishable now beneath identical soot and the pale crust of dried potion salts. In another life I would have spoken of treaties and old grudges; here on the wall we are simply the weary, and the weary shared everything: water skins, spells, curses, the crushing certainty that we will not see tomorrow's sun.
I rushed past a goblin sapper who had once bragged that nothing scared him save an empty wallet; he pressed a glowing rune charge against a breached portcullis framework, hands shaking. His fingertips were already blistering, and yet he held until the sigil flared, sealing the gap in a burst of molten force-glass. He laughed—a brittle, too-high sound—and then slumped, spent. Two medics dragged him toward the medical bunkers that ran out of thread and morphic salves the day before.
Below, I watched the ants pile upon each other, making living ramps. Fire poured from murder-holes, slick ribbons of alchemical naptha that should have charred them to husks, but the creatures have learned—the uppermost ants curled their bodies, a sacrificial crust, letting the hidden ranks scuttle up the mound unharmed. They crested the lip of the collapsed first tier and spilled onto the narrow service stair that wound up to us. The stair's runes had pulsed with repulsion for sixty-nine hours; now they guttered like dying hearth embers. I felt the throb of the wardstone beneath my boots lose another heartbeat.
A horn blared: three descending notes. Brace—flyers incoming. I tilted my head back, neck joints popping. A squadron of lightning rocs eclipsed the high sun, silhouettes rimmed in blue fire. Their shrieks slashed through the sky, and my teeth ached with sympathetic resonance.
Ballista's tracked them; nets snapped outward towards the bombardment enchantments set to harden the links into iron mid-flight. The birds sheared through half the nets—thunder sheeting from their wings vaporized chain links—but one roc was entangled. It fell like a demolished tower and struck the ants in a splash of crackling feathers. For a heartbeat the siege engine of insect meat stalled under the sudden corpse. Then mandibles carved a tunnel straight through the avian ruin, and the tide resumed.
I blinked grit from my and turned back to make my way through the hellscape. It felt as though I am underwater; each motion seemed measured in years. To my left, a kobold artillerist cranked the last functioning sun cannon—a marvel that drank solar light and spat it out as searing beams. Its focusing lens was crazed with fractures; each shot might be its last. She twisted the elevation wheel, tracking an oncoming roc. The beam speared upward, pure white, through breastbone and emerged blazing out the creature's back.
The roc plummeted, but the beam's feedback shattered the lens in a bloom of molten crystal. The recoil hurled the kobold backward; her tail whipped the stone as she landed. She did not rise. The cannon drooped like a wilted flowerwith petals of smoke drifting into the angry sky.
"Hold the line!" someone bellowed—an orcish captain, voice ragged yet still forged of iron. I staggered to his side. Together we rammed a barricade of collapsed merlons across the mouth of the winding stairs to the third bastion. The first wave of ants slammed into it, their combined weight a tide that flexed granite.
My arms trembled as I braced the shield wall; I can feel the pulse of mandibles hammering the other side, each strike a nail driven into my eardrums. A potion of giant's strength would have helped, but the alchemists brewed the last draught an hour earlier and the cauldrons cracked from overheating.
The orc shouted something—perhaps a prayer?—and jammed a powder-keg the size of a beer stein between loose stones. He flicked a rune-match. Sparks kissed the fuse. We hurled ourselves backward as the barricade vanished in a roar of pulverized rock and chitin shards. The stairs were clear—for a breath. Then the ants behind clambered over the corpse-heap of their kin, undeterred.
Farther along the eastern landing, I saw the Spellweaver Choir—thirty kobolds linked by silver circlets—attempt a grand binding. Ropes of pale blue sigils arced skyward, weaving a lattice meant to imprison the entire battlefield in stasis. It was both beautiful and futile. Before the final line sealed, a flock of rocs crashes through, talons shattering sigil-nodes, scattering kobold bodies like torn parchment. The lattice collapsed in a rain of broken runes that flickered out before touching stone.
There were moments, in that stretched rubber band of time, when I forget sound existed. One descended then: a hush after detonation. In that calm I heard the ants' mandibles clicking, a soft castanet rhythm. Had I not known what was behind the noise, it might almost have lulled me to Vantara's embrace—until the ground beneath my boots bucked.
A centipede—no, the centipede, the one we had whispered about for thirty hours—burrowed through the wall's facing, and surfaced upon the second terrace. It was seventy feet long, plates glowing with stolen magefire, and its arrival tore open a chasm in our line. I lurched sideways, watching three orcs tumble screaming into the fresh void. The centipede reared, spitting gouts of acid that hissed across stone like sleet on frozen ponds. Parapet edges sagged where the acid bit too deep; one section sheared away, cartwheeling into the ant ocean.
My vision narrowed to a tunnel: if the monster carved unchecked, it would cleave the terrace in half. I sprinted—if my—toward the last reserve of alchemical frost bombs. Two goblins were already there, fitting the bombs into wire slings. They nod; no words were worth the breath. We whirled the bombs overhead and released.
Frost blossomed upon impact, a sudden field of hoarfrost that creeps up the centipede's plated legs. Segments locked, crackith a sound like glaciers calving. The beast writhed, shattering half the frozen armor, but could not free the front quarter of its body and toppled sideways. It crushed thirty feet of battlement as it fell—yet blocked the gap it had made. For a heartbeat I wanted to cheer, but my throat would not obey.
An officer—orcish, badge smeared past recognition—stumbled along the line, distributing the last of the stimulant draughts. I downed mine. The world lurched from sepia to painful clarity.
Every torch flame became a dagger of gold. I could count the individual hairs on the antennae of the ants still pouring up the stairs. I tasted lightning on the wind as another flock of birds wheeled overhead. The draught would buy me perhaps an hour before my heart imploded from exhaustion. That hour will have to suffice.
A roar rose from below, echoed by a tremor through the stone. The plain itself lifted—not earth, but a mound of insects locked together in gargantuan synergy. They had built a living ramp twice the height of the first wall's ruin, and upon its crest marched beetles the size of siege towers.
Their shells were carved in sigils that mocked our own: cruel parodies lit from within by stolen witchlight. They advanceed toward the second wall's face, mandibles opening like portcullises. From each maw spilled a torrent of smaller creatures, a dark river that splashed against our runic stones, searching for purchase.
The wardstone beneath me gave a shuddering cough—and the runes along the parapet guttered out, one after another. The light died in a ripple, leaving only natural day, achingly dim compared to the glow that had become our second sun. I felt a sudden cold; the wall seemed to exhale as its lifeblood drains.
Shouts converged into one vast alarm. Engineers raced to dump quicksilver into the auxiliary sigil grooves, but they were seconds too late. With the wards extinguished, the living ramp struck. Beetles rammed the stone. Cracks spider-webbed outward - fitting, since real spiders were already swarming the joints, injecting silk that anchored new footholds.
The terrace groaned. My knees buckled as the floor shifts half a foot downward. Somewhere to my right the great sun cannon—dead since the kobold's shot—slid off its mount and vanished into the ant tide. I backpedaled, but the movement was sluggish, as if the very air has thickened.
Another impact. Stones leapt upward then fell, scattering like dice. The ramparts between two towers sheared off completely. Troops tumbled in a wriggling avalanche into the enemy mass; spellfire flared where mages attempted mid-fall retaliation, but then insect forms closed over the glows, snuffing them.
I reached the inner stairs to the third tier—only twenty yards away—but a wave of ants surged over the lip ahead of me, cutting the path. Their mandibles dripped acid; steam curling from the gouges where it lands. I wheel left instead, sprinting toward Tower Nine, hoping its interior lift still functions. I sprinted across the rubble that the second bastion was becoming and looked up.
Tower Nine was already lost. The doors hung twisted, and inside I glimpsde rocs tearing at support beams, lightning flashing between iron reinforcements until the wood burst aflame. A gust of charred feathers whipped past me, scorching my cheek.
The terrace bucked a final time. With a sound like the rending of the world's crust, a whole hundred-foot section collapsed. I dropped, arms over head, as masonry exploded upward then fell into the dark. Through the new canyon I saw the first tier's wreckage far below, boiling with victory cries of chitin and claw.
Dust blanketed everything. My ears rang. I pushed up onto blistered palms and looked across the ruin: the second tier lay in jagged fragments, no longer a wall but a graveyard of its own defenders; I was alive by the gods' grace alone. Monsters already scrambled over the debris, pouring toward what remains of the final parapet above.
Somewhere overhead a horn attempted one clear note—fall back, final defense—but it wavered, broken, and the wind swallowed the rest.
The second tier had fallen.
The fall of Tower Nine had killed both friend and foe. Just enough for me to move past scattered pools of blood and ash to another staircase to the Third Bastion. The climb to the crown of the wall felt a dream half-remembered and all in greys.
My gauntlets slipped on rails slick with frost-bomb residue; every step murdered my hips. I passed knots of warriors all headed up—faces I knew only as mud-masked eyes—dragging the wounded toward lifts that no longer moved. I pressed a waterskin to my lips and swallow nothing but air; it had emptied three hours earlier, yet I made the gesture because ritual is easier than admitting there was no water left.
At last, I hauled myself onto the final parapet: fifty feet wide, broad as palace avenues and strewn with the husks of spell-batteries. Dawn smoldered beyond the eastern horizon, a thin orange rind cracking over cloud banks. The air up there was sharp and strangely clean, as though the height had left the stench of blood below.
For one heartbeat the frontline seemed—quiet. The storm-birds wheeled but did not scream; the insect tide paused in uncanny silence, antennae lifted as if scenting some new god. I did not understand until I looked directly into the sunrise.
There, framed by newborn light, hovered a silhouette. Feminine, yes—slender limbs, the curve of hips, hair streaming like comet tails. She is unclothed but more than naked: skin forged of morning itself, bronze where the sun touched, night-shadow where it did not.
Wings unfurled from her shoulders—membranous, vast, featherless—each vein catching the dawn so fiercely they blazed transparent gold. Her left hand ended in talons of molten glass; in her right she cradled a sphere no larger than a child's marble. It burned white-hot, miniature sunfire held gentle as a pearl.
I was too tired to pray, yet some reflex bent my knees. Around me every soldier—orc, goblin, kobold—dropped into a stunned crouch or stood petrified, mouths open. Even the rocs faltered mid-wheel, thunder lost from their pinions.
She raised the clawed hand. The sun-pearl brightened, collapsing shadows until only she and the wall existed. Then she flicked it.
The world winked.
A line of light lanced through air faster than thought. It met the parapet three towers to my right—and erased it. No explosion, no roar: stone, runes, cannonry, men, monsters—three hundred feet of history—flashed into incandescent vapor. The shockwave followed a breath later, too immense for sound. It was a fist of force that lifted me, all of us, from the deck.
I hit the stones twenty yards back. Breastplate dented in, helm ringing like a struck bell. Silence devoured everything but that ringing, a crystalline note that seemed to originate inside my skull. I tasted blood and stone dust. My vision was a white glare rimmed with black petals.
When sight crawled back, dawn was brighter—its source a chasm where tower and parapet had stood. Edges of melted granite glowed cherry-red, weeping rivulets of slag that hissed into the tiers below. Beyond the gap I could see clean through the wall: a curtain parted onto distant hills where armies still gathered. The insect horde nearest the breach lay strewn like dropped grain—legs curling, wings twitching. Even the rocs tumbled, feathers on fire, thunder stolen. The silhouette in the sky watched, head cocked, as though curious whether insects or mortals flinched more prettily.
Something ancient in my marrow whispered run.
I obeyed, staggered, slipped on a carpet of shattered sigils, and sprinted toward the inner ramp that leads to the evacuation vault. A lantern guttering in its cage showed the sigil for MEDICA; I followed it because it is forward and not into the abyss.
Stone trembled beneath every footfall. Somewhere behind me, the angel of dawn, for what else could she be? drifts nearer; I feel heat on my back like midsummer noon though the sun is barely risen. Rubble slid from tower rims, raining sparks.
At the mouth of the teleportarium corridor stood an orcish matron. Once she might have been grand: tusks capped in brass, braids threaded with unit beads. Now she leaned on a length of rusted piping lashed to her thigh stump, her other arm ending at the elbow. Lightning burns lace one cheek; fresh blood matted her tunic. Yet her single remaining eye ruled the hallway brighter than any rune.
"Inside, cubs!" she barked, voice raw smoke. Goblin medics hustled stretchers past her, kobold runners shepherding shell-shocked soldiers. She shoulders each through as if whole-bodied. When I approached, she planted the pipe, and barred my path.
"Can you walk without falling?"
"Yes." A lie, but she saw enough truth. She nodded, and hauled me by collar through the arch.
The teleport chamber was a vault of polished obsidian shot through with copper inlay—once serene, now smeared in blood prints. Concentric circles of rune-metal form a dais wide as a ballroom; bodies packed it shoulder-to-shoulder, wounded braced by hale. A crystal keystone hovered above the central focus well, flickering—its glow weak, drainage lines cracked. Only one, maybe two, jumps remained before burnout.
The matron limped to the control plinth. From a pouch at her belt she drew an arcane stone: multifaceted, whisky-amber, throbbing with stored sigils. One crystal alone could purchase an entire town. Her hands shake from exhaustion and blood loss, but her eye was steady.
"Pack tighter!" she shouted. "You let daylight between you, you lose a leg in the bleed!" We obeyed, crushing together. Someone's pauldrons bit my ribs; I looped an arm around a human sergeant whose bandaged eyes leaked through linen.
Outside, the wall convulsed. Dust billowed down the hall; torches died. A low, grinding moan unspooled through the masonry—a colossus realizing its spine was broken.
The matron placed the stone upon the plinth. Copper lines raced alight, crawling toward the keystone like sunrise through canyon cracks. She spared us a final glance: fierce pride, and weary resignation older than empires.
Then she slams her makeshift crutch onto the activation rune.
The world folded. Light became spearpoints, sound a reversed thunderclap. Stomach and heart traded places. For a breath I was nowhere—only a bead of will strung on a wire of pain.
When reality snapped back, cold air filled my lungs—pine-scented,amp. I collapsed onto blood-soaked cobblestones beneath a sky untouched by smoke. The others spilled around me, groaning, counting limbs. The keystone above the dais flickered once, then shattered into cooling embers. The portal circle dimmed forever.
Of the orcish matron there was no sign.
Behind us, on the far horizon, the great wall glowed faintly red—like a candle guttering its last. A second silent flash silhouetted the mountains; the wall's crown crumbled inward, and dawn was swallowed by rising dust.
I lay on my back, tracing the shockwave's ripples across the clouds, and realized the ringing in my ears had at last faded. What replaced it is worse: a hush vast as the distance between here and ruin, filled only by the question of who that sunrise angel had been, and how we were meant to stand against something that could erase fortresses with a gesture.
But the matron's charge still echoed in my skull—see them paid—and exhausted or not,