The walls of Cardella faced an endless roar from the monsters below.
And it was now the knights' and adventurers' turn to answer those roars.
Fire was their answer.
Buckets of dragon oil — thick, sticky, and incredibly flammable — were tipped over the parapets as it splattered across hides and feathers, coating beasts as they clawed at the walls.
And all it took was a single flaming arrow to turn the world below into an inferno and roars into screams.
Monsters rolled and thrashed while their burning bodies spread the blaze to their kin.
The flames ate indiscriminately, even hissing as they licked across the edges of Faris's ice.
Heat rolled up the walls in blistering waves.
And yet, through fire and frost, through steel and spell — they kept coming.
Shadows writhed against gold and red light as the fields before Cardella became a living furnace.
And above it all, the captains stood firm, steel in their hands, their eyes never leaving the horde.
The cycle became its own rhythm — arrows loosed, spells flung, oil poured, and bolts released.
Each squad took their turn, their rotations giving the barest fragments of respite to those beside them.
While…
Archers drew until their fingers bled, passing their bows down the line for fresh strings while their comrades handed them new ones.
Mages staggered, leaning on staves as new chants began, circles rotating in and out as mana and the air in their lungs both ran thin.
The air itself stank of sweat, smoke, and burning flesh.
But the horde followed no such order.
Their barrage never waned — boulders hurled high and hammering down, fireballs trailing smoke like meteors, crude javelins and poisonous spit hissed onto the ward.
Faris's frozen ramparts began shattering under heat and impact.
As ice fell away, the warding shield of Liora had to stretch downward, spreading itself thinner, as it began trembling under the strain.
The shimmering barrier vibrated now with every strike, its surface warping as if the ward was glass struck from every angle.
Most blows scattered harmlessly, but no longer all.
Some broke through — flaming shards, jagged stone, or twisted spears.
And each one that slipped past claimed lives.
Knights caught within the gaps were either shredded, charred black or broken apart by impact, while archers toppled backwards from the battlement as their screams joined the chorus below.
The captains and the adventurers answered when the ward faltered, leaping to intercept the worst.
Astoria herself carved through a hurled fireball midair, scattering it into sparks and flames with her twin blades.
Serenya called down barriers of golden light to catch a troll's thrown boulder before it could smash into the wall.
Faris himself braced against the stones with shield raised high, while his halberd swept out arcs of frost to quench flaming projectiles.
But even they could not stop it all.
The wall ran with blood as surely as the fields while the hours crawled forward.
The ground beyond the gates was no longer ground at all.
It was a carpet of corpses with layers upon layers so thick that the earth beneath had vanished.
The dead formed hills that twitched as the living still scrambled across them.
Though the walls fared little better.
Boulders jutted from their flanks like arrows in a dying beast.
Its sections caved inward while the masonry fractured with black scorch marks running in veins across the stone.
Ballista crews lay crushed under the very engines they manned, while shattered bolts lay splinters.
Knights sagged against the merlons, gasping and trembling as their hands blistered from bowstrings and magic abuse alike.
Even the captains glistened with sweat, their breath dragging harshly in and out as their chest heaved.
But the monsters bled, too.
The endless tide had thinned.
The horde no longer pressed shoulder-to-shoulder in a tsunami of flesh.
Gaps showed in their lines while the corpses clogged their charge, forcing the living to scramble and climb over their own dead.
Their roars had dulled, no longer a singular voice of fury but scattered bursts.
And yet… they still came.
Mana potions began running dry.
Mages clutched at near empty belts with staves shaking as they scraped the bottom of their reserves.
What spells they cast now were both thinner and weaker - ragged things barely held together.
Even the adventurers—those who had come to prove their worth—were little more than husks with embers left to burn.
Only the priests still stood strong.
For the knights and clergy of Liora did not draw from mana at all.
Their strength did not sit in a bottle or reserves, simply waiting to be spent.
It came from faith.
Through prayer, through devotion, they borrowed slivers of their goddess's infinite light.
So long as their faith remained unbroken, so too did their strength.
But the others… they were mortals tethered to a finite well.
And that well had run nearly dry.
Medics dashed between the fallen, pouring precious healing draughts into split lips, while the healers themselves pressed their pale trembling hands over wounds and forced the last of their magic outward while the smell of herbs and the copper tang of blood mixed on the night wind.
Supplies were thinning, their hands were trembling—but still, the horde kept coming.
Until eventually, it didn't.
The tide broke.
The endless press of bodies faltered, and then stilled.
Corpses littered the ground so thick the earth itself seemed to have vanished beneath them.
And when no new wave rose from the forest, silence fell over the walls.
At first, none trusted it.
But then one knight lifted his sword to the moonlight, letting loose a cry so raw it split the night.
-HAAA!
Another joined him.
-HAAAA!
Then another.
Soon, cheers thundered from the battlements, rising like a festival had broken loose.
Men clapped each other on the shoulders, their voices hoarse with joy, their rivalries forgotten.
Hands raised skyward as their praise shot to the heavens.
Even the captains cracked.
Astoria turned to Faris, lips twitching into a rare smile.
And he answered with one of his own, weary but warm.
Serenya clasped her hands and bowed her head as words of thanks spilled upward to Liora's endless grace.
One knight slid down against the battlement, putting to rest the bow in his hand, too tired to stand but unwilling to stop grinning.
While the cheers still rolled along the walls like a festival.
But Astoria's ears caught something else.
A rhythm.
Not the roar of celebration, or the last shrieks of dying beasts.
But a sound beneath it all — a gut churning cadence of marching.
Thousands of feet striking the earth out of sync in a chaotic thunder that made her blood run cold.
Just as her lips parted to shout—
—the night split open.
For a heartbeat, it felt like dawn had come early.
A roar of flame rose from the forest, not the scattered fireballs of before but a sun birthed in the dark.
That ball of fire tore through the sky at impossible speed, painting every corpse below in searing orange light.
Serenya's prayer choked off into silence.
While Astoria's eyes widened as she screamed, "Brace for impact!!"
And then…
-BOOOOM!
Stone and steel erupted into dust and shrapnel as the western gate was torn asunder.
The blast rattled the entire wall, toppling men from the parapets as their victory cries shredded into screams.
Where once the barricade stood, there was now only a gaping wound—a straight path into the heart of Cardella.
And through the haze of dust and fire, shadows stirred again.
Not the thin ranks of the broken horde—but a wall of wings blotting in front of the moon.
A patch of black spread across the horizon, growing denser and louder.
Harpies, wyverns, twisted beasts of the sky—all mutated, all wrong—rose like a storm.
And from the forest's shadow stepped a figure.
Skin green as rot, his tusks jutted from a jaw clenched in a cruel grin.
His frame was carved muscle, draped in a robe blackened by old blood.
And beneath him padded a drake - its scales jagged obsidian with breath steaming molten fire.
The Orc Shaman.
In his hand glowed a familiar staff, crackling with runes etched into its length like scars.
"…That staff," Faris whispered with eyes refusing to believe, "Is that… Lyra's?"
Astoria's blood froze.
While Serenya's mace shook in her grip as her teeth clenched until blood welled on her lip.
"They killed her," she spat, voice crackling in fury. "They killed Lyra!"
Before Astoria could command, the forest itself shifted.
The forest was not done.
It heaved, before the massive trees bent sideways before breaking.
And from its depths the true horde poured.
Trolls larger than towers with limbs warped into grotesque proportions.
Goblins bloated and jagged with eyes burning wrong colors.
Harpies twisted into shrieking banshees of talon and fang.
Every creature that had once been flesh and blood was now something more—something broken.
Not orcs or trolls or goblins.
Monsters.
Mutated children of the Cataclysm with bodies remade by its corruption, convulsing in endless hunger.
While the western gate lay in pieces, the priests straining to hold the thined ward, and the defenders running on fumes…
And so, beneath the full moon, the siege of Cardella truly began