< . . . . . >
The sand rafts sped down the shifting, sun-bleached slopes, their massive sails gorged on the howling desert winds of the Mandavorth wilderness. Ahead, rising from the haze like a jagged crown, the capital city loomed. King Igresi's monolithic palace pierced the sky, a distant target for the tens of thousands of Sarvuski soldiers roaring across the dunes.
At the vanguard of the assault rode the lead command raft. Ivor's lower face was masked tightly by a cloth wrap, his striking hazel on the glorious city ahead. They advanced in a tightly locked, interlocking formation;
the most ferocious, heavily armored shock-troops holding the line at the front, while the long-range artillery rafts guarded the rear.
High above on the battlements, the city wall soldiers and the arcavels stood watch, completely oblivious to the Sarvski tearing through the horizon.
When the Sarvski drew within a kilometer of the towering walls, Ivor raised a single hand. With a sharp, practiced twist of his index and ring finger, he gave the command.
Instantly, hundreds of sand-bullets erupted into the sky, launched from the heavy sand-arcavels of the Sarvski fleet. They activated their velori in perfect unison. A deadly storm of grit and force rained down upon the city, but before the projectiles could impact, the city's massive velori barrier spread out, absorbing the brunt of the assault in a blinding flash of energy.
However, Ivor had anticipated this exact defense.
In the brief micro-second that the barrier deactivated to allow the city's own arcavels to return fire, Ivor's troops unleashed a devastating second barrage. This time, the hundreds of sand-bullets breached the perimeter unchecked, tearing through the unsuspecting ranks on the wall and claiming the lives of the defenders.
Blaring alarms instantly pierced the air, throwing the entire city into a panic. Desperate for order, the garrison reinforcements rushed to the battlements, led by their towering general, Cald'r Ora. The bulky commander stood like a mountain upon the walls, clad in heavy, gleaming silver armor, his massive hands gripping a broadsword.
"My lord, phase one of the plan has been successfully completed," the pilot, Savis, reported, stepping back after receiving a coded signal flashing from the west side of the wall.
Ivor nodded, a cold smile hidden beneath his mask. "Commence Phase two."
The co-pilot of the raft moved with fluid precision, fitting a thick glass lens into an elevated hole. Channeling his velori, he ignited a concentrated beam of light, manipulating the lens to reflect the beacon directly toward their hidden strike team's location.
As the command raft neared the outer defenses, Ivor stepped forward, balancing flawlessly on the prow of the speeding, roaring vehicle. He reached behind his back, drawing his twin kar sabers with a hiss of steel, dropped into a low fighting stance, and vaulted from the deck directly into the fray below.
"Sarvski, attack!"
The six elite guards stationed at the heavy gates of Aberon searched the luggage of the foreign and local travelers flowing in and out of the city. Aetheris guided her horse forward slowly, patiently waiting her turn in the swelling crowd, cast down by the heavy iron token of her master resting in her pocket. When she finally reached the front, she hid her anxiety and flashed a warm smile at the inspecting soldier, who softened and returned the gesture.
After thoroughly checking her gear and inspecting her horses, the guard stepped back, his expression turning grave. He lowered his voice, offering caution.
"Be careful, Aetheris. We've gotten word of a brutal killer loose in the city. I wouldn't want a childhood friend becoming a victim. Especially with you traveling on your master's business alone."
Aetheris let out a confident grin, masking her resentment. "Come on, Nolan. You know me better than that. Whoever that guy is, I'll be able to handle him."
Nolan chuckled softly, shaking his head. "Yeah, I can trust you on that. Goodbye, old friend!" he called out after her as she guided her mounts through the threshold and sped out of the city gates.
The two horses galloped hard, leaving the stone walls of Aberon behind them as they closed a silent chapter of her life.
A few kilometers away, where the road was swallowed by the dense canopy of the Colewood Forest, Aetheris pulled on the reins and brought the horses to a halt. Stepping down into the cool shade of a massive, ancient tree, she prepared to rest, taking a moment to breathe in the tranquil scenery.
Suddenly, the shadows at her feet began to twist. A dark figure rippled out from her own reflection, the silhouette coalescing into physical matter. Arinthal's form slowly materialized from the darkness, though Aetheris barely spared him a glance, utterly unfazed by the display.
"That's a really useful ability you have there," he mused, stepping out of the shade and casually brushing the phantom dust from his dark clothes.
"Yeah, I learnt it from my mother," she replied coolly, her gaze remaining fixed on the distant roar of the waterfalls cascading above them. After a heavy silence, she added, "Why did your own kin want to kill you?"
Arinthal frowned slightly, his playful demeanor vanishing. "How did you know that?"
"I investigated the ship after you collapsed," she explained, turning her eyes to meet his. "It seems that every single person on board was explicitly ordered to take your life that night. Why?"
"I cannot tell you that, Aetheris," Arinthal sighed, closing his eyes.
"Well, I can't travel with you then. You're on your own now," she said quietly. She swung herself back up onto her horse and was about to snap the reins when Arinthal spoke, his voice dropping to a chilling, dead-serious register.
"A few months from now, millions of elven troops will march into Nadindel and burn the city to the ground. Not only that, any soul who opposes them will be slaughtered or enslaved. The whole of Tamerlein won't be spared."
Aetheris froze, then jumped down from her horse immediately. A look of profound shock washed over her face, an expression Arinthal couldn't help but quietly relish.
"You want to save Nadindel? You're a brave one, but that's absolute foolishness," she breathed, sighing heavily as she shook her head.
"Why?"he asked
"Well, try finding Nadindel first, and then you'll actually have a shot at saving the Tamerlein continent."
"What do you mean?" he demanded.
"The correct route to Nadindel changes every sixteen days," Aetheris explained, pausing to search his face for any signs of despair. Finding none, he continued, "Each road can only be seen on a specialized map. Only the highest-ranking officials and the rulers of every nation possess them. It's a fiercely guarded secret you'll have to uncover."
Arinthal's eyes suddenly burned with a terrifying, absolute hatred. "Who said I want to save Nadindel, Aetheris, you idiot? I want to burn it to the ground myself, tear the flesh from every local, and feed them to the piranhas and starving dogs."
Aetheris held his gaze, unblinking against the sheer venom of his words. She saw her opportunity. "Fine then. I'll help you track down those maps and get to Nadindel... if you free me from my master when this is over."
"Deal."
"Great. He's in the next kingdom," she said, pointing toward the roaring cascade of water ahead. "We start by using the teleportation gate right over there to cross the border."
Arinthal followed her gesture and noticed a faintly glowing, ethereal spiral etched into the stone deep within the cave behind the rushing fall of water. Beyond it lay a hidden passage carved from massive boulders, leading straight to the portal's teleportation gate.
< . . . . . >
The deafening, resonant clash of steel rang out across the vast plains of Avoth, stretching out before the capital city of Mandavorth. hit-and-run tactics turned into a chaotic melee. The Sarvski raiders were dismantling the city guard with merciless efficiency, capitalizing on the chaos while the capital's main reinforcements were still desperately scrambling to the front.
Cald'r Ora, the towering general of the wall, leapt from the battlements. He drew his massive, heavy blade through the air, aiming a devastating cleave directly at Ivor, who had just hit the ground from his raft.
Ivor sidestepped the plummeting blade by a mere hair's breadth, the wind of the strike whipping his cloak. As the massive sword embedded itself deep into the earth, Ivor calmly leaned his weight against the hilt, gesturing with a mocking, casual hand for Cald'r to try again.
Roaring with fury, the general channeled his velori, using an explosive burst of energy to tear his grip free and leap backward onto the lower wall to gain high ground. Before his boots even settled, he conjured massive, jagged boulders out of the earth and hurled them downward.
Ivor stood completely nonchalant, watching the incoming barrage. The boulders suddenly detonated mid-air under a counter-surge of force, dispersing into a blinding, choking cloud of dust that swallowed the immediate area.
Within the screen, the old general used his velori connection to violently recall his broadsword from where it was stuck in the ground. The weapon ripped through the dust cloud back into his hands. Harnessing pure, brute force, Cald'r swung the weapon in a violent arc, creating a sudden, rushing vacuum of air that cleared a pocket of visibility in the middle of the dust storm.
"General, whoever stands between me and killing Igresi will die. And I mean it," Ivor's voice hissed, sounding like a phantom, silent whisper directly in Cald'r's ears.
Suddenly, a tempest of long, razor-sharp spikes of sand rained down from the heavens. The barrage threw the general off balance, but he reacted instantly, summoning his velori to forge a dense, protective dome of solid rock.
"Terra Firma!" Cald'r roared.
The earth shield erupted outward, transforming into a massive, complex spike formation that tore through the battlefield over a wide radius. The jagged earthen spires pierced through a young Sarvuski soldier nearby, killing him instantly. If Ivor hadn't swiftly manipulated his sand magic to
push the rest of his vanguard out of the zone, dozens more would have been impaled.
Ivor looked down at his fallen comrade. Slowly, his pupils shifted color, igniting into a brilliant, glowing golden hue. Whipping currents of razor-sand began to rotate violently around his body, his aura exploding outward with suffocating pressure.
"You just killed a Sarvski soldier," Ivor said, his voice dropping into a terrifying, dead calm. "And you just ruined your only chance of living to see another day."
If Cald'r could have seen through the dark mask pulled tight over Ivor's face, he would have looked upon a countenance of pure, unadulterated hatred and vengeance.
Ivor rushed forward, leaving a crater of displaced sand in his wake. The twin sabers collided with the broadsword, unleashing a kinetic shockwave that tore across the wilderness floor, clearing every ounce of sand from the bedrock. A blinding flurry of strikes followed, both men moving with supernatural, terrifying speed as the wider battle between the Sarvski and the city guard raged around them.
Cald'r's combat instincts screamed, a sudden realization dawning on him—but it was already too late to counter. Ivor's relentless, high-velocity strikes hadn't been aimed at hurting him; they were calculated structural strikes meant to shatter his weapon.
With a deafening crack, the massive broadsword fractured into pieces under Ivor's final blow.
Before the general could recover from the recoil, the young lord delivered a devastating, brutal kick to Cald'r's groin, sending the armored giant soaring backward for meters. In the blink of an eye, Ivor vanished, reappearing like a ghost directly behind the airborne general. The twin sabers flashed in a lethal cross-arc, severing both of Cald'r's arms cleanly at the shoulder.
Ivor didn't let up.
He followed through with a ferocious forward kick, sending the armless, heavily armored general speeding back in the opposite direction. Moving with blinding speed, Ivor materialized one final time directly in front of the falling commander.
A single flash of silver divided the air. Cald'r's severed head parted from his body before the torso even hit the ground, dark blood seeping heavily into the hungry sands below.
Ivor sheathed his blades, stepped over the corpse, and spat on the general's headless body. "Go to hell, bastard."
He turned back toward his army, raising his hand to halt the advance. "Their general is dead, so their forces on the walls are useless. Fall back to Thavor. We return tomorrow, where we will conquer this land once and for all!"
The Sarvski soldiers roared in victory, turning back to climb onto their rafts, speeding away into the desert sands from where they came.