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| − | -----
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| − | === The Battle of Shaha's Defile ===
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| − | <b>Haslanti Forces:</b>
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| − | Commander: Miruna
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| − | 250 Haslanti Militia ("The Bloody Bears")
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| − | 200 Haslanti Militia ("The Black Trout")
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| − | 25 Haslanti Glider Commandos ("The Snow Hawks")
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| − | 20 Haslanti Civilian Conscripts
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| − | <b>Enemy Forces:</b>
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| − | Commander: Onil, the Callous Wolf
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| − | 250 Wolfmen Warriors
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| − | 800 Twisted Hills Barbarian Warriors
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| − | 1 Hero, Onil, the Callous Wolf
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| − | -----
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| − | [ST] They are coming.
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| − | [ST] They come across leagues of snow and ice, into the face of the wind that seems to drive sleet and snow into their faces as viciously as if it too is the ally of the Haslanti. Snow rises to their knees, then their thighs. They battle through drifts, smash the clinging snow from their snowshoes.
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| − | [ST] Their lines are little more than a ragged clump, a teeming collection of men and women bundled against the cold, dark obsidian knives gripped in their fists, their faces and skin marked with swirling blue red paint.
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| − | [ST] Ahead, the wolf-brothers move easily through the landscape, bent low as they hurry through the snow, yellow night-eyes gleaming, muzzles lifted to catch the scent of the Haslanti. They were the enemies of the Twisted Hills people, once, in the days before the tribes turned away to join the Haslanti and fought their wars against the people.
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| − | [ST] Then came the wolf-mother, and she had shown them all that the Haslanti were the real predators, devouring, weakening, culling. Transforming the tribes into something soft, green, and weak.
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| − | [ST] Old Sodo walks with his eyes half-lidded, sleeping between strides, awakening only when his feet strike the earth, always sure, always steady. In his drowsing state, he notes with a vague amusement that the young men marching around him have stopped chuckling at his stride and begun to imitate it. He had learned it in the last war. The Great Defeat
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| − | [ST] He had been younger then, his back straight, as confident as the youth who chatter around him now. He has learned. They have all learned The old man blinks the snow from his eyes , and looks towards the fires burning on the horizon, and hopes he has learned enough.
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| − | [ST] "Not until the last moment," Sweet Flower told Teskar when he protested. "And only if we have to. The traditions must be respected. You want me to have a strong son soon, yes?" Teskar had known the others would laugh, but he could never tell her no. And so he had kissed her brow, and agreed and ignored the laughter around the war camp. The leather cord that binds their wrists together is like a part of him now, and he has learned to march beside her in time.
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| − | [ST] The others in the ranks give them a little extra room. The three days since their marriage is almost up, and then the cord can be wound in her hair to stay. Soon. The battle comes first. His fingers tighten around Sweet Flower's, and she returns the gesture, dark eyes gleaming in the torchlight. The battle comes first.
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| − | [ST] "Just save a few for me," Laughing Shrike says, cutting his friends off. "I want my own set of skulls to piss in." A chortle runs through the nearby ranks, and the massive man nods firmly, hand on the head of his obsidian axe. Around his neck, Shenna's doll hangs on a cord, rapping against his breast with every step. "To keep you safe, father," she had said. "He's a fierce warrior."
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| − | [ST] "Not half so fierce as me," he had said, ruffling her hair. He promised to bring her back something pretty.
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| − | [ST] Tenno is deep in thought. A thin, silent man with dark hair and a boyish face, he marches along near the front of the ranks, his pants wet with snow, a slight smile on his face. Gonna fuck a Haslanti bitch. Gonna cut her up and let all the green out, make her bleed, split her in half. Gonna fuck her till she turns cold. Gonna cut off her tits, Gonna...
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| − | [ST] Far above in Heaven, deep within the Bureau of Destiny, the strange, multifaceted forms of the Pattern Spiders dart back and forth across the Loom of Fate, weaving, cutting. In the section of Destiny that guides the North, a network of threads hum and quiver, drawing the spiders' attention, their motion producing a sound like a soft sigh of anticipation. Fate coils and prepares to spring.
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| − | [ST] They are coming.
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| − | [Miruna] Miruna waited with the soldiers, his now, sitting in their battle lines. There was intermittent desultory conversation, but mostly there was a tense readyness. They weren't terrified, but they weren't looking forward to the battle either. Just preparing to defend their homes and nation.
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| − | [Miruna] The watcher wheeling above dropped a signal. They were coming.
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| − | [Miruna] The scout swooped down to make his own report, but the initial signal had been enough. There was more talk now, and the grating rustling of metal on metal everywhere as the women and men of the Haslanti prepared themselves for the battle.
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| − | [Miruna] Miruna stood with Sela and Morta in the center of the line. File leaders were kicking the ranks into order, and comrades were making their bets and boasts. He'd wait. Their minds were occupied for now. The enemy would take a bit of time to reach them, as far as a glider could see from up there.
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| − | [Miruna] After he'd heard the man out, and sent him back up the defile to rejoin his own for the fight, he stepped out of the line, turning to address them a last time before the fight. They were starting to get restless - tense and ready for the fight because the signal had meant to them that it was time, even though neither force was in sight of the other yet.
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| − | [Miruna] "Bears," he yelled to the ranked women and men before him. "The wolves have come. They've come to destroy our farms, our towns. They've come for out men and our women. They are a tide that will break on our rock. Here."
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| − | [ST] The defile is near two hundred yards wide at its narrowest point, a backcurving notch where Miruna has drawn up his battle lines. On either side, raw rock walls rise into the air. Night came early to the defile, and torches flare to light as Miruna speaks. The Haslantis hammer the hilt of their blades against their shields, shouting wordless assent.
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| − | [Miruna] "We'll pile their dead till this valley is clogged, and we'll have to find a new way down from the hilltop. We'll feed their blood to the land!" In the pause before his next exhortation, the wolves come, racing into view up the defile. THe time for speaking was over. Good. It had never been what he was best at. He seats his helmet, turning to face them.
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| − | [Miruna] Still paces in front of the Haslanti lines, Miruna raises his shield above his head, whooping and beating his mace against its edge, taunting the racing enemy. There was one of Magdala's pups down there. He needed it to come to him. Only a raven was going to kill an abomination like that, and he couldn't leave the line without letting it splinter. So he'd draw it to him.
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| − | [Miruna] Another use to painting the armor. It'd give the enemy something to aim for so he could break their teeth for them as they came for his throat.
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| − | [ST] The forces of the Winter Wolf come, crammed tightly together within the defile almost shoulder to shoulder. The snow here is lighter, and after the struggle through the countryside, they move with glee, the sound of their footfalls loud enough to swallow all other noise. A vicious howl comes from a thousand throats.
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| − | [Miruna] He steps back into his place as the enemy drew near. Everything was rolling now. No more time for words or negotiations or plans to change a thing. It was down to the killing. His hour, he'd make it that.
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| − | [ST] From their position on the ground, Miruna and the front ranks cannot grasp the size and breadth of the army, but the observers on the cliffs above can get some idea. It fills the defile, clogs it with bodies. In the front come the wolfmen, a head taller than the Haslanti, their yellow eyes gleaming in the darkness. They swing stone clubs, obsidian blades, the occasional steel axe.
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| − | [ST] Behind them come the great mass of the Twisted Hills barbarians, men and women, young and old, full of the wrath of battle and the hope of vengeance.
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| − | [ST] "HALT!" A voice rings out, and the advancing ranks of the wolfmen stop. A moment later, the Barbarians follow suit with a soft crunch and a few muttered curses. The force has halted at the extreme edge of bowshot range.
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| − | [ST] A figure moves to the front of her forces - even from this distance, Miruna recognizes her. The harsh woman who he first saw after he awoke - tall, body as hard and flat as a steel blade, hair in a long dark braid. A doeskin dress stitched with protective runes.
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| − | [Miruna] "Let them tire themselves running up the hill! Never seen so many run to their deaths, eh?" It was always hard to stay steady when your blood was calling for you to run, fight, flee, move somehow. Later maybe there'd be countercharges. But for now, the biggest boulders they'd found were lined up at the clifftop, aimed for the ground the enemy would ahve to cross.
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| − | [ST] Onil raises her left hand. She grimaces, a burning pain springing up in her chest, radiating down into her loins, up into her head. She whispers, and Essence throbs in the air around her. The Haslanti can feel it, warm, strange. Glowing motes begin to dance and form in the air. As Miruna's troops on the clifftop prepare to release their boulders, Onil concentrates. Sweat pours down her face and back, freezing almost instantly in the biting wind.
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| − | [ST] Then, with a scream, she throws her right hand forward. There is a shrill scream, and the motes of light dancing in front of her coalesce into something dark and razor sharp. Shards of obsidian, Miruna realizes a moment later, as they begin to fly forward into the front ranks of his forces, caroming off the sides of the narrow canyon. Screams split the air, and a moment later barbarian arrows begin to fall among Miruna's troops
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| − | [Miruna] "Shields!" he bellows, suiting his actions to his words. He wished there'd been money to outfit more of the militia with crossbows. But they were expensive things in peacetime. After enough war, the Haslanti would remember the bargain they were.
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| − | [Miruna] The airship would have done for the bowmen, but for now he'd have to rely on what the Snowhawks could do about it.
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| − | [Miruna] The Haslanti settled in behind their shields, letting stone tipped arrows shatter on them. The townsmen volunteers moved boulders along the cliffedge to roll down into the archers, and what crossbows he had sniped from behind set shields propped by wood or a soldier's fellows.
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| − | [Miruna] The dogs wouldn't have the patience for it for long. And every minute they ditered was a jot closer to their reinforcements. If Otter did her job.
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| − | [ST] A few of the arrows get through - a young soldier collapses near Miruna, vomiting bloody foam. An arrow just from his throat. A few others here and there fall, wounded. The obsidian chunks quiver in shields and torn flesh alike. Miruna can see that each is a perfectly shaped butterfly.
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| − | [Miruna] He is a ham hand with his own crossbow, but even a boy could hit the enemy massed below as they were. He tried to aim for those that seemed to be ordering the others about, but there wasn't much like order in the horde, and his aim wasn't good enough for sniping regardless.
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| − | [Miruna] The snowhawks wheel above, taking turns to find a bunching of the enemy to dive themselves at, releasing a firepot, or sometimes bags of caltrops, as they pulled out of the swoop, working the air currents of the defile to regain height.
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| − | [Miruna] After bleak minutes of the arrow rain, a cheer goes up among the Bears as the first of the repositioned boulders rolls down the side of the defile, breaking men and wolfmen alike under its momentum. Like a stone thrown into water, the horde ripples back from its path, packed men crushed against eachother in the tight pass, some trampled as they lose their footing. Then more stones come racing down the rock walls in a flu
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| − | [Miruna] Miruna grins. They'd not be able to keep it up for long, but while the boulders they'd gathered lasted, they'd give the enemy something to worry about.
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| − | [Miruna] Then more stones come racing down the rock walls in a flurry, as the teams of townsmen finish their positioning.
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| − | [ST] The boulders carve deep furrows in the enemy force, smashing those in their wake to bloody paste before fetching up among the enemy, leaving them broken and screaming. One of those screams belongs to Sweet Flower. Where her husband Teskar stood only a moment before, there is now a mangled mass of blood, bone, and hair. She sinks to her knees, gibbering, as she realizes that it is still tied to her. No one hears her over the other shouts. Firepots explode amongst the ranks, and the stench of burned flesh and fur rises in the cold air.
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| − | [ST] Onil's nostrils flare as she shouts commands, gathering her forces again, the wolfmen forming a battering wedge. She stands behind them, Essence beginning to glow around her again. The Barbarians behind her continue to loose arrows at the Haslanti, a constant harrassment. Then, a cry rings out, and the Wolfmen drop to their bellies as Onil unleashes her sorcery again. A wave of obsidian butterflies soar from her fingers into the front ranks of the Haslanti defenders. In their wake, the wolfmen stand, howling, charging.
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| − | [Miruna] Miruna stands to meet them, bawling something about valor to the line. It hardly mattered what, the scar twisting his words when he wasn't being careful enough. Butterflies lit sparks off his armor, chipping away paint and skipping intot he less well armored men behind him. A wave of pain and blood broke over the Haslanti, and then the second wave of bodies hit with a crunch.
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| − | [ST] For a moment, the line holds. The Bears stab back with blade and spear, and the wolves die. But in their death, they are destructive, tearing forward though mortally wounded, their bodies alone bearing down the front ranks, tearing ragged holes through which the followers can pour. The forces of the Winter Wolf come onward, scrambling over the bodies of their own dead.
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| − | [Miruna] A weight fit to move mountains smashed into his shield, driving him back a step. grizzled muzzles full or teeth pushed over the shield edge, and long arms swinging awkwardly with axes and spears. He beat at the wall of flesh pushing into him with his mace, breaking bodies indiscriminately.
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| − | [Miruna] Selza sees the line failing and leads the Trout into it immediately, plugging what she could of the rents the foe were tearing into their line.
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| − | [ST] It isn't enough. Now the rest of the Wolf's forces are throwing themselves into the fray, constrained only by the fact that they can't crawl over their fellows. As some of the wolfmen fall back, exhausted and spent, the barbarians smash into the fray, inflicting greivous injuries on the Haslanti. Out of the corner of his eye, Miruna can spot Onil. The woman wields a moonsilver scythe as tall as she is, tearing through the ranks of Haslanti troops like steel through a rabbit's throat.
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| − | [ST] Desperate to stop the bleeding, the Haslanti commanders throw themselves into the fray, and they pay for it. A screaming barbarian woman with a severed arm tied to her left wrist falls upon Selza, deeply slashing her across the abdomen, and then they are swallowed by the tide of battle. Butchery reigns, and for long, desperate minutes there is nothing but close, frantic struggle.
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| − | [ST] At the end, the Haslanti find themselves back in ranks perhaps a hundred yards back from where they started. The ground between here and there is carpeted by bodies so thickly that the forces of the wolf can barely struggle through them.
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| − | [Miruna] His arm aches, and his armor is painted over with blood. He'd given ground with the rest of his men, rather than be swallowed. He was losing too many. They were being stretched now that they were diminished, and driven off the place he'd chose for their line. He howled with frustration, the noise dying within feet of him among the clamor of battle and death.
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| − | [Miruna] The townsmen above have run out of boulders and now watch with horror as the Haslanti are swept back. Some throw smaller rocks, but those simply disappear into the masses below. Despair reigns there, where they have enough time, enough space, to think beyond merest survival.
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| − | [ST] There is the sound of a loud hunting horn. Eyes are drawn aloft, where the airboat Glorious Wind has appeared, silhouetted against Luna's silvery face, now rearmed and prepared to continue the fight.
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| − | [ST] The forces of the Winter Wolf are taking trophies from the dead, severing fingers, necklaces, and ears. Miruna can see a bushy-bearded barbarian with a wooden doll around his neck kneeling to cut a gleaming ring from the finger of a fallen Haslanti woman. Onil draws them up again with a shout.
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| − | [ST] "Twisted Hills people! Hear my words! This battle is not over. Look to the skies!" She points, and a groan of dismay goes through the enemy forces. They remember. Old Sodo's bones ache. He remembers them in the last war, the final battle, the gouts of flame.
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| − | [ST] "Form wedges!" Onil barks. "On me! Jarska! Old Mallen! Attack the flanks! Now. NOW!"
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| − | [Miruna] The airship's arrival gives them some heart, and some respite as the enemy draws back momentarily. "Morta, get to the right wing! Keep them sound."
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| − | [ST] Morta salutes sharply. Like Miruna, she seems to be unhurt, but her face is painted with gore, formed into a crust like war-paint. She hurries to the right flank as the enemy advances.
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| − | [Miruna] Selza was nearby, after the crazy mixing of the retreat and constant fighting. Sela was nowhere he could see. He pushed through the men to get to the left flank himself, yelling for Selza to take the center. The left was where Onil was heading. He would meet her there himself. There was no one else who might hope to stop her. By herself she might cave their weakened line if he couldn't do something.
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| − | [ST] There is a muffled crunch as the two sides smash into each other. The barbarians at the forefront are borne forward by the weight of their fellows behind, crashing into the Haslanti spears and blades and falling back, broken. Morta shouts loudly, driving a spear through the eye of a feather-garbed wolfman warrior, and the attack there collapses. Selza and her troops likewise repulse those driving towards them.
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| − | [Miruna] Miruna rushes through his own lines, sometimes having to shove soldiers out of his way. Even so he barely managed to get to the flank before Onil's wedge hit. For a moment if opened the line, but he drove into the wedge's side, pulling soldiers in behind him, breaking its momentum.
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| − | [Miruna] He called for Onil's blood, but there were too many Hill People betwwen him and her, and she had no care for him it seemed.
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| − | [Miruna] The Glorious Wind tacked on the air currents, weaving back and forth over the thin defile, trying to keep over it as long as it could, dropping its payload of firepots, boiling oil and stones into the horde behind its frontline, breaking the surge that would have cemented the wedges temporary gains.
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| − | [Miruna] Without that support they were slowly forced back.
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| − | [ST] The forces melt away around Onil, and she gradually wheels to her left, moving along the center of the line. Selza tries to call the Trout back, but they swarm for her and her bodyguard, hoping to pull them down and revenge their fallen comrades.
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| − | [ST] As the Trout move forward, Onil scowls, holding her position in the midst of the assault. Behind her, the barbarians form a long, thin column, charging directly into the ragged hole opened by the eager soldiers of the Trout.
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| − | [Miruna] Miruna leads a wedge from his flank, hoping to keep the Trout from being destroyed, but has to divert when the barbarians come rushing into the gap between the pieces of the line. No time for strategies, and there wasn't enough discipline for anythign fancy anyway. "Charge!" he yells, bringing both flanks crashing down onto teh Twisted Hills People.
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| − | [Miruna] His wedge cuts the into the column from the side, chopping it off, leaving a pocket surrounded on all sides by the Bears behind, Miruna to one side and the Trout in front.
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| − | [Miruna] Most of the Twisted Hills People die as the Haslanti crush inwards mercilessly from all sides. A fragment of the end of their column falls back, those cut off from their People by Miruna's few. The oldest, useless and lucky.
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| − | [ST] A bearded soldier lunges for Morta, pinning her to the earth under his bulk. Her sword skitters away, useless, and she scrabbles for her knife while her other fingers curl around the edge of his blade, holding it at bay.
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| − | [ST] At the last moment, Morta spots a wooden doll hanging from his neck on a leathern cord. Reaching up, she tears it free, inverting it, jamming its pointed wooden legs into his eye in a convulsive jerk. The man gurgles and collapses atop her.
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| − | [Miruna] Selza manages to hold the Trout together through it all. If they hadn't been able to hold with the Twisted Hill barbarians behind and Onil pressing in with her wolfmen from the fore, the battle might have collapsed into chaos. But Selza organized the rear of her line against the barbarians even as the front held, and actually drove hulking Onil back, the brokens shaft of a spear hanging from her shoulder, a disembodied arm hanging from it like a bloody flag.
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| − | [Miruna] Miruna vowed to find that soldier at the end of the day and pin a medal to their corpse.
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| − | [ST] Onil finds her forces hemmed in, captured, almost annihilated. Hundreds are dead or fled. She has failed. Mother will kill her for this, or worse, give the next command to Luyu. Everything now rested with the Shanarinarans. She does not know if it would be worse if they lost, or if they claimed her victory.
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| − | [ST] In any case, Magdala will stripe her hide for this, and all these fallen People will have died for nothing. She falls back, fending off the attack of a bright eyed Haslanti, and slays him with a backswing. Barely satisfying. The enemy forces are pressing in all around, and the Painted Knight is at their head. The one who wounded Mother. The one she respects. The one she-
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| − | [ST] No, Onil thinks, fury boiling up in her white-hot. I will not lose!
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| − | [ST] She screams, raising her scythe into the air, her determination hardening as she cries out to her forces. "Brothers! Sisters! They are only men! We have the blood of wolves! Crush them! Crush them! FINISH THEM!"
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| − | [Miruna] "This is it. Hold now and we've crushed them!" he yells over the screams of the dying, and noises of the killing. They didn't need more commanding than that. Fighting to the bitter end was in the blood of the Haslanti.
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| − | [Miruna] He plants himself into the path of her desperate charge, with the few remaining from his wedge. The line was muddled beyond reforming. But together they were still a mass of good Haslanti steel. It would be enough.
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| − | [ST] The Twisted Hills People and the Wolfmen pour over the Haslanti, shattering their lines, bearing them back, screaming in fury. Selza gasps as a wild eyed old man stabs her in the thigh, staggering and going down. For a moment, it seems as if the furious, crazed attack will win the day.
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| − | [Miruna] It was true chaos now, the forces mixing together, neither with any cohesion. Miruna bulls through melee hunting Onil. In this she might be put down, but only under a hill of Haslanti corpses.
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| − | [Miruna] The Glorious Wind tacks above uselessly, the two forces too mixed for bombing. Some of the Snowhawks bravely swoop into the melee itself, to do something, but most of these die quickly, the glider being too restrictive for actual fighting.
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| − | [Miruna] Onil was in among the Trout still, breaking them even as her forces were broken.
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| − | [Miruna] Leaping Orca tries to rally them, but Onil catches her up, squeezing the life out of her slowly, forgeting herself in her frustrated rage, and taking it out slowly on the militia commander. Miruna, forcing his way past a screen of wolfmen, takes advantage, crushing her hip with a blow of his mace.
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| − | [Miruna] She screams, falling, and then a wave of Trout scurry over her, smashing at her to finish the job. "Alive!" Miruna yells, but a wolfman he'd bulled past crashes into his back before he can do anything about it. His perspective narrowed to that bloody struggle for life, and by the time he'd killed the thing it had been decided one way or the other. They were trussing her body, but they'd be lucky if it weren't a corpse.
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| − | [ST] Onil screams, thrashing suddenly, her sharp nails ripping into the face of a man who is trying to bind her. The handsome green-eyed glider pilot, Miruna realizes, even as Onil's scratching hooks one of his eyes out and causes him to reel away, screaming and holding his face.
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| − | [ST] Spearbutts crash down on her skull, knocking her unconscious.
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| − | [ST] The battle has ended, all of Onil's forces captured, fled, or slain. Bodies carpet the length of the defile, both Haslanti and Wolf. This was a sorely won battle.
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| − | [ST] As Miruna rights himself, a runner staggers up to him, bleeding from the stub of an ear. "Your captain, sir. She's... she's... ah... you better come."
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| − | [Miruna] "Lead," he commands, voice hoarse after all the shouting. His voice was trained to be heard over battle, but after hours of it, it still hurt. He followed the runner as fast as he could, only slowing him slightly.
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| − | [ST] Selza has been laid on her shield, bleeding out. A wound in her thigh, another in her shoulder, another in her midsection gush crimson. A thin, drawn woman with a shaman's tools is desperately trying to close the wounds with beeswax and tincture to no effect. The wounds seem to be mortal. Selza is very pale.
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| − | [Miruna] That stopped him. He took off his helmet after a moment and trudged those last few steps to her field of view. "Selza." His voice is cracked and hard.
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| − | [ST] "I don't think..." she gasps slightly. "Oh, damn it. It hurts."
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| − | [Miruna] She'd been pulled in his wake, off to battle. And there she'd held the Trout to break the Twisted Hill People. Without her, they would have lost the emerald. "You held them, Selza," he tells her quietly. A reminder of valor to die with. It was what he could give her.
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| − | [ST] "Yeah. We did. We... won, huh?" She shivers. Blood has begun to puddle under her thickly. It won't be long now.
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| − | [Miruna] "We broke them. We captured Magdala's spawn. Those who fled will tell the rest of it." He grabs her hand, squeezing roughly. "Got to take your own back out of the wolves, huh." No matter than it had been different wolves that had destroyed her old life. Twice. No matter than some of them had been human, then and now.
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| − | | |
| − | [ST] "Yeah. We... stopped them. This time. This time. That's worth it. It's worth dying for." She coughs, squeezing his hand with what strength she has left. It isn't much.
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| − | | |
| − | [ST] "Miruna... please. Find... if you get the chance... find Gaf, and Shinza, and tell them I'm... sorry. And tell... *koff* ...tell Otter I was right." She looks at him, her eyes wild, crazed. "And kill the wolf bitch, for me. For everyone. Kill her. Kill her. Kill her."
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| − | | |
| − | [ST] Selza's eyes cloud over; her hand goes limp in his.
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| − | | |
| − | [Miruna] "We'll kill them all for you. Win the war, yeah? I won't leave one wolf bastard alive in the League." She was dead before he finished the first sentence.
| |
| − | | |
| − | -----
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| − | | |
| − | === The Battle of Shaha's Defile ===
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| − | | |
| − | Haslanti Victory
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| − | | |
| − | Casualties:
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| − | | |
| − | Haslanti: ~400
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| − | | |
| − | Onil's Forces: ~1000 (Annihilated)
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| − | | |
| − | -----
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