Cinders of Magic

Chapter 9-2

Beyond the dead monster, Elias saw another two men wrestling a pair of the creatures to the ground to decapitate, and beyond them, another three of the creatures were sprinting to where the small group of soldiers lay. Elias spared a glance back towards the robed figure to see that he been alerted to their presence. With a simple gesture, the wandering corpses stopped in unison and turned to where Elias’s group had begun the fight.

“Retreat!” Elias roared as he stood, firing. His first few shots hit home into the skulls of the charging corpses and disoriented those few for moments, but a wave of the abominations followed the slowed ones far too quickly. “Retreat!”

By the time Eladrine made the top of the rise, his lungs were burning from the exertion. Around and behind him, men and women raced to the top of the slope, where they found the six-seventy staring at the top of a hill. The men and women, mostly young and inexperienced recruits, stood ready for an attack they were sure would come at any moment. As of yet, nothing had come swarming over the hill to devour them.

Eladrine, still panting, pushed his way free of the two squadrons that he had brought with him to search for Sergeant Rook. He was stopped as another man came running up to him.

“You’ve finally made it,” he said. The man seemed to wear a permanent scowl. Eladrine recognized the man as one of the sergeants under Rook. Roan was his name if he recalled right, but he had not been able to find the time to make a proper introduction yet.

“We have,” he said. “Where is Squad Sergeant Rook?”

Roan gestured to the far end of the hill that the company had set themselves to defend against. “He took some soldiers and headed around the end of the hill. No one’s seen them since.”

“How long ago was this?” Eladrine asked.

“Twenty minutes or so. There were some gunshots heard from coming that way, but it’s been quiet since.” It was difficult for Eladrine to read the man. Roan gave no hint as to his feelings. “Captain, we need your decision.”

“We take the hill,” Eladrine answered immediately. “I’ve spread the word below, and more support will be coming our way. We need a staging position when they arrive, and if those guns start firing before that, then there is not much chance that we can wait. Have your company moving by the time the other two have caught their breath.”

Sergeant Roan nodded and hurried away to relay the order. His other two squadrons had already made the top of the rise, and many of them were struggling with the toll the day was taking. He gave them only a handful of minutes before ordering the soldiers into a loose formation and up the hill in front of them. He heard a few mumbled complaints, but the Fiorian soldiers moved fast to complete the order, and within ten minutes of reaching the top of the rise, all three squadrons were marching up the hill.

There was no effort made to move silently as the soldiers approached. Eladrine, flanked by his two remaining squad sergeants and Technical Sergeant Roan, lead the group as they crested the hill. He ordered the companies behind to halt once they reached the top and begin to build a defensive position.

Roan, without invitation, sent two scouts running to the far end of the hill to see what was happening on the other side. The top of the hill was long and flat, covered with sparse boulders and a single wooden building that had been long destroyed. The runners were swift in reaching the other side and looked down on the terrain below for less than a minute before they started their run back.

“What’s the news,” Roan asked.

“It’s strange, Sergeant,” one said.

“Strange how?” Eladrine asked as he stepped forwards.

“Well, sir, they’re all dead down there,” the scout said.

“Is that right?” Roan snapped. “We’ve been flanked by a damned Sloanish necromancer, and people are dead. Do the stars shine at night too?”

“That’s not what he meant, Sergeant,” the second man said. “Razorbacks down there are dead too. One down there didn’t look all that dead to me though.”

“They were sitting up, sure. Didn’t seem to have much life to ‘em though,” the first scout commented.

Eladrine pushed past the men, and his three sergeants followed. When he made it to the opposite end of the hill, he was finally able to see the mess below.

Hundreds of men and women in Fiorian uniform laid unmoving on the ground in the small, narrow valley. A handful of the Sloanish fighters also lay dead in the dirt around the batteries that stood as silent metal markers. Eladrine saw only one figure not sprawled on the ground. It appeared to be a man kneeling, and he wore a bloodied Fiorian uniform.

Eladrine hurried down the hill into the valley even as one of the men with him called for him to wait. He did not heed the words. He ran onto the battlefield towards the bloodied man, and as he drew closer, clearly saw him to be Elias.

Elias, still holding tightly clenched in his hand a sword of Sloanish make, knelt in the dirt. The body of a Sloanish warrior was heaped onto the ground before him, and not three paces away was a man in blue robes that Eladrine assumed to be the necromancer. Elias was covered in wounds that bled into his uniform, and Eladrine prayed to the Lowlord that he would survive them.

“Elias,” Eladrine called as he neared. He knelt next to the man, but Elias gave no hint that he was aware of his presence. “Elias, what happened here?”

He received no answer. The three sergeants that trailed after him caught up and began seeing to Elias’s wounds. The man seemed to be lost in a haze.

Eladrine stood, looking once more at the c*****e around him. That close, the stench of death was almost overpowering, and the gore of bodies dismembered around him was enough to make him want to retch. He recognized some of them, and in that recognition, he turned away from the horror around him back to the man that had somehow survived it all. That man continued to stay kneeling in the dirt even as two other men worked to pull his jacket off him to see to the wounds on his arms.

His gaze was set on a far-off place. A place that was long past the range of this battle. Past the scope of this war. Eladrine hoped that he never looked to the place Elias was seeing now. He did not think he could survive it.