Luckily, the tent had remained pegged into the ground. Sirillia had managed to hide beneath the king’s stern wooden desk, visibly shaken.
“What is happening?! Are we under attack?” Sirillia cried.
“I don’t know, but we need to get ready to leave at once, my queen,” Yelin said, bending down and reaching a hand out to Sirillia. “Whatever is going on, we cannot stay here.”
Sweat trickled down Yelin’s large body inside his plated armour as Sirillia took his clammy hand and they ran from the tent.
The pair froze for a moment, in awe at the scene around them. Flaming rocks fell from the sky. The wattle and daub rowhouses and tiled roofs of Tellersted in the distance were crumbling from the barrage of impacts. Dozens of fires were breaking out. The Blacktree soldiers were frantically putting out their own fires and establishing a perimeter around the camp.
A smaller rock fell from the sky and struck a soldier nearby, piercing his helmet like it was nothing. His head caved in. Blood and brains splattered at Yelin’s feet, the soldier’s limp body collapsing with an enormous, open cavity left where his face had once been.
From the edge of Tellersted, peasants were fleeing in all directions away from town.
“What do we do?” Sirillia said. “We have to get Emery and Petir!”
“My queen, we cannot enter Tellersted right now. The king and prince will be back any minute, I assure you,” Yelin urged, keeping his hand firmly around the queen’s lanky arm to keep her from running for her family.
Another fireball screamed as it flew over them, a trail of billowing smoke chasing behind it.
Sirillia pulled at Yelin’s grip to try and run for the town in an act of motherly instinct, but Yelin knew he needed to protect the queen at all costs.
“Please, we need to help them!”
“Let’s find you a horse, my queen. We need to be ready to leave at once. It is too dangerous to go into town.”
“My husband… my son!”
Then, from the eastern side of Tellersted, out of the crumbling facades and debris-strewn streets, came a small contingent of mounted men at full gallop. Yelin breathed a sigh of relief upon seeing it was the king and Baron Artima Lowe with their guards.
A ball of flame struck right next to the mounted group, directly into the Two Horns Inn. The wood and brick structure exploded in a brilliant display of flame and shattered material.
The king and his men ducked to narrowly avoid the blast. Debris rocketed out in all directions as a cloud of fire shot high into the air. The seared bodies of the people inside were flung onto the adjacent street.
One of the king’s guards was hit by a flying timber board and knocked off his horse with great force, killing him instantly.
“Emery!” Sirillia shouted in both relief and panic as the group rode into their camp.
Emery leaped off his horse, grabbing his wife in a long hug as she cried into his arms.
“My king, we need to leave at once. We are in great danger,” Yelin said.
He hated to interrupt their tender moment, but he knew that in the moment, every second mattered. He had a job to do- protect the royal family.
Another flaming rock smashed into a horse-drawn carriage. The horse panicked, barging through a group of men as it tried fleeing the sudden heat.
Emery let his wife go and looked to his trusted guard. “Where is Petir? Has he made it back here yet?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” Yelin said, shaking his head.
Emery spun back to look at the burning town of Tellersted as it bore the brunt of the continuous onslaught of falling stars. Far away, fleeing residents were wailing as their homes collapsed around them and their streets burned.
“My king?” Artima said, still atop his horse. “Your orders?”
King Emery scrunched his face up as he ran through many stressful decisions in his head all at the same time. Yelin nervously awaited a command.
Emery turned back to Yelin, unblinking. “Take the queen. Get her out of here to safety, at once.”
Sirillia protested, begging to go and help find Petir in amongst the chaos, but Emery ignored it as he gave his next order.
“Artima, get our men ready. We march for Tellersted to find our sons. I will lead one-half into town; you will take the other half into the fields to the north to check if they escaped in that direction.”
“And once we find them?” Baron Artima asked.
“We leave for Ashen immediately.”
The Old Bear took in each word of the command with a stern expression before bowing in acknowledgement.
As the Baron began to order the men and spread the word to form up into two battalions of a thousand each at the edge of camp, Yelin approached the king, eager to fight for him.
He knew it was the right thing to do, to stay at the king’s side.
“My king, let me ride with you. I am more valuable in there than out here,” Yelin said.
He knew that whatever was happening was both dangerous and unpredictable, and he trusted no one more than himself to protect Emery’s life.
“I need someone to stay with Sirillia, to protect her,” Emery said as he called for a horse to be brought over for Sirillia.
“Let me put my best men on it, then. I will march with you, defend you, and help find the prince, sir. It is my duty.”
An enormous flaming rock crashed into the fields in the distance, sending tremendous vibrations through the earth and an outburst of ash into the air. The dry crops in the fields combusted and a wall of flames spread out in a ring from the crater.
Emery considered his guard, admiring Yelin’s persistence. “Alright then, have ten men escort Queen Sirillia back to Dawnhill. We will rendezvous there when all this is done.”
Fires began to take tents around the Blacktree camp, catching alight from the smouldering debris and the rainfall of embers. But the Ashen soldiers left it all to burn as the orders were given to gather up into two separate battalions at the edge of their perimeter.
The horses were panicking from the madness. Some fled with singed manes and burning skin, helplessly whinnying.
Emery aided his weak wife up onto his own horse Midnight, realising that she would need him more than Emery would. Midnight’s bravery would see her through. She was seated in front of one of his guards to keep her balance and control the reins.
Sirillia looked down at her husband with teary eyes as smaller, pebble-sized fireballs sprinkled down from the heavens. “Find our son,” she begged.
“I will. Keep yourself safe, alright? No risky business,” Emery said, clasping his wife’s hand tightly.
“I love you.”
“And you, my queen. Now ride.” Emery gestured for the guard to head off, and in an instant Midnight was away with nine other mounted guards shadowing the queen.
Emery watched nervously as his wife rode off, the clouds overhead still rumbling and glowing like flame.
“She will be safe,” Yelin said reassuringly.
Emery could only nod. “I know. Now, let’s find my idiot of a son.”
Emery’s battalion began to march up the road towards the town centre in a tight formation. They held their shields high to protect them from the debris still raining down periodically.
Meanwhile, Baron Artima Lowe took his one-thousand men in a northern direction from the Ashen camp before heading west and making for the burning fields surrounding the town, full of terrified peasants, collapsing windmills, and fire-filled pastures.
The flames moved like living, breathing animals, spreading from one crop, tree, house, to the next within seconds, before completely swallowing them whole and leaving nothing but soot and charred skeletons.
The Citadel, at the heart of Tellersted, rose like a column of stone surrounded by pillars of black smoke with scorch marks and impact craters scattered upon its exterior. Though, somehow, it had held the barrage of huge fireballs.
Yelin noticed that the bigger rocks appeared to have stoppe
d falling, with only smaller ones still striking like a light snowfall of fire.
They avoided enormous ash-covered craters in the road, some as large as the pools in the Midsummer Gardens in Andervale.
Enormous, glowing rocks remained in the pits they had created. Yelin was in disbelief. Where had these rocks come from? Were they really stars?
The people running for their lives carried little with them, only the singed, tattered clothes on their backs. The fear in their eyes was contagious.
The Blacktree men were nervous too, Yelin could tell. Not a single soldier spoke or hummed as they marched- a clear indicator of their fear.
“What could have done this?” Emery whispered to Yelin, both leading the march.
Yelin could only shake his head, horrified by the devastation they were walking in to. The Two Horns Inn, or what was left of it, had been completely engulfed in roaring flame and looked more like a dumpsite for rubble.
Yelin held up his hand to block the radiant heat from the firestorm.
The corpses out the front of the inn were unrecognisable and completely blackened in frozen expressions of terror and pain.
Yelin said a small prayer for them as they passed the bodies. “May the Creator heal your pain in the æther.”
Emery was speechless.
The rain of fire continued to ease.
Further into town they marched. Many of the wattle, brick, and timber dwellings had been damaged by the blasts. Walls had crumbled, doors and windows blasted out, roofs collapsed in on themselves, and fires were still spreading.
Yelin had never seen anything as devastating as this before, not even in the border conflicts with Caldaea. It was unlike any siege or thunderstorm he had heard of. He kept his composure, however. He knew he needed to be strong and resilient for the king and for his own men.
However, he could not deny the fear coursing through his veins.
They reached the denser part of town where smaller streets and alleys branched off from the main thoroughfare. The sky above had not seized its rumbling, nor its glowing. Embers flew into Yelin’s face; he brushed them aside like a hunter would the buzzing flies around a carcass.
Yelin turned to face the squad leaders at his rear, directing each to a street or area of town to take men and search in an organised, grid-like pattern. The battalion split into a dozen smaller groups and dispersed into the devastated, narrow streets of Tellersted.
Yelin remained with the king and a hundred men as they steadily marched towards the Citadel. Yelin’s ears still rang from all the impacts, but he kept his mind silent and on alert.
“What is that?” one soldier asked.
Emery instantly held a hand up, gesturing for his men to stop where they were. Yelin then heard it too- it sounded like more distant rumbling.
“Is it more of those falling rocks?” a soldier guessed.
“No,” Yelin said, closing his eyes to help listen closer. The rumbling was different, not as pronounced, or nearly as dreadful, as the rainfall of rock and fire they had just experienced. “It’s… marching,” Yelin realised.
Emery cocked an eyebrow, staring down the long thoroughfare ahead towards Teller’s Square where the armistice had taken place, several hundred metres away.
The thoroughfare was lined with the collapsed remnants of the once-beautiful houses. Broken stones and shattered bricks scattered across the crater-riddled road.
Then, the noise became far more distinct. Movement came from up ahead, through the wall of smoke.
Soldiers in unfamiliar colours came from the other side of town and began to file into Teller’s Square. Hundreds of them. The marching grew louder, eventually turning into a storm.
The smoky street made it difficult to view any specific details.
Emery and Yelin stood frozen in shock.
“They’re not ours, are they?” Emery asked.
Yelin tried deciphering their colours to try and identify who they were through the smoke. “No way. Our men couldn’t have gone through town so fast.”
Immediately as Yelin finished his sentence, Emery drew his sword without a word of warning. The Blacktree soldiers followed by drawing their weapons in unison, like a symphony of metal. They held their shields out in front to create a shield wall, ready for anything that was to come.
Cinders from the burning buildings continued to rain down like glowing drops of water. The air was filled with plumes of black smoke. The smoke ahead blew in the wind and their sightline became clearer.
Yellow and white banners and uniforms. Spearhead sigils on raised flags.
This force was Caldaean.
“Shit,” Emery muttered under his breath.
“What? What is it?” Yelin said nervously. “What’s going on?”
But before Emery could reply, the Caldaean force down the road began charging towards them, swords and spears held high. They crowded into the narrowing thoroughfare like a wave channelling into a chasm of rocks.
“Form up!” Yelin shouted upon seeing what was going on.
Emery and Yelin fell back into ranks at the front of their force who huddled shoulder-to-shoulder from one side of the road to the other in a defensive shield wall formation.
An officer handed Yelin a tower shield which he gripped firmly.
“Why are they attacking us?” Yelin said to Emery. His red cheeks were glowing, and his forehead dripped with sweat.
Emery kept his eyes forward. “They think this was us,” he said starkly.
The Caldaean force continued their charge down the road, two-hundred metres out, swords glinting red from the reflections of the glowing sky, and faces consumed by rage and panic.
Yelin peered to his left and right, viewing the horrific destruction they were caught in. The burning homes, smouldering flowerpots, broken cobblestone.
“What do you mean? How could we have done all this?”
“We didn’t, but I suspect Tobius Seynard and Baron Decaster believe we may be responsible for this siege.”
The Ashen army braced for the coming impact, shields straight and in a row, swords pointed outwards at eye-level, legs steadied.
One unbreakable wall of shielded men, as they had been trained.
A huge soldier clad in midnight black led the Seynard rush, several feet taller than any other, a spear-shaped sigil imprinted into his breastplate. He wielded a large, menacing war hammer.
“Creator, who is that?” Yelin gasped.
“That looks to be Sen Dorval- Tobius’s personal bodyguard,” Emery said. “Met him at the armistice.”
“The Ogre?”
“Mm.”
Yelin wiped his brow one last time, feeling helpless and shocked. He’d heard his men talk about the beast of a man before, described as a raging bull. His reputation was extensive.
Yelin’s eyes were stinging from the sweat and his lungs burning from the hot air surrounding them. He remained by the king’s side like an armoured sentinel, ready to do his duty and defend his king.
“Hold, men. Keep your positions, guard the flanks,” Yelin ordered.
Officers shouted further instructions like an echo, with the force forming a square-shaped defensive perimeter to ensure the side streets and alleys were guarded from attack as well.
The Seynards continued their charge, gaining momentum as they descended downhill towards the Blacktrees. Hundreds of them. It was a harrowing sight.
“Hold!” Emery repeated, flipping the visor down on his shining helmet.
Through the smoke the Seynard army rushed head-on into the Blacktrees, the distance between them dissipating with each breath.
“Hold!”
Suddenly, the mission wasn’t about finding Petir anymore. It had become survival.
Sen Dorval roared, raising his giant hammer before launching himself into the Blacktree men with the rest of his vanguard. The flood of Caldaean troops smashed into the Ashen shield wall with incredible force and deafening roars.
Yelin held firm, push
ing his body weight against the tower shield he wielded as the wave of men crashed into it. He kept his head low. He strained his legs to keep the right position, pushing the tower shield out.
The noise was intense, a roar of metal on metal and men screaming and howling like animals.
The outstretched spears from the Ashen shield wall acted like a deadly barricade on which Caldaean troops impaled themselves, hurling themselves into the spearheads and deep onto the shafts, with no way to shift out of the way or slow down their advance.
Both armies had had their vanguard in straight lines, but all order was lost as soon as the two forces collided, with men unable to slow down, flying over Blacktree shields and being attacked upon landing.
Yelin could see no further than a few feet in any direction, with men suffocating him all around. Unrecognisable expressions of rage. Weapons flying about. Blood spraying out from unseen injuries. The air became unbreathable.
And the screams. The screams were deafening.
Yelin pushed against the tower shield again, this time knocking a soldier off his feet on the other side, who he promptly stabbed in the gut as he fell before taking position back behind the shield.
A spear tip came out of nowhere and hit Yelin, though it luckily bounced from his breastplate and off to the side with a screech of metal.
Emery held a smaller shield, using it to defend his upper body as he blocked oncoming strikes. He thwarted one, before stabbing back, then shielded another and counterattacked in a flurry of concise moves.
Yelin felt more attacks against his shield but held strong. Each gap in an opposing strike, he would launch forwards with his sword.
The next stab impaled a man through his eye, leaving a deep, dark, bloodied slit in his face. The sword was difficult to pull from the man’s face, especially as he wailed and flailed about.
The officer to Yelin’s left took a spearhead to the knee, causing him to drop. Another spear stuck him in the neck, slicing his arteries clean open and nearly taking his head off. Blood pumped with his racing heartbeat from the wide gash as the officer desperately clung to life.
Fuck.
Yelin’s flank was left open, but a Blacktree from behind took the position, trampling over the officer’s body as he bled out beneath his feet.
Starfall (The Fables of Chaos Book 1) Page 47