A tall elf in the center of the platoon came forward. He carried himself with the grace and elegance of a chief, though his joints creaked and popped as he walked. When he spoke, his voice was thin and hollow.
“I offer you no greetings, Teferi of Tolaria, nor will any here call you friend.” The chieftain did not bow but stared boldly at the planeswalker. “I am Llanach, Captain of the Skyshroud Rangers. Through me Freyalise, our patron and protector, hereby renews her objections to your presence. I have no malice toward you, but in her name I bid you and your cohorts begone.”
“Zhalfir,” Teferi said gently. “I am Teferi of Zhalfir.”
The elf captain’s expression did not change. More emaciated bodies shuffled in the brush behind him. “Upon being corrected by a visiting dignitary,” Teferi sniffed, “an experienced envoy would apologize.”
Llanach face remained fixed and skull-like. Then he spoke, loudly, though his lips barely parted. “Whence you came is not my concern. Only where you are now.” Llanach drew his crude sword and crossed it over his chest. “Freyalise herself has decreed it. Praise to her name.”
The other elves voices’ formed a ragged, monotonous chorus as they responded in unison. “Praise to the goddess Freyalise, protector of Skyshroud.” The elf captain called out to his fellow rangers and all six archers nocked arrows onto their strings. They did not take aim or bend the bows, but stood with arrowheads pointed at the hard-packed ground. Though frail, each archer seemed capable, even eager to demonstrate his skills.
The viashino and Ghitu had seen enough. Corus’ long claws slid out and Skive’s tail curled up over his head. Dassene drew her batons but did not light them. Aprem simply stood with his right hand on his hip, next to the bolas on his belt.
Teferi signed. He opened his eyes wider, taking in all he could about Skyshroud and the valley that supported it before circumstances became too distracting.
He could sweep the elves aside, of course, or shield himself and the Shivans indefinitely as he completed his inspection of the site. That direct action would almost certainly prompt Freyalise into an equally strong response. Things would then escalate, as they invariably did, until a full-fledged planeswalker duel was happening dangerously close to the Skyshroud rift.
Teferi could allow the Shivans and elves to skirmish while he alone observed the forest, but he instantly disliked this option more than he had instantly disliked the previous. Not only did it require significant risk on the part of his allies for no reward—since the Shivans winning the day would just bring Freyalise down to keep her unwanted visitors out—but it also led to the same bad end, two planeswalkers dueling on the rift.
He decided to freeze them all, to stop everyone in their tracks except for himself, Jhoira, and Llanach. It would prevent anyone from getting hurt, but it would also give him a starting argument to head off Freyalise’s anger—he wasn’t simply paralyzing Skyshroud’s defenders, he was pacifying both sides of the conflict as part of a larger, nobler effort.
A sudden blast on a battle horn startled Teferi. It was a strong, clear, sustained note from high on the ridge overhead, roughly where Teferi had paused for his first long look at the forest.
The Shivan warriors all responded to the strong, baleful sound, reacting as a lone wolf does to another wolf’s howl. There were other predators in this valley—potential danger and potential competition. The Shivans kept their weapons ready as they split their attention between the elves and the ridge overhead.
The horn’s peal drew a more violent reaction from the elves. The archers all drew their bows and oriented on the sound, twitching for the order to fire. Every other elf drew and closed ranks around Llanach. The rangers’ captain had not taken his eyes off Teferi, but it looked as if not looking up required considerable effort.
Teferi did not wish to simply turn his back on Freyalise’s emissary, so he closed his eyes and bowed to Llanach. Proper protocol observed, he quickly turned as he straightened and scanned the ridge. There, a thousand feet up the mountainside, Teferi saw a single sallow-skinned barbarian. He was shirtless in the cold and steam rose from the twisted mass of tattoos and scar tissue on his chest and shoulders. The squat, burly warrior raised to his lips a hollow ram or steer’s horn and blew a second loud, clear note. The horn was bone white, twisted like a nautilus, and as large as the barbarian’s forearm.
“That’s a colos horn,” Skive said. He shielded his eyes against the sun glaring off the ice and snow. “Only warlords use those, and it’s blowing an attack call.”
“What’s a colos?” Aprem asked.
“Think of those yak-goat things you Ghitu shepherd only bigger, much bigger. Five times as tall, twenty times more massive. Bad tempered and aggressive. Sharp hooves”—he angled his head toward the barbarian on the ridge—“and big horns.”
Aprem grinned. “How do they taste?”
“The meat’s gamey, but it’s good for sausage.” Skive’s tongue flicked out. “Better than field rations, anyway.”
Dassene called out, “Is this the same cannon fodder we drove off the beach?”
“Yes,” Teferi said.
“No,” Skive countered. “If they’ve got a warlord, they’ll be a lot more dangerous.”
Aprem drew his weapon. “The horn means they’ve got a warlord?”
“Someone’s giving orders,” Jhoira said. “Waiting for a signal is already more organized than they were on the beach.”
“Teferi.” Llanach’s voice was soft but forceful. “You must leave here. Leave the Gathans to us. We have dealt with them before.”
Teferi’s ears caught on the unfamiliar word, but he had no time to press Llanach for his meaning. “I cannot leave yet, Captain, as I still have work to do. Let me and my associates help you beat back these raiders. That will give me time and us the common cause—”
Llanach’s ravaged face twisted in anger. “You are not welcome here! This is not your battle, planeswalker. Leave us to defend our home, as we have always done and will always do: on our own.”
“I know you are capable of doing just that, Captain, but I’m not going anywhere until I’ve got what I came for. Fighting the Keldons with our help has to be preferable to fighting us and the Keldons simultaneously.”
The colos horn pealed again. A collection of large, fast-moving figures streamed past the bugler and half-skidded, half-charged down toward the valley.
“They’re coming,” Skive said.
“How many?” Aprem did not have the viashino’s keen vision.
“Thirty,” Teferi said. He did not take his eyes from the elf captain. “With twice that held in reserve. Are you equipped and prepared to handle a Keldon warhost of ninety, Llanach? With a colos horn driving it and a warlord close by?”
Llanach hesitated, weighing the options. To his credit, it did not take him long to reach the only possible conclusion.
He turned to his warriors and said, “Target the barbarians and only the barbarians until I say otherwise.” He turned back and drew a second sword. “We’ll sort out the rest later.” To Teferi he said, “Planeswalker. Stay out of our way.”
“Count on it,” Teferi said. He looked over to Jhoira, who nodded.
“Go,” she said. “Learn what you can. We’ll help the elves … if they allow it.”
“And stay out of harm’s way,” Teferi said.
“Of course.”
Behind them, an archer let fly his bone-tipped arrow. The bolt arced high over the valley then plunged down into the front of the charging raiders. Teferi watched a berserker near the front take the elf’s arrow squarely in the chest and winced sympathetically as the warrior fell.
His sympathy flickered out like a candle as the stricken raider rolled, recovered, and resumed both his place in the formation and the overall charge. Though the arrow now protruded from both sides of his torso, the brute never lost a step, never acknowledged the wound or the tumble in any way.
Keldons kill quicker than they die. The quotation c
ame to Teferi unbidden from an old Tolarian history scroll, a truism coined by the author to explain the barbarians’ long history of prevailing against numerically superior forces. This particular text was one of many that featured sensational, perhaps even slightly exaggerated, firsthand accounts of Keldon campaigns. It told wild, frightening tales of the berserkers’ violent excess, terrifying accounts of blood-maddened beasts who ignored fatigue, hunger, the elements, and mortal wounds alike in their mad rush to destroy the enemy.
Dozens of arrows arced up from the valley floor. As Teferi watched, the berserkers come straight through this surge of elven arrows, he saw how this particular battlefield aphorism got its start. Almost all of the raiders took crippling wounds, but not a single one abandoned his headlong plunge into the valley. The sight of their own blood actually seemed to spur them on and drive them into an even deeper frenzy.
“Swords ready,” Llanach said. The elves moved into formation and waited for the barbarians to draw closer.
Nearby, Teferi spared one last look at Jhoira. She nodded again and mouthed, “Go.” Teferi nodded back. He positioned his elbows on his hips, opened his hands to the sky, and rose into the air on a blue nimbus of light.
As he soared up from the valley floor, Teferi glanced back down. Llanach had thirty elves at his back, and together with the Shivans they would certainly be able to repel the raider’s first wave. That would give Teferi the chance to finish here at Skyshroud, and then he could send the entire Keldon population to the far edge of the country. He might even earn Freyalise’s help in the process.
Not likely, Freyalise’s voice said, nor even possible.
Freyalise materialized before Teferi in a foggy bloom of green energy. She appeared, facing him five hundred feet above the forest, and as her body became fully solid and real, the great rift phenomenon behind her let out a deafening blast of thunder.
Teferi screamed in agony. The crack in reality widened, and the Skyshroud rift released a blast of primal energy that engulfed both planeswalkers as well as a huge section of Keldon sky.
Radha watched the barbarians descend. Her eyes were sharp and her view was clear from the highest surviving branches of Skyshroud’s tallest surviving trees. She perched among the boughs as solidly and surely as if she’d grown there among them. She was tall and broad shouldered, her long arms and legs wrapped and folded around the trunk and branches of the tree. Her eyes were dark and fierce, and her hair was thick, coarse, and wild. Her dusky skin was the color of some exotic alloy of copper and steel, a rich stony gray tinged with reddish gold. Between her natural coloring and the dark tanned tunic and breeches she wore, Radha was almost perfectly camouflaged against the drawn and wasted timber.
As the false Keldons came roaring down into the valley, they could neither see nor hear Radha, and they would not until she was ready to introduce herself. She absently tightened her grip around the wrist-thick branch in her hand, imagining it was the lead raider’s neck. The sturdy Keldon hardwood cracked in Radha’s fist, sending a comforting jolt up her forearm.
This brief moment of grim joy faded as Radha turned back to the valley floor and saw that enfeebled stick insect, Llanach, leading Freyalise’s rangers. The old ranger had performed his ceremonial duties adequately, meeting the party of strangers and giving them Freyalise’s standard greeting. Now he was actually presuming to lead Freyalise’s rangers into combat.
Radha’s lips twisted into a sneer. Better to say he was leading the worn out, consumptive remnants of Freyalise’s rangers, those few who could still walk. Skyshroud’s elves had grown too drawn and thin to hold off the false Keldons for long. Radha knew it, Llanach knew it, and deep down, Freyalise knew it too.
Radha smiled, clenching her jaws. They would need her again, and they would need her soon.
She stepped onto a thick branch and gracefully ran out along its length, heading away from the trunk. When her weight began to bend the bough, she hopped down to a lower one and darted along its length until it also began to give. She continued to cascade downward and forward in this manner until she was a prodigious leap away from the tree line and a bare ten feet above the endless tangle of roots and ivy below, where each tough vine was dotted with bulbous, pulsating shapes.
The saproling thicket covered most of the forest floor and made absolutely all land travel in Skyshroud tedious, if not treacherous. The vines could latch on to careless hikers and pull them down, or huge wads of the stuff could separate from the main mass and act independently—saprolings, as these mobile and aggressive drones were called. Half-formed and directed by some foul combination of primal instinct and collective consciousness, saprolings came in all sizes as they limped and shuffled out, engulfing unwary travelers and dragging them back into the main thicket. Once inside a large enough mass of vines, the victims were then torn apart and digested in a matter of hours.
The elves had carved a few relatively safe paths through the center of the forest where the children of Freyalise needed them most, but almost elsewhere else was choked by thick hedges of the revolting, predatory plant-fungus such as the one below her now. Radha watched the thicket surge and undulate like some rank stew coming to a boil. It was an overwhelming sight, but she had not survived in Skyshroud by letting every exotic danger bewitch her to the dangers of every other one.
Beyond the greedy rustling of the vines and the loathsome gurgling of the fungus-bodies came a new sound. Hard, chattering sounds and whiplike slithering echoed in from the distance. Radha peered intently into the dark recesses of the woods. Slivers, the forest’s other nuisance, always sounded close, but Radha had never caught more than a quick glimpse of one.
Vaguely insectoid and voracious, slivers were concentrated along the edges of the saproling thicket, mindlessly swarming where the fungus vines were strongest. There were supposedly a dozen different breeds of the voracious little fiends in the forest, each with its own unique adaptations. Some had developed the ability to fly, others delivered toxic stings, and others grew larger and stronger when attacked.
Furthermore, if Llanach’s rangers were to be believed, slivers magically shared these specialized abilities with every other sliver nearby. If one of their number could fly and another spit poison, the entire swarm became flying poison-spitters. In the long term, Radha felt this made the sliver swarms more dangerous to Skyshroud than the saproling thicket. Where the thicket encroached slowly and consumed the forest in increments, the slivers would be sudden and devastating.
Freyalise disagreed with Radha, which meant that so did every other elf in the forest. They claimed to have experience with slivers, and they insisted they knew how to handle them.
In the short term, Freyalise and her followers were proven correct. The competition between saprolings and slivers was the only thing keeping both mindless colonies in check. Whenever the thicket rolled in like a viscous green tide, the slivers responded as any voracious hive would to a sudden and large concentration of its primary food source: they rushed in and devoured as much as they could. So the saprolings flowed, the slivers swarmed, and they all killed and consumed each other rather than Skyshroud.
Radha grumbled to herself. Thus the patron of Skyshroud trusted the forest’s safety not to action but inaction. She had staked the elves’ home on the convenient interaction of two aggressive armies waiting outside their door. One day the slivers or the saprolings would gain the upper hand, and two seconds after that happened the victor would be stronger and battle-hardened when it came for the rest of Skyshroud.
Radha fought the impulse to leap down among the vines and begin slashing them to pieces, to cut down enough vines so that the slivers massing nearby would lose interest or chose a more robust target. She also considered slashing a path through the thicket and on to the swarm to accelerate the inevitable, to start an all-out three-way war between fungus, bug, and Skyshroud.
These were both tempting thoughts, but they paled next to what she already had before her in the valley. She cou
ld take her exercise any time she liked by wading into a sea of shambling, twisted fungus creatures or an endless stream of chattering, sharptaloned slivers. It had delighted her to do precisely that, often in fact. Not today, though. Today, right now, she had more important things to kill.
Radha curled up and dropped into a low squat, gathering her strength as the heavy branch shuddered and sagged beneath her. Arms extended, she rolled forward along the branch until it started to swing back into place. Her heels touched the surface of the branch and Radha sprang upward, using the bough’s momentum to launch herself high into the air, past the saproling thicket and on toward the edge of the forest.
Radha turned one last somersault in the air then landed silently among the outermost tendrils of the saproling thicket. Here the vines were no thicker than her bootlaces and the fungus bodies were only the size of chicken eggs.
Radha ducked down among the ivy, staring intently at Llanach and the strangers. There had been six newcomers in all, though now there were five. The dark one had flown off and left three little ones and two big green ones to meet the oncoming raiders. They all wore mana stones and the armed ones seemed capable enough, but they were taking orders from the studious-looking young girl standing safely behind them. Following the girl’s lead seemed to leave the warriors standing idle, unable to commit to a fight with either the elves or the barbarians.
Radha resolved to keep an eye on this girl—she was smarter than she looked. Staying neutral was the smart move, as all of the locals had either proven or declared themselves hostile. There was no way for the visitors to guess which native tribe was the more pressing danger, not before the battle started. Once the blood started flowing, however, Radha knew the newcomers would have to side with the defenders of Skyshroud. The raiders were so indiscriminate in combat that there was simply no way stand by without being engaged. If the strangers were the kind to hit back when hit, they would be trading blows with the false Keldons before long.
The first howling barbarians reached the valley floor. Radha shifted her face back and forth, trying to keep track of elves and raiders as they rushed toward each other. A few more seconds and they’d all be close enough to see at once. She wet her lips and crouched lower.
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