“They should still have at least one dragon. Where is it?”
Three sets of eyes started surveying the skies. It took a few seconds, but the archer yelled out, “There! Above the clouds!”
Jarell looked where he was pointing and saw a red dragon, circling high on the winds. But, that wasn’t what made his blood turn cold. It was the fact that there were five red dragons up there, circling like vultures over a fresh kill.
“Prepare your men to fight!” yelled Jarell as he turned and started sprinting toward Morgath and Venia. He got there just as the two women were climbing into their seats.
He pointed to the sky and the circling red dragons.
“You two are no match for those five dragons. And those are just the ones we can see.”
Morgath harrumphed and said, “Just you watch.”
“I don’t want to watch, Morgath!”
“What would you have us do, Jarell?” asked Hilde, “Sit this one out?”
“Absolutely not. I require you to fly west and find the other two riders. Dispatch one of them over the mountain to Rosemoor and beg and plead for them to send us some dragons.”
“Can you not just use your mind sight to contact Claudious?”
“The distance is extremely far and there are mountains between us. I won’t get through.”
“Let’s go, Lady Hilde,” said Caroline as she turned Morgath to the west and prepared to launch into the sky.
“When you return, there will only be three of you. Be careful.”
“You be careful, husband,” she said as she and Venia turned to follow the other two.
After watching them take off, he sprinted back to where Pendivall was standing on the hill. Brinn was standing next to him, reflecting on how he had ever thought the life of a wizard was what he wanted more than anything.
“We’re in the middle of it now,” said Pendivall.
“That we are, old friend. That we most certainly are.”
Both wizards had their staffs at the ready. Pendivall’s Staff of Lightning was ready to cast the fire from the heavens straight through the lines of enemy troops and Jarell’s Staff of Wind was going to be causing all kinds of mayhem with wind balls and whirlwinds.
Brinn was going to be left to his own devices, which were shields. He did not lack any confidence in his ability to cast shields. Jarell and Pendivall had made sure of that during the morning training session.
The enemy troops continued with their banging on their shields and Brinn was beginning to wonder if this was all they knew how to do. They didn’t seem to be in any hurry to initiate this battle.
Cragg had gone back to the lines and started pulling a few of the royal soldiers forward. With the revelation that they would be facing some of their own, he wanted to make sure to bring his men forward to help protect the regular soldiers as much as possible.
Jarell was still trying to figure out how these royal soldiers had come to be in the service of the dark wizard. That was something he never would have dreamed possible. The royal soldiers had always been an army that fought on the side of good and righteousness. This didn’t make any sense.
Then the leaders of the enemy troops decided they had waited long enough. The enemy troops began advancing forward and as they marched, their royal soldier leaders began moving to the front of the lines. They were not content to send their troops into battle from behind. They wanted to lead the charge.
When Cragg saw what was happening he called even more of his men forward and within a minute, there was a line of royal soldiers stretching across the front line of the troops.
He thought surely, the enemy troops will see the superior numbers of royal soldiers and this will give them pause. But, the enemy kept coming. They weren’t running. They were just marching very confidently toward the conflict.
The dragons stayed high in the sky, showing no inclination to drop down and attack the troops on the ground. Jarell kept a wary eye on them, half expecting them to drop any second.
Then he saw one of them split off from the others and start flying quickly to the west. He could only surmise they had seen one of his dragons heading for the mountain, going for help, like he had asked Hilde to do.
He pointed the dragon out to Pendivall and told him to bring him down. Pendivall brought his staff up and fired a lightning bolt directly at the dragon, striking it’s left wings and sending it into a spiral.
“If it’s that easy to take them down, you should take them all down,” said Jarell.
“That wasn’t easy, my friend. They are staying too high. That was a lucky shot.”
“Lucky shot. Right,” said Jarell with a smile. “What I wouldn’t give to have Garlan’s Blaze right about now.”
“One of these days you and I will have to sit that boy down and talk to him about leaving the battlefield a little too early.”
They watched the other dragons, who seemed content to stay over the coming battle. Jarell looked to the west, hoping to see his wife and companions returning and it wouldn’t have caused him any grief if she decided to land the dragons and stay away from those red dragons.
Then he laughed to himself. Hilde? Back down from a fight? What was he thinking?
It only took a few more minutes for the two armies to come crashing together and the sounds of battle began to rage across the fields.
The bowmaidens began firing arrows over the heads of their own swordsmen and into the troops following the enemy royal soldiers.
After four volleys, they had cut the size of the enemy army by about half, but they still kept coming.
The royal soldiers from both sides met in the middle and the sounds of their swords was enough to shake the earth beneath their feet.
Lieutenant Cragg met with the soldier his archer had fired on and their swords met in a resounding crash of metal blades.
“Good afternoon, brother,” hissed the dark wizard’s captain through his teeth.
Cragg pushed him back and brought the point of his sword down, pointing at the chest of the other royal soldier.
“Don’t call me brother, as long as you bear those colors. You are a disgrace to our heritage and the memory of our fathers!”
The captain lunged forward, batting Cragg’s sword away and slashed at his neck. Cragg was able to bring up his armored forearm and stop the blow, but there was some power behind it and it almost knocked him over.
He knew this was going to be a fight for his life. Fighting the ogres would have been child’s play for him and his men. They were just enormous, dumb animals, with minds easily controlled by the dark wizard and easy to defeat. But, having to battle against another royal soldier was more than he had planned on.
The captain swung again and Cragg found himself having to defend instead of attacking. This was something most royal soldiers were unfamiliar with. They were used to attacking and being successful in doing so.
As he stumbled backward, trying to gain some footing where he could fight back, he began to harbor genuine doubts about his chances. All around him, he could sense his men were having the same difficulty. Out the corner of his eye, he saw one of his men go down, cut down by another royal.
As he brought his sword up to fend off another slashing attack from the captain, an arrow whistled through the air next to his ear and embedded itself into the forehead of the captain. The captain’s eyes rolled back in his head and he fell backwards like a great tree that was falling in the forest.
After the captain fell, Cragg glanced backwards, looking for the one that had fired the arrow, but saw a wall of bowmaidens who were firing one arrow after another. The thought crossed his mind that he hoped he could find the one who had saved him so he could give her a big kiss.
He only had a split second to relax before the ranks behind the bowmaidens erupted in a fiery explosion. He saw bodies of soldiers and Guildenians fly through the air, most dead before they hit the ground.
Jarell and Pendivall jerked around to seek the source of the
explosion and saw a red dragon flying over the rear of their troops, getting ready to unleash a torrent of dragonfire.
Terror gripped the hearts of the two wizards when they saw the red dragon bore a rider. He was dressed in black wizard’s robes and carried a staff with two crystals in the head.
Kerrick wasn’t nearly as dead as they had hoped and now, he was rejoining the war.
He had flown around the valley to the south, low over the trees and had come in from behind, catching the Wyndweirian troops unprepared.
Pendivall jerked the Staff of Lightning up and fired a bolt straight at the dragon, but Kerrick shielded him and the lightning bolt scattered harmlessly. He could hear Kerrick laughing maniacally at succeeding with his surprise.
They could see the form of Kerrick had changed drastically. He was hunched over now, not sitting as tall and proud as he used to and now wore a dark helmet and mask over his face. Jarell had time for a second’s worth of pride knowing his wife had caused Kerrick’s current condition.
Pendivall fired again and again, but each time his lightning bolts were ineffective. But, they did keep the dark wizard and his dragon busy, allowing the troops on the ground time to assume defensive positions against another attack.
Brinn took off down the hill, much to Pendivall’s consternation, but he was also proud of the fact that his young apprentice displayed no fear of getting involved in the fight.
Brinn raced to a spot near the center of the bowmaidens and prepared himself to carry out the one thing he had been given extra training for. His ability to cast shields had been elevated over the past few days and he was going to do whatever he could to make sure no more bowmaidens or swordsmen would fall.
Kerrick circled away from the troops, climbing higher into the sky. He had achieved his purpose. He had made his return to the battlefield, with a significant loss of life among his enemies and had shown the wizards he was as strong and powerful as they were.
This war wasn’t over by a long shot.
Chapter 14 ~ Even The Strongest Can Fall
Belgard and his men raced up and over the mountain, gaining the summit within an hour of leaving the fields. Snow was falling now and starting to pile up on the ground and he knew that as they descended further into the Northern Lands, it was only going to get colder and deeper.
Calling for a five minute rest, he should have known better. His men just laughed at him and kept jogging down the other side of the mountain. Their huge feet crunched through the snow in a long, rapid beat. None of them were breathing with difficulty at all.
He laughed to himself, thinking he just wasn’t as young as he used to be and all the men with him were quite a bit younger than him. He pressed on, thankful that it was mostly downhill now. He wouldn't allow these young pups to see any weakness on his part.
It only took one more hour and they reached the bottom of the mountain. As they raced down the foothills, they could see through the falling snow, the frozen lake in the distance.
But, there was a distinct absence of ogres.
Belgard thought, maybe they had gone cross country and he and his men had run right past them. But, they had seen no tracks leading off toward the mountains.
As they reached the flatlands, they came to a copse of trees and the lake sat less than a five minute jog on the other side of them. The trees grew up and around a few mounds, which Belgard surmised were boulders under the snow. The boulders were small and rounded, no more than three or four feet in height.
Entering the grove of trees, he ordered his men to slow down and keep an eye out. Those ogres had to be nearby somewhere. They could see out to the lake and the ogres were nowhere on the ice.
As he and his men walked slowly through the grove, he began getting a bad feeling in the back of his head, that they had somehow walked into a trap. It tickled at the primitive places, deep down inside his brain, like the feeling a deer gets when it knows there is danger nearby.
They came to a stop near the edge of the tree line, less than a couple hundred yards from the edge of the lake.
They could observe all the way across the lake and could just make out the red tint of blood in the distance. Most of the bodies of the enemy troops were now covered with a light layer of snow, but the blood was soaking up through the blanket and showing as a beacon to anyone with eyes.
“We should be able to see them,” said one of his men.
“See them?” said Belgard. “Hell, we should have already confronted and battled them.”
He looked toward the mountains to his right, knowing they hadn’t gone that way, because it would have been impossible for them to cross over from there. The pass was the only way over and they had just come down from there.
He turned and looked at his men, raising his hands to show he was at a loss for finding nothing here. He was absolutely sure Hilde and Caroline didn’t imagine their encounter with the ogres.
As he took another sweeping look across the landscape, the snow-covered mounds erupted like white explosions. Within seconds, the soldiers found themselves surrounded by about thirty ogres, armed to the teeth and ready for a fight.
The soldiers pulled their swords and the fight began within seconds. Though the men were outnumbered, they made quick work of a handful of the ogres and within a couple of minutes of the battle starting, the odds were even. About a dozen ogres lay dead or dying in the snow and not one royal soldier had gone down.
As the numbers began thinning, the soldiers started pushing the ogres farther out from the center, which gave them more room to maneuver and fight.
Then it happened. One of the ogres got a lucky swing in with his sword and took the head right off one of the royals and screeched a battle cry of victory. The sound caused the rest of the royals to hesitate for just a second, seeing one of their comrades laying dead in the snow for the very first time.
This gave the ogres just a split-second advantage. It only took a few more seconds before three more royals joined their brother on the other side of the veil. The red blood of the royal soldiers was mixing with the green blood of the ogres, coloring the snow in a grotesque layer of carnage.
Belgard could sense the battle was swinging away from their favor and it drove him into a rage. He raged his own battle cry and the men heard it and it drove courage and strength straight into their hearts. It only took a few more minutes for the royals to cut the number of ogres in half and then half again.
Before ten minutes had passed, there were only four ogres left standing, but they showed no signs of letting up. Belgard walked up behind one of them that was battling with two of his men and recognized him as the one that had beheaded the first royal.
So Belgard returned the favor from behind. As the ogre’s head bounced off the snow, his men finished off the last three and the battle was over. But, it had taken a toll that Belgard wasn’t extremely keen to accept.
He looked around and could see his men beginning to take care of the bodies of the fallen royals. Some were gathering branches from the trees to make litters to bear their bodies back over the mountain.
“What are we going to do with these enemy bodies?” sought one of his men.
Belgard looked around at all the slaughtered ogres. Never had he harbored more hatred for them than he did right then.
“Pile them and burn them.”
“Yes, captain,” said the soldier as he and few others began dragging the dead ogres to a spot away from the trees.
Belgard walked over to where the four fallen royals had been laid out and knelt down next to each one and said a prayer over their bodies that his father had taught him.
“One still lives!”
Belgard looked up, toward the voice and saw a young soldier standing over an ogre with his sword drawn and pointing right at the ogre’s throat.
“Kill the pig!” yelled another soldier.
As the soldier raised his sword to finish off the ogre, Belgard yelled, “Belay that order!”
The sol
dier stopped and looked at him. A few of the others halted what they were doing and watched as Belgard rose to his feet and walked to where the ogre was laying in the snow. He had a huge gash in his gut and was oozing green blood at a relatively fast rate. It wouldn’t be long before his life would expire.
As he looked down at the ogre, Belgard said, “You had to know this was going to end badly for you and your kind. Why did you bring such a small number of troops this way? It makes no sense.”
The ogre laughed as he coughed up some stinky, green blood.
“This is funny to you?”
“The dark wizard’s plan worked.”
“His plan?”
“To bring you over the mountain, cutting your numbers in Terranasia.”
“Only twenty of us came over the mountain. There are eighty more of us and over three hundred other troops still in Terranasia.”
The ogre laughed once more through his pain.
“I didn’t say it was a good plan. Just enough to lower your numbers, royal.”
“Eighty of us still stand with the army. How many ogres did you leave with the army? Twenty? Thirty? That will be nothing for us to cut down.”
“We left no ogres.” coughed out the dying ogre.
Then he laughed again as he coughed on his own blood.
“We saw the troops coming through the pass and there were definitely some of your filth with them.”
The dying ogre merely laughed at him.
Belgard was beginning to wonder what he wasn’t seeing. It was beginning to feel like someone had wanted to draw him and his men away from the rest of the army. It didn’t make sense to him. Leaving more than enough royal soldiers with the army left it very well protected.
He turned and stepped away a couple of steps. He looked toward the mountains, knowing that by now there was a battle raging on the other side.
“Captain, what should we do with this one?”
He turned back around and looked at the soldier who was going to kill the ogre. Then he looked over at the pile of ogre bodies that were being burned.
“Toss him on the fire.”
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