Rime rings the scales of Sagistan's imperial make armor. Each tiny piece of the armor is a work of enchantment so intricate that it would put the weapons of most magicians to shame. But then, he was the imperial prince; it would be criminal to go into battle in anything else. The monster on which he stood, a massive collection of skin stretched over hollow bone, soars through the sky so high up that the air was difficult to suffer, even for him.

"Almost there now," Jav Cla'Mari says from his right. The duke's firstborn son kneels on the back of his summoned demon, his fingers pressed to its flesh, commanding it to navigate the skies. Two more ride alongside him, other commanders from the various armies scattered throughout the duchy.

Through the breaks in the clouds, there is an occasional glimpse of the ground far, far below. The monsters of the tide swarm, looking like a congregation of ants covering the eastern part of the Takis Forest. All kinds of creatures moved down there, beasts for a myriad variety, all working in concert with one another, no infighting as far as he could tell. That alone confirmed to him that Illigar had the right of it. Sagistan can only pray that it is so, or this gambit might be his last.

"Torid?" Sagistan asks, the slashing wind stealing most of his voice's volume.

"Yes," the earthspeaker says, kneeling on the back of the bird-like demon and staring down into the forest floor. "I have the peak third rank. There." He points to a part of the wood below, a part that might as well be any other. "There are some other high third-ranks with it and…something else."

"One of Illigar's man-monsters?"

"Hard to say," Torid Yas Falladri replies. "We could make it from here."

Sagistan considers for a moment before nodding, instructing Jav to slow the demon's flight. With the three men is a woman, the fourth of their company, Emi Deva, known in the imperial capital as the Lady of Spheres. The woman, her dark hair pinned up in an odd construction on her head, glares balefully down, the silk lengths of cloth wrapped about her frozen in the high altitude. She didn't have the temperament to run an army, which is why he didn't give her one, but the decision to bring her and not advertise her involvement in the operation to destroy the beast tide might prove a fortuitous one.

He breathes in, listening to the whistle of the wind, centering his mind and attuning himself to the natural confluence of the region. Did the enemy below that a leyline of naturally attuned power ran through the middle of their swarm? Perhaps it was simple good fortune.

"Lead on," Sagistan says, clapping Torid on the back.

The man nods at him, pointing down to an innocuous spot in the canopy of trees below before leaping from the back of the demon. Sagistan follows just after, plummeting from the sky like a meteor, his destination the same as Torid's, Emi Deva at his side.

As they fall, Torid pulls free the massive two-headed hammer he carries on his back, the weapon beginning to vibrate with barely restrained power. Magic flows between the three falling magicians, multiple spells from the Lady of Spheres wrapping around all three, enhancing their strength and durability, encasing them in a barrier of magic, improving their eyesight, and even starting to restore their bodies before there is any need. A light begins to emanate from Torid's hammer, a yellow so pure that it might as well come from the sun itself, or perhaps a bolt of lightning at dusk.

The man waits until they are merely fifty feet above the canopy before he swings. The sound of snapping tree limbs and cracking trunks is drowned out completely by the assault of thunder. Those monsters that notice the descent are crushed to the ground by the awesome force of the thunderblow or flung away as even the earth cannot withstand the assault. Dust and dirt spray high into the air as a patch of the forest turns barren from the assault.

Sagistan lands before the ground can finish quaking, his armored feet making the dirt buckle beneath him in a secondary explosion. His helmet filters the dust suffusing the air about them, augmented sight piercing it easily. He stands in a shallow crater, the topsoil blown away by Torid's strike, only a few trees remaining standing around them. The corpses of monsters lay scattered about, broken and oozing dark blood, but even more still twitch.

A hundred paces away, near the edge of the groove dug into the earth, a single beast still stands. Sagistan recognizes it at once as a Pridestalker, a monster with the form of a huge cat, its white fur striped green, a mane of emerald around its neck, twin fangs protruding from its mouth. The regal creature pulls itself erect, staring down at Sagistan, easily three times his height. Next to the Pridestalker is a monster he doesn't recognize, one that stands in torn rags, its face twisted and strange. He might have mistaken it for a person if not for Illigar's warning.

Sagistan can't help but smile within his helmet. It would appear that the man's prophetic moniker was well earned. He pulls his sword from its scabbard on his hip with a hiss, pointing the edge toward the two monsters standing before him. The beast tide would end tonight.

The most difficult part of reaching the enchanted sanctuary beneath the broken barracks was not stopping to take out her glee on the few patrolmen left to guard the crumpled building. Kessa manages, though, slipping past the impromptu guard station erected just outside of the northern gate. It was built there, not to check who came in and out as the city had closed passage that way for the time being, but to show some kind of presence to keep the masses unpanicked. As she moved past, dropping unseen from the wall into the breach Morello and Ferro had made in the barracks days earlier, a part of her hoped those out in the city would be panicking no matter what the lords and ladies on their high hill tried.

Kessa only spends a few minutes sifting through the wreckage before finding the stairs down. The underground of the barracks stands remarkably intact from the explosion, several floors of corridors built into the rock of Danfalla, everything as pristine as if the guards stationed here merely went on break a few minutes ago and might be back at any moment. Just a few days abandoned, not even a hint of dust lingers on anything. Say what you want about the guards of Danfalla, they cared about cleanliness.

The door she needed, a nondescript rectangle of steel at the bottom of a stairwell, stands locked and latched closed. The enchanted lock melts beneath her touch, the talon-like nails at the end of her fingers drinking in the magic running through it. The second door beyond her does not bother to sap with her power before beating the steel down, the frenzy she feels in the full throes of her power pushing her toward ever more destructive methods.

Past the barriers, Kessa drops into the ring of stone pathways carved beneath the perimeter wall of Danfalla. Lines of infused copper cover the walls, the tunnel practically thrumming with the power running through them, the power holding the monster-repelling barrier surrounding Danfalla up. A whine joins the pulsing vibration in the air, the sound of Kessa's nail digging into one of the veins of copper, supping from the unimaginable power. The flow of mana leads her on as powerfully as any signage would.

The path breaks apart, leading into an underground set of chambers where the coursing lines of copper in the walls converge. Three enchantment engineers look up from their work at her approach, a flash of confusion on their elven faces at seeing a strange human woman approach. They recognize the lavender fire burning in her pupils a moment too late, sense the menace in her stare.

The metal table between her and the nearest man shrieks as it is flattened into the floor, steel legs giving out beneath Kessa's stomp. He dies, screaming his life away while his eyes turn into shining beacons of combusting mana. The second man in the room stares, his mind not believing what his eyes are telling him, that a predator has dropped into his life. The last engineer, a woman with powerful survival instincts based on how quickly she darts for the alarm rune set into the wall, bolts without hesitation. It doesn't matter, both of their lives end the same way as the first, their death knells joining the echo rebounding off the walls.

At last, she arrives at the vault door. The lines of infused copper running through the wall converge around the perimeter of the heavy steel, slipping in through the frame to continue inside. Mechanisms, locks, and backups designed to require hours of uninterrupted attention constitute the lock. Inspecting it, Kessa highly doubts that anyone else inside the duchy might be able to get in, might be able to force open the door. Maybe the duke could, if he were in peak health. She somewhat doubted the rumors about the strength of the high lords and ladies, but Sigrid took them seriously enough, so she might as well pretend that she did as well.

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The welded locks of the vault door sizzle, sparks of magic flying like embers from a fire, as her nail begins to cut through the enchantments.

"They would have been better off with a normal lock," she says, grinning to herself as the best security money can buy folds easily beneath her wicked touch.

The cutting takes several minutes to complete, and the layers of protection for this chamber are no small things. At last, the door sinks, thudding loudly against the frame as its last supports are ripped through. Kessa pulls the seal aside, revealing the room beyond, a huge circular chamber riven with seams of copper cascading through the walls. The lines converge, coalescing on a downward sloping pillar descending from the ceiling like a stalactite. At the point of the pillar hovers a gem of enormous size, shining a light so pure and bright that it would put the sun itself to shame. She feels the power as soon as she steps into the chamber, and hesitation crawls into her heart. The gem in front of her supplies all of the power to the barrier around the city; it draws from the convergence of leylines upon which Danfalla is settled. If she makes the mana inside go wild, will she be able to survive the blowback?

Movement drags her attention away. Beneath the blinding halo of the nexus crystal floating in the center of the chamber, a dark-skinned human woman sits on a steel cable as thick around as a small tree. The shifting chains of rusted iron wrapping the woman like armor conceal much of her, but Kessa's eyes narrow, focusing on the almost-black irises staring at her from an indifferent face. The woman before her shifts, her hand lazily resting on the haft of a crude and massive ax that leans against the same strip of steel she sits on.

"You killed the engineers?" Athemia asks.

"I hope you haven't been here long," Kessa replies, striding into the room, feeling the waves of ambient magic wash over her like a warm bath, a bath trying to cook her insides. "This room isn't safe for humans."

Athemia nods, her fingers dancing over the haft of her weapon. "I suppose Illigar was right then. He said that you would be some kind of monster that only looked human." The woman moves to stand, gripping her ax. "I wouldn't worry about me, though, I'm quite safe here."

There is a moment, a single instant, when the magician's eyes turn toward her weapon as she stands. Kessa darts forward, faster than she has any right to be, covering the distance between the two before the iron-bound woman can even glance up. The iron links rip the skin from her fingers as she plunges her hand in like a dagger, her pinky snapping as it hits a piece of metal wrong. Three of her nails find flesh, breaking the skin on the magician's side just above her third rib.

Kessa feels her power flow out, diving into the body of the woman, setting alight all the mana close to the surface, burning her alive from the inside out. Only, there is no burning. Kessa's power burrows inside, but it finds nothing inside the body of the magician, no mana to combust.

A hand with power enough to shatter bone clenches onto Kessa's wrist, making her hiss in pain. Her gaze turns upward, meeting the dark orbs of the magician's eyes once more, only now there is amusement in the place of indifference.

"It seems like you are looking for something I got rid of a long time ago," Athemia says.

The woman's axe cuts sideways, the strike not impressively fast, but the force behind the head more than makes up for it. Kessa's body crunches, folding over itself as the blade of the ax connects with her side, throwing her spinning into the far wall, where more bones shatter as she falls to the floor.

Athemia finds herself smiling as she watches the monster before her begin to knit itself back together, pushing itself up as it mews in pain. "How unlucky for you."

This was not going according to plan. Ferro never put all that much faith in the plan, but he hadn't expected things to turn quite so badly. Hundreds of palace guards summoning demons to combat him and the coven, which had been expected. Being surrounded by a legion of fire-spitting imp creatures, slaughtering as many of the guardsmen and fleeing gentry as he could, that had been expected.

Looking down at the crumpled body of Lumina, her form slowly shifting and pulling itself back together from the hole she had been smashed into by an attack from above, that had not been expected. The coven stands together now, surrounded by waves of infernal monsters with armed men and women standing behind them. The worst of it was those up on the flying disks just ahead of him; ships, he believes they are called.

Ferro raises his hands, the coven around him slowly stilling, calling back their power. Throughout the grounds before the palace, bodies lay in clumped heaps, recently built platforms smolder with demon fire, the gardens stand transformed into the wreckage of a battlefield, hundreds of blades sprouting from the earth. His gray eyes focus on the two individuals floating in front of the ships in the sky overhead. He recognizes them both: Illigar the Sage and Madalasca Jane.

"You aren't supposed to be here," Ferro calls up.

"Then that means I am in the right place," Illigar calls back.

The magician's eyes scan the handful of beings surrounded on the ground beneath him. He holds no weapons, but his fingers itch to grab hold of one. The death below is indiscriminate: men, women, and children lie among the field, bodies splayed in all horrible manner. It isn't a sight he is unused to seeing; one doesn't become the lead investigator for the Willian guild without finding such horrors. There is something about this creature standing among the dead down on the field before him. He knows that it isn't human if it ever was, but Illigar sees none of the callous disinterest or glee he has seen before when stopping crazed magicians who thought themselves above reproach. Something dark lurks in the gray eyes of the frail-looking figure, something calmly amused, as if it has already read ahead in the script.

Jane shows even less restraint. Her right hand squeezes one of the spiked spheres she uses as a weapon, the same device that drove the female monster into the earth before. "Why should we not kill you now?" she asks, the sphere in her hand whirring, its magic approaching detonation.

Ferro shrugs, "Maybe you ought to." He moves sideways as the sphere sails downward. It crashes into the earth behind him, digging a furrow before disappearing into a deep hole. A beat passes, each watching the new rabbit hole in the lawn, waiting for the detonation, remembering what just happened before.

It is at that exact moment, perhaps by some comical twist of fate, that the ground begins to shake. Guardsmen fall over themselves, some grabbing hold of one another to keep their feet. Just ten feet away, Tanalious drops Dal, the sickly boy moaning as he hits the dirt. Those fallen to the earth forget to stand, watching as a shadow begins to crawl across the palace grounds. The rumble in the earth is followed by smaller crashes, as the entire center section of the palace groans, pushing outward as it is born skyward by the sprouting of a great and dead tree. Stones begin to crash into the earth like meteors, crushing men and demons alike as the sudden turn of events sends a frenzy through the 4th army.

"Calm yourselves!" Jane screams over the confusion, her aura washing out to instill her voice through the entirety of the battlefield. "Order! Come to order!"

Illigar's eyes never leave Ferro, watching as the creature's grin widens even further. Questions spiral in his mind, too many lines of investigation to count, but he holds himself back from asking. The shaking of the earth begins to subside, the vast majority of the 5th and their demonic horde uninjured by the assault of falling stones. There, sprouting from the center of the palace, stands a tree hundreds of feet high, a lone and dangerous figure standing at its apex. It holds its hand out toward the sky, the moon itself answering as it is dyed a vibrant crimson, the entirety of the color in the heavens seeming to invert.

"The Blood Moon has come!" Ferro yells, hardly able to keep a handle on the exhilaration flooding through his body. "Give your everything to kill us now! I want there to be no regrets!"

A pulse ripples through the air, so subtle that it goes unobserved by most. Men and women ready themselves, training their weapons upon the enemy in front of them.

Before they can act, Lumina springs from the hole she was thrown into, her twisted body mostly sewn back together. She shrieks, an eruption of blindness spreading out around her, clouding the world in a veil of darkness. People move as one, commanding their summoned beasts forward, hurling magic from their platforms in the sky, preparing to leap directly into the fray despite the consequences.

Dovik just barely manages to grab Illigar's arm before he can hurl himself forward to destroy the enemy. However, he doesn't manage to articulate the danger before the massacre begins below. Only he and Jess felt the wave of energy pass over them, felt it brush against their minds and try to invade before heading out into the rest of Danfalla. His hand shakes on Illigar's forearm; he had felt this power before, the same power that drove everyone mad in the tower. Even while he tries to form the words, his mind can't reconcile it. He had been told that the monster responsible had been killed, that the guild had destroyed it. How could it be here?

The screaming begins below. Madness descends once more, but it is not the guard nor the magicians in the air affected. On the night of the blood moon, the subtle power of bloodlust that descends upon Danfalla lets each and every demon slip its leash. They turn on their masters, burning, biting, gouging, ripping, tearing, in their frenzy.

The magicians of the 4th and 2nd armies watch from above as chaos overtakes the ground below. Far afield, those men, women, and children who managed to make it away from the massacre turn on one another, scratching and biting as their minds are overtaken by the bloodlust.

Illigar pulls away, shouting orders, putting his people to right, but Dovik hears little of it. He hears it well before actually seeing it, the distant tremor through the city, the low moan of thousands of voices screaming together. Small, dark figures like ants in the night spill from the buildings, meeting in the street with sticks and clubs, mindless killing intent pumping through their minds. In just a few seconds, the veneer of civilization is wiped away. A mad war sparks in Danfalla, illuminated beneath the crimson glow of the blood moon.

Deep beneath the city, in a forgotten chamber, a wave of hardly felt force sweeps through, passing over a sphere of iron suspended above brackish water. The whine of iron breaks the silence, one of the hilts that comprise the iron coffin sinking inward. The whine becomes a crashing din as more and more of the hilts crush inward in a cascade, their restrained growth finally released, striking in at the vulnerable creature inside they have strained to reach for weeks. Then, all together, the plunge. The coffin cracks, a flood of deep red blood is made pearlescent in its cascade to the water below, the magic infused within dying the dirty water rainbow like an oil slick. Three pale fingers fall from the crack, carried on by the flow of blood spilling forth. They rest unmoving on the edge of the coffin, lifeless, dead.

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