“If you put yourself in peril, they would come, and they would extinguish their own Light to defend yours.” The Elf woman’s eyes were steady and unwavering, giving away nothing. “Is that what you will do?”

“That would be a perversion of their gift, wouldn’t it? To force them to fight, when all they swore was to defend?”

Silverleaf remained silent, and that seemed answer enough.

“I will not abuse the great gift they entrusted to me.”

The Elf neither commended Ellysetta nor condemned her. She simply turned and walked back to her Aquiline, but Ellysetta had the feeling she had just passed a very important test.

Rain and Ellysetta took to the skies once more, and the battle continued well into the night.

To the north, the dahl’reisen’s attempts to take out the bowcannon across the river were unsuccessful. The Eld had strewn the ground around them with sel’dor dust, which sparked like mad against the dahl’reisen invisibility weaves, making them instantly detectable. Between demons, Mages, and darrokken, the warriors were slaughtered in a few brutal, bloody chimes of battle.

Earth masters tried to seal the boreholes by turning soil to stone, but the corrosive flesh of the revenants still ate through. The bodies of Elf, Fey, dahl’reisen, Aquilines. Shadar, and tairen littered the field, coated in thick layers of black dust from the destroyed revenants.

The allies were exhausted. Bells of nonstop battle, with little rest or food, and no faerilas to rejuvenate flagging magical energies, had beaten them down.

And still, the revenants came.

The Pale ~ North Slopes of the Feyls

The slivered crescents of the Mother and Daughter moons rode low in the night sky over the Feyls. Moonrise had brought with it a surge in power for the Mages who had been bombarding the Faering Mists with Mage Fire since their arrival the previous night, and as the night deepened, that surge increased.

Three thousand Mages now stood on the peaks of the Feyls, oblivious to the ice and snow around them. Great, blazing blue-white globes, some the size of tairen, flew through the air, exploding with concussive force against the shifting rainbowed radiance of the Mists. With each blow, the Mists flared bright.

“Keep firing!” Primage Garok shouted over the roar of exploding magic.

Around him, the other Mages continued the barrage, each drawing deep upon his well of magic. Several pooled their power to amass larger globes and send them flying into the Mists.

The magical curtain shuddered beneath the assault, its clouds undulating in frantic waves, bending inward where the concentrated barrage hit hardest.

“Mahl! Rutan! Concentrate!” He spun to address a group of Mages working together to combine their flows of magic into a single, enormous globe of Mage Fire. “Fursk! Keep those Mages channeling power! Make that Fire as big as you can!”

Pale faces strained. Sweat broke out on pallid brows and trickled down the sides of ashen faces. The globe of Mage Fire centered between the thirty-six Primages expanded, growing larger and larger, until they could barely hold it aloft. Shouting with exertion, they heaved the massive sphere towards the Mists, straight into the center of the barrage.

Magic exploded, bolts of searing blue-white light shooting out like cracks of lightning.

For one, shocking, shuddering instant, the Mists thinned, and a small hole appeared at the center of the thinned area. Primage Garok had a clear view straight through the Mists to the snow-capped Feyls on the other side. The edges of the hole fluttered like a tattered sail pierced by a great sword. Then sparks of magic sputtered, and cloudy, rainbow-lit wisps of mist surged inward to fill the empty space, the tendrils reaching for each other like desperate hands reaching across a chasm. The tiny hole in the Mists sealed.

But it had existed.

“It’s working!” Garok crowed. “We need more power. Mahl, Rutan, you and your Mages add your Fire to Fursk’s!”

Seventy-two more Mages joined the circle. The globe of Fire trebled in size. Garok called more Mages to join the others. The ring of magic wielders expanded to one hundred eight, one hundred forty-four, one-eighty. Then at last, the magic number, twelve hundred ninety-six. Thirty-six groups of thirty-six.

The globe of Mage Fire at their center was like nothing Garok had ever seen—or ever even read about in his centuries of existence. As big as a mountain, and nearly as large, hovering over the thirteen hundred Mages like some great, glowing god-sphere.

“Now!” he cried. “Now! Let it fly!”

The Mages bellowed a communal roar and heaved the massive sphere towards the Faering Mists. The Mage Fire sailed up the mountain towards the shimmering curtain. Brilliant, enormous, deadly, the Fire skimmed across the ground, catching the remnants of already battered trees and winking them from existence, leaving a trail of barrenness in its wake.

The massive globe of Fire plowed into the Faering Mists. Energy erupted like an exploding star. The flash of blinding light made Mages scream and cover their eyes. Then came the boom, a roaring wave of sound like the thunder of the gods, and just behind it, a blasting jet of air and magic and pulverized dirt that knocked the Mages to the ground and sent half a score of them flying to their deaths off the side of the mountain, their dwindling shrieks muted by the deafening roar as the Faering Mists rippled and shook, and split in two.

Celieria ~ Orest

A flash of light illuminated the western horizon. All heads turned on the battlefield of Orest as the clouds of Mist riding the top of the Rhakis Mountains suddenly flared with wild, riotous jets of color.