You Have Been Affected By The Aestus Autus Anima!

One Aura Is Active!

The fog is an aura?

The System message blared through the battlefield, accompanied by the ringing gong of the Fiend’s powerful Authority. Kodal felt it like a slap in the face, even through the multilayered barriers of the city walls.

That fog followed on the heels of the blaring sound, flowing from the base of the enormous Spirit Tree and rolling across the countryside in every direction. It poured like water from the cup of a god, the waves of it washing against the Shining City’s barrier like an angry sea.

The Foglands come to Amaranth. Kodal siezed the hilt of his sword but did not draw it. How is this possible?

“I cannot see anything, Hierei,” Finks hissed. He all but pressed his nose against the shimmering barrier. “The third battalion might as well not exist! It’s as if the entire field has vanished!”

“We must destroy that Tree,” Kodal said, before jerking his chin toward his subordinates. “Commander Sar, take the sixth and seventh battalions into that miasma. Join the third, find the Tree—and cut it down!”

The commanders jolted, scorched by Kodal’s incendiary Authority, and the disgusting Sar leaped to action. He dropped nearly two hundred feet to the base of the Shining Walls, his bronze-armor blossoming with fungal vines that slowed his descent. The Paladins followed him down the battlement stairs at speed, their putrescent weapons squirming in their sheathes.

Kodal put them out of his Mind. He needed a better vantage.

“Commanders! Join me in the tower. We will peer at the Fiend’s latest desperate attempt.”

“To the left!”

Belloc couldn’t see anything through the accursed fog. His Ettin Wolf snarled with each confused tug of the reins, but it was no better off. The Twinblessed magic that bound their senses blazed in his center, but Belloc could feel it rebounding from the fog.

His battalion shifted to the left, bounding over the low corpses of burst Plaguerats.

Shadows moved around them; harmless to the Wolves but dire threats to those that rode them. The Paladins held their halberds and lances tight, but no tighter than the glittering barriers that sparked with the Twin’s blessings. Noctis’ creatures were mad, flailing their many, ill-formed limbs without rhyme or reason. They were a thresher of jagged edges, churning the fog and mud into a soupy sameness that occluded the Paladins’ path. The Fungal Horrors made it little better, as their frantic the wet clicking forced Belloc’s Perception astray as the gill-capped monstrosities stumped blindly at their sides. For all their hectic movement, however, none were fighting any longer. There was no blood or death. Only muffled silence.

Where in damnation is the enemy?

A deep bell tolled, longer and louder than anything Belloc had ever heard. The fog shivered with the sound, and ahead, the trunk of a vast tree loomed out of the impenetrable miasma. It was immense, a silhouette of verdant vibrancy that was incredibly different from the shadowbeasts. To Belloc, it was a darkness of potential.

At its center, a creature rose up. Dirt clung to its long, almost emaciated limbs, matted into its thick fur, and woven with streams of Mana that dripped from its joints. Long ears atop an elongated head twitched, bent by long hibernation, were matched by massive horns that curled outward. It reared back, skeletally thin and three times the size of his Ettin Wolf. Eyes like black flames filled cavernous sockets, and teeth as bright as stars and sharp as sabers jutted savagely from its yawning jaws. A series of long tails rose up behind it, each as thin as whips…yet for all of that, it held the shape of a prey animal.

Without a word or cry, the prey became the predator.

The Ettin Wolves and Paladins fell, sundered with lightning speed as those tails lashed out. Blood sprayed in the mist, and Belloc sawed at his reins. His mount leapt over the first lashing and sidestepped the second. Terror seized him, a new pressure now descending upon the field. The weight of it nearly collapsed him, and his mount yelped in pain as the Spirit of the creature and the Tree shoved all its foes back.

It lifted its head, black eyes wide, and howled.

The sound was fear itself.

All around them, the godslaved minions went insane, surging forward through the mist. Belloc himself felt his connection to the Twins sharpen, as if the gods themselves were now paying attention to the battle. Eyes were upon him as he spun his mount and fixed his grip on his weapon, eyes that pierced through the skin of the world itself, staring through Belloc's center at the creature before him.

Derision was all he’d ever felt from the Twins, but now, those four eyes cut through him with a new emotion: Alarm. The sensation shivered through Belloc and carried with it a terror greater than any howling hare could account for. There was a swell in the twins' blessing. Shielding increased around him, wrapping across Ettin Wolf and Paladin like sheets of divine armor.

Go, he was sent plowing through the mad minions, weapon raised toward the creature. Kill The Grim!

Belloc charged, lance leveled, only to have it smashed from his grip. He was nearly knocked from his saddle, but the Ettin Wolf leaped into the blow and kept its feet.

The howling cut off.

The Roots Of The Wilds Reach To The Center Of All That Is!

All Things Are One In The Green!

All Places Are One!

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

A Second Aura Is Active!

Belloc's mount's ears perked up. He shouted to those Paladins that remained, "Something is here! Brace!"

Bright blue dots swarmed the dark, each burning like captured lightning. A sibilant call shook the air, phrases that Belloc couldn’t parse, save one.

“Glory to the Returned God!”

Monsters surged out of the mist, crashing toward their line. They were serpents, scaled and fanged, but wielding weapons like men.

“Nagafolk!"

Thousands burst from the mist, sideswiping Belloc's team and sending him careening end over end. He clung to his saddle. As his mount found its feet once more, their protective magics holding beneath the onslaught of vile monsters, he spun, trying to orient himself in the fog, only to spot the racing form of a titanic nightmare.

Its scales were shadows and bright blue eyes burned in its wedge-shaped skull, bigger than even the foul creature. A maw opened up, fanged and hissing, and Belloc spurred his mount to run.

The shadow was faster.

There was only pressure and pain, and then silence.

"The third company is gone, my lord," Finks reported.

“What of Sar’s battalions? Did they make it out?” Kodal asked, his eyes fixed on the monstrous serpent that undulated through the mist.

“The city gates have only just closed. They are among the fog and battling…that.”

Skills discharged in the mist, lighting small portions in sprays of flame and bronze-colored foulness. Serpentine shapes thrashed amongst them, confused amid the shadowflesh and pestilent hide of the godslaved minions. From Perception alone, Kodal could not tell what transpired below. Even his Authority was blunted, as if the fog itself were hampering the Hierei’s power.

“Dear gods in heaven, what is that thing?” someone asked.

The Abyssal Serpent. Kodal grimaced. Its scales were a dark green, so dark they were nearly black. He had heard rumors of such a monstrosity to the south, whispers that it had enslaved itself to the Fiend's Will. He had not expected to see it here, on the field of battle, in Amaranth itself.

Nor had he expected to see the horrors unfolding around the impossible Tree.

Nagafolk were battling the godslaved minions, their numbers obfuscated but clearly multiplying by the moment. Hundreds, if not thousands of the disgusting creatures slithered across Amaranth’s lands, and their tridents and spears were already dripping with ichor and blood in equal measure. Paladins were already falling. He had lost track of the tools he had sent out.

“I am more concerned with what lay beyond the Abyssal,” Kodal said, trying to keep his composure. There, a bipedal shadow waded among the Tree’s growing roots, Mana flowing around it like water.

"What is it, my Lord? It looks like a hare—”

“Have you ever seen a rabbit, horned and tall as a building?” Kodal snapped. “No, it's some trick. Same as this Tree. Same as all of it.”

“What should we do, my Lord? Do we send out more companies?”

“No. The Fiend has blinded us with this fog. Sending more men out to die does not serve the Hierophant’s Will."

Suddenly, a new roar split the air, sending a shudder of relief through Kudal's Spirit. A rumbling whine split the tension among his men, and smiles and cheers broke out. “This is what we need.”

Kudal turned to witness the Manaships flying low over the city. A hundred approached the Shining Walls, with twice that number still lifting from the ports at the interior of the city. Most of the first hundred were cutters, smaller ships built for speed over offensive power, but they would do nicely in clearing the chaff before them.

“My Lord Kodal, Captain Kelso of the Lumen Company, reporting for duty, sir.”

The voice scratched out of the miniature Seal worked into the wall at Kodal’s side, flashing golden with the light of the sun. “You are a welcome sight, captain. You have my permission to exit the city and engage with the enemy. Kill them all and burn that Tree to the ground.”

“Acknowledged, sir.”

The cutters’ engines flared, sending all of them into the dome-like wards of the city. Their hulls flashed as they intersected it, and Kodal knew each captain possessed a key tuned to their Spirit that allowed them to breach their defenses—a hole opened up, allowing each cutter to slip out into the fog-strewn sky. The moment their forward cannons cleared, they fired.

Golden beams splashed down into the horde. It didn't matter to Kodal whether godslaves or Nagafolk died; the gods' creatures experienced only momentary death…but the serpents did not rise again. They hissed and flailed their pathetic limbs as they were burnt to a crisp beneath the Hierocracy’s golden might. Kudal grinned, glorying in the bright light that reflected back onto the city.

It was a light of Strength, and Order, and of Purity.

The destruction was immaculate. He noted a keen hunger in his commanders’ eyes around him, most especially Finks, as the man thumbed black flesh that had started to grow along his jawline. He seemed perturbed and eager by measures, and that armor of his rippled as if in anticipation of the slaughter. Kudal could not bear to glance at the darkness, and focused instead upon the Tree.

Its roots were burning now.

The first volley had carved burning lines into the thick fog, and igniting it into a crimson glow that suffused the field like blood. Kodal watched gleefully as a second volley was fired off, this time by the cutters’ full complement of cannons. More destruction laid the battlefield to waste, but the fog only swirled higher. Kudal could not tell what was being hit. The pure light and fire Mana of the Manacannons dragged across the terrain like swords, their impacts blooming with infernal heat.

Nothing could survive those strikes.

Yet as the shots trained upon the Tree itself, the Fiend rose atop a pillar of jagged stone, his black jacket snapping in the wind.

"FIRE!" came Captain Kelso’s call. A third volley screamed toward the would-be king. A hundred ships at once firing broadsides upon the monster that would bring war to Amaranth.

Nevarre lifted a hand, as if to shield himself.

Kudal leaned forward, his grin eager and sharp. He would relish the sight of Nevarre cowering beneath the Light, though he lamented that his death would be so swift. A filthy Unbound deserved to die a thousand deaths, each slower than the last.

The golden beams dropped upon the Fiend, several hundred all at once, until the land was lit by a new sun. Kodal shielded his eyes, and for a moment thought he’d missed it.

The Fiend still stood and the beams…they curved around him. Bent, as if afraid to approach his snapping coat…and the ethereal jaws that loomed around his form. Those closed, and the light vanished.

He ate them…

"You've raised the stakes," the Fiend said. Black scales slid over him like a suit of plate mail, thick across his shoulders and thigh, but even his full, featureless helm didn't muffle the awful volume of his voice. "Let me do the same."

Behind him, the green shadow of the Tree trunk gleamed, and a cascade of Manalights spilled across the fog. A blue bolt fired at the nearest cutter, slicing through its shields and exploding its hull in a rain of apocalyptic fire. It fell to the earth, crushing the horde beneath, and Kudal went pale.

One by one, enemy Manaships poured from the Tree.

"It's a gateway!”