Crematorium
Princess Edda's Throng marched on Karag Rhyn, the elite mercenaries of the Besiegers joining them, but they were not the only ones. One person makes little change in the calculus of war, but the right person at the right place can make a difference. Adela Burgstaller, Journeywoman of the Bright Order knew her place. Fire was ever the answer to trolls.
***
Adela Burgstaller had been in battle before. This wasn't it. This was an extermination. Dangerous, deadly even, but not a battle. The battle was what happened to this place before they got here. Tunnel after tunnel was carpeted with the dead. Here Broken Toof orcs fell charging a barricade, but the wood was broken and splintered and beyond it there were few orc dead, and many goblins. The Crooked Moon goblins had died hard, but they'd died.
There a number of holes in the walls and floor were sprung clean, the covers shuffled about and stomped but still recognizable. Some of the Moon goblins were still in the holes, dead before they made it all the way out. But it was the orcs they'd surrounded in ambush that littered that cavern, not goblins.
In a side tunnel a number of deformed, broken and melted orc bodies lay still among still wigging troll guts, while men and dwarves tossed them into the flames of cobbled together firepits. She called upon her blade and joined the grisly work. Every troll already down that they could end permanently was another one not producing the shouts and screams echoing around the mountain.
***
She stuck close to the mercenaries. Her Khazalid was still a work in progress, and she had no intention of dancing in close with trolls. There was bravery, and there was stupid. Not when she had other options. The noise had masked them on approach, and the bodies they strode over hid the stink. Her group rounded a corner in the tunnel and were suddenly at a cavern opening. One not only covered in the dead and the still wiggling trolls, but whole ones, feasting on the fallen, orc, goblin and troll alike. She'd long past lost her sense of smell, but even so the stink was choking.
The mercenaries wasted no time, planting their shields and firing. The thrum of crossbows seemed to only anger the monsters. They were too close and lumbering closer. She called upon the inner fires, feeling the warmth in her soul. How it wished to burn, everything. Well, she was in need of some burning. Flame arced above the heads of the solders, barely staying below the tunnel roof, before splashing against one of the monstrosities. Its scream deafened her. The trolls took off at a run and they would reach the lines in but a moment when the second thrum came.
The first shot had been near panicked, reflexive, a result of countless drills. The second one was aimed, placed with forethought and precision. All three trolls collapsed as several bolts found their knees, each. The follow up sought other joints. The Besiegers would struggle to kill the trolls, even with multiple bolts to the head, the damn things were too stubborn and too stupid to die from it. But they could leave them wiggling on the floor, near helpless. Near, as one found out, as several streams of vomit exploded from the downed monsters. For once, the crossbowmen did not hide behind their shields. Instead, in the half second the steel barrier bought them, they threw themselves aside, so that when the stream inevitably punched through, none of them were caught. Well, badly anyway. More than one was stripping boots, or jackets from stray drops, but better leather and steel than flesh.
Those could be replaced with dwarven gold. At least this group wouldn't have to wait for dwarves to arrive to dismember the trolls. Adela Burgstaller called upon the fires in her soul and burned them out and then kept burning until all the bits and pieces of their kin the trolls were eating were still as well. The cavern, the tunnels, the entire mountain was a charnel house, one being burnt out, one piece at a time. The rot and death being replaced by burning flesh, to end in pure ash. An ancestral home polluted by greenskins, now cleansed in flames.
It was a good day.
She tried not to think about the Dragon and hoped it would not become her problem. For once in her life, she wasn't at all sure there was enough fire in the world for that problem. Hopefully the Magister had some cunning way of dealing with it. Adela wasn't at all sure how this had all come to be, but when all your enemies start killing each other, and the battle is over before you arrive, you don't need to be a child of Burghers to understand simple truths. Who profits?
From there, she didn't need to know. Not the schemes or the plots. The results spoke for themselves. It was said there was no Wizard so feared on the field of battle as a Bright one. In sheer scale of the damage they could do, none were their match. This? This is what the Greys did. A battle won, before the first swing. Adela was witnessing the work of a maestro of that terrible art.
Letters would need to be penned. The Colleges were aligned, allied. But they were also rivals and the Greys could be as coldhearted as the Astromancers, in their own way.
Best to keep the fires warm and close at hand.
