Then—the marsh road suddenly shuddered as though struck by a hammer. Mud and shattered stone leapt into the air as a jagged ridge of rock erupted from the ground and surged forward like the spine of some belligerent, basalt-buried beast.
The shockwave struck the outer trench that had been dug around Barston proper. Timbers splintered like a coastline surge. Crrrrrkkkkkk!
Half the newly planted perimeter stakes tore loose from the soil and scattered across the hastily dug ditch as the ground folded inward on itself. Tub was right. It was just wood and mud, after all.
“Hold!” shouted Teln, voice cracking. “Hold the line!”
Arrows flew. Some prematurely, like awkward fireworks, still shuddering with the nervous fingers of those that let them loose.
“Fire!” Roared Teln—a half tinge of annoyance on his voice.
A ragged volley flung from the palisade with a hiss of fletching and iron. The shafts streaked across the open ground and clattered harmlessly against S0da’s earthen stone plates.
One arrow struck his chest. It snapped clean in half. He glanced down at the broken shaft with mild disappointment and huffed.
Then he kept walking. “They are cute, though.”
The goblins behind him surged forward, scrambling through the reeds in a screeching tide, crude blades and jagged spears raised high above their heads. Mud splashed beneath their feet as they poured onto the road. They were doing that weird thing again. Warbling and warbling, before clenching their jaws in silence.
“Now!” roared Hamish, as pitch barrels tipped from the palisade. Black tar spilled over the trench in thick glistening streams. Agnes hurled a torch after it with a desperate overhand throw.
The flame caught with ease. Fire bloomed across the ditch in a violent orange sheet. The first wave of goblins shrieked as the burning pitch clung to their oily green skin and lacquered armour. Bodies tumbled backward into the marsh water, trailing smoke and blistering flesh.
A cheer broke from the villagers.
“Silly fuckers!” Sammy howled, raising his axe.
“Not without a fight!”
The cry rolled along the palisade, and for a fleeting moment the defence held. Or it felt like it could’ve held—at least for a moment longer.
Then
Lightning fell from the sky.
The bolt struck the palisade with the sound of a hundred year oak being split. Wood exploded outward in a storm of splinters and sparks as the charge ripped clean through the timber wall. Three Barston folk vanished in a flash of white-blue light, snuffed out. The remaining villagers staggered backward as the entire structure shuddered beneath them, leaving a thin gash in the defenders perimeter—just thin enough for a surge of goblin berserkers to slip through.
Kash laughed, trans-Atlantic accent caught somewhere between Luton, England and upstate New York.
“That’s better,” he said as another flash split the sky. “Gorgi, you're up.”
The one that walked between shadows vanished with a smile. In one heartbeat,
Agnes never saw her coming.
The shadow behind her thickened suddenly and a slender blade slid clean through the gap beneath her ribs. The woman gasped as the steel emerged through her chest, dark blood spilling over the point.
Gorgi withdrew the blade with a quiet twist and a wry smile.
Agnes collapsed beside the ruined wooden palisades.
Hamish roared—half sob, half rage—consumed entirely in a wash of grief. The kind that makes you choke on snot and tears. He swung his axe with a feral bellow, the blade carving a wide arc through the morning air.
With ease, Gorgi stepped backward into shadow, the axe passing through empty mist with a soft puff.
She appeared again ten paces away, watching him with faint interest, like a wolf amused by a half-chewed deer. Gorgi cocked her head and slipped back into the shadows, Hamish spinning and roaring, wailing like some revenant on a haunted heath.
Across the road, the pale lady,
Her pale fingers dipped into the bubbling tar like a small child that had just discovered mudpies. She raised them slowly, spores drifting from her skin like falling snow. The corpse twitched, muscles spasming, cheeks shuddering.
Its burnt limbs jerked once… twice… then forced themselves upright from the trench as fungal tendrils burst through its blistered flesh.
The creature climbed the burning ditch without a sound—then another rose beside it. And another.
Hamish stared on in horror, snot trailing from his nose in a stark revelation.
“Oh you foul—”
The revenants surged forward together, dozens of them, wrenching themselves upon him like a pack of starving wildcats.
Sludge watched. The Cold Prince whispered deep within its folds. Seize them, it hissed.
Bogheart burned warmer and brighter in its chest, its golden corona wrestling in vain to find a Barston heart to stir from faltering.
The battlefield spread before the lumberjack in layers of noise and movement. Fire spread and caught in a patchwork of splinters and ash.
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The one named
Lightning cracked. Spores drifted through smoke. Goblins clawed their way over the broken trench line as the brave souls of Barston fell one by one.
Yet the gate still held. Sludge stepped down from the palisade, scattered screams and cries for help ringing in its lumberjack ears.
The ground crunched beneath its boots as frost spread across the mud in a delicate branching of veins. The trapper’s axe lowered into its grip as a familiar cold gathered along the blade.
A new wave approached, and as the first goblin reached the gap—the axe fell.
The creature split from shoulder to hip in a burst of bone and frozen blood. Ice raced across the corpse instantly, locking it into a brittle sculpture that shattered beneath the weight of the next charging body.
Another lunged past it and the axe rose again.
This time the Cold Prince answered fully.
Frost detonated outward from the impact, freezing three goblins where they stood. Their bodies cracked apart as Sludge stepped forward through the storm of splintering ice, rime-ridden offal collapsing to the floor like thin withies of willow.
Behind it, the recently fallen greenskins began to stir in a perverse obedience. Blood lifted slowly from the battlefield in thin twisting ribbons as Sludge flared its nostrils and spat an icy wad of phlegm to the floor.
Hal-p?x had begun to wake, yet its voice did not answer within the folds of Sludge’s soul pit. Not yet. It did not feel the need to rumble—only nod its head and beckon like a restless king.
The first revenant rose behind Sludge with a wet tearing sound as flesh and bone dragged themselves upright from the frozen ground.
Across the road, Kash lowered his hand momentarily, shit-eating grin still plastered ear to ear. The lightning around his armour flickered.
He watched the rising dead with sudden and curious interest.
“Huh,” he said. “Did that thing just raise a corpse?”
Jenna turned slowly. Her pale smile widened.
“Well,” she murmured. “That’s… new.”
Just beyond the splintered line where greenskins wretched and clawed for purchase, Hamish still lay in the melee, frame vanished beneath the thrashing heap.
He was a blur of arms, claws, pale green sinew.
The mass of revenants folded over him like a sack of snakes dumped upon a slaughter table. Mud churned beneath their feet as they tore and snapped and clawed. For a moment his hefty arm flashed within the pile—one heavy, tavern-room swing that crunched a skull and flung pale spores into the air.
Then his flesh disappeared in totality. The mound convulsed once, then twice. A final wet crunch followed and the creatures dragged themselves upright again, spattered with gore that steamed in the morning chill.
The rest of the villagers upon the palisade saw it happen in all its bloodthirsty starkness. The sound that left them travelled across Barston like wind through dry grass. A breath. Singular and sharp—half caught in throats.
Tub sputtered and swore loudly, voice cracking as he hauled his axe into both hands. “Saints take me,” he rasped. “They’re chewing him apart!”
Sammy could only answer with a howl. The butchered rage of it rolled down from the wall as he leapt from the half-splintered palisade and landed in the mud below with a hard thud. His boots slid as he charged forward through the broken trench, axe raised high above his head.
“Bassstttaaarrrdddssss!” The blow fell.
The nearest fungal corpse lost half its neck in a spray of pale fibres and blackened blood. The body staggered sideways and collapsed, twitching as spores burst from the wound like a shaken sack of flour.
Another greenskin lunged at him—this one fully living and filled with fury.
Sammy’s axe buried itself deep into its collarbone and wrenched free again with a sickening tear. He roared through gritted teeth, swinging wildly as the mass of green and pale flesh closed around him.
Above the wall, Teln watched the scene unfold with horror tightening his throat.
“Keep ‘em cocked!” he barked hoarsely. “Don’t let these hounds reach the gate!”
Arrows flew again. This time the shafts found flesh in a duff, duff, duff of split fletching and crunching arrowheads.
Two goblins toppled into the ditch with thin iron shards protruding from their throats. A third creature collapsed beneath the wall as a bolt punched through its eye and lodged deep in the skull behind.
For a few fleeting breaths, the Barston defence held the line once more. They could feel the ebbing of the green tide slipping back, if only momentarily.
Across the cobbled pass the five Gronk players watched the struggle unfold like spectators at a travelling show.
S0dadrinker shifted his weight. The ground groaned beneath the stone plates of his boots.
“Bit messy,” he muttered.
He lifted one arm and the earth answered.
A ripple travelled through the road as soil and stone convulsed beneath the surface. A jagged ridge surged upward once more and slammed into the palisade with crushing force.
Each side of the gate, the timber wall split open and beams cracked beneath their own weight. One entire section tore free and collapsed inward with a splintering crash that sent two villagers tumbling to the mud below. The eastern palisade wall stood cleft in half—bracings flailing like torn britches—though still clinging to structure in perverse hope.
The goblins poured through the cleft gap immediately.
The shadow—Gorgi—watched the breach with a faint smile tugging at the corner of her mouth, shoulders turned, chest set.
“Not exactly the front door, dummies,” she said aloud.
Kash snorted. “Close enough.”
He lifted both hands as lightning crawled between his fingers like living filament before snapping upward into the cloud cover above.
The sky answered with a groan and three bolts fell in quick succession.
The first struck the broken wall ahead and exploded outward through the splintered beams. The second struck the ground beside Sammy and hurled him backward through the mud like a rag doll flung by a bored toddler. The third speared through a cluster of Barstonfolk scrambling along the barricade behind him.
A pale light filled the air. When it faded, three bodies lay smoking beside the shattered wagons and braced piles of pine and alder.
Kash rolled his shoulders and grimaced.
“Alright,” he said lightly. “These mobs can build.”
Behind the others, HighestPyre finally stirred.
The tall man stepped forward through the drifting smoke with a slow deliberate stride. Embers trickled from the seams of his armour as he moved.
He watched the battle unfold for a moment longer. Then he exhaled.
A cone of fire rolled from his mouth and washed across the marsh road like a tide of living flame. Goblins caught in the blast shrieked as the inferno swept past them, their bodies igniting instantly like moths to a lantern.
The fire roared onward in a sickening blaze, before it finally struck the broken gate. Wood blackened and curled inward as the flames devoured it, and when the blaze faded, the entrance to Barston stood open.
The one that Tub had called the Pyre smiled faintly.
“There we go.”
As the walls fell and the gate finally wrenched to the mud with a thud, inside the village, Sludge fought on—lumberjack jaw set in a cold-blooded silence as it hacked forward through the tide of bodies.
Cold trailed behind every movement. The trapper's axe rose again and again and again. Goblin after goblin died in a flash of rime and splintering bone.
Blood lifted from the battlefield in thin twisting strands as Hal-p?x drank deeply from the carnage spreading across the mud. Softly, the air filled with a faint crimson glow as the lifeblood of the fallen gathered around Sludge in slow spiralling currents. Mannagoth supped on it drunkenly.
The first revenant had already risen, and now another corpse jerked upright beside it. Then another.
A goblin with half its skull missing dragged itself to its feet, eyes empty, flesh stiffening beneath a tightening shell of frozen blood. Its wretched maw snapped and turned toward the enemy—Gronk.
Across the road, Jenna watched with widening interest.
“That’s definitely a fragment,” she said quietly to the others.
S0dadrinker narrowed his eyes. The stone-armoured giant studied the growing cluster of revenants marching beside Sludge as frost crept steadily across the ground beneath their feet.
“Huh,” he rumbled.
The earth cracked under his heel as he took another step forward.
“Looks like Morg found a new boss.”
Kash grinned wider. “Finally. Think this thing killed Smellbrecht, too?”
Lightning danced eagerly between his fingers again.
In a blink, Gorgi slipped through shadow and reappeared atop the shattered wagon behind Sludge, silent as drifting ash. Her blade glimmered in the dim morning light as she crouched low upon the wood.
She studied the lumberjack creature for a long moment.
“Alright,” she called lazily across the battlefield, like some grizzled trapper teaching their secondborn how to bait a deadfall.
“Which one of you wants to try it first?”