The Shining Wyrm

10.4

Today, Jewel found the center to be well into the valley, almost at the halfway point which Father and the other allied fliers had probed five days ago.

It was also plenty before the torn up earth and broken timbres that had once been the village.

They offered battle properly by noon, as had become rote, waving the banners of their Captains and Knights high to be seen by the watchers on the Fortress Towers and their counterparts standing on the higher earth works.

Today Tsulogothulan had joined Jewel with the rest of the force of Rochford as guardian. Standing and looking at the torn up earth in a contemplative manner with their single violet eye.

As Jewel waited she watched her friend considering the turned over earth. And then the Weird spoke.

“Not a proper bog yet, but give it water and time and it could be. Make a lake and mire of this valley, I could. A deep soak and it all would be right. Bring in the heron and the weed and reeds. The good silt and frogs and fish. A cold bog, but a proper one.”

Jewel looked at the tilled over village and its half ruin of a temple. She could smell meat, still mostly fresh, but with the stink of spilled offal spoiling it.

“You could, but then it wouldn't be a village. There were houses here, there is still half a temple. If you made a bog of it then no one could live here again.”

Tsulogothulan nodded but their eye kept moving along the furrows and hillocks of turned over dirt. The pits where the wizard fire, maybe even their own had however diffused landed and undone everything beneath it.

“No man could no, but it’s not a village now, and if they marched on us, the mire would catch their horse’s legs and drown their men. Tangle their weapons and hold them off long enough for the trap to finish being sprung. Assuming we don’t have to work against the Earth-Mover.”

Jewel turned from the devastation back to Tsulogothulan.

“Earth-Mover?”

The Weird nodded and pointed past the village to the trenches, hills and spikes that had been raised. In particular at the regular stones spearing alongside the wooden stakes.

“One of the wizards among them is an earth mover, perhaps with a truth or knack for stone. But I’d guess it is earth and ground in general. I know bog land and water and mud. Those are not the hills of land moved with shovels or hoes. And those stones were called by sorcery, not made by any mortal tool.”

Jewel looked harder at the shape of the stone spikes, she’d not thought much about it but they did indeed look more like simple outcroppings jutting from the dirt as if that was simply the natural shape. Strange in their regularity when you considered it that way.

“So an Earth Wizard? Are they a Weird do you think?”

Tsulogothulan shrugged.

“There is a Weird of farming and tilled soil that I’ve heard has the grasp for it. But he is Southeast and then through two over ways and one under. He also abhors traveling and warfare and I’ve yet to see the bounty that could bribe him to serve in an army.”

Jewel considered that with what Euewyn had told her.

“The other I know is very deep in their secret indeed by this point. Far my elder and barely inclined to think let alone speak. That one is the Weird of a specific mountain even further away far north and over and under twice more than past a sea.”

Jewel frowned a bit trying to recall the meaning of that word. She was sure she read it but had not found much sense to the term. Eventually she gave up and asked the Weird.

“A sea?”

Which got Tsulogothulan to actually turn away from the once village and meet the Wyrm’s eyes with their one.

“Unfathomable masses of water, deep as mountains are tall in places, full of vast beasts and with water salty as tears. Like lakes and rivers but filling all below a sky vault sometimes. I know you’ve read books which mention them before, Lady Jewel.”

Jewel boggled at that and put her full attention on the Weird.

“Truly?! I thought that was flowery prose and exaggeration! Boasts, Like the knights that claim to have slain lairspawn thrice my size.”

The Bog Wizard shook their head at that and chuckled like a mud choked crow.

“No, seas are quite real. A distant journey to find any of them from here, but no less real. But given the distance, I think we don’t face either of the Weirds that work stone and earth I know of. They could be uncircled or newly risen but that would be quite an odd thing in either case.”

There was mostly silence then, the men around them murmured and muttered conversations. Bromthil and Kraok reprimanded those whose attention was too lax. But it was shaping up to be another day of long, boring waiting.

That is until Jewel felt it.

A sorcerous working trying to take root in the earth below their feet. Seeping like roots.

And just as suddenly stalling and stymying as Tsulogothulan fixed their one eye upon the dirt below them.

A disconcerting, rumbling bubble and a seeping moisture welling up was the only sign of the abject violence and conflict Jewel could feel in the fires of the earth beneath them. Around the shoes of the men and the hooves of the horses there was a damp moisture. But no one’s footing was even fouled.

A few curses and complaints at the sudden sogginess drew a lashing hiss from Jewel’s tongue before she even realized it.

“Quiet you! Tsulogothulan is parrying a blow of sorcery against us! Bromthil! Sound warning: the wizards are striking!”

The captain of her father’s guard and of Rochford’s footmen and Levies nodded hard to her and set his lips to blow hard the three long two short notes. The signal of enemy wizardry in the ranks.

He was just finishing the first call and taking breath for the second when Jewel heard the same from their left and right flanks. Echoing each other, Jewel’s sense of the other sorcery was unclear and muddled by distance.

Some of it familiar and friendly, much of it distinctly not.

The rest was uncertain.

The tumult and rumbling shifts in the land beneath and around them continued to fail to fully rise and present any issue other than a slight sinking into moist soil.

All of Rochford’s foot and levy and those under the captains to their left and right were secured by Tsulogothulan.

But those further afield from them were stumbling a bit as the earth rippled and heaved a few inches.

Their lines rallied, shifted and mostly avoided the uncertain ground, the captains getting them into good order and even getting the levy to turn their attention back to the hills and trenches that had been dug ahead of them.

Or at least where they had been.

Where before there had been walls well over the head of a man even on horseback was now nothing but a line of soldiers, footmen, archers and mounted knights.

Where the torn-over village with loose dirt had been the earth had gone packed tight and compact as the most solid trail. All signs of wooden stake or stone spike had vanished all along with the fortifications.

And that was not the end of the change to the landscape.

The incline was even as Jewel watched turning against them. The earth ahead was dipping down and the rest rising up in a swell of smooth dirt.

A ridge similar to what they had been trying to bait Thurzó into assaulting up on their first offering was now growing before them.

Carrying at its peak the arrayed and ready army into position.

And then the cries of unfamiliar Gryphons called in the air and the enemy army began marching towards them.

What Jewel had assumed were levy at a distance resolved on approach to be distinctly better armored then their forces.

More like a full line of footmen built up in the opposing center.

Or dismounted knights.

Their offer of Battle had finally been accepted.

Jewel braced herself. Neither Zephyrvam nor Smokespear had made the cry that signaled she was to take flight.

She had to stay grounded with the troops and spew ineffective spurts of her weaker flame until then.

Jewel stared ahead as Bromthil and the other captains bellowed.

And then they began moving at a paced march to close with the force of Thurzó.

As their opposition also approached the swell of terrain moved with them, carrying a hillock and steepening the angle between them all along the lines of Viznove. Except the five formations in reach of Tsulogothulan’s working.

Where instead of rising hard packed land there were streams and springs breaking out along the incline, cutting and undermining the forming hill, threatening to break the swell of earth carrying easily a thousand men into a churning froth of bog, duck weed and shaking reeds.

A swamp fighting against stones, timbres and the moving earth.

Jewel glanced to the left and right with a frown.

The reach of her friend’s sorcery was nowhere near as far as the apparent working of their opponent.

The entire Thurzó line had good terrain moving with them.

She spoke softly to her friend, who was looking significantly less solidly human, their cloak, hat and eye almost wobbling in place like waters over thrashing eels.

“Tsulogothulan... are you alright? Are there more than one wizard doing this?”

It took the Weird a disturbing amount of time to even respond. Jewel had never seen any wizard having to concentrate like Tsulogothulan was right that moment. The violence of sorcery moving under their feet and the narrow wedge ahead of them where the terrain bowed to the will of the Bog instead of whatever it was their opponent was doing seemed to consume all attention.

Even Jaksa the Red had not been so single minded when he did his protections.

They were still moving with the army, approaching on the only even terrain as the rest of their allies had to fight a rising incline.

And then Tsulogothulan found words or attention or perhaps just a moment’s respite to respond to Jewel.

“Blasted stars’ fortunes. I was wrong, it’s not an earth moving wizard, nothing of the sort.”

There was a wet throaty laugh. Like frogs choking on mud.

“They have Lord Sorcerer Veoul, War Mage of the Realm of Cantor Reborn, Weird of Fortresses.”

Jewel had a moment to consider what a Weird of Fortresses even meant before the work of the springs and reeds to try and cut and stymy the approaching swell of earth suddenly was turned over by a rising swell of stone, wood and packed dirt.

She felt the stones and earth rallying up together, marching like the boots that once had trod them. Paving over the swampy bog and skewering it deep with solid foundations. Cutting off the springs and wells that sought to undermine them.

Her friend turned to Jewel and before the wizard even could speak Jewel knew what she needed to say.

The wyrm loosed her voice with none of the restraint she normally kept. Bellowing at her full volume.

“Men of Viznove! Brace!”

And then Jewel discovered what it was like to have a wall of stone actually leap up to her like she had often felt they wanted too.

Even when it was rushing up out of the dirt around them Jewel could feel how joyful the stone was to meet her.

It arrived quite rapidly.