I’ve gotten nervous before every fight I’ve ever been in. Whether it was a duel, a spar, a skirmish, or a full-scale battle. Never once have I escape the flutter in my stomach unaided by the Touch of the Black Hand and today was no different. They led each of us to different points in the force that held the gate. I was to be in the frontline, with Ellen behind me. Two laborers led Mika and Nora away to join the small cluster of casters. Mika’s golems floated in the middle ranks, ready to take advantage where he could. Maggie, who would have no hand in the battle, stood beside Helle and the other commanders.

  Directly beside me to the left was another woman I recognized. We’d fought together briefly during that first battle. Taller than most other warriors, only the [Brood Guard] were bigger, and she’d been a redwood on the frontline during her time in the gap.

  “My name is Bran, of the Cult of Weeping Grace.”

  “Oddveig.” The woman said in return. Her Trade Tongue was good, but she clipped her name so the g cut off halfway through the sound.

  I tried to get her to say something more, asking after her heritage, her exploits, even what she liked to do for fun, but all she responded with was silence.

  “Do you want to spar after this? Perhaps we can learn something from one another?” I asked.

  It was a trick I’d used all the time growing up when trying to get to know the other trainees.

  “If we both survive.” Oddveig said, looking at me for the first time. “I would be happy to exchange paths with you.”

  Once she stopped speaking, Oddveig shifted her gaze back again and didn’t mutter another word. I studied her a long moment, trying to see if I could spot even the slightest hint of pessimism; but there was none. Her earlier statement seemed to come, not from a place of defeatism, but from a stone-hard practicality I was envious of.

  ~~~***~~~

  The first signs of combat came from the wall. The noise around me died out as people stopped their hushed conversations to listen. The wails of the dying spread amidst the chaotic sounds of spells and arrows crossing the gap. I felt it in the air, like a noose about to tighten, when the towers finally got close enough to drop their bridges. The sound of launching spells and the howls of the dying grew louder as the towers approached. All that faded as a curtain of stillness draped itself over the fort.

  The stillness broke to the sound of grinding stone and the slap as they hit the wall. Roars, and a sound like hoofbeats, filled the air as brave or suicidal goblins rushed across the gap. Having combat so close that I could hear it, without being able to see it, was deeply unpleasant.

  Every part of me was tense and ready for violence, but there was none around me. Still unaided by Iona’s touch, I tried to focus my breathing, to hone on the beautiful melody of violence. The clash of steel, the cries of pain, anger, terror, lament, death. They all melded into that one seamless harmony and without noticing, I began humming along.

  My song was interrupted, I don’t know how much later, by a crash at the gate that deafened all other sounds. The impact filled time as it echoed off the walls, each echo built into the last grasping for some terrible climax that was deafened again by another crash that began the cycle anew.

  To this day, I’ve never heard anything that compares to that goblin battering ram against the gate. It was so deafening, so consistent, so all-encompassing that with every impact I tensed and pressed either my hands or shoulders to my ears. I did anything I could to dampen the noise.

  Nothing helped. My ears felt like they would pop, my eardrums collapse. It was all I could think to do in the moment, so I picked up the war hymn. Concentrating on the vibration in my chest as I hummed. Hoping to force the shattering cacophony of the ram to the back of my mind with the vibrations.

  When the goblins landed the first strike against the massive stone doors, it rattled them in their hinges. Ancient steel groaned and stone dust rained down from the arch. It’d been an hour since the goblins began trying to ram through the gate, and I’d been mostly successful in keeping my attention on the vibrations rather than the deafening impacts.

  Larger and larger flakes fell from the door frame. Each impact of the ram rattled the gate harder on its hinges until chunks of stone fell from the arch that contained it. With an impact that pulverized stone, a spike of metal with a tip the size of my fist speared through the two stone gates. Rivets of bronze ran the entire visible length of deeply scarred and scored metal.

  With every impact, more of the spike came through the door, and the gates rattled harder until eventually they boomed off the hinges. The right door swung just long enough to impact against the back of the wall. Runic light flashed beneath the door and pulsed up the wall before it toppled to the floor, gravel sprayed from beneath it. The left side was more contained, but almost crushed a team of five laborers as it impacted the courtyard floor.

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  The doors gone, I could see how the portcullises stood. Rather than tear them down, the battering ram – shaped into a twenty-foot-long spike – spread the bars wider and wider until they were so bent they opened meters-wide circular gaps.

  A stone pyramid with dozens of wheels on each side contained the ram and its operators. Because of the shape of the ram, and how they’d torn through the portcullises, the goblins couldn’t just rush through the gap they created. Instead, they had to pull the ram back far enough that it no longer blocked the way into the fort.

  As the goblins milled about waiting to charge, our casters launched a volley of spells, a mist building within the gate tunnel. Spells of every school landed amongst the goblins, but killed and injured little. It gladdened me, however, that the ‘idiots in command’, as Nora put it, stopped forcing her to use her weaker spells and allowed her free rein to deploy her mist.

  We weren’t the only ones to fire off spells, but those that launched from the goblin side were weak and barely more than six. Somehow, they’d brought even less casters here than we had. I easily battered aside a javelin of stone, but almost stumbled as one of their mages cast an earth wave spell.

  When the ram finally pulled back from the gate, the goblins didn’t all charge forward as they usually did and as I could hear them doing above me. Instead, they formed up into ranks. Locked their shields and marched forward as a single unit. The goblins maintained extraordinary rank discipline as they marched through a hail of deadly spells, massive shields raised to defend the person beside them and not themselves.

  Helle and the other commanders called something out in their native language as the goblins advanced. The aranae around us shifted seamlessly to match the goblin shield wall. Their own smaller shield covered only their human-like torsos. Unsure how we fit into the formation, Ellen and I stood near, but slightly apart.

  “Adventurers!” Helle shouted in the Trade Tongue, finally acknowledging us. “Fall in formation!”

  Her order was less than helpful as we’d never practiced how to fit in the aranae line, so I did what my own trainers would have wanted. Ellen and I pressed in tight to the women next to us and I brought my shield up to cover some of Oddveig’s lower half.

  I’d wager that I had more experience with war than most sixteen-year-olds, but even for me it was strange to see a force usually so disorganized and chaotic act so disciplined. They moved in lockstep. Those at the center patiently waited and guarded those at the corners as they climbed the curved and jagged metal bars. It was concerning enough that I forced myself to drop my previous evaluations of how goblins fought.

  The fact the Touch of the Black Hand hadn’t graced me, and that once more the Willow’s Wrath’s weaknesses constrained me worsened my tension. It was made for the forest, for the freedom of moving from dense grove to sparse thicket to small clearing. It was a style dedicated to the wrath of the trees and best suited to combat amongst them. Here, miles underground, surrounded by stone and women who fought like mountains, it was like placing a willow in a mountain pass and being surprised when its branches slashed at the walls.

  It provided me a slight advantage, however, even though I couldn’t use the Willow’s Wrath the way Iona intended, the goblins still had to march through the pass I occupied.

  They never charged, too focused on keeping formation and it wasn’t until the first rank was almost upon us that Iona sapped away my fear and the lingering pain of injuries not worth treating.

  The first goblin fell to the beat of the war hymn, their shield battered away with the rim of mine and their skull caved in with my hammer. Those that followed got dispatched with merciless efficiency from everyone around me. We moved so in sync with one another that for a time all slipped away and all I could do was focus on the rhythm of the hymn and the person in front of me. I was so locked in with the cool harmony of battle that it was a shock when they called the first switch. First in the aranae language and then again in the Trade Tongue by Helle as an afterthought.

  Ellen took my place on the frontline while I rotated back into the fifth. Even within Iona’s grasp, being so far away from someone within my grove put me on edge. I trusted in Ellen’s ability to keep herself safe enough to not do anything foolish about it, however.

  Next to me in the back line was Oddveig. The large woman took slow, controlled breaths as she stretched out her shoulders. She meandered through various arm and shoulder stretches but her eyes never left the goblin [Clerics], always wary of a stray spell.

  I glanced up at her once she transitioned to neck stretched and for the first time noticed the burn on her right arm from neck to elbow. The skin red and blistered, flakes of black peeling from the pale white. The injury didn’t seem to faze her, and neither did she let it impede her range of motion.

  Ten minutes later and another switch got called out. Ellen rotated back to the line behind me, her maul bloodied. She looked tired, gasping in long breaths, but uninjured. During the switch, I caught glimpses out of the corners of my eyes of Mika’s golems as they slipped through goblin legs. They created small whirlpools in the mist, which transformed from a thin layer to a thick fog now, as they ran past.

  I couldn’t see the front line well from my place at the back, only catching glimpses through the lines as people died and shifted. From what I saw, a goblin would just drop a puppet with their strings cut. Afterwards, I’d hear a cry and a flash of white stone as one of Mika’s golems latched onto the face of the goblin.

  When I finally got back to the front, I rotated in early. The woman in front of me was too slow to dodge and took a spear thrust through her windpipe. I stepped up and to the side, avoiding the corpse to engage with her killer. I’d expected the body to be pulled off the field quickly by a trio of laborers, but powerful mana flashed from deeper in the courtyard and the stone itself pulsed in such a way that the body drifted out of the line as if a piece of driftwood.

  Stepping back into it, I did what I trained for, what I lived for, what I was born for. Like the wind against the willow, goblins came at me. They made me bend, they made me sway, but never once did they make me move. I was rooted into the frontline and would not be moved from it.

  Ten minutes later, when I switched back out with Ellen, I had to wipe the blood out of my eyes. The holes in my eye mask were small enough that it rarely happened, but halfway through my turn I’d gotten a goblin in the neck with the spike of my hammer. When I tore out, blood painted my helmet, getting some in my eye.

  Ellen and I spent hours at the gate. Going back and forth through the lines. It didn’t matter how many times we injured or killed a goblin. It didn’t matter how many aranae casualties happened. Someone always filled the gap. Even Ellen and I were injured on multiple occasions, only to be moved by those waves of stone quickly healed and sent back into the meat grinder.

  I was nearing my fifteenth turn on the front line, maybe eighteenth, when a jagged wave of stone cut across the gap and tossed the warrior beside me into my lap. The dull spike of her leg, which she’d thrown sideways to catch herself, caught on the chain mail of my arm and tossed me backwards into the second line.

  The woman couldn’t catch her balance and within seconds of me landing hundreds of pounds of muscle and chitin followed, to crush my legs and stomach.

  Air fled my lungs in a wheezing gasp. Trapped between her and the unforgiving stone, I fought for a gasp of air but couldn’t do more than choke like a fish out of water. Air entered my mouth but nothing I did got it past my throat.

  Desperately I struck with hammer and shield trying to push her off. Chitin splinter and gave way under the blows and the woman thrashed as my hammer landed but nothing I did moved her. Black encroaching on the edges of my vision, I flipped my grip over to the spike of the hammer and was about to try pulling her off me the hard way when mana further into the courtyard pulsed again.