NaNoWriMo 2017 - Day 2

Cassidy sliced the spearhead off this poor, piss-stained soldier’s spear. He was the only one nearby who hadn’t immediately fled after she had killed her mother’s cousin. It was a pity that he hadn’t accepted her request. Not unexpected, but still a pity. She had always liked Herrick A bit scrawny, the spearman was probably a few years older than he looked, which would put him in his early twenties, of an age with Cassidy.

“Open your eyes, soldier,” Cassidy finally had to say when he continued to stand before her, frozen in terror.

He opened one eye, just a teensy, tiny slit. He was shaking so badly that his knees were knocking together. “Please don’t turn me into a newt and eat me!” the spearman begged.

“Turn you into a newt?” Cassidy asked. Was there no end to the foolish tales that country lords told their common folk to convince them she was an evil sorceress? “Never mind that nonsense. You duck down here and wait for me. Try not to get shot by any arrows so I can offer you a job. You’re either very brave or very stupid, spearman, and whichever you are I have a place for you. If you want it, that is.”

He sputtered a bit, but there was no more time to waste on him. The archers were regrouping. Cassidy shoved the spearman down and took off at a run along the wall towards the nearest group of archers.

Arrows were clattering harmlessly against her new armor. It was the lightest set yet that Corbus had been able to forge and still be virtually impregnable. She leapt, using her air godstone to boost her up higher so that she could crash into the middle of the archers’ ranks. She spun, her Halcyon blades cutting through their leather armor like butter.

Cassidy’s siege towers were nearing the moat now. No army had ever taken Kilgrey Gap by force, which was no doubt why Baron Helshire had chosen it. The craggy mountains to either side of the castle just inside the mouth of the gap made surrounding it for a siege impossible and the narrow valley turned into a killing ground as archers could rain arrows down on attackers unable to make use of their superior numbers in an assault. That is, if the archers were paying attention to approaching attackers. Cassidy hadn’t seen a single arrow aimed at anyone but her, so Aunt Diana’s plan was working perfectly.

The archers around her were fleeing so she took off down along the wall to scatter the rest of them. Among the next group of frightened bowmen she found the man that had made her new suit of armor necessary.

“Cousin,” Cassidy said to the tall man in front of her. Uthor was as tall as his recently dead father, but not as broad. The archers had all retreated, but just behind Uthor a half dozen men waited in full plate mail with massive hammers instead of swords.

“Warwitch,” he replied. His Halcyon blade glowed bright red in his hand. Uthor’s mission this past year had been to assassinate Cassidy. His last plot had ended with him burning through Cassidy’s helm with his sword and leaving her with an angry red scar all along her left jawline. Uthor raised his blade, a longsword that he wielded in one hand so he could hold a double layered shield in his off hand.

Corbus, this armor had better work, Cassidy thought as she stepped forward to engage the only man who had ever managed to penetrate the armor her mad inventor had engineered for her. Cassidy attacked, swinging one sword at Uthor, which he caught on his unusually thick shield. Her blade began to burn through the steel so he swung his sword around at Cassidy’s side. He was expecting her parry with her other Halcyon blade so that she would be open to his hammer wielders leaping forward to batter her – Uther had learned that anything short of Halcyon steel had no chance of injuring Cassidy so his henchmen used hammers to knock her off balance and expose her to his Halcyon blade.

No doubt to Uthor’s shock and consternation, Cassidy let his blow land on her left side so that she could cleave the head from the nearest unsuspecting henchman who had leapt forward with his hammer raised, not a thought spared for defense. She felt the fire godstone set into her breastplate surge to life. As Corbus had explained to her – at painful length, as he was wont to do whenever he got excited about one of his discoveries – all godstones had two natures: a push action that could be used to flare the element and a pull that condensed it. Aunt Diana had used a water godstone to” push” the water from a nearby river into water vapor and create the fog that had concealed their approach. That same godstone could be used to “pull” water from its liquid state into ice. Almost no one used the pull action of a fire godstone and to Cassidy’s knowledge, no one had ever come up with anything useful to do with a fire pull until now. Fire godstones could be used to push a small flame into a roaring blaze or power the vicious heat of a Halcyon blade. The pull action of a fire godstone could be used to suck the heat out of an object. On the continent it was evidently a popular practice among nobles who had nothing better to do to use a fire pull to cool their soup. Corbus had, in his twisted way of approaching every problem from an utterly foreign perspective, devised a way to set a fire godstone into her armor that would pull away excess heat if she were to become engulfed in flames or attacked with a Halcyon sword.

Corbus’ invention worked and Uthor’s blade clanged harmlessly off her side. Cassidy shoved Uthor back with a blast of air and sliced clean through the arm of one of the hammer wielders. Two henchmen down and four to go. Uthor staggered back, confused by the lack of effect his trusty sword had yielded. His four minions backed up with him and Cassidy couldn’t help but smile. Uthor’s father had been a worthy adversary, but his son was a smarmy little sneak and she would be glad to rid the world of him.

Cassidy charged forward, forcing the hammermen back lest they lose limbs from her quick flurry of slashes. Uthor likely wanted to run, but the first platforms from the siege towers were crashing down behind him so he was stuck between Cassidy and her soldiers. Cassidy pressed her attack, taking advantage of the gap the hammermen had left. Uthor caught her first blow on his shield and parried her offhand strike, but by then she was already slamming her sword down on his shield again. Thick though it was, nothing could last long against a Halcyon blade and it was cleaved in two, leaving Uthor with nothing but his sword and his four frightened henchmen.

“I yield!” Uthor shouted, spreading his arms to the side and sinking to his knees. His minions dropped their hammers and did the same. The heat was draining from Uthor’s blade as he disengaged the godstone in its pommel.

“You would,” Cassidy muttered disgustedly. “Drop your sword. It will make a fine addition to my collection.”

Uthor did as he was told, but then lunged to the side suddenly. A gust of wind hit Cassidy in the chest and she was sent tumbling over the edge of the wall. Whirling, she slammed one of her swords into the stone as she fell. The blade sunk in and she jerked to a stop a little over ten feet down from the top. Above, Uthor and his henchmen had recovered her weapons and were waiting to attack her when she climbed back up.

“That rotten little…” Cassidy grumbled to herself. She should have just cut his head off and be done with it. Oh well, no use crying over murders she could have done. It was time to focus on how she was going to kill Uthor now that she was in this predicament. He would have seen her latest trick of flipping herself around with an air godstone so that was no good. At this point in the battle she could technically wait until her soldiers pouring out of the siege towers finished taking the walls, but that was hardly satisfying. She could climb up the wall, ramming one sword after the other into the wall. It would be slow and that was probably what they were counting on…unless…

Cassidy began to climb, her Halcyon swords allowing her to scale the wall. Uthor and his goons waited eagerly at the top. Just out of reach of their hammers, Cassidy shoved her sword up into the wall at an angle instead of straight in, the point of her sword going up towards where Uthor and company waited. She began to shove the sword to the right, cutting slowly, but surely through the stone. After pulling the sword back out there was an angry gash across the face of the wall.

Uthor might have recognized what I’m about to do if he’d ever bothered to put in a day of honest labor, but if that stuck up rat has ever chopped down a tree in his life I’ll eat my boots, Cassidy thought as she rammed the blade back into the wall, this time at a downward angle. She pushed the blade through the stone until she felt the wall began to creak and groan under the pressure.

Cassidy pushed herself to the side and out of the way as the wedge of stone she had cut slid free and crashed down into the moat below. With a substantial portion of the wall below them gone, gravity took care of Uthor and the remaining hammermen. The wall above her wedge tumbled forward under the weight of the five heavily armored men atop it and Cassidy had the distinct pleasure of hearing Uthor scream like a little girl as he plummeted to his death.

NaNoWriMo 2017 - Day 1

Bimley told himself that he was shaking so badly because of the cold. It certainly wasn’t the terror of the upcoming battle. No, certainly not. And this fog that had suddenly rolled in out of the previously clear night was not ominous at all. He was a man who had been conscripted to fight for his lord before, not some peach fuzz faced boy awaiting his first battle. Still, he had never had to face anyone like her before. The rumors about her where just lies her grandfather spread to scare good men into joining his stupid kingdom…weren’t they? He heard a faint clang from somewhere in the mist, out on the flat plains across from the moat.

“Did you hear that?” Bimley hissed to the soldiers next to him on the wall.

“Hear what?” Fred asked nervously. “I didn’t hear nothing. Is she coming?”

“Will you two shut it?” grizzled old Tom snapped. Tom didn’t seem unnerved by the prospect of an attack from the Warwitch of West Wending. Then again, Tom had been sneaking swigs out of his flask for the better part of an hour so he could just be drunk.

Bimley heard another soft clang, closer this time. It was so quiet, if she was attacking why couldn’t he hear the thousands of rabid monsters in her army stomping across the glen? He couldn’t see anything in this fog. Nerves frayed to the breaking point, he gripped his spear tighter.

“How long ago did the fog roll in?” A deep voice behind them made Bimley nearly jump out of his skin and he definitely peed just a tiny bit.

They all spun to see a mountain of a man made all the more imposing by his spiked plate armor. Baron Helshire was the one who had gathered everyone here at Kilgrey Gap to try and break the tide of the Warwitch’s unrelenting conquest of the Brawgreen Isles. Bimley was proud that his lord was among these final heroes here on Vermatt Isle who had resisted her and her wicked grandfather. They were the last free men of the Isles and they bowed to no one, certainly not some fool old king on Raltattan Isle whom they had never even met.

“Less than half an hour ago, I’d say, m’lord,” Bimley answered, perking up a bit at the sight of their commander. Baron Helshire had never lost a battle and was a demon of a duelist. If anyone could put an end to that West Wending freak, it was him.

The baron considered this. Then he removed helm and cocked his head to listen to the foggy silence. Bimley did the same and thought he could just barely make out footfalls.

“Trying to sneak up on me?” Baron Helshire roared suddenly and Bimley hoped no one heard him yelp when he jumped in surprise. “Ha! I thought you had more honor than that, girl!”

Bimley strained his eyes to see if she really was there in the fog. Then he saw her, Cassidy Ryncaster, the Warwitch of West Wending herself. She wasn’t as tall as Bimley had thought she would be. Then again, she could hardly have been ten feet tall with a scaly and six inch long fangs as the rumors claimed. In fact, thirty-five feet down and across the moat as she was, the Warwitch hardly looked impressive at all. Bimley began to feel better about their chances. Baron Helshire would crush this foolish girl and Bimley could get back to his farm and hopefully convince Marta to marry him before the summer harvest took up all his courting time.

The slow, cold laughter that floated up from the Warwitch set Bimley’s knees immediately quivering again. “Dear, dear mother-cousin you wound me,” Cassidy called back. Bimley gulped, he had never heard that the Warwitch was the daughter of Baron Helshire’s cousin. What did that mean? Surely the baron wanted nothing to do with her even if they were kin. He was the one who had organized this massive defense, after all.

Cassidy continued, “You have fought well this past year. Vermatt should have fallen months ago, but you’ve been an ever-present thorn in my side. Always turning up where I least expect with some clever ambush. Hell, from what I hear you’ve managed to get nearly every fighting man left on the isle behind those walls and all their lords sworn to obey you. Why not enjoy the fruits of your heroism? Name yourself Archduke of Vermatt Isle and let your men live in peace. You’ll rule them as you see fit, I’ll make sure grandfather offers you special terms. I’d say you’ve earned it and you have some distant royal ties through my mother. How does Archduke Helshire sound in those great hairy ears of yours?”

To a man, every soldier on the wall turned to look at the baron. His craggy, scarred face frowned down at the Warwitch. After what seemed an eternity, he spoke, “I promised these men they would bow to no king and that promise will be kept until I draw my last breath! Vermatt – free and true forever!” He roared and then slammed his helm back onto his head.

The Warwitch regarded him for a moment and then shook her head. “So be it,” she called back.

Bimley heard the scraping of her twin swords as she drew them from the sheaths on her back. There was a red stone in the pommel of each that began to glow bright red. Fire godstones. Bimley cursed under his breath. He had been hoping that if the rumors about her tail had been false then so would this one. The swords were remnants of the fallen Halcyon Empire when pagans had corrupted the beauty of the holy godstones into weapons. As the godstones’ heat flowed into them the blades began to glow red hot as though fresh from the forge, but the legends of the Halcyon swords said they would remain hard and sharp instead of becoming pliable as normal steel did at that temperature, the fiery metal were said to be able to slice into stone and armor like an axe chopping wood.

The fog around Cassidy took on an eerie orange glow from her swords. She planted her feet wide and then raised her arms. The ground rumbled below her and the earth began to undulate and heave like a stormy sea. Slowly, the Warwitch began to rise on a pedestal of dirt and stone as she used her earth godstone to create a pillar that was nearly ten feet high by the time Bimley recovered enough from his terror to hear Baron Helshire bellowing at the archers to open fire.

Arrows clanged harmlessly off of the Warwitch’s armor. It did not look nearly as thick as the baron’s heavy plate, but her armor was supposed to have been forged in the fires of hell by some devil she had pressed into her service. Her pillar of earth rose until she was level with the top of the wall. The moat was still between them, she couldn’t possibly jump that gap…could she? Bimley glanced nervously over at Baron Helshire. He had drawn his massive greatsword and had his eyes fixed on the Warwitch, waiting for her next move. Bimley did his best to stamp down his fear and did the same.

As he turned his eyes back to her, the Warwitch bent into a crouch and threw her arms down as she leapt. A blast of air – did she have godstones from all four elements?!? – sent debris spinning from her pillar as she threw herself into the twenty foot gap that separated her from Bimley.

She was flying! Glorious Savior and the Four Saints above, she could fly! She really was a witch! This time the stream of urine shooting down his leg was more than just a bit. He was going to die! He would never get to see Marta naked.

Then Cassidy began to fall, she wasn’t going to make it! The Warwitch dipped below the crenellations and out of Bimley’s sight. Evidently she couldn’t fly after all. Bimley heaved a sigh of relief. Tom was throwing up on Fred’s boots. Evidently the whiskey had been a bad idea to combine with the stress of thinking the Warwitch could fly. Baron Helshire did not look relieved at all though. He leaned forward to glance down towards the moat. Bimley did the same and his eyes bulged in shock.

Cassidy had burned her Halcyon blades into the side of the wall and was hanging about five feet below them. The baron readied his greatsword so Bimley leveled his spear and tried not to think about how sweaty his palms had become. The Warwitch planted her feet on the wall and kicked off. As she did Bimley could feel another blast of air and he saw the momentum of the gust fling her all the way around so that her feet crashed into Baron Helshire’s chest. The move had obviously caught him off guard, because he hadn’t had time to bring his sword down on her.

Bimley had assumed that she had been planning to claw her way up by wrenching one sword free at a time, relying on her armor to shield her from attacks as she used her devil blades to scale the wall, but he had been so very wrong. Now he was face to face with the most deadly warrior in the Isles. She had two magic swords and at least two additional godstones. He had a pointy stick…good thing his bladder was now empty.

“I-I-I’m warning you!” Bimley stammered. “Stay back!” He pointed his spear at her chest.

The Warwitch cocked her head to the side quizzically. Bimley hadn’t even seen her ram one of her Halcyon swords through Baron Helshire’s breastplate. His commander was dead. Behind her Fred and Tom had both thrown down their spears and fled. Across the moat Bimley finally noticed the army approaching through the fog. Massive siege towers rumbled forward with men carrying ladders hidden behind them. None of the archers were paying any attention to the attacking army though, all eyes were on the Warwitch and Bimley.

Cassidy Ryncaster brought her sword around in a lazy backhand and Bimley shut his eyes tight.