[POV Ryan Third-Person Omniscient] [Tense: Present]
12:00 a.m. - At Front Wall, Eryndral Village, Aurelthorn (11 September 2025)
Fog presses tight against the stone like wet cloth. Timber gaps leak night into his eyes. Ryan's fingers bite cold mortar. Wind has teeth. Behind him, the village rustles and shivers—soft footfalls, a kid choking a sob, a crate's edge scraping a threshold. A tool clinks against wood, small as a heartbeat.
"Okay. Breathe. Think it through." — my brain did, and sent back a resignation letter signed 'Hope.'
Through a slit between planks, fire moves like a slow tide. Torches bob in long lines, stars dragged along the ground. The army crawls toward them—too many bodies under too many banners.
(20,000 men. Fuck me. This village has only 200 villagers include old and young)
He kneels, sets the pack down, pulls out the laptop and the cobbled speaker. Tiny lights carve little islands of home in the dark. He jacks his phone to the laptop. The dragon roar he recorded earlier waits on the screen, waveforms like teeth. He tweaks the EQ—bass up, highs cut, tail lengthened until it feels bigger than the village.
(If he can't fight, he can scare. Fear is a weapon for negotiation.)
He glances back. Old men hold pitchforks. A girl stuffs rag into a basket; blood stains the first layer. A boy grips a bundle of arrows that look like sharpened sticks from a yard. This is not an army.
(Don't worry. If they fail, at least no one will live long enough to complain about his strategy.)
He hits enter.
The roar rolls. Low. Long. It slams his ribs. The wall thrums. A loose board rattles. Echoes chase themselves through trees and back. Birds explode from a pine like dark confetti.
He pressed play, and the sound that came out was terrifyingly realistic to the extent of the Drakensvale frontline soldiers. Some of them hesitated and were a little confused, but that didn't seem to make any difference. The soldiers continued to advance.
Something in the trees answers the roar, and the answer rearranges the night.
A shape unknots itself from shadow—first a rib of darkness, then an impossible body that makes the fog seem thin as breath. It is wrong by every honest measure: taller than a carriage house, broader than a war-drill, its neck a column and its head a blunt hill of teeth. If memory reaches for a name it finds only rude approximations—a tyrant-lizard, a mountain with jaws—because the Umbrathorax is older and meaner than any name affords.
Chitin plates overlap like a ruined city's roofs; fractal veins pulse slow and cruel along its flank, catching torchlight and throwing it back as molten lattice. Gold-glow eyes open like furnaces. Its breath is a low bell that makes the ground answer with a tremor. When it moves, the trees seem to lean away, unwilling witnesses to its hunger.
It knows the sound of dragons. The recorded roar had been a beacon; the forest gave it an honest call and the beast came.
Then it springs.
Not a stagger or a step—an enormous, terrible coil, the world tearing at the seam as it launches. Fog whips off its scales. It lands in the field with the blunt violence of a falling hill and, for a heartbeat, the Drakensvale ranks are simply inside its shadow—caught in the hollow of a mouth that wants everything warm and alive. Spears look like matchsticks. Banners fold under its breath. The Umbrathorax opens its maw, a cavern that hungry things build around themselves, and the sound it makes is the promise of swallowing: dragon, soldier, villager—meat, and more meat.
The next roar hit hard. It bounced and stacked with earlier layers. For a moment, the night sounded like a deep pit where many beasts breathed and all of them were hungry.
"Yo, this one isn't from me." Ryan said.
Through the fog, shapes in armor drifted back a pace. A banner slumped. A hand made a broken circle—an old charm against unknown things.
For a heartbeat, hope or hopelessness made a small beat in his chest.
Then the night answered.
It was not his sound.
A low growl came from the forest—not loud, not huge, but deep in a way he felt in his bones. The ground hummed. The hair on his arms rose.
Some villager said, "God… it's real." Some old man fear "No, no, no…"
(That's not mine. That's not from the laptop. That's… something else.)
"Everyone, listen!" Ryan said.
He forced his voice through the panic.
"Do not run—running marks you as prey! Hold the wall. Stay low. Be still."
He said that because he remembered a scene from a dinosaur movie where the main character was staying still in the car to avoid being eaten by a dinosaur. In reality, Ryan didn't know if it would work or not.
"But—what are you saying? That thing will eat us!"
Ryan sees a chance. "It will eat anyone who runs. Villager or soldier. Look at them!"
He pointed beyond the barricade. Even through fog, he saw bodies shift. Tight lines loosened. Some figures stepped back. Others held still only because their feet would not move.
(We're not going to be eaten, right?)
An elder near him grabbed the wood with both hands, his voice shaking.
"The Umbrathorax. The Shadow of the Deepwood. The devourer from the old tales."
Some villager said, "Stories to frighten children!"
An old man said, "Stories come from truth."
The forest moved.
---
[POV Seraphina Third-Person Omniscient]
01:12 a.m. - At Fogged Field, Eryndral Village, Aurelthorn (11 September 2025)
The head of the Drakensvale military force.
Fog and fire breathe together. The thing from the trees looms—patterns of pale gold shiver across plates that drink the night. Teeth like saws. A body built to swallow. It coils through broken lines as if the army is grass.
Seraphina plants her boots in churned mud. The ash-red of her cloak drags heavy. Blood nets the fur lining. Her halberd is gone. She grips a dragon blade.
"Stand your feet," her voice shaking. "Do not run. Running feeds it."
Shapes steady. Not enough. Men hunch beneath their shields. A banner's black dragon slaps wet earth and drags. The fog makes ghosts out of everyone she loves.
Lyscia's braid snaps at her back. Her hawk eye blinked alive like small stars trying to be a sun.
"Angle of strike is two beats after the tail," cool and precise even with smoke in her lungs. "Burn through the joint."
Her arc dragon blade. Flame rings the beast's limb. The chitin scars and peels and closes again with that sick, crawling shimmer of light.
Varrik's voice lifts from inside a knot of shields. Iron belts iron. "Hold. Step together. Brace!"
His line meets the weight like a wall meets a ram. Spears bite seams. The monster grunts—low thunder in its gut—and slams down again.
Mersha moves like a blade thrown from the fist of war. Quick, fearless, every muscle in debt to purpose. She runs up the planted limb with both swords wet and bright.
"On me," breath like a meditation.
"Too high, Mersha!" Seraphina's chest tightens. The word tears.
"I'm already there," laughter that sounds like wind on steel.
Her knife finds a throat seam. It sinks. It twists. The monster shrieks, a sound that makes ribs rattle.
"For Drakensvale!" someone cries, drunk on a heart's memory of winning.
The beast snaps. It is faster than it looks. Mersha flips—grace into ruin—and vanishes into jaws that close like a door to hell.
"NOOOOO!"
Sound rips out of Seraphina and leaves pieces of her with it. Her knees try to go. They do not. She drives herself forward where the head dips low, red eyes like coals turned to rain.
"Burn it out of our sky!"
Her strike is fire dragged screaming across scale. The wound seals while her heat still hisses. It heals while her grief is fresh.
Lyscia pivots to her shoulder, eyes bright and fixed. "Light disrupts the camouflage more than flame," breath clipped. "Dawn helps. We amplify it."
"Do it."
"Fire-gems to the front! Lenses!"
A runner fumbles a case open. Small disks of glass flash in grubby hands. Men angle light from gems into the beast's eye. Beams stab the fog. The monster shies and hisses and hates the shine.
Varrik roars and his voice shakes mud. "Shields up! Hunker! Do not chase!"
He knows the hunt when he hears it, and this is not their hunt. It belongs to something older.
The beast lashes. Tail scythes. Men become thrown straw. A helm cracks like an egg. A scream snaps off, mid-stream. Seraphina grabs a spear, and measures the distance and drives the broken spear into a joint where light gathers. The wood shudders. The tip sinks a finger's width. Not enough. Gold bleeds over the wound and the gap is gone.
"Mersha," she whispers to the ruin, and the name tastes like iron.
Fog thins, not because it chooses to, but because dawn forces its fingers under it. Grey blooms along the field's rim. The beast pauses. It listens to the law that binds its shadow-born soul. It hates the law and obeys it.
Seraphina hears it. She tastes the turning of the air.
"LYSSY. SUN TO THE EYES."
Lyscia lifts a palm. Her lens catches the thin light, throws it into the beast's gaze like a knife. The Umbrathorax pulls back as if something stabs behind the eye. Its growl drops into a quiver you feel in teeth.
"Not a rout," Lyscia mutters as she sights the beam again. "An ordered retreat."
Seraphina hears horns. Not theirs. Short, sharp, many. West. Then the rain of arrows. The sound cuts the air in a sheet. Shafts hiss through fog and find backs and legs and any place without iron. Men jerk. Some drop. The line folds where the weight is new.
"West flank!" Varrik's voice turns. "Wheel left! REAR RANKS, FORM A BACK SHIELD!"
"Arrows from the hedge!" a young voice breaks. "No flag!"
"Not Aurelthorn?" Lyscia's lens flares once more, then she swings the halberd and fans heat low to burn a path for the stretcher-men. "No, this is Draemyr's army from Aurelthorn!"
"No way," Seraphina growls. "RETREATTTTT!."
"RETREATTTTT!" Lyscia moves without waiting. She already does the thing most like survival.
"We lost the war before it even started," Seraphina points, arm shaking but steady. "We mark our dead. We do not leave them nameless to rot. Then we move to the creek line and breathe."
Her voice turns down into something for ears that belong to her alone. "We come back for her." Mersha
Varrik hears the second part as if it lives under his own ribs. "We do," a promise that feels like a hand on a grave.
The Umbrathorax decides. One last roar, thick with hunger and denial. It slides back between trunks. Branches sway. The light on its back flickers and winks out, leaving gouges and blood-slick mud to prove it was here.
---
[POV Ryan First-Person]
04:56 a.m. - At West Field, Eryndral Village, Aurelthorn (11 September 2025)
Fog bares teeth. The Umbrathorax moves like a mountain that learns to bend. I can't see the whole. The fog gives pieces and keeps the rest.
Burn steady—thin lines along a halberd like stars mapped onto steel. They cut through vapor, draw clean circles of fire, vanish, flare again. A voice counts with them, cool and exact.
A deeper sound rolls from a knot of shields. Words hit like timbers dropped into mud to make a road.
"Do not underestimate our foe. Brace every step."
The shields bite earth. A tail smashes. Men stagger and hold. Sparks spit from edges. Someone laughs high and brittle, then bites it off.
Another voice—near, then far—wraps itself around panic and pins it down.
"Make no mistake; every life lost weighs heavily upon us all. We fight not just for victory but for those we stand beside."
The beast tears a trench. Armor crumples like tin. A man crawls one elbow at a time, helmet gone, hair matted. His mouth moves. No sound reaches me. The world is all impact, and the body of something that wants to escape.
I track rhythm. Strike. The lines in the fog. For a minute, order exists. Men push together instead of apart.
Dawn creeps like a thief—thin light fingering hedges, sliding under the fog's belly. The beast pauses as if a rule touches it behind the eyes. Light hits its angles. It hates the light. It does not love leaving.
It slides back into the trees. The field exhales like a chest that forgets how.
Arrows answer that breath. West hedge. Low hiss, no trumpet. Bodies jolt, spin, drop. Shields try to be everywhere and fail. The ordered retreat buckles, not from fear, from too many cuts at once.
I see men pivot on command toward a creek's dark line. Shapes lift wounded. A standard drags. The long black dragon in mud lifts, then sags, then lifts again. Someone shouts for a name that never answers.
I don't think about myself until the wall moves under me. A plank snaps. My feet skid, knee bangs a bolt head. I try to catch the edge with my left hand. Something sharp slashes wrist bones. Then a harder one, quick as a sprinting thought, clean as a guillotine.
White strobe. Then red.
This time, I realise. "This is not a dream, and I F..ck up." I hear myself somewhere between mouth and ground.
"AHHHHhhhhh, FUCKING HURTS."
I look. Sleeve flaps. No hand to fill it. Heat pours out of me fast as water through a broken pipe. My head swims. The bell tower leans in the wrong direction.
"AHHHHhhhhhh!!!"
I reach with the other arm, pull the lost sleeve against my ribs, press like I can glue myself back together. No scent rides the air. Just wet warmth, slick skin, the world narrowing.
Afterwards, the villagers stab the Drakensvale soldiers with spears, knocking them down. Hands catch me, not gentle, not cruel, just necessary. A strip of cloth bites my upper arm. A knee wedges my shoulder to keep me still. The cart wheel turns once, creaks, stops near my ear.
"Stay with us, lad. Stay."
I hunt for a word. Any word.
"Fuck."
My mouth opens. No sound. My tongue feels like wood. The sky flickers above me—grey torn by pale, then fog again, then grey.
I fall into the quiet that waits when a night ends and a new day begins, not knowing if I will see that day at all.