October, 1371. The Silverstream Valley had become something that no longer resembled a battlefield. It resembled an end.
For two weeks, the human alliance and the demon army had thrown everything they had at each other across this stretch of land, and the land had absorbed it all without mercy. The forest was gone — not burned, not felled, but simply erased, as though it had never existed. The sky above was a ceiling of black smoke and ash that sealed out the sun entirely, and below it, as far as any surviving eye could see, the earth was carpeted in the dead. Corpses lay stacked on corpses, human and demon alike, their blood long since stopped flowing, long since soaked into soil that had drunk so much of it the ground itself had changed color. Thousands died here every day. Fewer than a hundred bodies on any given morning remained whole.
Draven Whitlock, captain of the 18th troop — dispatched from the Whitlock clan and present on this ground for the entirety of those two weeks — found himself alone at sixteen hundred hours on the eighteenth day.
He didn't know exactly when the last of his soldiers had fallen. The fighting had been too continuous for that kind of accounting. What he knew was that when the latest engagement finally guttered out, he looked around and found only corpses — his own men, the enemy's, indistinguishable in their stillness. As far as he could see in any direction, nothing stood.
Neither did he, quite. His left shin had taken the worst of the previous engagement — a half-dragon, large even by the standard of high-rank demons, its strength enough to fracture bone through armor before he'd managed to bring it down. The pain had been abstract during the fight. Now it was not. He lowered himself to the ruined earth and sat, because standing was a negotiation his leg refused to continue.
Above him, something changed.
The wind shifted — came down from the mountains to the east, strong enough to push a channel through the smoke — and through that channel, for the first time in days, came direct light. The sun was descending toward the horizon, and in the gap the wind had opened, it scattered its last amber across the ruined sky in a wash of deep crimson and amethyst purple that seemed to have no business existing above a place like this. The light reached the valley floor. It found the smoke-grey earth and the silent shapes of the dead and lay across them gently, the way an old painter might lay the final stroke across a canvas he knew he wouldn't finish.
Draven looked up at it and felt something in his chest that he had no name for — something that lived in the space between grief and relief, between exhaustion and gratitude. He had not seen the sun in two weeks. He had forgotten, somewhere in those two weeks, that it still existed.
A sound behind him.
He turned before the thought was fully formed — reflex, the body's older and faster intelligence taking over — and saw the half-dragon rising from the carnage seven feet away. Another one. Wounded badly: its right arm was gone below the shoulder, its chest and face mapped in long, deep scars, one of its eyes bleeding freely from a gash that crossed the socket. In its remaining hand it held a violet crystal mace, using it as a third leg to brace itself upright.
Draven reached for his sword and tried to stand.
His left leg had opinions about this. He stood anyway.
One more, he thought. Find a way.
Half-dragons were high-rank demons — born with substantial magical power, capable of instant self-healing when that power was available. But the creature in front of him wasn't healing. The scars stayed open, the bleeding eye kept bleeding. Which meant its magic reserves were empty. Which meant it was vulnerable to magical attack in a way it ordinarily would not be.
The problem was that Draven's reserves were equally empty.
The remaining mana in his body was barely enough for a single speed dash and a half-cast explosive spell. It would not be enough to reach the creature and cast before it closed the distance with that mace. He needed a crystal — any magical crystal from any fallen soldier in the field around him — to supplement what he had left.
He looked. There were none.
The mace swung. He raised his shield and the impact traveled up his arm like a bell being struck, his muscles shaking with the resonance. Another swing coming — he read it and jumped, clearing the arc, landing on damaged ground and catching himself with effort.
Think.
The second impact had driven something into his shield. He glanced down and found it — several shards of violet crystal, fragments of the mace's facing, embedded in the shield's surface from the force of the blow.
He pulled one free.
Crushed it in his palm. The stored magic entered him — not much, but enough, exactly enough — and before the mace could find him again he moved, burning the reserves in a single committed dash that brought him to the half-dragon's back. He cast the explosive spell at contact range and ran.
The detonation was violet and enormous. What had been a half-dragon a moment before was now scattered across a ten-foot radius in pieces that continued, briefly, to explode on their own — purple blood spraying outward in all directions, drenching him completely before he could clear the blast radius.
He lay down in the silence that followed.
His vision was already blurring — blood loss, mana depletion, the accumulated cost of two weeks finally presenting its invoice all at once. He thought, with some distant and detached part of his mind, that peace might finally be arriving.
Then the sky opened.
Crimson portal gates — massive, dozens of them, tearing through the bruised purple above the valley like wounds in the fabric of the sky. Through them poured tens of thousands: demonic creatures of every rank, ancient dragons, undead in numbers that blocked the light. Their shadows covered the valley entirely. A moment later the death rays came — thousands of them, crimson beams of annihilation sweeping the battlefield in overlapping lines, destroying everything they touched.
One found him.
The heat of it reached him first, enormous and absolute, and his vision went dark before he could complete the thought that had begun forming in his mind.
This is—