Subtlest Game: Book One - March of the Pawns

Chapter Six

11993759

"Lock down the wall!"
"Strengthen the shield!"
"Charge the cannons!"
"To arms! To arms!"
Ceris had heard it all, all the shouted phrases to rally the troops before a battle. She tuned it out, along with the dull booms of impacting fireballs overhead as she and Arabella soared over the streets on tense, shocked wings.

"Down there!" Ceris yelled to Arabella over the noise, pointing at a certain blonde sorceress arguing with a couple of generals.

Ceris and Arabella landed behind Gwendolyn. She turned at the sound of their feet – or rather, Ceris's feet – hitting the pavement.
"There you are! I need you on the front line, this place is our last bastion!"
Ceris winced as another explosion shook the ground.
"How did this happen?? An army that size can't have appeared out of nowhere!"
Gwendolyn waved her hands in a complex motion, her spell book fluttering around her head, sweat beading on her skin. Her spells were rewarded with the slightest brightening of the shield.
"Well, they did. Came straight out of the ground, out of orange cracks in the stone. Right behind our frontline watch towers, and started firing everything they have at us."

Arabella scowled and kicked the pavement.
"Brimstone."
Ceris frowned.
"What?"
Arabella kicked the pavement again, this time causing a small chunk to break away.
"Brimstone attack. They form portals in the ground, destabilising the battlefield before attacking. We're just lucky the shield stops them burrowing right beneath us."
Gwendolyn waved her staff around her head.
"That would have been helpful five minutes ago!"
"Well, I've been rather preoccupied!"
"Oh, nevermind the safety of the kingdom if you're preoccupied!'
"You–"
Ceris grabbed the back of Arabella's dress before she could leap at Gwendolyn and mince her with the claws now sprouting from her fingernails. She glanced at the sorceress.
"What do you need us to do?"

Gwendolyn ran a hand across her brow.
"From what we've got out of captives, most frontal attacks are lead by a general called the Silent Speaker."
Ceris rustled her wings. The faintest prickle of unease rippled down her spine.
"You two have wings. Find them, and end them."

Ceris gazed down at the battlefield as she soared over the carnage. It was neither the first, nor the worst battle she'd seen, but the capacity of living beings to slaughter each other never failed to send a numb wave of shock through her. Dark figures – mostly odd figures she could only assume were demons, with the occasional pocket of Pigmen or Wither skeletons – clashed with the purple robed sorcerers, cold white arcane magic flaring against the furious, roaring blasts of soul fire. Blades swang, blood spilt and bodies crumpled to the earth, slashed and burnt and mangled. More of the strange crystalline spires routed the battlefield with their murderous blasts of energy, turning demon and enderkin alike to dust.

"There!"
Ceris nearly tumbled out of the air. Arabella's voice hadn't sounded in her ear, but in her head, echoing around her skull.
"I figured out how to communicate telepathically. Figured it might come in handy. But...it had a price."
Another voice, almost identical to Arabella's, but lower and colder, spoke out.
"Unfortunately? How cruel. Who wouldn't enjoy listening to me?"
"Anyone sane. Ceris, you see that cluster of spires?"
Ceris looked down and saw it, a group of half a dozen or so spires blasting energy at the shield.
"That's got to be where the general is. Lots of protection, but close enough for a powerful being to do maximum damage."

They circled lower, so as to catch a glimpse of their enemy. They did, and Ceris felt her stomach turn to ice. She'd known it really – known it ever since the Satan had first mentioned the Silent Speaker. All the same, confirmation hit her like a physical blow.

Kaze, Ceris's sister, first in line to the throne of Dragonspire, stood tall and proud amid the demonic forces. A glossy black blindfold, inscribed with blue and purple arcane runes, covered her eyes, and in her hand she held a scythe, five feet of polished crying obsidian topped by a crescent of gleaming netherite.