Story #41 - Front Lines

Front Lines

Foolish woman.

Log'thar retrieved his bloodied axe from solid ice-wall she'd created when she saw the weapon careening for her head. She'd been panicked, he knew, and had created the wall as an act of desperation, not only puffing away into a veil of black smoke after it shimmered into view, but leaving it standing on the misty field. That was a waste of magic, through and through, but her kind was known for such excess.

A large chip now marred the top edge of the axe, thanks to the supernatural hardness of the ice, and he sighed. He had met her more than once and on each occasion he'd done his best to kill her but with little success. Her kind were a blight, a frail and wispy race of magic-users that did nothing more than pollute the land with their items of power and their research on the arcane. Such things were best left in the hands of gods, not slender waifs with more power than good sense.

He sniffed. And now they wanted his homeland.

There had been emissaries, but to a man – and the only men of their kind Log'thar had even seen – they were beheaded and returned to their people in small burlap sacks. No matter how politely it was couched, asking the Glorious Leader to simply give up his land was not something that would be well received.

Now, the battle raged. The Glorious Leader was hardly infallible and had assumed that such a display of force would overwhelm the tiny people and their pitiful demands, but instead an army of magic had marched on the capital. They had been defeated, of course, but when the bodies were counted more than a few were missing, gone in the chaos of the fight after having leveled devastating attacks against the city itself. They had fewer numbers but greater raw, elemental power, the kind that had fractured his people centuries earlier.

And this woman was infuriating.

Shorter than him by half and with a wispy mass of long black hair, she looked more child than sorceress, but she wielded her filthy magics well. In truth, he'd gone easy on her the first time, hoping to simply scare her off, have her return with stories of the ferocious barbarians to the north and trouble their people no more.

It hadn't worked, of course, and he had begun to see her on an almost regular basis, as if she was going out of her way to find him. Their battles were...invigorating...he had to admit – the rush of steel, the cold fear of blazing fire as it streaked by his twisting form – she didn't make it easy for him, and he found that he liked it.

Still, she had damaged his axe.

He was going to have to kill that woman.

***

As the clouds of black smoke thinned enough for her to see, So'sara noted that they had once again brought her east instead of south. The magic was growing less and less predictable and the foolish war the Mistress had ordered was costing them more each day. Of course they needed access to the Ley Lines under the barbarian territory, and of course the fools should simply give it to them, but they were uneducated, uncultured. Stooping to their level – demanding instead of maneuvering, and attacking instead of talking – had not produced the immediate results the Mistress had desired.

The first attack on their city was to be the last – the few men lost as messengers were expected and hardly relevant, as there were too many of those petulant children among her kind already – but the barbarians fought back with a ferocity she had never seen.

Above all, one had fought harder than she thought possible.

He seemed to be following her now, showing up every time she stepped on to the battlefield, her spirit more weary than the day before. Sleep restored only a portion of her energies and there was precious little time to waste in bed. Her people needed her on the front lines and her Mistress commanded her presence. A foolish leader was, even still, a leader, and she was in no position to stage a coup.

So she fought and killed as she was ordered to – save for this one man.

He was larger than most of them, which was to say almost twice her height. Rippling muscles were standard for his kind but he seemed to have trained to a point where each muscle, each individual portion of his body was supremely well-crafted. They needed such base forms of physical strength as they refused – simply refused – to benefit from the use of magic. She had assumed he would be an easy kill like the many others of his kind that had fallen before her, but he had somehow been able to anticipate, move around her attacks before she completed them.

At first it had been her surprise at his skill that saved his life, that prevented her from simply killing him where he stood in a burst of power, but now she found that her meetings with him were...interesting...stimulating, to say the least. He had proven to be more of a challenge than his brethren, something that she wouldn’t have expected from any of their backwater kind.

She looked down at her robe, covered in the blood of fools and the grimy stains of long use. He was tiring her, wearing her down, and he had made her use the last of her Walled magic, the only kind she could receive nowhere but from the Mistress herself. It pained her, she had to admit, as he was becoming something akin to a favorite experiment, a curiosity that she never thought to see in course of this foolish war.

She had a job to do, a purpose to serve and if fate willed it – should the Mistress ever pass – a people to lead.

She was going to have to kill that man.

- D