Tundra

A million mechanical legs swept over the snow as they had swept over the sand, scattering drifts that rose to kiss the shadow of the rising moon. Tusks reared up, banded in silver for war, and caught the glint of the brilliant aurora. Erasmus had arrived. He was vaguely aware that his primary weapon, the aeons-old elder that could pull the orbit of the moon itself and change the tides, sweeping a tsunami over the defenceless plains, lagged behind, but it was not imminently his problem. That was an issue for his Seafarer division to handle, and face his wrath if they failed. For the moment, he was content to ride on meticulous death, grateful that he had met the desert nomads on that fateful day, and been clever enough to adapt their design to better reflect the deadly potential of an armoured scorpion. The skitterer’s sting was enough to pierce mammoth hide, while the spears and nets wielded by the tattooed men who followed him as High Thane were enough to bring the great beasts down. Several had already fallen, and lay like mounds of barrows on the broader grey of the tundra.

At first, the mammoth riders, with their robust builds and great, bone clubs, had outnumbered the Seafarers, but they were not warriors as their coastal rivals were. Many strong clans had joined Erasmus, and fought now with the precision and savagery of a pack of sharks, driven into fervour by the acrid scent of blood on the air. These were men who had seen decades of fights, had learned to spar as a way of living. The only thing on the entire battlefield that they had not banked on was us. Diminutive and without even a staff to arm her, Hackley stood as tall as she could in the middle of the field, unflinching as steel and beast flesh whirled and stomped around her. Her voluminous sleeves were flapping, her arms stretched high in a tireless pattern of casting that created shields for every mammoth to match the eldritch second-skins that protected Erasmus’ own fighters. I was beside her, exhausting my knowledge of runes for blasting and scouring. But unlike Hackley, I was fast running out of strength. The spells I cast drained my very life-force as their side effect.

Despite our efforts, the mammoth riders fell back into a defensive line, beasts bending their knees and lowering their tusks to scrape enemies off the ground, to swipe and pierce and shovel. Meanwhile, from the back of Erasmus’ flank came a hoard of the most infected, the least sane and therefore the most dangerous Seafarer soldiers. The stink of seaweed that rose with their surging tide was unbearable. Drenched cloth hung from them in strips, no proper clothing remaining to show the scars and inked black marks now stretched beyond comprehension. Monstrous lesions oozed pus from their skin, and their faces were slack, their eyes seeing beyond. Some had mutated, sprouting uneven growth between legs and shoulders. Others had been mutilated, and seemed to charge oblivious to losses of flesh and limb

At the same time as this battalion moved forward, the skitterer itself mounted the line of kneeling mammoths, bulldozing over several, which bellowed painfully. The metallic tail swept through the air like a lasso, striking caravans and beast-mounted parapets and sending their archers tumbling to the ground. In other places it stung human clusters, forcing them to scatter, or skewered unfortunate individuals and waved them high above the battlefield as it swum forward. None of the losses truly mattered beside the most cataclysmic of defeats. Mossen Grove was breached.