The Vampire & Her Witch

When Sybyll charged across the gap between her army and the forces assembled inside the wall, it was a signal to the entire army that the next phase of the battle had begun. The sound of her axe striking stone echoed through the gatehouse tunnel, immediately answered by a renewed fury from Captain Ipiktok's bombardment.

-WHOOOM- -CRACK- -WHOOOM-

Iron shot hammered the battlements with faster and faster, no longer seeking individual targets but creating a devastating barrage that forced the remaining defenders to cower behind whatever cover they could find. The once neatly notched crennalations of the battlements now resembled the broken teeth of a bareknuckled fighter and men who had once stood proud with bow and arrow in hand now crawled on their bellies, dragging wounded companions away from the most exposed sections of the wall.

Under this protective storm of iron and exploding stone, four figures charged toward the gatehouse, following in Dame Sybyll's wake.

As the thunder of Tuscan slings provided cover, Hauke could hear the distant ring of steel on steel from the plaza beyond his soft white fur stood on end as he felt the ripple of intense energies unleashed by the violent collision of Dame Sybyll's darksteel ax and Sir Tommin Pyre's Holy Light Blade

"Wait until Hauke seals the ceiling of the gatehouse!" Heila reminded Lord Jalal and Kurtz as they ran. The Eldritch Lord of Airgead Mountain simply nodded, as if he would never forget such an important detail, but Kurtz nearly stumbled as they ran, belatedly realizing that he'd been overcome by the sensation of power infusing his body as Sybyll's potent blood pumped through his veins.

"Snow, swirl and dance!" Heila commanded as they ran, drawing on the power of Snow Fang at her hip to sweep the snow from the ground and fling it into the air in a blinding flurry of drifting flakes that would obscure the vision of anyone in the gatehouse who thought to attack them through the building's narrow arrow slits.

Truthfully, Heila needn't have worried. The room above the tunnel through the gate wasn't large enough to hold many men and Inquisitor Diarmuid and the acolytes from the temple already felt cramped after squeezing into the confined space to pray over barrels of oil as they awaited the right moment to unleash holy flames that would seal the gate and incinerate any demon foolish enough to attempt to follow after the Crimson Knight.

Unfortunately, for all of their years of study and their limited experiences directly facing Eldritch forces, neither Diarmuid nor Loman Lothian had ever fought against a Frost Walker, nor comprehended what it would mean to have a sorcerer with an iridescent horn working so directly against their plans.

After days of squeezing every drop of moisture out of the sky to fuel the snowstorms, the air was painfully cold and dry, but even without moisture in the air to turn into ice, there was plenty of snow on the ground to fuel Hauke's sorcery and the young Frost Walker lord had long ago learned the methods to reshape snow into ice.

As soon as the small group reached the entrance to the tunnel through the gatehouse, Hauke knelt down low, brushing the tips of his claws through the snow on the ground as his horn began to glow with a pale, icy blue radiance.

"Tiny crystals, pack and bind, flow like water, fill the gaps, pierce what you find," Hauke intoned as he firmly envisioned the shape he wanted the ice to take. The simplest solution would have been to create a thick sheet of ice that lined the roof of the tunnel, blocking the murder holes and sealing off any ability the people in the gatehouse had to attack people moving through the tunnel. A lesser sorcerer would have done exactly that.

Hauke, however, understood all too well that such a structure would have been weak and vulnerable, cracking and falling to the ground as soon as the people above attacked it with enough force. So instead, Hauke focused on filling each individual hole in the ceiling, drawing in snow from both ends of the tunnel and transforming it into thin spikes of ice that shot into the holes, plugging each of them individually.

But Hauke's sorcery did more than just fill the gaps. After spending so much time studying and practicing with Heila and the other members of the coven, Hauke had begun to think about how he should incorporate trees into the sorcery that he was already familiar with, and his simple invocation was one of his first attempts to fuse the growth of trees with the spread of ice.

"Watch out!"

"AAAAAAAA! It's cold and it burns!"

In the room above, Inquisitor Diarmuid and four acolytes scrambled away from the murder holes as spears of ice shot upward, seemingly through every single murder hole at once! One acolyte, who had been leaning over the holes in the floor while preparing to pour oil, howled in pain as one of the spears of ice pierced his white and gold robes, staining them crimson with blood as it sliced through fabric and flesh with equal ease, leaving a deep gouge running from his elbow to his shoulder.

Hauke's sorcery didn't end there. Like the branches of a tree, each spear of ice spread outward, thrusting more spears of ice into the room as if they were seeking people to impale.

"Get back!" Diarmuid shouted, tripping over his robes and falling flat on his backside as he scrambled away from the expanding forest of icy spears.

"HAAAAAA!" One of the other acolytes screamed in agony as two branches impaled him from opposite directions, his cry of pain mixing with the distant shouts of wounded men on the walls above. The flickering reddish-gold torchlight in the gatehouse caught the crystalline rivulets of frozen blood at the ends of the ice spears, creating grotesque jewelry that sparkled and gleamed even as the man's face contorted in a gruesome mask of pain.

Outside the gatehouse, the bombardment continued its relentless rhythm, punctuated by the occasional cry of "Keep yer positions, ye fatherless sons of whores!" or "Take cover over here!" from the defenders struggling to maintain any sense of order in the chaos of stone shrapnel and blood stained snow.

-THUNK- -CRACK- -SPLASH-

The people in the gatehouse weren't the only targets of Hauke's Ice Forest. Several of the barrels of blessed oil were pierced or jostled by the spears of ice, cracking open, toppling over and spilling their contents across the interior of the gatehouse.

"H-h-holy L-lord of L-light above," the impaled acolyte began to pray as he clutched at the wound in his stomach. "Bath m-me in the warmth of your sacred…"

"Stop, you fool, don't you dare!" Diarmuid shouted as he scrambled back to his feet. "We're standing in a pool of sacred oil! If you try to melt the ice with your flames, you'll roast us all alive," he snapped as he searched the room for one of the heavy axes intended for chopping ropes to lower the portcullis in an emergency.

"You there," he said, pointing to one of the two acolytes who had been fortunate enough to escape unscathed. "Take up an axe and help me cut him free. You two," he added, pointing to the first man to be injured and the other fortunate acolyte who had hidden behind a giant winch when the ice first appeared. "Clear a path to the door, we can heal the wounded on the wall outside."

"Y-yes, Inquisitor!" the men stammered as they quickly got to work.

"Hold on," Diarmuid told the shivering acolyte who stood trembling in the middle of the forest of ice. "We'll cut you free soon," he said as he smashed one of the branches with the blade of the axe, filling the room with the tinkling sound of shattering ice as he hacked his way forward.

In the back of his mind, there was a part of Diarmuid that wanted to leave the work of freeing the man to the other acolytes. A part of him that was afraid that the longer he spent trapped in this gatehouse, the worse things would be for the soldiers who were depending on him to use his flames to stop the demon's army.

But as much as that part of him clamored at him to abandon the acolyte that he hadn't even known two hours ago, there was a greater part of him that knew the man would die if he wasn't healed soon… And if he left this man to die when he could have done something to save him, then a part of him would die along with the acolyte.

And so Diarmuid threw himself into the work, smashing at the demonic ice with wild abandon as the fires in his heart burned with fear for what was happening to the soldiers outside the gatehouse and an unwavering need to save every man he could. He just hoped that by the time he was able to rejoin the battle, it wasn't too late.