USER: Z3ke

  THREAD: The Eight Day Thunder

  Z3ke (Original Poster)

  We’ve set up camp for the night. Corva is cooking away and the rest of us are just trying to recoup from the hike. You all wanted me to ask Cole what we’re doing out here and what exactly is the Soundtrap.

  It’s kinda a dick move on all your parts to force me to listen to another history lecture from Cole…but whatever. This better earn me a shit ton of advice.

  My tech slate has a speech-to-text function and I’ve left it running to transcribe Cole’s lecture. You all owe me so much for this. Here it is:

  ***

  I’m surprised you’re asking me about this. You haven’t exactly shown much interest in my lectures during the hike. But if you’re genuinely curious about the area you incorrectly referred to as the Soundtrap, I might as well explain it properly.

  My mentor at University, Professor Abbi, is famous for his work on pre-Fracture societies, specifically the late Vash Dynasty period and its splintering. He’s the historian who most helped me with my dissertation about the rise of resonance weapons and how they spread through the land in the final decades of the collapse. I was able to trace the earliest deployments of these weapons to a single, forgotten pocket of civilization out in the Deadlands.

  That is the place that you call the Soundtrap. As I’ve told you before, the name is the result of a lazy mistranslation. The original name of the area is se Froun Traf, taken from the dialect of the earliest Venic settlers to arrive in the area. In Venic, se Froun Traf roughly translates to “Place of the Green.”

  The irony, of course, is that nothing about the region is green anymore.. Today, the land is all dust and salt and cracked soil. But only a century ago, se Froun Traf was an oasis.

  People often forget that the region we now know as the Deadlands wasn’t always dead. It was arid, yes. Dry. The earth was cracked by the sun and patched with hard scrub and bitter salt lakes. But the place was alive.

  Trade caravans crossed the plains daily. Oasis towns prospered along the routes, each on a small world of lantern-lit markets and rooftop gardens. There were cities with libraries and public squares and town markets and everything else you’d come to expect in a civilization.

  All of that, every road and every well and every border town, was all under the control of a sprawling empire known as the Vash Dynasty, so named because of the warlord who built it: Vash Calansis.

  He wasn’t made king by birth or divine proclamation. He earned his title the old fashioned way: by conquest. Calansis led a foreign horde out of the desert wastes and conquered the region we now know as the Deadland. What’s more, he knew something that most warlords don’t: victory is temporary unless you build the institutions to preserve it.

  When Calansis first arrived to these lands, he set about conquering an empire. His first targets were the merchant families who owned the caravans and controlled the flood of goods from city to city. First he took the trade routes. Then the oases. Then the fortresses guarding them. And once the water and road and goods all belonged to him, the cities fell quick.

  The Vash Dynasty was, depending on who you ask, either the first great civilizing force in the Deadlands, or a tower of cruelty and bureaucracy. The truth, as my professor always drilled into me, was a little bit of both. The Vash brought irrigation and taxation in equal measures. They laid roads and committed violence. They enforced peace by partaking in the cruelest atrocities ever seen.

  You’ve seen the remnants of their vast empire on our march through the Deadlands. Those watchtowers on the horizon, the ones built from stacked basalt? Vash. The bridge we crossed yesterday that still holds up perfectly after centuries? Vash. Their empire is gone now, but the bones of what it once was still remain. Even when we don’t say their name, we are walking on their legacy.

  The Vash believed, possibly erroneously, that the Deadlands could be tamed. Not just ruled, but civilized and shaped into something greater. And for three centuries, they more or less succeeded. But in the final century before the Fracture, the cracks in their empire began to spread.

  Historians like to joke that one can measure the success of a Vash ruler by how much they were hated.

  The Vash Dynasty rested on two pillars: the nobility and the commoners. The nobility were granted lands, titles, and the right to collect taxes in the Vash name. The commoners were granted everything else. They were the farmers, the artisans, the laborers, the soldiers, and the caravan traders. They were the empire’s hands and feet, and without them the Vash were just a collection of soldiers.

  In the times when the Vash focused on conquest, the nobles rejoiced and the commoners grieved. New conquests meant new territories meant new estates meant fresh streams of taxable wealth and the glittering prestige of victory for the nobles. But conquest also meant forced levies, grain seized straight from city storehouses to pay for the army, and imperial officers marching through villages with empty wagons to be filled at the people’s expense.

  By contrast, when the Vash looked inwards towards domestic policy, the commoners rejoiced and the nobles grumbled into their wine cups. The government levied ruinous taxes on the noble families and poured that money into roads, irrigation, public works, festivals, grain reserves, and trade subsidies that kept the markets full and cheap.

  It is rare to find a Vash emperor loved by both classes. It is rarer still to find one hated by both. Which brings us to the disastrous reign of Vash Callis.

  In the final century before the Fracture, the Vash Dynasty was consumed by three interwoven crises: succession disputes between rival branches of the imperial family, a theological fragmentation within the state religion, and the splintering of the military as soldiers shifted their loyalty away from the throne and towards charismatic generals.

  Each crisis fueled the others and formed a spiral of instability.

  These fractures didn’t appear overnight. They were the fruit of decades of decadence, administrative neglect, and political rot. Seen from the outside, the Vash Dynasty seemed mighty: legions marched, cities fell, and the imperial throne sat like a mountain. But from the inside, it told a different story. Decay expanded and the empire’s collapse had already begun.

  Vash Callis was the twenty-fourth ruler of the dynasty, and it was during his reign that the rot became irreversible. Even contemporary chroniclers within the empire - men who risked execution by pointing out Callis’ failings - describe him in unflattering terms.

  He was a drunk and a philanderer who was obsessed with food, wine, and women. His greatest expense was the vast harem who lived in his palace, filled with captives taken by his generals who often used the campaigns of the state as opportunity for personal plunder. He neglected nearly every function of governance, leaving the administration of his empire to corrupt advisors and sycophantic courtiers who traded policy for favors and bribes.

  While the debauchery of Callis wasn’t, by itself, enough to doom the Vash Dynasty, his personal weakness was paired with a profound disregard for governance. His chambers overflowed with silk and spices and imported luxuries while granaries stood empty and farmers starved in their fields. His officer corps was filled with a nest of sycophants who pushed out the competent in favor of the well-connected. His court was a mockery of previous imperial administrations, masquerading as a functioning government.

  By the third year of Callis’ reign, his younger brother - Vash Denma - decided the dynasty couldn’t survive under such misrule.

  Denma, according to most historical accounts, was the complete opposite of his brother. He was a disciplined, austere individual who was also deeply unpopular by the standards of Callis’ inner circle. In his youth, he’d immersed himself in administration and finance, two topics treated as dull and irrelevant by Callis and his hangers-on. To the Vash generals who’d grown fat on autonomous campaigns, Denma was a tedious moralist. To the courtiers who brokered favors in the court, he was an existential threat.

  Believing that the Vash Dynasty could still be saved as long as his brother was removed from power, Denma attempted a palace coup. In an earlier era, when the empire had stronger institutions and officers still respected the idea of discipline, Denma might have succeeded. But Callis’ corruption had long ago seeped into the officer corps.

  The generals preferred a weak emperor who ignored their abuses over a competent one who would have reigned in the worst of their excesses. They had no desire to reform the empire, instead wanting freedom from oversight. Under Callis’ limp-fisted rule, the generals were allowed to levy private taxes, build lavish estates, fight unauthorized campaigns, and grow their own power base. While Denma might have been a better ruler of the empire, to the men who held the real power he posed a danger.

  Denma’s coup inevitably failed, but rather than die as a martyr or languish as a prisoner, he did the unthinkable: he fled the empire. He abandoned the throne entirely, an almost unimaginable act. Imperial blood wasn’t meant to simply walk away. For centuries, Vash heirs were taught that authority needed to be seized and defended and never surrendered.

  Yet Denma walked away, and he took with him a small cadre of loyal retainers and a few hundred disciplined soldiers who were drawn to his vision of a restored and reformed empire. With his handful of followers, he vanished into the lands beyond the eastern caravan routes, disappearing into territories that the Vash considered marginal, uncivilized, and beneath their attention.

  Four years passed and rumors slowly drifted in from traders from the east: border kingdoms laid to waste, proud city-states kneeling to a strange new banner, and a wandering general gathering soldiers of every tongue. The stories were exaggerated of course, as these stories often are. But beneath the exaggeration was a hint of truth.

  Vash Denma had abandoned his earlier studies of administration and finance, and instead earned himself a name the old Vash way: through conquest.

  When he finally returned to the land of his birth, it wasn’t as a fugitive brother seeking pardon and protection. No. He crossed the imperial border at the head of a massive mercenary host, paid for by the spoils of war and forged from dozens of conquered polities. His banners were unfamiliar as they were stitched from foreign sigils and had never before been seen in the Deadlands.

  Vash Denma’s return sparked what historians now call the Three-Crown Crisis. That title is misleading though. There was only one crown and two men fighting over the right to wear it.

  Denma believed that marching into imperial territory would cause the “loyal” Vash generals to either bend the knee or flee from his massive army. What he found was a fragmented empire ruled by a network of warlords. While Callis drank himself numb in his palace, his generals carved the empire into a patchwork of private fiefdoms. And those generals refused to bend the knee to a foreign invader who’d rein in their excess.

  The war that followed was horrifying. Denma’s veterans fought with foreign tactics: tight spear phalanxes that advanced in a wall, cavalry whose saddles were built for archery, and siege engines that no Vash engineer had ever laid eyes upon. They carried composite bows, crescent shields of lacquered wood, and curved blades that were made in foreign forges. And worst of all was a new invention they brought with them: rifles that could allow peasants to fight at the same level as highly trained archers.

  Against them stood Vash legions who’d gone soft from wine and plunder. They were soldiers in name only, fat from idling and resting on the laurels of victories won by their grandfathers. Against such complacency, Denma’s host was like a knife through butter.

  Then the “loyal” generals did something they hadn’t done in decades: they united. Not for love of the throne or reverence for an emperor too drunk to defend his own crown. They united because of the fear of losing their own minor holdings. These men had tasted power and wouldn’t allow the exiled brother to reclaim what they had rightfully stolen.

  Thus began a civil war that lasted four cruel years. It was a conflict marked by atrocities, betrayals, and the near-destruction of the imperial heartland.

  But before we delve too deep into the war itself, we must first turn to the western provinces that would reshape the story of the Deadlands.

  For over two centuries, the western reaches of the Vash Dynasty held a peculiar status. The lands were wealthy, cultured, and as a distance from the imperial capital. They were ruled by tributary kings who sent gold, grain, and labor to the throne, yet still enjoyed broad autonomy over their internal affairs.

  As the war between Callis and Denma began in earnest, both sides cast their hungry eyes to the western regions. The “loyalist” generals and Denma’s mercenary host each craved what the western provinces had in abundance: coins, goods, and labor. Neither faction believed they’d experience fierce resistance when it came to fighting. They viewed the western provinces as granaries waiting to be emptied, not enemies to be feared.

  But the great city of Asteris, one of the largest and wealthiest in the western provinces, was the headquarters of a remarkable coalition that formed in the early days of the war. It was a coalition of different classes: nobles who refused to continue funding imperial decadence, generals disgusted by the fratricidal war, philosophers who viewed the conflict as proof that monarchy was a broken system of governance, inventors whose work had been misappropriated by imperial forces, soldiers who had abandoned both banners, and merchant princes who understood that without stability, trade was doomed.

  This collection of people didn’t share a common ideology, only a common enemy: the Vash Dynasty’s endless cycle of conquest and corruption.

  In a grand symposium in the greatest hall of Asteris, at long tables carved from cedar taken from the Western Forest, these people drafted a declaration. It was a blunt and searing indictment of imperial rule. With signatures from every city-state in the western provinces, they formed a new political experiment: the Concordant of Asteris.

  Unlike the empire that they rejected, this Concordant was a confederation. Authority flowed from upwards from city to council, not downwards from crown to subject.

  Had the Vash been united under a single competent ruler, the Concordant might have been snuffed out in its cradle. But the timing of its creation was perfect. Both Denma and Callis were too busy fighting each other to worry about the rebellious provinces, and thus the Concordant was given the time it needed to establish a sizable army with which to defend its borders.

  Years of bitter fighting followed. Denma’s paid legions clashed with Callis’ “loyal” generals who raided Concordant towns and were driven back. No side was able to gain supremacy over the others. Across the empire, ordinary citizens suffered while elites maneuvered for power. Frontier towns were burned, mines were raided, governors were assassinated, trade collapsed, and innovation turned towards destruction.

  In every war there is a defining mechanism. It’s not dramatic speeches or grand tactics or heroic charges that inspire epic ballads. Instead, it is something dull and transactional and utterly decisive: money.

  It is one of the grandest ironies of the age that the fate of nations and empires rests not on ideals, but on who can afford to keep their people fed and happy.

  Amateur historians often imagine Vash Denma as some tragic figure betrayed by fate, or a genius ruler undone by circumstances. The truth of the matter is far more simple. Vash Denma’s army was never truly his. It was bought and paid for.

  Denma’s mercenary host, which had ground down half a dozen petty kingdoms into dust, didn’t follow him out of some sense of loyalty to his cause. It marched because it was paid to. They fought for him because of the promise he made of wealth and spoils. And that promise only held weight so long as the Vash Dynasty appeared weak, decadent, and toothless. Once it was proven that they still had some fight left in them, the promise of spoils dried up.

  The campaign to conquer the Vash Dynasty was supposed to be an easy conquest. The emperor was a drunkard. The generals were disorganized. The land was fractured. What force could resist a well-paid and supplied army hardened by years of foreign wars?

  But the Vash Dynasty didn’t collapse in the early days. Instead of crumbling beneath Denma’s advance, the empire resisted him with an unexpected ferocity. Rather than sweeping aside a single decadent ruler, Denma found himself fighting entrenched warlords masquerading as loyal generals, and a new political force defending its homeland in the Concordant of Asteris.

  Worse still, Denma’s mercenaries found themselves fighting a professional force.

  The Vash generals, despite their corruption, had spent years tightening their grips on their stolen fiefdoms and training private armies.

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  Thus, what had been promised to be a quick campaign of spoils soon turned into a grinding war of attrition. And mercenaries despise wars of attrition. So, they did what all paid soldiers have done since the dawn of recorded conflict. They held a council, counted their dead, weighed their purses, and asked the only question that matters to those who sell their swords: why die for someone else’s crown?

  In fighting for Denma, they might win a few more battles, but it would cost them numerous lives. If they deserted, they would lose prestige and face and the illusion of loyalty, but they might be able to recoup some of their losses.

  Their betrayal of Denma was fast, clinical, and - with the benefit of hindsight - utterly inevitable. The handful of true loyalists who had followed Denma into exile were killed by the very troops they had once commanded.

  In a single night, the mercenary captains of Denma’s host severed the head of his invasion. His lieutenants were executed. His officers died in their beds. And Denma himself vanished from historical record.

  Some sources claim that he was cut down by the very swords he paid for. Others say that he fled into exile a second time, disappearing into the eastern regions never to return. Historians are baffled since the sources we have are all maddeningly contradictory.

  What we do know is this: after destroying Denma’s core following, his mercenary host looted its way east through the territories he had seized, stripping cities and towns bare. Then, as suddenly as they had appeared years earlier, they slipped beyond the horizon and disappeared into distant lands with their wagons brimming with coin and stolen relics.

  The empire they left behind was a hollowed-out carcass: battered, impoverished, and ungoverned.

  So what of Callis, the man who had “won?”

  When word reached the capital that Vash Denma had been killed and his foreign army dispersed, Callis reacted not as a statesman reclaiming a dynasty, but as a drunkard relieved that a nuisance had ended. He returned to his harem, his wine, and his endless feasts. He had won a war without ever mounting a horse or issuing a command.

  But the cost of his victory was ruin. His generals returned to their castles to find their coffers empty, their armies reduced, their towns weakened, and their lands stripped bare. The dynasty they ostensibly served was bankrupt in every way that mattered: financially, militarily, and morally.

  In hopes of regaining what they lost, Callus’ generals turned their eyes to the western provinces and the Concordant of Asteris.

  By this time, the Concordant was everything the empire was not: a functioning government with a unified council, a nation with a thriving trade network, stable currency, and prosperous cities. The generals knew that if they could seize the wealth of the Concordant, they could rebuild their strength, divide the western provinces amongst themselves, and restore their power.

  To understand the next phase of the Three-Crown Crisis, we must follow those generals west to one of the most strategically important spots in the Deadlands.

  Your original question was: where are we headed?

  (Zeke here. At this point, I had started to nod off. Here is where Cole finally answered my question about the Soundtrap.)

  The modern name of our destination is the Valley of Echoes. But before the Fracture reshaped the world and stripped the land bare, the region was known by a different name - se Froun Traf. “The Place of the Green.”

  The name comes from its original inhabitants, the ancient Venic. They were a people who have long since disappeared from this land, and their language is now only spoken by the cloistered monks of the Carenfel.

  The name “Place of the Green” is curious and almost misleading to modern ears. Today, the Deadlands bear no green. Nothing grows here but hardy shrugs. But before the Fracture, the land was as least only semi-arid and not dead. Sparse groves of ironwood dotted the hills. Seasonal runoff brought with it thin blankets of grass. The land wasn’t lush by any means, but it was alive.

  Se Froun Traf was a city that lay in a narrow mountain corridor, wedged between two steep ridgelines. The corridor was called Greenfall Pass and it formed the only reliable artery between the eastern heartlands of the Vash Dynasty and the western borderlands claimed by the Concordant. In the simplest of terms, se Froun Traf was the strategic center of the empire. Everything from troops to grain to trade to refugees passed through that pass.

  To the north were jagged peaks and broken ravines known locally as the Sawtooths. They were impassable to anything larger than a mule. No army could maneuver through them. No cavalry could charge past them. No siege engines could be hauled around them.

  Whoever controlled se Froun Traf controlled the destiny of both the Vash Dynasty and the Concordant of Asteris.

  At the beginning of the Three-Crown Crisis, the city had taken the extraordinary step of declaring its neutrality. Its leaders, an elected council of caravan traders, militia officers, and civic elders, issued a proclamation claiming that Greenfall Pass would remain closed to all belligerents. Moreover, they declared that any faction attempting to seize the pass would be declared an enemy, the town would collapse the route and render it impassable, and then throw their remaining strength against whichever side attacked them.

  It was a threat of ruin.

  For the Concordant, this proclamation was an unexpected gift. Neutrality at the pass created a buffer at the most dangerous choke point in the region. As long as se Froun Traf held firm, neither Denma nor Callis could drive heavy infantry through the mountains and into their territory.

  For both Vash emperors, the neutrality of se Froun Traf was tolerated more out of distraction than strategy. Callis, drunk on his own indulgences, had neither the focus nor political will to subdue a lone city. Denma, occupied with his war for the throne, had no reason to challenge a city that didn’t openly side with his brother.

  Thus, a strange equilibrium settled over Greenfall Pass. It remained closed, the armies of all three sides remained outside, and the war flowed instead through treacherous goat paths and narrow ridgelines where only skirmishers and raiding bands could maneuver. Battle was hit-and-run, fought among crags and ravines where organized legions were more hindrance than help.

  When Denma was killed and Callis returned to his pleasures, the Vash generals, ruined by war, all turned their eyes westward.

  They believed that the riches of the Concordant could repair the damage done to their petty kingdoms during the civil war. And the quickest route to the western provinces ran through one place: Greenfall Pass.

  Enter General Semson Tappal. He was a “loyalist” in the narrowest of definitions. He wasn’t a visionary or a reformer or even a competent soldier. He had paid for his commission and his talent lay more in servility than strategy. In the court of Vash Callis, where flattery outweighed competence, such a man could survive. Tappal’s few successes came from attaching himself to stronger men and harvesting their victories as if they were his own.

  After Denma’s campaign for the throne collapsed and his mercenary horde vanished into the east, the powerful Vash generals quickly withdrew to their strongholds to rebuild their private armies. Tappal understood that, once those generals marshalled their strength, they would inevitably wage war on the Concordant. He thought that if he could reach Greenfall Pass and seize it “in the name of the Dynasty,” he would be able to claim the gateway to the west. The other “loyalist” generals could spill their blood against Concordant walls later. He would be remembered as the man who opened the way.

  Semson Tappal gathered his army and, in his hunger to be first to the pass, committed a blunder that speaks to his own vanity. He marched way ahead of his own army.

  All he had with him at the start of the battle were three companies of scouts and infantry. He believed that speed and surprise would compensate for a lack of numbers. His main force, a private army of thousands, lagged far behind, still gathering supplies and wagons and siege equipment.

  As Tappal rushed towards the pass, the Concordant didn’t remain idle. They knew that with Denma’s campaign over, the Vash generals would soon test the neutrality of the pass.

  A veteran colonel, seasoned during the earliest battles of the Three-Crown Crisis, was assigned a company of rangers and scouts and told to watch Greenfall Pass. Their task was simple: watch for the enemy and warn the Concordant before the Vash could entrench themselves.

  The start of the battle saw Tappal’s vanguard enter se Froun Traf without resistance. It was just before dawn and the city gates were open, with locals all believing that their neutrality protected them. The night watch was a handful of guards who were quickly overwhelmed before they could sound the alarm. Tappal’s soldiers spilled through the streets and took control of the watchtowers, the granaries, and the governor’s house before the city even woke up.

  Then Tappal issued a command that would stain his legacy forever. He ordered the execution of all military-aged men in the city. Not the militia. Not those serving in the garrison. All the men.

  The city’s promise to collapse the pass if attacked required both time and coordination, and Tappal believed that a handful of trained men from the city could escape and trigger hidden charges that would bury his prize under stone. To protect his gains, he chose preemptive slaughter.

  Tappal announced that the men of se Froun Traf were traitors to the crown who had defied the will of Emperor Callis, and that he had “liberated” the city in the name of the Vash Dynasty. The men of the city - traders, porters, scribes, and farmers - were all rounded up in front of their homes and executed.

  After the killings, Tappal went to work fortifying se Froun Traf, certain that the Concordant would move to expel him. He raised barricades, reinforced walls, and prepared for a siege while waiting for his main army to arrive.

  What Tappal didn’t know was that the Concordant were already there. They’d seen the Vash soldiers enter town, massacre the men, and build their fortifications. Tappal also didn’t know that runners had already been dispatched to Concordant territory to warn them that the Vash now occupied the pass.

  This was the beginning of the most important battle in the Three-Crown Crisis. Historians who lack imagination call it the Battle of Greenfall Pass. While it is an accurate description, it is also miserably uninspired. The more poetic historians call it: the Eight Day Thunder.

  When historians speak of the Eight Day Thunder, they often focus on the spectacular: the invention of resonant siege weapons, the collapse of the Vash war machine, and the ghastly final hours of the conflict. But to understand how the conflict reached such a scale, one must first examine the hesitation that defined its early days.

  The battle began as a small skirmish of two forces circling each other, both afraid to commit to battle.

  The first few attacks were almost perfunctory. Skirmishers from the Concordant loosed arrows towards Vash troops probing the hills. The Vash replied with volleys of their own. No ground was taken and no banners were planted.

  In the ravines above se Froun Traf, scouting parties from both sides collided at close range. Neither group understood the other’s strength and both sides assumed they were facing the leading edge of a much larger army.

  Tappal, still drunk on his earlier “victory,” saw the Concordant scouts moving through the hills and mistook them for a small vanguard. He believed he could crush them before they could organize, so at midday he called his cavalry and ordered a charge up the narrow mouth of the pass.

  It was a poor decision twice over. His cavalry had marched all night, seized a city at dawn, and now had to climb a steep road through rough terrain. What’s worse is that the Concordant defenders were veterans used to the terrain and knowledgeable about how to bleed a larger force with hit-and-run tactics.

  Tappal’s cavalry charge faltered almost immediately. Concordant archers timed their volleys perfectly. The Vash cavalry, exhausted and unused to the rocky terrain, broke formation, and stumbled and spilled backwards down the road to the city.

  That skirmish ended with very few casualties, but the psychological impact cannot be overstated. Tappal suddenly realized he had no idea how many enemy troops he faced. He’d only come across a single Concordant company, but there were no doubt thousands of soldiers waiting for him in the pass. His confidence evaporated, and with it, his momentum.

  Meanwhile, the Concordant colonel commanding the scouts understood the situation almost perfectly. He knew he didn’t have the numbers to retake the fortified town, so he decided to instead bleed Tappal slowly, buying time for Concordant reinforcements to move through the western provinces and approach the pass. If the colonel understood how disorganized Tappal’s forces were, and how exhausted they had become after marching through the night, he might have been more aggressive in his actions.

  Thus the first day of battle, aside from the executions of the military-aged males in se Froun Traf, ended with very few casualties.

  That night, both sides dug in. Tappal built barricades and reinforced the city gates with scavenged wood, broken carts, and masonry torn from houses. In the pass, the Concordant dug shallow trenches and built earthenworks. Each side entrenched, waiting for the other to make the first reckless move.

  The second day of battle might have been the last had Tappal been competent. Before sunrise, the first reinforcements from his army began to trickle in. It was a small contingent of light infantry and a few dozen fresh riders. Fueled by his own arrogance and a shallow victory over the militia of se Froun Traf, Tappal decided to repeat the previous day’s tactic, hoping to catch the Concordant forces sleeping in their tents.

  But as his cavalry marched out of town and towards the front line of the Concordant, his men saw lights burning in the dark. A massive column was headed through the pass with their torches held high, snaking through the mountain road. To exhausted eyes, it looked like the arrival of a vast Concordant army. In truth, it was only three companies of light infantry.

  Each soldier carried two torches, one in each hand, doubling the appearance of their numbers and making the pass look like it was being flooded with reinforcements.

  Tappal, afraid that he faced an army twice the size of his own, aborted his cavalry charge. He pulled his soldiers back to the relative safety of the town’s walls, unwilling to gamble against such a seemingly overwhelming force.

  In reality, it was only a clever bit of theater. Those reinforcements were led by a young Concordant officer named Jake Dahel, whom the Vash Dynasty generals had once mockingly nicknamed “the Coyote.”

  The nickname was meant as an insult, saying that he was a scavenger in the hills. He was a commander who refused the honor of pitched battles, and was instead a man who struck from the shadows and vanished before the enemy could face him. Dahel embraced the name and turned the contempt of the Vash generals into his banner.

  Dahel’s combat experience came from defending the goat paths and ambushing the Vash patrols that made their way around Greenfall Pass in the early days of the Three-Crown Crisis. He was a specialist, raised to the rank of general because he understood the mountains and the land surrounding the most strategic corridor in the land.

  When word reached him that se Froun Traf had fallen, he didn’t wait for the rest of the Concordant to mobilize. He gathered three companies of soldiers - all that he had within reach - and a handful of engineers affectionately nicknamed “The Brains of Asteris,” and marched quickly to the pass.

  The Brains were an odd squad of inventors who worked with experimental new alloys, built collapsible fortifications, and studied the evolving principles of siege technology. They weren’t soldiers, but they understood the engineering concepts that could prove to be a multiplying force in war.

  Dahel had marched through the night, knowing that when dawn broke he would find himself outnumbered by Vash forces. His only hope to win the battle was to buy time in the pass so that the rest of the Concordant armies could gather.

  At the entrance of Greenfall Pass, he gave each of his soldiers two torches and ordered them to hold them high. His hope was that the Vash army would see double the number of reinforcements coming, and this would make them hesitant to charge. It was a simple deception, almost absurd in its childishness, but it proved devastatingly effective.

  The Vash scouts, bleary-eyed with exhaustion, saw what they thought was the vanguard of a massive force. Their reports to Tappal grew the illusion even further. By the time that Tappal saw the approaching reinforcements, his dull mind imagined a river of soldiers marching through the darkness. His instincts of self-preservation overrode his grand ambitions and he quietly retreated back to town, giving Dahel the time needed to reach and reinforce the Concordant lines.

  By mid-day, the illusion of overwhelming Concordant strength began to dissipate. Vash scouts returned to town with troubling inconsistencies. They couldn’t spot the massive campsites or supply wagons that would point to a large army marching through the pass. General Tappal, for all his incompetence in grand strategy, wasn’t ignorant of military logistics. If the Concordant truly had a large host reinforcing the front lines, there should have been signs of it. There should have been supply trains and animals. Instead, the front lines were quiet.

  The realization that he’d been tricked enraged him, not only because he’d been made to look like a fool, but also because the trick had forced him to spend a night doing nothing, allowing the Concordant to entrench themselves deeper into their positions.

  Seething with rage, he resolved to seize the initiative. He ordered a unit of light infantry to advance towards the Concordant lines with the simple goal of provocation. His soldiers would show vulnerability, wait for the Concordant soldiers to sally forth from their defenses, and then Tappal would unleash a cavalry charge.

  But Dahel understood the trap immediately, and refused to spring it.

  Instead of engaging with the bait, he sent scouts slipping wide around the flanks. These men were mountain men and hunters who were used to climbing through terrain that horses couldn’t even approach. Under the cover of broken terrain, the scouts slipped past the Vash lines and reached the walls of se Froun Traf itself. There, they loosed fire arrows into the dry thatched roofs of the town.

  Within minutes, the western quarter of the town was burning. Wind carried the flames from house to house, and a column of black smoke rose into the air. The Vash troops at the gates looked over their shoulders and saw their supposed fortress turning to ash.

  Tappal panicked, believing that the Concordant forces had somehow tricked him again and were now attacking the town itself. His mind, trained on palace intrigue rather than real warfare, immediately leapt to visions of enemy soldiers pouring through the streets. He abandoned his trap for the Concordant, recalled his infantry, scrambled his officers, and threw every available body into putting out the fires.

  By the time the Concordant scouts had vanished back into the hills, the Vash forces were exhausted, their fortifications weakened, and their commander humiliated for the second time that day.

  Smarting from constant humiliation and desperate for a victory that he could parade before the other generals of the Vash Dynasty, Tappal made his most disastrous error yet.

  Just past midnight, with the mountains drenched in fog and shadow, he ordered a cavalry charge into the darkness. He still didn’t understand that the terrain of the pass had made his cavalry worthless. In his mind, speed and surprise would make up for the slope of the ground, the slick of the stone, and the narrow choke point.

  His cavalry rode into a valley filled with decoys. Dahel, anticipating a desperate Vash attack on his front lines, had his soldiers build a line of dummy sentries. They bundled cloaks into the shapes of bodies and set helmets atop piles of rock, creating crude silhouettes.

  When the Vash cavalry thundered forward towards a line of silent “soldiers” they were met by Concordant rangers hiding in the dark. The rangers unleashed volley after volley into the exposed flanks of the charging cavalry. Horses screamed. Arrows fell. In the dark and the fog the Vash cavalry couldn’t find the enemy picking them off one by one. They panicked and retreated back to the town blindingly, trampling their own comrades in their hasty retreat.

  The third day of battle brought something new: weather.

  A storm rolled down from the mountains without warning. It was sudden and violent and utterly indifferent to the ambitions of man. The dry creekbeds carved into the valley became channels of rushing water within minutes. Dusty soil was transformed into a sucking mire that tore at boots and turned the ground into a treacherous soup. Visibility shrank to a few dozen feet. Torches were extinguished in the downpour.

  Both sides tried turning the chaos of the storm to their advantage.

  Tappal, frustrated and angry at his earlier humiliations, sent one of his heavy infantry columns forward under the cover of the rain. He believed their armor would offer some protection against the Concordant arrows, and the storm would hide their approach until they were nearly at the Concordant lines.

  That tactic might have worked. The rain hid the glint of armored soldiers and the column crept forward through rock and mud. Even Dahel’s scouts had difficulty seeing them. But Dahel had more than just scouts at his call. He had the “Brains of Asteris.”

  Those scholar-engineers had been studying Greenfall Pass closely ever since they arrived. They understood its unstable ridgelines and the spiderweb cracks in the stone. They knew the pass was unstable. In the early morning hours, under the cover of the storm, they placed alchemical charges along a narrow shelf of stone that hung over the approach to the Concordant front lines.

  And when the Vash soldiers marched forward, they collapsed the ridge.

  Stone and mud poured down in a wave. Men screamed and were buried alive beneath an avalanche of falling rock. Their armor became coffins and the few men who survived the crush couldn’t retreat as the mud had turned the ground to glue.

  Dahel’s soldiers surged from the rocks, cutting into the trapped Vash column. It was the first true fight of the battle. There weren’t any feints or illusions or traps, just raw and ugly combat in knee-deep mud among broken men and crushed armor. Steel rang against steel. Men drowned face-down in shallow pools of water formed by the storm.

  After the storm had finally exhausted itself, Greenfall Pass had been transformed. What had once been a dusty corridor was now covered in mud and blood and rocks and broken men and dead horses.

  Both commanders understood what the end of the storm meant. The probing phase of the battle was over. The days of deception, feints, and harassing maneuvers were finished. From the fourth day onwards, the battlefield would be honest. And honesty in war favors the numbers.

  Tappal had the numbers.

  Every day brought fresh columns of men through the eastern mouth of the pass. They arrived soaked, caked in mud, and having marched through the night, but they arrived. What began as a trickle on the first day became a stream by the third. Concordant scouts could already see the influx of Vash forces racing into the pass.

  Tappal lacked vision, caution, cleverness, and strategic intelligence, but he did not lack the bodies to throw into the meat grinder. He understood that the sheer weight of numbers would eventually be able to crush the Concordant defenders.

  Dahel saw it too.

  His reinforcements were arriving as well, though much fewer in number than what Tappal was able to call on. But what he lacked in numbers he more than made up for in training, discipline, and experience.

  At sunrise on the fourth day, Greenfall Pass saw its second storm. This one wasn’t a storm of weather, but one made of boots racing through the pass.

  Three full legions of heavy infantry and shield-bearers poured into the eastern mouth of Greenfall pass. The ground trembled under their advance. Tappal had given them a simple order, one of the few sensible commands of his career: punch through the Concordant lines and break them before their reinforcements arrived.

  The fourth day of battle didn’t see any feints or traps or midnight cavalry charges into lines filled with decoy soldiers. Instead, it was a battle where a large force charged at the enemy and ground them to dust.

  Dahel understood that he didn’t have the numbers to hold the pass by using a static line. Tappal’s three legions would crash through the barricades and shatter them through repeated impact. The only option available to him was to fight a rear guard action through the pass.

  He needed time, not territory. For every minute that he could force the Vash to spend clearing barricades and pushing aside rocks to give their forces a clear road through the pass, that was a minute closer he got to Concordant reinforcements arriving from the west. Dahel just needed to bleed Tappal’s forces enough to weaken them and buy himself some time.

  At each chokepoint the Concordant built, they set up fixed positions and the Vash pushed their way through. Dahel’s troops held just long enough to inflict a cost, then broke away cleanly and sprinted away to the next chokepoint.

  Behind them, the Vash legions found themselves stalled. They were forced to clear rubble and pull aside barricades and trample over their own dead just to continue pushing forward.

  Concordant rangers operated like wolves on the ridgelines. They targeted officers and banner carriers, striking fast before disappearing into thin air. Kill the banner-man and the soldiers don’t know where to form. Kill the lieutenant and the column hesitates.

  The engineers set a series of fire traps and ignited them whenever the Vash legions passed over them. Smoke billowed up from the narrow gaps between the cliff walls and visibility dropped to mere feet. Soldiers choked and swung blindly at silhouettes in the haze.

  But despite the heroic efforts of the Concordant forces, it wasn’t enough. Their lines bent and nearly broke. By nightfall, Tappal had managed to seize nearly a third of the pass by brute force. Hundreds of men lay dead on both sides. Corpses filled the valley floor. Tappal’s advance was ugly and tactically wasteful, but it was an advance. Dahel’s defense was brilliant and horrifyingly efficient, but it was a retreat.