USER: Z3ke

  THREAD: The Eight Day Thunder

  Soooo…it seems like there’s a character limit to these posts and it cut off in the middle of Cole’s lecture. Guess I just never hit it with any of my previous posts. Anyway, here’s the rest of what he had to say:

  ***

  Day five of the battle looked, at first glance, much like what had come before. The same grim pattern played out again: Vash numbers grinding inexorably forward, Concordant defenders yielding just enough ground to survive while extracting a terrible price on the attackers. The line would buckle, then would push itself back into shape. A hundred men would die to buy a dozen yards.

  The Vash boasted the numbers, and their strategy was to just lean on the Concordant until they fell over. Dahel’s men were veterans, but Tappal’s men were numerous.

  Things began to change around midday. As the sun reached its zenith, a dense mountain fog poured into the pass. It rolled over the terrain like great white sheets, filling the ravine floor and swallowing the battlefield whole. It was a thick, choking wall that reduced vision to the length of a spear. One diary from a survivor of the battle described it as “a tunnel of white, where both friend and foe were shadows until they were close enough to kill you.”

  Both Tappal and Dahel believed that the fog would be to their advantage.

  Dahel reacted first. As soon as he saw the choking wall of mist slide down the cliffs, he ordered his soldiers to build small stone cairns in the pass. They were small stacks of rocks, often no higher than a man’s knee, but they served a purpose. When the fog consumed everything, the cairns acted as lifelines. They were a breadcrumb trail meant to guide Concordant troops as they fought and then fell back. Dahel hoped that Vash soldiers would blunder blindly through the fog and, due to their disorganization, fall to friendly fire.

  General Tappal, meanwhile, believed that the fog would erase the advantages that the Concordant enjoyed during the battle: long-range archery, the ranger units who could melt into the terrain, and the skirmisher tactics that had frustrated his forces for days. If the battlefield was reduced to arms-length visibility and all the combat was close-quarters, then numbers and not finesse would decide the day. And Tappal had the numbers to spare. He pushed wave after wave of soldiers forward, convinced that the Concordant would be helpless in the fog.

  The result was chaos. The pass dissolved into a maze of isolated skirmishes. Soldiers from both armies stumbled into each other without warning. Officers lost track of units. Entire companies became separated and fought desperate battles entirely unaware of the broader situation.

  The Vash pushed forward and suffered the exact kind of friendly-fire carnage that Dahel had anticipated. But the Concordant also paid a terrible price. Their casualties were smaller in raw numbers, but each one was a veteran or a specialist or a ranger who couldn’t be replaced.

  When night fell and the fog dissipated away to nothing, both armies took stock and both armies were shaken at what they found. The Vash had lost an entire regiment for the sake of a few feet of ground. The Concordant had lost fewer men, but their losses cut deeper.

  It’s the sixth day of battle that historians universally mark as the turning point. By dawn, the long tail of Tappal’s army had finally caught up with him. The quiet of the early morning was shattered by the grinding roar of heavy equipment as it entered the pass. Even the stone of the mountain seemed to tremble at the noise.

  The first to arrive on the field were the siege ballistae - huge wooden engines that were built to hurl bolts the size of trees. Alongside the ballistae came something even more unsettling for the Concordant defenders: the first Vash firearms.

  These early rifles were crude attempts to replicate the weapons brought by Denma’s expedition. They were notoriously slow to reload, unreliable in wet weather, wildly inaccurate, and prone to misfire. But none of that mattered in this battle. What mattered was the sound they made when they fired. The sharp crack of rifle fire was unlike anything the Concordant had ever fought against. It echoed through the pass and shattered the nerves of the defenders. And behind that noise was the truth that the Vash had already figured out: anyone could be trained to use a rifle.

  Training a competent archer took years. Training a rifleman took days. And if you piled up enough rifles together and pointed them in the same direction, it didn’t matter that the rifles were inaccurate because the sheer volume of fire they released was enough to do serious damage.

  The introduction of artillery and firearms changed the battle. The Vash ballistae hurled their great bolts into the Concordant barricades, splintering defenses that had held for days. Siege engines loaded with volatile alchemical mixtures sent burning debris cascading through the Concordant lines. And the repeated crack of Vash rifles was a dagger into the heart of the defenders.

  Day six of the Eight Day Thunder was the moment the battle stopped being a contest of wits, endurance, and terrain, and instead turned into a war of technology. Nowhere was that more evident than in the new siege weapons that the Vash rolled out during the battle, the first of which was the cannon.

  When the “loyalist” generals first encountered Denma’s forces using rifles, they reacted exactly as you’d expect from men who saw the future of warfare staring them in the face. They captured the weapons, tore them apart piece by piece, and put their finest engineers to work reverse-engineering every component.

  They understood that any nation that could mass-produce rifles would no longer need a generation of trained archers. They could arm farmers, conscripts, and city militia with a weapon that multiplied their effectiveness overnight.

  But the rifles weren’t the only new technology the Vash engineers developed. It was only a matter of time before an engineer took the basic concept of a rifle - a metal tube launching a piece of metal through the air at incredible speeds - and thought to themselves this should be bigger. The result of that thought was the early Vash cannons. Crude, alchemically reinforced monstrosities that dominated the battlefield.

  These cannons were hardly refined, but they didn’t need to be. The shells they fired were packed with sticky flammable compounds that ignited on contact with the air and clung to anything they touched. Timber, barricades, shields, cloaks, and even the soil beneath a soldier’s boots all went up in sheets of hungry flames.

  The fighting on the sixth day was held underneath a sky streaked with falling fire. Ballistae hurled bolts the size of trees in long, sinister arcs. Cannons bellowed. The defenders’ barricades that had been lashed together from fallen timber shattered under direct hits and caught fire instantly.

  General Dahel had been directing his troops from the front for nearly a week. He’d barely slept at during the battle. Surviving journals from the conflict describe him as running on will and determination. Up to that point, his instincts had been flawless. He’d kept his army alive through storms, fogs, and days of attritional combat. But with the sudden appearance of siege engines, General Dahel made his first, and ultimately final, mistake of the battle.

  He believed that speed could save the Concordant forces. The ballistae were carving gaping holes in his front lines, and Dahel needed to counter them. He believed that, since Tappal was a poor general, he wouldn’t dig trenches or defenses around the siege engines. Especially since the weapons were in constant need of being repositioned into accurate firing angles in the pass.

  Dahel called upon his rangers; the same mountain fighters who had carried the Concordant forces through the fog. The ones who slid across the terrain as easily as a bird flies through the air. Dahel asked them for one last miracle. He asked them to break through the chaos, slip behind the Vash front lines, and cut down the siege crews before the artillery could finish tearing his army apart.

  His rangers obeyed without hesitation.

  Small teams vanished into the smoke, slipping through the Vash front lines. But the Vash had learned their lesson from the early days of the battle. Tappal had stationed infantry companies near his siege engines, specifically anticipating a strike by Dahel’s rangers.

  So when the rangers emerged near the siege engines, they didn’t find unprotected engineers. They found ranks of fresh Vash soldiers waiting with their blades drawn.

  The skirmish was brief and one-sided. The rangers were overwhelmed, outnumbered, and stripped of their greatest advantage: surprise. They fell to the last fighter. Their loss was catastrophic for the Concordant. In one failed attack, Dahel lost his scouts, his outriders, his assassins, and his most capable soldiers. He lost his sight, his quickness, and the most important tool in his arsenal to keep the Vash off balance.

  Even with the loss of Dahel’s rangers, a stalemate in the battle might have still been possible. Dahel’s tactical brilliance had stalled the Vash before. Tappal’s inexperience and poor strategic planning had already cost him dearly. The battle might have dragged on for much longer if not for what happened next.

  One of the Vash siege ballistae fired a shot that struck a weakened section of the ridge above the Concordant positions. The storm on the third day of battle had weakened the stone with water seeping into the spiderweb cracks, then the impact of the bolt was enough to finish what nature had started. The mountainside collapsed.

  Witness accounts describe the landslide as a wall of earth and rock and mud that roared down into the Concordant lines. It crushed barricades, swallowed whole companies, and sent a shockwave through both armies. And at the center of the landslide was General Dahel. He was caught under thousands of tons of falling rock and killed instantly.

  Now, it’s important to understand what General Tappal knew in that moment, and what he didn’t. Tappal had no idea that he’d just witnessed the death of the commander who had frustrated him for the past few days. All he saw was an opportunity. There was now a gaping wound in the enemy lines. It was a break that was so wide that entire formations could pass through without meeting any resistance.

  If Tappal had known that General Dahel lay dead, he might have sent his entire army into the gap in the Concordant lines. The Vash forces could have pushed through the Concordant defenders and wiped them from the field. But Tappal had been stung too many times over the past few days to send his entire force forward. He feared a trap that would make him look foolish. Instead, he only sent two regiments of infantry through the gap.

  Even that was nearly enough. The Vash poured into the breach and crashed into Concordant defenders who were disoriented, leaderless, and reeling from the artillery barrage. Their defensive line buckled and snapped. Units retreated without orders. Barricades were abandoned. Panic spread through the lines.

  That should have been the end of the battle. Tappal had momentum, numbers, artillery, and a path straight into the heart of the Concordant formation. Had events played out slightly differently, he might have won the battle and his forces might have broken through the pass entirely.

  As the Concordant defenders collapsed and retreated, fresh reinforcements had finally arrived from the Concordant heartland. They had marched through the night in a desperate bid to save the pass, and they reached the battlefield just as the Vash breakthrough threatened to finish the defenders entirely.

  If Tappal had committed fully to the attack that was handed to him, those reinforcements might have been caught up in the retreat and been routed as well. But with only two regiments pushing forward, the Concordant were just able to defend themselves.

  The reinforcements formed up amid the chaos and stood shoulder to shoulder, turning back the Vash surge.

  That was the last chance that Tappal had for a pure victory in the battle. He had squandered it with his inaction and his timidity. Fighting continued long into the night, lit only by the glow of burning pitch and the fierce arcs of siege ammunition tracing through the darkness, but both sides knew that there would be at least one more day of battle.

  Due to Tappal’s failure, there was a seventh day of battle. This time it wasn’t shaped by weather, terrain, or clever tactics. It was instead shaped by something far more destructive: ego. Specifically, the ego of General Tappal.

  As the Concordant forces struggled to reorganize after the chaos of the previous day, new banners appeared at the eastern mouth of Greenfall Pass. The exhausted Vash soldiers under Tappal’s command recognized the banners immediately. Some even cheered, understanding that reinforcements had arrived to secure the final victory.

  But Tappal didn’t cheer.

  The banners marching into the pass didn’t belong to him. They weren’t marked with his sigils, nor were they dyed in his personal crimson-black motif. Instead, they belonged to someone else - someone far more dangerous to Tappal’s ambitions.

  Marching into the pass was the army of General Varrin sa Kheled, one of Emperor Callis’ most respected commanders. Kheled wasn’t a palace schemer like Tappal. His career was formed through disciplined and methodical campaigns out on the empire’s frontiers. He’d crushed rebellions, reopened crumbling trade routes, and earned the respect of soldiers due to his years of steady and dependable leadership. Among the “loyal” Vash generals, Kheled was one of the few who commanded real respect.

  Much like Tappal, Kheled had set his sights on Greenfall Pass following the end of the war between Denma and Callis. He even had the same motive: control the pass to control access to the western provinces. He planned to levy tolls, expand his personal power base, and force rival generals to negotiate on his terms.

  The only difference between Tappal and Kheled was timing. General Kheled had mobilized later, assuming that a measured deployment would give him a greater chance at victory. Because of that delay, Tappal had enjoyed six uninterrupted days of command. Six days of chaos, six days of blunder, six days of poor decision making, near disasters, and narrow escapes.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  As he watched Kheled’s banners roll into the pass, Tappal understood what was bound to happen. If he didn’t win the battle right then and there, Kheled would assume command, finish the job, and become known as the general who opened the way for the Vash Dynasty.

  Tappal would be forgotten. Worse still, he’d be seen as the fool who softened up the Concordant for a real general to defeat. His army would have smashed itself against the defenders of Greenfall Pass for nothing.

  Tappal couldn’t stand that thought. So, instead of coordinating with Kheled, or even waiting for him to finish deploying his troops, Tappal chose the more destructive path: he’d force a decisive victory over the Concordant before Kheled’s troops even reached the front line.

  His subcommanders begged him to reconsider. They warned him that his army was exhausted, the formations were unstable, and their supply lines were overextended. They tried explaining that pushing deeper into the Concordant defenses without adequate reserves was inviting disaster. Tappal ignored all of them.

  He shoved unit after unit into the gap created by the previous day’s landslide, trying to break the Concordant line through sheer force of will. The Vash troops surged forward in a long, disjointed spearhead. They boasted no coordination, no support, and no fallback plan. The numerical advantage that had so terrified the Concordant for six days was suddenly meaningless in the chaos of the battle. Tappal’s forces weren’t an army anymore. They were a chain of isolated soldiers stretching through the pass, each one too far from the next to be reinforced or commanded properly.

  That was when the Concordant reinforcements proved their worth. The cohort that had arrived during the chaos of the sixth day had reorganized under the command of a new officer: Salia Tren, one of Dahel’s proteges. Tren wasn’t a master of maneuver like Dahel, nor did she try to be. She understood that the army she inherited was shaken, grieving, and dangerously close to breaking. So her first order was simple:

  Remember Dahel.

  She implored the Concordant forces to remember who they were fighting for. They were fighting for their families in the western provinces. They were fighting for their brothers and sisters on the front lines standing shoulder to shoulder with them. They were fighting for the memory of General Dahel who had led them to, what Tren assured them, would be a historic victory over the Vash that would lead to the Concordant’s freedom.

  Her command didn’t have any of the tactical brilliance of Dahel, but it still worked. Her soldiers, taking heart and remembering what they were fighting for, locked shields, anchored their pikes, and braced themselves against the charging Vash. When the Vash soldiers hit them, they slowed. When they slowed, they faltered. And when they faltered, Tren ordered a controlled counterattack. The Concordant managed to push the Vash back and retake a few yards. It was the first time the Vash had yielded ground in the battle.

  Behind the line, the Brains of Asteris immediately set to work. They dug trenches, built barricades, and constructed angled bulwarks designed to absorb or deflect the Vash siege fire. In the span of a few hours, they transformed that tiny regained section of the pass into a fortified anchor point.

  By sunset the battle had died down, letting both sides see the carnage the day had brought. Vash bodies lay in scattered pockets where unsupported units had been cornered and cut down. On the Concordant side, soldiers crouched low in the freshly dug trenches and behind hastily erected barricades. They were exhausted, soot-stained, and still hollow-eyed from grief over General Dahel’s death, but they held firm. What had looked like a collapsing front that morning had been reforged into a bulwark.

  Tappal surveyed the field and the state of his army and felt the weight of despair settle over him. Seven days of grinding combat had earned him nearly two-thirds of Greenfall Pass. But the final critical stretch remained stubbornly in Concordant hands.

  What was worse was that standing behind him was the full, untouched might of General Kheled’s army. Perfect ranks. Gleaming armor. Fresh horses. Well-rested troops. Subcommanders from Tappal’s own army were already praising Kheled simply for arriving to the battle.

  Tappal knew what came next. The eighth day of battle would begin with Kheled assuming formal command. Then Kheled would finish the battle that Tappal had started, claim the victory, and ride home in triumph. Everything that Tappal believed he had earned, all the risks he had taken, all the lives he had spent, it would all be swept aside and buried under Kheled’s inevitable glory.

  The seventh day of battle didn’t end with a heroic final charge or a decisive clash. It ended with a man staring at the reality of his own mediocrity. And it was that bitter desperation that Tappal felt that set the stage for the eighth day of battle.

  The next morning the valley had fallen into an eerie silence. Greenfall Pass had howled and roared for a week straight. The noise had come from storms and ballista fire and cannon blasts and the dying screams of thousands. But all that noise had gone quiet. A pale morning sun reached across a vast stretch of no-man’s-land. The ground between the two sides was a graveyard of broken weapons, shattered stone, dead bodies, and the burned remains of siege equipment.

  Across that wreckage, both armies stared out at each other and were forced to confront a sobering truth: neither side would win the battle through conventional warfare.

  The Concordant had been reinforced with fresh soldiers who were a cut above what the Vash had, but they controlled barely a third of the pass. In front of them were the remnants of Tappal’s battered army as well as Kheled’s pristine force. If both Vash armies struck at once, the Concordant lines would inevitably snap.

  And yet, the Vash were hardly in a better position. Tappal, after a week of blunders and poor tactical decision making, found himself in a political trap. If he did nothing, Kheled would seize command and claim victory before midday, leaving Tappal with nothing but the knowledge that he’d bled thousands of his own men for nothing. If he launched another attack, his exhausted soldiers would be butchered. He couldn’t retreat since his men were already whispering that Kheled would make a better protector for se Froun Traf and he was worried that Kheled would seize that. He couldn’t wait, attack, or withdraw without ruining himself.

  General Kheled was in a no-less precarious situation. His reputation and career had been built around precision and discipline. His army did exactly what he wanted it to, exactly when he wanted them to do it. Rumors from Tappal’s men talked about missteps in the battle and unnecessary losses, all compounded by an enemy commander who outmatched them at every turn. If Kheled allowed the battle to devolve into a brutal slog, he risked losing parts of his army to the same mistakes that Tappal made. How would that play out with the imperial court? Other “loyalist” generals would argue that his victory over the Concordant was weak, especially since he arrived late to the battle. But if he waited too long and Tappal miraculously achieved a victory, Kheled would look like a coward.

  Both sides were desperate. Both sides were anxious. Both sides were willing to gamble for what they hoped was a victory. And in their desperation and anxiety, both sides turned to the most experimental and least understood weapons ever brought to a battlefield.

  Of all the technological marvels unveiled during the Three-Crown Crisis, firearms were the first and least transformative. They were crude and unreliable and rarely worked as intended, but they had opened a conceptual door.

  Military engineers realized that the world now contained weapons that let untrained men rival expert archers. This allowed a new question to form: what other forms of power were out there?

  For generations the Vash had poured fortunes into weapons research. Most of it was centered around metallurgy, alchemy, and conventional arms. But a small, eccentric corps of engineers within the Vash hierarchy had pursued…stranger studies. They were fascinated with the concept of sound. Specifically, they were interested in the acoustic mysteries that were often found in small pockets of the Deadlands.

  Around fifty years before the start of the Three-Crown Crisis, these engineers examined an ancient mountain temple carved into a cliff face. The monks who had built it had mapped a “song.” It was a sequence of resonant frequencies capable of making stone vibrate until it crumbled to dust.

  Research into this “song” led to the creation of vibrating metal plates, harmonic alloys, and alchemical solutions that responded violently to certain frequencies. When the Concordant of Asteris formed, several of these Vash engineers defected, bringing fragments of their research with them. Thus, both armies began developing a terrifying idea: weaponized resonance.

  The result of all that research was the Resonance Engine, though calling it a “weapon” is being generous.

  Each Resonance Engine was a sprawling construct, part siege engine, part musical instrument, and part alchemical and metallurgical nightmare. They required enormous tuning chambers, wagon-sized amplification frames, metal plates soaked in exotic oils, and long resonator conduits designed to channel vibration into focused bursts.

  No one on either side of the war truly understood how the Resonance Engine worked. Early tests of the weapon shattered buildings, cracked foundations, and left entire work crews deaf. A Concordant prototype had collapsed an iron mine from kilometers away. Several Vash prototypes had killed their own operators without any visible cause.

  Yet with the battle at a deadlock and both armies desperate for a victory, each side came to the same deadly conclusion: it was time to use their most powerful weapons.

  Both armies made their final preparations for the eighth day of battle. On the Vash side, General Kheled’s engineers hauled their prototype Resonance Engine into position. It was a hulking, asymmetrical brute that was bolted to a siege chassis usually reserved for the largest ballistae. Iron braces clamped down on massive tuning forces larger than a warehouse. Resonator chambers flickered and hissed, spitting sparks of blue energy into the air. The engine looked less like a weapon of war and more like a machine that had been dragged screaming out of a laboratory and chained to the battlefield.

  Across the pass, the Concordant were making their own preparations. Their prototype was sleeker and narrower. Its amplification frames were wrapped in silver alloy. Its resonator plates hummed faintly. Commander Salia Tren stood next to the engine, unable to hide her worry. Every engineer she spoke with had warned her that the prototype was unstable. But without some sort of advantage, she knew that the Concordant forces couldn’t survive another day of battle.

  The pass was strangely quiet as the Resonance Engines were wheeled forward. Soldiers and engineers watched with a horrid fascination as each side moved their weapon into place.

  At that point, neither army had any intelligence on the other side’s development of Resonance Engines. Each side believed that it alone was about to unveil a weapon that the enemy couldn’t possibly counter.

  And into this volatile standoff rode General Tappal, making his final, catastrophic mistake.

  For seven days of battle, Tappal had repeated the same doomed tactics: a cavalry charge through a narrow rocky corridor where horses couldn’t maneuver, couldn’t build speed, and couldn’t maintain formation. And over the course of seven days of battle, his cavalry had been shredded. Their horses were exhausted. Their armor was dented and cracked. Any sensible commander would have dismounted his riders and folded them into the infantry days ago. But Tappal wasn’t a sensible commander.

  He had only one goal left. He needed to achieve something before Kheled forcibly seized command. Something daring. Something heroic. Something bold. Something he could point to and claim, “I did that.”

  So, in what historians almost universally regard as one of the worst tactical decisions of the entire conflict, Tappal called together what remained of his cavalry and organized a direct charge against the Concordant front lines.

  From his command post, General Kheled stared in disbelief as Tappal and the tattered remnants of his cavalry trotted into formation. He was torn between fury and disgust at what was happening. Kheled loathed Tappal and the toadies like him that had invaded the Callis court. He saw him as an undisciplined egotist who had squandered manpower and momentum and wasted Vash lives and got his army stuck in the quagmire that was Greenfall Pass.

  But Kheled understood the cruel mathematics of politics. He knew that if Tappal managed even a partial breakthrough, even by sheer luck, he would be celebrated for it. And Kheled would be forced to share credit for victory with a man who he considered to be an imbecile.

  Kheled’s own words from letters that survived the battle describe his thinking best: The gods protect children and idiots. And I was not about to allow the latter to steal the victory that I had marched all this way to claim.

  Determined not to allow Tappal even the chance of an unearned victory, General Kheled ordered his engineers to fire their Resonance Engine.

  On the other side of the field, Commander Tren saw the Vash cavalry forming and came to the exact opposite conclusion, but with the same urgency. A massed cavalry unit, racing headlong into a choke point, made for a perfect target. If the Resonance Engine prototype worked as the engineers claimed it might, a single burst would liquify the incoming riders and break the morale of every Vash soldier watching.

  This was her chance to win a victory for the Concordant. This was her chance to repay the Vash for the death of General Dahel. Without hesitation, Tren ordered her engineers to fire their Resonance Engine.

  There is debate among historians about whether the simultaneous activation of the two Resonance Engines was coincidence or the cruel hand of fate. What is not debated is what happened next.

  Both engines discharged at the same time. Greenfall Pass, with its steep walls and narrow corridor, became the perfect echo chamber. No sound could escape. There was no outlet, no dispersal, and no path for the vibration waves to leak to.

  The waves from both engines collided. Frequency layered atop frequency. Vibration folded into vibration. It was a self-amplifying, runaway cascade of destructive sound.

  The valley screamed. The Earth shuddered. The mountains groaned. Stone that had stood for millenia shattered.

  There are eyewitness accounts of what happened, but their stories are all fragmented. It is difficult to piece them together. What little we know is absolutely horrifying.

  Rocks split open due to the vibration. Siege engines shattered like glass. The armored plate of soldiers, meant to protect them from weapons, turned their bodies into large tuning forks. Thousands of soldiers collapsed instantly, bleeding from their nose, eyes, and ears. Others were split open and burst like canned food that had been pressurized. Others were simply vaporized entirely in a flameless explosion, a pressure wave that tore them apart without burning them.

  General Tappal and every member of his final cavalry charge were erased in the first fraction of a second. One moment they were charging forward, and the next they were turned into a pink mist that continued its momentum and was carried into the Concordant defensive lines.

  The Vash lines buckled as the harmonic wave amplified. Bodies collapsed. The Concordant lines broke as well. Their barricades shaken to pieces.

  Rolling across the mountains and echoing through every splintered ridge, came “the sound.”

  It was thunderous. But this thunder didn’t come from the sky and it didn’t come from a storm. It was a thunder created by human hands, born from fear and ambition and desperation and the reckless fusion of magic and machine.

  When the “sound” finally died out and the echoes faded, there was no attack by either side. No banners rose. No horns sounded. No counterattack emerged. No final charge was ordered. No attempts to seize the pass came about. There was only silence.

  Greenfall Pass, once the most strategically vital corridor in the entire Vash Dynasty, had become a graveyard.

  The only survivors of the battle were those who had been stationed on the far edges of the conflict: the supply wagons, the rear guards, the medics in their tents, and the scouts position on the roads leading into the pass. Those few soldiers were spared the full force of the blast solely because they’d been too far away to be obliterated. But they were the first to see what remained.

  Greenfall Pass was gone. It had been carved away in the destruction. Corpses were scattered about the battlefield, some with their skin intact but their bones pulverized by the vibrations. Siege engines had been reduced to splinters. A fine pink mist covered the battlefield and rained down on the survivors.

  Once the survivors took in the state of the battlefield, they did what anyone would in the face of that kind of horror. They ran away. Both sides. At the same time. It was the only act of unity in the entire war. Vash survivors fled east. Concordant survivors fled west.

  The Eight Day Thunder didn’t end with a surrender or a retreat or negotiations, but with abandonment. Neither side claimed victory of the massacre.

  The Vash had entered Greenfall Pass with dreams of conquest, but those dreams were shattered.

  They lost General Tappal who was annihilated instantly during his suicidal final charge. They lost General Kheled who had been standing near his engineers who had several experimental alchemical mixtures they wanted to use during the last day of battle. Those mixtures were caught in the resonance cascade and contributed to a massive explosion that took out a majority of Kheled’s army. They lost tens of thousands of soldiers and their entire siege train, including experimental artillery and other prototype resonance weapons built in decades of secret research.

  As for the Concordant, they didn’t fare much better. General Dahel’s death on the sixth day had already plunged their command structure into chaos. The Eight Day Thunder consumed the rest. Dahel’s veterans, the newly arrived reinforcements, and the Brains of Asteris were all casualties of the final day.

  The town of se Froun Traf suffered its own catastrophe. The amplification of the Resonance Engines had hit the town. Its walls buckled inwards and its homes disintegrated and the massive air pressure from the weapons tore the remainder of the settlement apart. The few survivors of the battle describe the ruins of se Froun Traf as literally humming for hours afterward.

  But the greatest casualty of the eighth day was the land itself. Greenfall Pass doesn’t exist anymore. The amplified resonance cascade tore the entire corridor apart at a geological level. Stone disintegrated. The floor of the pass dropped. The ridges collapsed inward. What had once been a narrow, defensible corridor became a vast, uneven basin of powdered stone.

  Over the course of a single day, all of the maps of the region had become obsolete.

  What once was known as Greenfall Pass is now an area that we call the Valley of Echoes. It’s named that because travelers to the region say the area never truly stops ringing. Tiny vibrations shiver through the valley at all hours. There are whispers that sound bounces strangely, carrying farther than it should. And on still nights, people sweat that they can hear faint, lingering screams from the soldiers that had died generations ago.

  Despite the horror of the final day of battle, neither the Vash nor the Concordant retreated very far. Instead, both sides entrenched themselves at the new edges of the valley. They built earthworks and watchtowers and fortified camps and stared across a wasteland at the other side.

  Both sides had expected the other to rebuild and resume the fight, but neither ever did. The cost of the battle had been too great, and the surviving soldiers too few, and the new land too terrifying.

  The sheer, incomprehensible cost of the battle had broken the will for invasion. The Vash didn’t have the armies to spare to put down the rebellious western provinces. And the Concordant generals were forced to deal with the political realities of losing an entire volunteer army of citizen soldiers.

  Now we return to your original question of: why are we here? Why are we dragging ourselves through miles of the Deadlands, dodging deadly beasts, all to head into the Valley of Echoes when any sane person would avoid it? The simplest answer is: we’re here for evidence.

  I believe, and this is backed up by Professor Abbi, that the Eight Day Thunder was more than simply the last battle of the Three-Crown Crisis. It’s my theory that it was the spark of something far larger. It was the beginning of an arms race that reshaped both the Vash Dynasty and the Concordant in the century leading up to the Fracture. Furthermore, I believe that the magitech revolution it created can still be seen in the present day.

  My theory is that both sides witnessed what resonance weapons could do, and fear took over. Both the Vash and the Concordant poured innumerable resources into research. They funneled fortunes into experiments with Resonance Engines.

  The logic behind it is sound. Both the Vash and Concordant knew that their enemies had managed to build a prototype Resonance Engine. And if your enemy has access to that kind of power, your only hope is to develop something equally as devastating.

  Which brings us to why we’re headed into the Valley. We’re going there to recover whatever evidence remains. Maybe some scraps or fragments of machinery. Maybe some notes from engineers who didn’t survive the battle. Really, we’re just looking for anything that survived the destruction.

  If my theory is right and the valley does hold the origin of modern magitech…and if fortune favors us, we might be the first people in a hundred years to find something that the valley hasn’t swallowed.