The back of her forearm swiped across her brow for the umpteenth time that day. She could feel the dirt and grit as it scraped against the grime already covering her face, but attention to such a friction had long since been abandoned in the heat of the day. A heavy bead of sweat that had just missed the interception slipped down and caught on a fringe of thick eyelash, hovering there like morning dew caught in a spider’s web, before dropping to her cheek. Her palm followed, smearing the perspiration-and-dust mix even deeper into her pores.<br/><br/>She had been given the much-appreciated gift of a short break in between training and trench-digging (today, anyway), but as a group of Lindenian women moved in to start a shift she had casually inserted herself into their ranks, making her brief respite even shorter. The sister-warriors had molded around her lanky figure in an almost unconscious, natural acceptance of her presence, though for the most part Sen was unsure if they had truly even seen her approach.<br/><br/>Armor was quickly discarded in the heat of the day, as well quite a few more articles of clothing than Sen would have deemed appropriate amidst so many male soldiers. The majority of the women wore enough to keep their legs protected from errant shovel strikes of flying bits of rock, but as sweat soaked into their shirts many of them were being removed in favor of replacements that left little to the imagination. The Brigham daughter felt her youth very keenly for the first twenty minutes or so, noticing the thick garden of scars that decorated their female figures and the ropes of sinew that lined the bones beneath the weathered skin. She stood out a little more without her piecemeal leather armor or jerkin; the sleeveless tunic remained to cover her entire torso, though it tended to lay plastered to her back and chest and smelled heavily of earth and salt. Her skin was still a far cry paler than most of theirs, contrasting the muck and dirt, and her body still soft, unworked. The remaining tenderness was vivified by the bruises that decorated her long arms and the bit of her chest exposed beneath the unlaced collar, and even in the way she moved; determined, unrelenting, but with a shakiness that announced her crying muscles to the world.<br/><br/>A familiar voice snapped her sunset eyes to full attention and her breath caught in her throat, arms frozen  with the shovel half-way into a pile of stubborn gravel.<br/><br/>“… seems like he ought to be an<span style="font-style: italic">example</span>, is all I’m saying.”<br/><br/>She recognized that another male voice had muttered a response, but her ears only focused in on the familiar one, trying to gauge the distance and position. Her shoulders hunkered over her body and she turned her head down, seemingly in a display of determination toward her shoveling.<br/><br/>“…  too familiar and the respect is lost, right? Isn’t that what the old quartermaster always said?”<br/><br/>Her breath steadied as the distance of the speaker remained steady, but her mouth felt far more dry than it had a few second ago. She shouldn’t be surprised, obviously; the order was that everyone needed to help dig the trenches, so why wouldn’t Emmet be here? She wasn’t wearing armor, which made her feel undisguised, but at the same time a portion of her mind knew her to be unrecognizable even in a sweaty tunic, as long as they didn’t come to close or spend too much time observing the trench-diggers on shift around them. A long breath steadied the nervous young woman, and she reassured herself that Emmet wouldn’t spare a group of female warriors a second glance. Still, the knowledge that he was closer now than he had been thus far made little tingles of anxiety creep up and down her spine in a way that she had believed herself too exhausted to feel.<br/><br/>The look on her face must have been a little worse than she thought. One of the women, a taller, older one with broad shoulders and hair so short it was almost shaved, set a hand on her shoulder. She didn’t say anything, but as Sen looked up into her face the woman gave a short gesture upward. The intention was clear, and the once-noble leaned her shovel against the wall of the trench. She headed down the line a few meters or so, then gripped the knotted rope anchored to the ground above and heaved. Her muscles trembled dangerously, but she was not about to tumble down and admit defeat in front of all the warriors. Or in front of her brother, who could easily be closer than she thought.<br/><br/>Before she could steady her grip and haul herself further, a familiar voice echoed. The clear, deep resonance of the Prince-Commander’s voice, lowered in a way that bespoke a conversation rather than a deliverance of orders, came from the stretch of ground just above her head. Sen wasn’t sure why, but she released the rope from her grasp and let her feet thud softly in the disturbed soil, eyes glazing over as her ears honed in on his words. The din of shovels and gravel faded into the background.<br/><br/>“… the Ravine, as you predicted.”<br/><br/><span style="color: #FFFF00">“How long?”</span><br/><br/>“A few hours at the most. They will be here before nightfall.”<br/><br/>A thick lump the size of a black cherry materialized in Sen’s throat.<br/><br/><span style="color: #FFFF00">“How many?”</span><br/><br/>“…”<br/><br/><span style="font-style: italic">Oh, by the Light, no.</span><br/><br/><span style="color: #FFFF00">“How many, Ayala?”</span><br/><br/>“Many thousands, My Prince. I would say it is nearly twice the size of the force that sacked Linden and stormed Castle Krinwulf.”<br/><br/>Sen’s eyes closed and she bit her lower lip, the granules of dirt from her face melting onto her tongue. She didn’t have to be a veteran of Castle Krinwulf to know that there had probably been a lot of Tutar. And what came… what came in<span style="font-style: italic">hours</span>… was twice that. The muscles that had trembled and shook with exhaustion now found themselves stiff with electric fear, frozen in position and forcing the Brigham woman to listen to the rest of the conversation.<br/><br/><span style="color: #FFFF00">“Are you sure?”</span><br/><br/>Her eyes opened as the Prince-Commander spoke. He didn’t sound afraid. He certainly didn’t sound pleased, not by any stretch of the imagination, but… he didn’t sound scared, either. A slow breath, one that she didn’t know she had been holding, escaped from Sen’s lips.<br/><br/>“I… I’ve never seen anything like it.”<br/><br/>Before the would-be Sister could force her slowly-mobilizing limbs into real action, orders began echoing from the giant man with the penchant for leg-breaking; she had heard some of the warriors refer to him as “Haman”, but to Sen, he would always be the man to split her kneecaps if she ever messed up. As the shouted commands echoed, the warriors clambered out of the trenches double-time and fell to their tasks, moving with a speed and coordination that no one could have guessed having seen them digging for hours. Trenches were covered and spiked and dusted and finished, the pounding heat of the day forgotten and the ache of arms lost in the flurry of activity. Sen found herself caught up in the fluster, rushing to carry out barked orders as quickly as any of them; it was more than a small relief to be told what to do at a time like this. She wasn’t sure her own brain could function on that level just now… and since the end of her life was no doubt only a few hours away, she wasn’t sure it ever would again.<br/><br/><br/>-------------------------<br/><br/><br/>It wasn’t the way she thought it would be. Things seldom were, but Seniré had been an avid reader for most of her life and the battles depicted and described in books… well, she had a certain idea in her mind. This… this was not it.<br/><br/>They were<span style="font-style: italic">huge</span>. Not even close enough to truly see the full size, and even at this distance she could see as much. Not just height, but in width of shoulder and expanse of muscle, bulging beneath skin that looked leathery-tough even from the midst of the Linden infantry, where she had been positioned. They were armored, but it looked less like the armor she had seen around the army camps and more like bits of sliced black rock that had been roughly attached over the too-large musculature, making their misshapen bodies seem even more grotesque as they writhed in their massive horde. The short spears they carried were easily as thick as her leg, wickedly-shaped blades glinting in the pre-evening light. They… simply didn’t seem<span style="font-style: italic">real</span>. None of this did. Everything seemed to be something from a nightmare, something that she would wake from and be in her tent, in the quiet army camp, with nothing but the occasional shuffling of the night watch to lull her back to sleep… her heart seemed to be unable to decide if it would thud arrhythmically like an autumn thunderstorm or just freeze in her chest, violently switching back and forth as the whispers of the soldiers died around her ears.<br/><br/>The ring of the Prince’s voice echoed in her ears, authoritative and strong. The leg-breaker’s voice echoed the Commanders, but by the time the echo reverberated over Sen’s head her hearing had become strangely selective and attuned to the twang of bowstrings and the rush of arrows through the air, whistling en masse in the skies ahead of her like a school of thin, wooden flying-fish. The raging growls and bestial snarls adopted a new pitch as their numbers started to fall, crashing into the hastily-dug trenches and being crushed beneath arrow and feet alike. Despite the numbers that collapsed into death within the ensnaring pits, still more came, endless black rock savages trampling and clawing their way toward the human forces.<br/><br/><span style="color: #FFFF00">“SWORDS FORWARD!”</span><br/><br/>Battle-cries arose from her left and right like sudden gusts of wind from the edge of a canyon cliff, the power behind them enough to sweep her off of her feet: even if the forward movement of the infantry ranks did not. Bumped and jostled and even occasionally lead along by the few Sisters that had been positioned around her (by Verana, Sen was pretty certain) she crept forward. Her booted foot landed on something hollow and wooden and instinctively she pushed back into the wave of her fellow humans until her footfalls fell quiet once more, as though the boards that covered the trenches were electrified. Her eyes darted about the battlefield with a strange sort of clarity, pupils only pinpricks in the expanse of dawn-light color. A flash of dark auburn glinted somewhere to her right, but was gone before she could focus. She stepped on something else, not a board but something soft and pliable; her eyes dropped to see the fallen body of one of their own, a spear neatly puncturing it through the sternum and out the center of the back. A wave of bile rose in the back of her throat and she felt her fingertips go numb.<br/><br/><span style="font-style: italic">I can’t do this. I CANNOT do this.</span><br/><br/>The thought sounded louder in her own mind than even the Prince-Commander’s orders as they resounded in her ears. Her breath came in shallow, fast gulps as the sounds of carnage engulfed her senses, drowning her awareness, crushing her beneath the weight of the dead and dying. A splatter of thick arterial blood from a warrior’s bisected torso splashed in a vertical spike, the hot, thick liquid coating Sen in a broad streak from jerkin to forehead. It smelled –and tasted- metallic. The wave of nausea rose again and her vision darkened around the rim, and somewhere outside of her consciousness she knew she was being jostled and moved ever forward into the din, into the madness, into the writhing, seething mass of blood and carnage and screams and snarls.<br/><br/>The short blade, hilt grasped so tightly that her fingers had turned white and she could no longer feel the tips, began to tremble as the immediate closeness of the sister-warriors broke away from her, quickly finding themselves overtaken by the crush of combat. A hard shield jolted her from behind her left shoulder blade and she jerked to the right, the weapon breaking from her fingers (apparently they weren’t as tight as she thought) and flying into the tide, lost beneath the bodies of the fallen. Sen felt the tendons in her knees start to loosen.<br/><br/><span style="font-style: italic">Light, don’t let me fall.</span><br/><br/>Her vision continued to close, the cacophony fading out as though it were drawing away.<br/><br/>“Sen!”<br/><br/>The familiar voice snapped into her mind, the volume suddenly restored to full and the clash and clang of metal and bone flooding back into her. Her head whipped around as a rush of blood cleared her eyes and banished the vomit that threatened her throat. Verana’s sleek black armor and Thaam coloring stood out against the backdrop of random silver plating that adorned the infantrymen. She wasn’t close –maybe five yards away- but she was close enough.<br/><br/>“Why are you here?”<br/><br/>The woman’s voice was loud enough to be heard clearly over the fighting but was almost conversational in tone, as though they two of them were having tea and discussing the carnage from a picnic-spot vantage. The Brigham woman blinked. As though a curtain had been wrested from her body, she saw the situation for what it was: this was not a wave of unbreakable, monstrous change. These were beings, with blood and flesh, who encroached on her home. On her people. Towards her family, seeking to destroy anything that had ever given meaning to anyone. They would devour and decimate everything in their path, and here she was, about to crumble to the ground without so much as a whimper and let them walk right over her body as if it were a welcoming threshold.<br/><br/>Her brows tilted down into a furrow of determination, the swirling pink-orange of her eyes flickering from pastel fear into a fierce, burning sunrise. She felt her teeth grit and her muscles pulse with adrenaline, a flutter of desperation filling her lungs with befouled air and forcing her heart to beat deeply once more. Her mind cleared, but her eyes still had trouble finding something on which to focus; everything was still happening so quickly. Where was she supposed to go? Her face turned back toward where Verana had been but the older woman had disappeared yet again into the throng, the twang of her bow lost amidst the gurgle of dying snarls.<br/><br/>A spear, embedded into the space between neck and shoulder of a soldier, lay sticking almost straight up. Sen didn’t study the weapon for more information than that; it was close and in an area that she could get potentially get through. Her feet carried her almost without conscious thought and her fingers wrapped around the shaft of the weapon before she knew what she was doing, yanking it with a thick sound from the cadaver of her fallen countryman. The weight felt good in her hands; heavier on the ends, probably because one of them had a savage-looking blade curving around it, but she paid little attention. Another cursory glance of the immediate terrain displayed the nearest group of soldiers -three of them, one archer and two foot soldiers- under a bit of duress as they pushed their focus onto a particularly large creature. Another flicker of fear made Sen’s heart skip a beat, but she pushed it back aggressively, unwilling to wait to be saved again. There was no time.<br/><br/>Her legs broke into instinctive action and as she ran, her awareness of her surroundings intensified and grew; her long torso swiveled slightly backwards to avoid the spear that came zooming toward her neck. One of the Tutar, closest to her approach, raised its thick arm to deliver a blow onto the archer. Somehow –Sen was pretty sure she was still moving her body, but couldn’t be positive- the bladed end of the spear she had ransacked buried itself almost four inches into the leathery axillary region of the eight-foot monster, finding a slightly tender spot. Her ears welcomed the roar of pain alongside the pulse of devotion to her home, entwining with the new anger that was making itself known in her veins as she yanked the weapon free with a thick squelch. The archer spun around and twanged more shots into the beast, trying to walk backwards for distance; unfortunately, another fallen body made that difficult and he stumbled, landing hard on his backside.<br/><br/>The young man’s thick black bang shifted upward, the long end of his horsetail fluttering around over his shoulder. A thin brow under a high forehead caught Sen’s eyes, and as she glanced into the face of the archer her gaze met a pair of pale, emerald orbs. The green eyes widened in synchronization with her own.<br/><br/>“Seniré?”<br/><br/><span style="color: #80BFBF">“Rendir?”</span><br/><br/>A roar came from behind her, close;<span style="font-style: italic">really</span>close. She spun on her heel and immediately leaned backwards, an intuitive movement colored with half-training, and managed to slide under the swift cleave of a wicked axe curve. A monstrous hand came for her from the other side, but it stopped as two arrows dove into the beast’s face; Sen didn’t know the origin point for the projectiles, and at the moment she didn’t much care. She hefted her purloined spear back toward her body, instinctively going loose to avoid attacks but trying to maintain some semblance of weight to keep braced against the weapon. Her eyes stayed locked on the wounded Tutar closest to her, but she tried to keep her senses open, ready. She felt a taller, stronger back press against her own, and a flutter of a jet-black horsetail swished from her right shoulder into the corners of her vision for a half-second.<br/><br/>The injured savage roared again, the two sets of eyes lost to its rage and blood frenzy.<br/><br/>A deep breath heaved her chest.<span style="font-style: italic">Light, don’t let me fall.</span>she said in her own mind, the words resounding in her skull with a sense of realness, a heart-felt burst of genuine intensity,<span style="font-style: italic">Please, Light, don’t let <span style="text-decoration: underline">them</span> fall</span>.