When Wolves March

The wind shifted.

Atop the Imperial ridge, the Governor removed his gloves slowly, methodically, as dust and screams rolled across the battlefield below. His expression never changed.

A rider approached. "Arl Senjar's cavalry has breached the southern wing..."

"Enough," Governor Harren de Voss said, cutting him off. His voice was dry.

"Send in everything. All ranks. All mages. No more positioning.Bring me Senjar's head."

The rider blinked. "All, my lord?"

"Everything."

And the field shifted.

Twelve thousand Imperial soldiers began to move in unison a massive tide of steel and discipline. Reserves that had not yet fought joined the fray. Formations thickened. The trenches began to disappear under the weight of feet and shield.

Then came the mages.

All twenty of them.

They strode into the open in groups, robed and unarmored, but ringed by elite guards. Each stood with purpose, forming triangles and circles with their hands.

The sky changed.

Wind coiled unnaturally across the field. Flame erupted in arches. Stones lifted from the ground and exploded into shards. Water coalesced into frozen spears and struck down across the Harkoraal flanks.

Rasa screamed in pain, wounded but standing. Aelynne dragged two soldiers to cover with a wave of her hand. Gavren countered one spell with a blunt shield of fire but even he was being pressed.

Corien was nowhere to be seen.

Kaelric stumbled to his knee near the forward line, blood seeping from his side. "They've turned the field..."

"They've turned everything," Varrik growled, parrying two blows at once.

Senjar rode toward the center. His black cloak was torn. His cheek bled. His horse had taken two arrows but still moved, foam at its mouth.

The banners of Harkoraal wavered.

The lines began to bend.

And the dead piled high.

Then Senjar stopped.

Right at the heart of the chaos. He dismounted slowly, planting his sword in the ground. Blood streaked down his gauntlets. His breaths came fast — not from pain, but something deeper. Rising.

A hum.

A sound in his bones.

Velyra's words echoed in his mind:

"You are not a vessel for magic. You are a storm that fills the sky."

Around him, fire danced from enemy spells. One struck a tree near him — it exploded in splinters and ash.

But none touched him.

The wind curled toward him. Not away. Not against.

Toward.

The soil beneath his feet began to blacken. His sword, still planted in the dirt, shook.

A mage from the Imperial line stepped forward, raising both hands to unleash a final spell lightning drawn from cloudless sky.

It never reached him.

The bolt arced,

and shattered in midair, unraveling into light.

Silence.

Then Senjar opened his eyes.

They glowed.

Not like a torch. Like a forge.

The raw, blinding power surged outward from his body, silent at first then deafening.

A wave of invisible force pushed outward from him in all directions, flattening grass, cracking shield rims, and throwing three approaching soldiers from their feet like dolls tossed in wind.

Every Harkoraal soldier on the field felt it.

Not heat. Not cold.

Power.

Mana ripped through Senjar's veins not channeled through words or staff, but instinct, fury, need. It wrapped around him in threads of burning air, bending light.

He stepped forward, and the ground smoked under his boots.

Kaelric, gasping from behind a half-broken bulwark, whispered: "Gods help them."

Then Senjar ran.

Not toward the Harkoraal lines.

Toward the twenty mages.

Straight into the mouth of the Empire's storm.

They saw him coming.

The Imperial mages tightened their ranks, fingers splayed, mouths moving in unison. Their voices rose into a single incantation binding circles etched into the air with glowing sigils, shaped and sharpened by years of study.

A wall of lightning. A storm of ice. Three earth pillars lifted to crush his path.

None of it reached him.

Senjar didn't dodge.

He walked through.

The ice shattered before it met his skin. The lightning bent not deflected, but devoured by the air around him, absorbed into his advancing presence. The earth rose, groaned, and cracked but did not strike. The land itself recoiled.

The Imperial formation broke.

One mage shouted, "Fall back! Fall back!"

Too late.

Senjar reached the first line.

His blade rose. It didn't shine. It burned.

One swing and a mage's torso folded like wet parchment. Another burst backward, body flung like chaff in gale. Their spells struck him like rain on iron light flickered, mana clashed, but Senjar did not stop.

He did not hesitate.

He did not slow.

Gavren watched from the flank, lips parted.

"Stormborn…" he whispered. "By the old gods, he really is..."

A fresh group of Imperial knights surged to protect the mages.

Senjar didn't change direction.

The ground beneath his feet exploded outward, chunks of dirt and stone flying as if his steps struck with the weight of mountains.

Soldiers were lifted off their feet by force alone not from a spell, not from a weapon, but from the sheer pressure of his presence.

Rasa and Aelynne joined the edge of the chaos, throwing water like blades, wrapping enemies in coils of ice but they were chasing his shadow.

The battlefield around Senjar collapsed into noise.

Heat shimmered where he walked. Grass turned to ash. Metal bent. Arrows curved away. Even the enemy's magic began to stutter.

One of the Imperial mages tried to flee.

Senjar reached out with an open hand.

No words. No gesture. Just intention.

The man screamed lifted from the earth and folded into a heap as if gravity itself chose to devour him.

The remaining mages broke.

Senjar advanced through them like a scythe through grain, leaving behind only steam and ruin. But the storm didn't stay contained.

It grew.

The sky above began to twist. Not dark, not light but a kind of colorless churning, as if the world had blinked wrong. The earth trembled at the edges of the plain.

And then came the silence.

Complete. Awful.

Even the fighting at the flanks paused.

Soldiers from both sides turned to look at the center, where Senjar now stood alone, surrounded by fallen mages and sundered earth. His eyes still burned. His skin radiated heat.

He raised his sword.

And the black wolf banner of Harkoraal was lifted behind him, flapping in a wind that no one else could feel.

Kaelric, bloodied and staggering, looked to Varrik.

"He just broke the line."

Varrik nodded once.

"No," he said. "He broke the world."

Gavren whispered.

"That's not him anymore."

The silence after the storm was unnatural.

Even the dying seemed to hold their breath.

Senjar stood motionless, sword in hand, the wind pulling around his body like unseen threads. A ring of scorched earth circled him, wide as a temple dome, littered with collapsed mages, shattered stone, and steel twisted into knots. The glow in his eyes had dulled but not faded.

No horns sounded from the Imperial lines.

No orders rang out.

Only the tremble of uncertain feet and the clatter of retreat echoing faintly on the northern ridge.

Kaelric, still bleeding from his side, stood near Rasa and Aelynne. He took one look at the field of ruin and whispered, "It's over."

But it wasn't.

From the far rise, the Governor moved.

Governor Harren de Voss stepped out from his guard line not fleeing. Advancing. Alone.

He was not robed like the mages. He wore plated armor of blackened bronze chased with falcon symbols in white. His blade was long and slender, a duelist's weapon, not a general's. Behind him, his bannermen stirred, uncertain.

Senjar saw him.

And began to walk.

There were no words exchanged across the field. No proclamations. Just two figures moving toward each other, as if the battle had narrowed to a single, terrible equation.

Somewhere behind him, Gavren muttered, "He's going to challenge him… gods preserve us."

Kaelric tried to step forward, but Rasa grabbed his arm.

"No," she said. "This isn't ours."

The soldiers fell back in waves. Imperial and Harkoraal alike. A corridor opened across the wrecked plain.

At its center, the Governor and Senjar stood facing each other silent, still, the black wolf and the pale falcon cast in flesh.

Senjar's eyes no longer blazed. But the heat still pulsed from his skin.

Governor Harren unsheathed his sword slowly, deliberately, and held it in a dueling stance. "You're not a man," he said quietly.

Senjar answered without anger. "Then stop sending men to fight me."

They moved at the same time.

Harren's blade was fast. Faster than age or armor should allow. It struck in blinding arcs thrust, feint, draw, slice aimed not for show, but for killing joints. He had killed men like this for decades.

Senjar blocked every stroke.

Not with magic.

With steel.

He countered with brutal precision, his footwork heavy but exact. His mana didn't surge outward now it coiled inside, restrained, a furnace with a closed door.

The Governor struck high and low, then stepped back, eyes narrowing.

"You've trained well," he muttered.

Senjar didn't answer.

He stepped in and slashed once.

The Governor barely turned it aside. The force of the blow jarred his grip.

Another.

Another.

Each strike from Senjar sent vibrations through the ground. Dust kicked up with every stomp. Harren staggered on the third, reeled on the fourth, and when the fifth came a heavy, diagonal slash he was forced to throw himself backward, rolling through ash.

Senjar advanced.

"You sent twenty mages," he said, voice steady. "You sent twenty thousand men. You used all your names. Your banners."

Harren stood, shoulders heaving.

"You think killing me changes anything?"

"No," Senjar said. "But it ends this."

He lunged.

Their blades met once twice.

Then Senjar slipped under the third stroke and slammed his elbow into the Governor's chestplate. It cracked with the sound of snapping bone. Harren gasped and fell to one knee.

Senjar raised his sword.

And stopped.

The battlefield had gone silent again.

The Governor looked up, defiant.

"Do it."

Senjar's eyes burned again.

Then he said "No. Not so easily."

He turned, and raised his voice so all could hear.

"This man does not die today."

Gasps. Cries. Confusion. Rasa looked toward Kaelric, who shook his head in disbelief.

Senjar continued.

"He will walk back to the capital. He will carry this defeat in his bones. In his breath. Let the Empire know what happened here."

He turned to Harren again.

"You came to crush a tribe. You leave as witness to a reckoning."

Senjar walked away.

He didn't look back as the Governor collapsed fully to the ground.

Behind him, the black wolf banner rose again, and the roar of Harkoraal shook the plains.

The Harkoraal banners swayed over the ruined battlefield, torn and stained but still flying.

The field of Tivar Crossing lay quiet, blanketed by broken shields, scorched trenches, and the groans of the wounded. Bodies of thousands lay in tangled clusters, blackened earth beneath them and a blood-tinged wind above.

But the Empire was gone.

They had not just retreated they had shattered from Iskorith.

Governor Harren de Voss was taken alive by his remaining personal guard, who fled without resistance. They didn't wait for horses or order. They fled like men dragging the memory of a nightmare.

Kaelric stood atop a slope, holding his ribs, watching them go.

"They'll be back," he muttered.

Rasa wiped blood from her temple. "That they will."

Senjar stood before his soldiers, sword still in hand, its edge dark with ash but unmarred. He looked over the ranks that remained torn, burned, but alive. Survivors of an impossible storm.

Gavren walked up behind him.

"You held it in," the old mage said quietly. "You didn't let it consume you."

Senjar didn't answer at first.

Then, "Not yet."

He turned toward Kaelric and Varrik, who were already assembling what was left of the command circle.

"Casualties?"

Kaelric answered, tone grim. "More than two thousand dead or dying. Another thousand wounded beyond fighting. We hold just under six thousand who can stand."

"And the mages?"

Rasa stepped forward. "We lost two of the younger ones. Aelynne is still alive. Barely. Kirel will need weeks before he walks again."

"And Corien?"

No one answered.

Senjar's jaw tightened. "Find him."

Varrik motioned to his scouts. "If he's alive, we'll drag him out of hell itself."

Senjar nodded, then turned toward the smoking field.

"Get the dead burned. Separate piles. Ours and theirs."

Kaelric raised an eyebrow. "And theirs?"

"Bury them," Senjar said. 

He stepped forward again, to where the black wolf banner had been planted in a mound of broken spears.

Senjar took the pole.

He raised it higher.

So that all the field could see.

"Today," he said, his voice low but carrying, "we broke a thousand years of chains. The Empire bled here. Its law ends here."

The soldiers around him stood taller.

"You who stand now you are not soldiers of rebellion. You are the first generation of the new Harkoraal."

He drove the banner into the earth again, this time beside a cracked imperial sword.

"From here, we march to the heart. And we do not stop."

Murmurs swept the camp. Some raised weapons. Others knelt. No one cheered but there was something stronger, resolve. The kind born from fire and loss.

Garrin approached from the rear lines, her hair damp, her clothes torn. He looked exhausted but alive.

"We've received word," he said quietly. "From the capital. The Emperor has summoned a council of nobles. There's talk of sending a full legion."

Senjar turned to him.

"Let them come. The next one we burn won't have a road to flee."

Garrin hesitated. "And what of Iskorith?"

Senjar looked toward the western hills.

"It's not a province anymore. It's a state. Ours."