She shifted quickly so that she could run up to him and give him a kiss as well, since she was a firm believer in the power of the wolf, and it being their true form. She would pray to the gods in no other way except her wolf, and she knew that it would bring him fortune. The only way she would ever be whole again would be if one of the men she loved was dead. She would pray for victory. Whose, she didn’t honestly know. I love you.
* * * * *
Somehow, in the midst of the fighting, Ziem and Lea managed to stay more or less together, after finding out quickly that her extremely disciplined fighting style meshed well with his wild abandon, on and off the battlefield. While she was meeting her enemies with well-shaped weapons forged from every available piece of scrap metal, he was laying about himself with fists that were cased in solid iron boxing gloves, shattering every bone of every wolf he came in contact with.
The tide of the battle was turning very slightly all around them, as the Ironborn rallied behind the two of them and met the Stoneborn head on, and there was fear in every grey eye that they saw.
“You know,” he shouted over the chaos at one point, when the Stoneborn began falling back to try and regroup, “you’re kinda handy to have around!”
Lea took both swords she had recently formed and beheaded a Stoneborn before she looked back to acknowledge that he had spoken. “Do you think you could mention that to your friends? I’d love to have a mate eventually!”
“I’ll see what I can do!” He put his knee through a Stoneborn face, but another managed to slam him in his ribs with a stone the size of a watermelon. It dented the breastplate he wore, but didn’t cause too much damage to him, and the dent worked itself out as Ziem growled at the woman who’d heaved it at him. “Better be glad you did that to me and not my car, asshole!”
The fight continued for what seemed like forever, and Ziem could admit that he was beginning to tire, but there came a point when things around them began to quiet. The battle with the Earthborn was mostly being fought on the other side of the compound, and the sounds of that fight were dulled by the dust cloud that had risen over everything. But more than quiet, it was another kind of noise that hadn’t been present before. Several of the Stoneborn staggered back, a group of a few hundred that had been cornered by the almost thousand Ironborn that were left in that part of the compound. There were bodies everywhere, some half-buried in the ground or lying in pieces that Lea and the others had chopped them into, but there was something else on the ground that hadn’t been there before. Water.
It moved toward them as though the compound itself had been flooded, running up over the tops of their feet and mixing to become a pinkish brown color with the mingled blood of their friends and enemies. It rose slowly, and everyone nearby was looking around for the source, for the Oceanborn that had to be nearby. The Stoneborn especially were fearful, many of them covering their mouths and noses as they panicked at the sight of the water, but when the splashes finally came, it was the Ironborn who were attacked.
It was only a matter of moments of confusion before Lea was pulled down onto her back. It was as though someone tied a string between her ankles and pulled her legs out from under her. As she scrambled to get back up, unsuccessfully, she looked around for the source. Most of the Oceanborn that she met in her life weren’t strong enough to bring so much water into a dry place, or up from the ground, if that was the source. A group of them, sure, but she couldn’t even see a group. That would be noticeable.
Instead of fighting it, she buried both of her swords in the ground and then held onto them for support as the water continued to rush in around them. A ripple shook through the ground as she felt the metal around them answer her power, and some of the houses started to ring with the vibration. It would catch the attention of the others, she hoped.
Several of the Ironborn banded together around her and pooled their power in the houses still standing nearby. Between them, a few of the walls began melting off the homes and circling around them, making a thick shield around them against the attack of whoever was out there. But water was a hard thing to keep out, and it kept on rising around them. Some of the Stoneborn had renewed their assault, recognizing an ally when they saw one, and the fight was no longer as one-sided as it had been.
Ziem was not one of those taking shelter, but he also wasn’t one of the principal targets of the water’s attack, and so he fell in with the others pressing what advantage they had left against the Stoneborn. They pressed until a large wall of the water rose up near them, leaving all of them in its shadow for a moment before it fell, knocking Ziem and every Stoneborn around him off their feet and into a tumble of iron and stone and blood-stained water.
Lea recognized that they needed to focus more on staying together than trying to keep the water out, so she collapsed her part of
