King Emery scrunched his face up as he ran through many stressful decisions in his head all at the same time. Yelin nervously awaited a command.
Emery turned back to Yelin, unblinking. “Take the queen. Get her out of here to safety, at once.”
Sirillia protested, begging to go and help find Petir in amongst the chaos, but Emery ignored it as he gave his next order.
“Artima, get our men ready. We march for Tellersted to find our sons. I will lead one-half into town; you will take the other half into the fields to the north to check if they escaped in that direction.”
“And once we find them?” Baron Artima asked.
“We leave for Ashen immediately.”
The Old Bear took in each word of the command with a stern expression before bowing in acknowledgement.
As the Baron began to order the men and spread the word to form up into two battalions of a thousand each at the edge of camp, Yelin approached the king, eager to fight for him.
He knew it was the right thing to do, to stay at the king’s side.
“My king, let me ride with you. I am more valuable in there than out here,” Yelin said.
He knew that whatever was happening was both dangerous and unpredictable, and he trusted no one more than himself to protect Emery’s life.
“I need someone to stay with Sirillia, to protect her,” Emery said as he called for a horse to be brought over for Sirillia.
“Let me put my best men on it, then. I will march with you, defend you, and help find the prince, sir. It is my duty.”
An enormous flaming rock crashed into the fields in the distance, sending tremendous vibrations through the earth and an outburst of ash into the air. The dry crops in the fields combusted and a wall of flames spread out in a ring from the crater.
Emery considered his guard, admiring Yelin’s persistence. “Alright then, have ten men escort Queen Sirillia back to Dawnhill. We will rendezvous there when all this is done.”
Fires began to take tents around the Blacktree camp, catching alight from the smouldering debris and the rainfall of embers. But the Ashen soldiers left it all to burn as the orders were given to gather up into two separate battalions at the edge of their perimeter.
The horses were panicking from the madness. Some fled with singed manes and burning skin, helplessly whinnying.
Emery aided his weak wife up onto his own horse Midnight, realising that she would need him more than Emery would. Midnight’s bravery would see her through. She was seated in front of one of his guards to keep her balance and control the reins.
Sirillia looked down at her husband with teary eyes as smaller, pebble-sized fireballs sprinkled down from the heavens. “Find our son,” she begged.
“I will. Keep yourself safe, alright? No risky business,” Emery said, clasping his wife’s hand tightly.
“I love you.”
“And you, my queen. Now ride.” Emery gestured for the guard to head off, and in an instant Midnight was away with nine other mounted guards shadowing the queen.
Emery watched nervously as his wife rode off, the clouds overhead still rumbling and glowing like flame.
“She will be safe,” Yelin said reassuringly.
Emery could only nod. “I know. Now, let’s find my idiot of a son.”
Emery’s battalion began to march up the road towards the town centre in a tight formation. They held their shields high to protect them from the debris still raining down periodically.
Meanwhile, Baron Artima Lowe took his one-thousand men in a northern direction from the Ashen camp before heading west and making for the burning fields surrounding the town, full of terrified peasants, collapsing windmills, and fire-filled pastures.
The flames moved like living, breathing animals, spreading from one crop, tree, house, to the next within seconds, before completely swallowing them whole and leaving nothing but soot and charred skeletons.
The Citadel, at the heart of Tellersted, rose like a column of stone surrounded by pillars of black smoke with scorch marks and impact craters scattered upon its exterior. Though, somehow, it had held the barrage of huge fireballs.
Yelin noticed that the bigger rocks appeared to have stopped falling, with only smaller ones still striking like a light snowfall of fire.
They avoided enormous ash-covered craters in the road, some as large as the pools in the Midsummer Gardens in Andervale.
Enormous, glowing rocks remained in the pits they had created. Yelin was in disbelief. Where had these rocks come from? Were they really stars?
The people running for their lives carried little with them, only the singed, tattered clothes on their backs. The fear in their eyes was contagious.
The Blacktree men were nervous too, Yelin could tell. Not a single soldier spoke or hummed as they marched- a clear indicator of their fear.
“What could have done this?” Emery whispered to Yelin, both leading the march.
Yelin could only shake his head, horrified by the devastation they were walking in to. The Two Horns Inn, or what was left of it, had been completely engulfed in roaring flame and looked more like a dumpsite for rubble.
Yelin held up his hand to block the radiant heat from the firestorm.
The corpses out the front of the inn were unrecognisable and completely blackened in frozen expressions of terror and pain.
Yelin said a small prayer for them as they passed the bodies. “May the Creator heal your pain in the æther.”
Emery was speechless.
The rain of fire continued to ease.
Further into town they marched. Many of the wattle, brick, and timber dwellings had been damaged by the blasts. Walls had crumbled, doors and windows blasted out, roofs collapsed in on themselves, and fires were still spreading.
Yelin had never seen anything as devastating as this before, not even in the border conflicts with Caldaea.
