Hardly, Ryn answered. Though, to be fair, this was true for both sides of the conflict, at that point. We made most of the same presumptions you did. What was another ten thousand when we were already being pressed steadily and consistently towards the end of our existence? We’d suffered too much ancient blood spilled to so easily turn a blind eye to the wrong humanity had dealt us. His next breath came shakily. Trouble was… It wasn’t ten thousand for very long…

  “The corpses.” It was Ester who made the realization first, her hollow voice a sharp contrast to the steadily blooming blue of the early morning sky.

  Ryn only grunted to tell her she was right, letting Bonner handle the explanation.

  “Despite everything—despite Igoric’s conclave and the signing of the Accord—the base reality was we’d only had letters and reports, until then.” The mage shifted his weight so he could bring his legs around to cross them more comfortably beneath him. “Even during the course of the negotiations in Aletha there had been voices of disbelief. To be frank, I’m not altogether convinced any man could have wholly believed in the power Sehranya was capable of wielding before witnessing it with their own two eyes, and by then it was always far too late.” Bonner was staring at the ground once more. “Whether to our fortune or not in the end, the Vigil was struck first. Fall had come and gone by then, and winter in the mountains—even the Reaches—is a cruel thing. There were few places to bury the dead, and fewer ways still of carting them back to the lower forests of the valleys easily. The army had taken to laying their fallen down in whatever space they could afford among the cliffs, preserved by the ice and cold of the season, to be gathered and give their proper dues once the nobles had accomplished their goal…” Bonner lifted a hand slowly, almost thoughtlessly, like he was lifting some invisible thing from the ground before him. “They rose the very night Sehranya arrived on the field. She might have lacked for military strategy, but the witch was no fool. Before the bodies could be burned, she set them on the ranks of man. Almost ten-thousand of the dead, given a Purpose so as to suddenly take to life.”

  A thrill crawled its way unpleasantly up Declan’s back. He was unable to keep himself from recalling his own encounters with the ghouls, in the woods far to the west of them now. Despite all desire not to, he saw again the dead, empty eyes, their reaching talons of bone and the black fire that echoed their final wail as they died. There’d only been a handful, when he and Ryn had faced them, but they had overcome him just the same.

  He couldn’t even imagine what kind of fear a thousand times their number would have brought to the hearts of the men and women of the Vigil…

  “Ghouls are slow, though.” Ester sounded dubious. “Even with the element of surprise, I can’t image any force of them doing much in the end to fifty-thousand soldiers.”

  “Ghouls are,” Bonner acknowledged, lifting his head to meet his daughter’s eye, “but you forget that ghouls aren’t the only thing Sehranya could manifest from the dead. Liche, for example. I imagine she’d had a hard time finding suitable corpses until then. She would have needed bodies capable of channeling magic in no small amount, and there would have been few—if any—among the er’endehn she’d lain waste to. Now, abruptly, here were more than a hundred slain mages, felled and ready with no effort in the least made on her part. Even those rent completely asunder by dragons’ claws she made use of, patching them whole again, or stitching what parts she needed together as needed. She summoned wights, too, where she could, crafting more complex Purposes for those bodies which were the freshest, the most suitable. In the end, ghouls only made up the majority of the risen army that set upon the Vigil, serving as little more than a wall of flesh for the more dangerous factions of their ranks. One which could be summoned up again and again if they weren’t properly slain.”

  That wasn’t the worst of it, Ryn assured them sourly after Declan and Ester had exchanged a look of mixed horror and disgust. Sehranya didn’t set her eyes on man and leave it at that. We had done a better job of seeing to our fallen. There were fewer of us, and burning the dead was our custom already, so we'd disposed of most of those we’d lost. We couldn’t see to every corpse, though. Many of us had been slain behind enemy lines, impossible to retrieve, and a few had been claimed by the winter storms that usually kept us in our caves until spring. We hadn't left her with much to work with, but what Sehranya had found she’d already corrupted in the most heinous of ways. He spat—actually spat—then. While the Vigil were fighting off their fallen comrades, the drey were set on us.

  Despite having known it was coming, Declan felt that clinging thrill redouble, made barely more bearable by Ester’s hiss of angry fear from beside him.

  Ryn, on the other hand, didn’t even flinch. I remember that night most vividly of any of those years, I think. More so than when I signed the Accord of Four, or even the fight and flight from Aletha. Abruptly, we were dying. Just… dying. Five, then ten, then twenty of us. The Vigil’s mages had been able to mask much of their troops’ movements from our senses before that, but this was something altogether different. We were falling from the sky, our patrols tumbling out of the heavens without cause or explanation. We could sense nothing, their presence completely shielded from us. I eventually called back all that remained, ordering everyone to take shelter within the caves until first light. When morning came, we were finally offered a glimpse of what it was that had been tearing us apart so absolutely.

  Ryn shuddered, like the memory was too much for even a dragon to bear without trouble. I cannot explain the feeling to you, of seeing your brethren unmade, of knowing them torn apart and put back together into those… things. There weren’t many of us to begin with, as you know. His face went slack. I could recognize the pieces of my friends, distinguish the parts Sehranya had used to create her beasts in the colors and patterns of the scales…

  Ester let out another sound, this time a soft “oh” of miserable empathy. Declan himself felt the urge to go to his friend then, to put a hand on his scaled shoulder, even if it meant offering only the barest of comforts against a horror long past.

  Bonner, fortunately, did one better, giving Ryn a reprieve and taking up the story more succinctly.

  “We fought like that for two more weeks, maybe three. Sehranya was the greatest threat—even the Vigil learned to set aside mages whose sole task it was to burn the dead—but it remained a three-way war, which must have suited the witch herself just fine. The more we killed each other, the stronger she became. Even as our sides grew more adept at dealing with her troops, so we also grew weaker as the battle devolved into one of equal attrition. The drey might have been our greatest trouble, but the Queen’s wereyn ended up posing a threat of nearly equal magnitude to the Vigil. They were mostly-living things—only minimally less-so than their descendants are now—with no Purpose to make them vulnerable. No matter how many the soldiers cut down, Sehranya or her liche could raise them up again. It made their smaller number a negligible disadvantage.”

  “If given the choice between a hundred mortal men, or ten that can’t be killed, I know who I’d pick,” Declan muttered.

  “As would any general worth their mettle,” Bonner agreed. “For that reason and many others, it was a losing fight. Eventually the Vigil even quit their assaults on the cliffs, given little choice otherwise as their strength was steadily needed more acutely on their northern front if they were to keep at bay the Queen’s mounting attacks. It allowed our own focus to be narrowed, allowed us to properly defend against the drey, and start pulling them apart one after the other. Sehranya could not so easily make those particular beasts, we found. Likely they required her personal attention, and could not be fabricated with a mere weave, despite her power. They were replaced, but slowly, and we managed to shed their overall numbers little by little, day by day.”

  At a steep cost. Ryn broke in then. At the price of our own blood and lives.

  Bonner nodded. “Indeed. Even the Vigil had been decimated by then, a third of their remaining number lost to the Queen’s army. In a matter of weeks Sehranya achieved what we had been unable to manage in months of defending and counter-attacking. Thousands—tens of thousands—of men dead or turned. Our numbers dwindled, while her own steadily increased, fed by our own losses.”

  “But… you won.” Declan couldn’t see hope on the horizon, had never glimpsed what had brought a close to such a battle through Herst’s memories. “How? What happened?”

  The er’endehn.

  Ryn’s tone was one of relief, like he was reliving the final days of the war all over again.

  The er’endehn arrived. Theirs is a martial kind, a people raised from birth to fight and war, sometimes against the beasts of Eserysh, but more often amongst themselves and their individual states. He glanced at Declan. Even among their lesser warriors you’d find better teachers than I, and certainly more to learn. The siege could not have done anything but rankle the pride and spirit of the dark elves, forced to cower one-and-all behind the walls of Ysenden under an onslaught they’d had no hope of defending against. They must have seen an opportunity when Sehranya turned her back on the fortress, a chance to rid themselves of tarnished pride and return in kind even some small measure of the suffering the Endless Queen had inflicted on them. They tracked her, followed the string of scattered bones she left behind as she fed her wereyn on the corpses of the army’s ghouls. Barely half-a-moon after she’d set herself upon the battered forces of our own petty war, they arrived, having trailed the very same pass she’d taken. Sehranya had no scouts. Apart from the liche she kept on her front lines, she had no truly intelligent beings within her ranks that could be instructed to keep watch over her flanks and rear. She’d always depended on brute force to win her battles, with admittedly consistent results given her ability to regularly replenish her forces during and after most any fight. As a result, however, the dark elves struck her from behind with as much speed and surprise as she had taken our two armies with, and nearly equal in devastation.

  The dragon grinned, still without amusement, but there was a distinct pleasure in his eyes. Where Sehranya had arrived confidently with a small force, the er’endehn made no such assumption. They’d set out en masse from Ysenden, every last man and woman among them who still had the will to fight taking up their swords and spears. They struck her rear with more than forty thousand blades, and fought with all the knowledge gained from two years battling the draugr through the snowy plains and forests of their homeland. Sehranya’s arrogance proved her undoing. In a matter of a single morning she went from dictating a battle between two mortal enemies—a clash which would have undoubtedly had her emerge the victor, and all the more powerful for it—to fending off a three-sided assault she’d inadvertently positioned herself into. For the first time, our kind and the Vigil fought practically side by side, pressing her up from the south through the Reaches while the elves held their ground north of her, immovable in the opportunity to enact their vengeance.

  “Six days,” Bonner picked up. “After months of ceaseless, back-and-forth slaughter, it took only six days to bring it to its end. Four of those were spent closing in, casting the undead from the cliffs and burning the rest where they fell to keep them from rising again. On the morning of the fifth, the will she had granted the wereyn broke, and what remained of them scattered, some thousands fleeing into the storms and crags of the mountains.”

  The last was spent pitched against Sehranya herself, Ryn said quietly. Her, and the strongest dregs of the risen army she’d managed to gather about her.

  For the third time, Declan was taken away. On this occasion it was only a flash, a glimpse of a moment in a time long past. An overcast sky choked with hundreds of winged forms, some dragonish, some twisted and terrible.

  And below them, the vice closed.

  The black-and-red of the Vigil were pressing from the south, led by a torrent of flashing, fiery spellwork while to the north the dark armies of the elves in their gilded black armor held as a wall against the dwindling foe being crushed between them. Beneath him, Declan felt Ryndean tense, then dive abruptly with a roar of fury, making for the eastern edge of the remaining undead. Declan knew what he must have seen, knew in that instant what the dragon was plummeting after. He had to cast a ward before him to clear his vision enough to make out the details of the roiling, shifting masses below against the ripping force of the wind.

  And then he, too, saw her. A small, ambiguous form standing near the great ledges her armies had been pressed against, distinguishable only by the glimmer of dull, iron-black magic flowing like smoke from upraised hands. A dozen looming figures hovered in an unliving, half-circled wall before her, frightening in their ragged robes and colors of what once had been the King’s mages, their own spells shimmering outwards into the chaos. For a moment Declan met the witch’s eyes, nothing more than flecks of grey flint beneath the raised hood of her tattered cowl.

  Then he was wrenching his blade from its sheath and howling the Endless Queen’s name as the familiar thrum of Ryndean gathering his flames built up beneath him.

  Declan gasped as he came back, his physical body having been holding its breath while his spirit wandered. This time his journey—quick as it may have been—did not go unnoticed, and he felt Ester start at the sound of his return. Ryn and Bonner looked at him sharply, too, but he didn’t give them the chance to ask.

  “You reached her first,” he said to the dragon, working to catch his breath while struggling to cling even momentarily to the subtler emotions of the memory. “You and Herst. You were the ones who found her.”

  Ryn blinked in mostly muted surprise. We did, he confirmed. We had the advantage, in that. I’d forbidden the survivors of my kind to engage with the Queen even if they did make her out, and Elysia nor Bonner nor Arathia had ever been willing to go dragon-back. Herst and I caught her not long after the wereyn broke, all avenues of escape lost, short of casting herself from the very cliffs, which I very much doubt was a thought that would have ever crossed the mind of a woman like Sehranya. Eight hours. He grunted at the memory with a shake of his head. Eight hours at least we fought, until night came, the two of us facing off against her and the liche she’d gathered to her sides. Despite the fact that her strength lay outside of direct combat, she still made for a terrible opponent. We were a poor match for her, her weaves countering what fire and spells we could throw in her face while simultaneously making it essentially impossible for either of us to get close enough to strike at her with sword or claws. It was all we could do to keep her contained, to hold her attention while cutting down her guard one at a time, and even that we only managed because of our gifts, and not easily. We barely held out long enough for those better suited to the task to reach us.

  The dragon’s eyes shifted to Bonner, who put on a smile marked with grim cheer. “Elysia and I were the ones who put an end to it,” the mage said darkly, and Declan remembered he had already known this. “And not without great effort, even after the bitch had spent half-a-day engaged already. Amherst and Ryndean had seen to her liche, and the dragons, elves, and Vigil were dealing with the remainders of her other creatures. She was alone, and yet just the same it took the two of us—with the help of a handful of the bravest of man’s surviving mages—to take her down. Elysia, in the final moments, became the hero of the war. She had a new talent for fire—an inclination you share, Declan—” he rolled his eyes pointedly at Ryn for a moment “—and the moment her chance came she took it. The instant the Queen broke—her wards shattering around her under our combined castings—Elysia weaved her into ash.”

  Declan heard rather than saw the spell, this time, the sound of it dragged to his ears. A roar, bearing ten times the force of Ryn’s own dragonfire, and he could imagine a spiraling maelstrom of smoke and flame splitting the very heavens.

  There was nothing left of her, the dragon himself finished. By the time Elysia’s spell had run its course, Sehranya was little more than scattered dust on the stones of the mountains.

  There were several seconds of silence, which Declan suspected was for his benefit, allowing him to soak in this tale that cast aside so much of the confusion which had plagued him these last weeks. Ester, however, was clearly not about to let the other two off the hook until they had explained everything to her satisfaction.

  “You’re not done,” she said pointedly. “I admit I wasn’t aware of much of that, but I know too that you’re not done yet.”

  Ryn let out a long sigh. For all his earlier inclination to share, it was clear the story had stolen much of that will, the trip back through the centuries clearly more taxing than he’d anticipated. Bonner, too, looked weary, sitting across from the dragon with his back to a fire that had slowly burned down to embers while dawn broke overhead. Declan couldn’t blame them. The heft of his own history was starting to make itself known, and he couldn’t imagine what it must have been like to live through such a war, much less bear the responsibility of playing key roles in its outcome.

  The noble houses were the first to take their leave of the field, drawing what was left of the Vigil away with them, Ryn picked up with a tired glance at Ester, and he spoke faster, like he wished to bring an end to the recounting as soon as possible. Of the seventy-thousand who’d eventually mounted against us, less than half that number were returning to their homes. The er’endehn left not a day after, despite Herst and Bonner’s attempts then and there to bring them into the fold of the Accord of Four. They mistrusted us, I think. All of us. If they’d been willing to listen to the wisdom of the pact before Sehranya’s fall, they were distinctly of a different mind afterwards.

  “Can you blame them?” Bonner asked bitterly. “Of the three races that did take on the pledge, one had its crown prince murdered, and the others set to each other’s throats barely a month after the signing. There was nothing more left than a vague assurance of future security to use as leverage, and with the Queen gone and most of humanity’s army in tatters, what need had they of such a promise anymore?”