Battle · Book 15 · Marshal Arcane
The rescue assault on Darkfaller Castle, mounted to recover the magi and Talented commoners that Mycin Amana, the so-called Witch Queen, had abducted en masse from the Sevendor Magic Fair. All captives recovered; Mycin Amana retained Darkfaller. The raid drew first blood against her court, drained her of half her Paranchek, exposed the Otherworld-conjoined necromantic field at the heart of the castle, and set up the eventual Siege of Darkfaller.
The Darkfaller Raid was a rescue operation, not a takeover. The objective was to extract the magi and Talented commoners that Mycin Amana had abducted from the Sevendor Magic Fair some weeks earlier and were now being held in Darkfaller's dungeons. The Magelaw and Sevendor expected, correctly, that Darkfaller itself could not be retaken in this engagement.
Mycin Amana, a senior Nemovort of Korbal's court, had taken possession of the body of Baroness Isily of Greenflower (the same coma-bound body left over from the Greenflower Magewar; Isily's own enneagram displaced into the Otherworld). Calling herself Queen of Castabriel, she had marched a Nemovort host into Darkfaller Castle while Prince Tavard was off campaigning against Terleman in the Magelaw, finding it empty. With it as a base she ordered a coordinated raid on the Sevendor Magic Fair: gurvani strike teams ported in through the Ways, suppressed everyone's rajira with a field spell, hauled hundreds of the most Talented attendees through the Ways to Darkfaller, and were gone before Sevendor's warmagi could respond.
Among the taken: Alurra (Pentandra's blind apprentice), Gatina (Rondal's betrothed, of House Furtius), most of Sevendor's senior working enchanters, Minalan's nephew, and several hundred lesser-Talented commoners and journeymen. The captives were marched on foot the rest of the way to Darkfaller through a wood, kept docile by a visually-keyed compliance spell triggered when they looked at the wielder's staff.
Gatina had been raised a thief and had closed her eyes the moment Mycin Amana's herald told the prisoners to look at the staff. ("When an evil sorceress tells you to look at something, it's usually a good idea not to.") She was the only captive in the column not under compulsion. On the march she walked the line, supporting Alurra at her elbow, dropping trail-markers as she went. Inside Darkfaller, in the chaos of the prisoner intake on the bridge, she slipped sideways into shadow and was gone.
The castle was vastly under-garrisoned (Tavard's campaign had emptied it of human troops; Mycin Amana had only her Nemovort court, her Enshadowed sorcerers, and her drafted gurvani). Empty halls and abandoned towers were everywhere. Gatina found a tall sentry turret with a broken staircase overlooking both the great curtain wall and the inner courtyard, and made it her base. Over three nights she mapped the patrol patterns, counted the wyverns flying in and out of the southern towers, charted the dungeon hierarchy, identified Mycin Amana's court (Mycin Amana, Ocajon, Raz-Ruziel, Kalbur, Gaja Katar), located the prisoners including Alurra, and found the catacomb network connecting the keeps. On the second night she re-established mind-to-mind with her brother Atopol and began transmitting.
Atopol delivered Gatina's intelligence to a war council at King Rard's palace with Tavard, Terleman, Astyral, Taren, and the rest present. Tavard tabled an embarrassing plan: a thousand-banner cavalry charge, single combat, expected surrender for "honour." Rard sided with the magi. Minalan extracted command authority over the operation and explicitly framed it as a rescue, not a retaking: "I do not think I have the forces to successfully drive the Witch Queen from the castle. This first battle does not require all of my power and resources."
The raid hit at dawn from multiple directions, deployed through the Ways. Minalan had built a new staff (Tanno Amberil) tuned specifically to thin out the necromantic shield Mycin Amana had laid over the castle, allowing humani magi to operate inside its envelope for the first time since the abduction.
The raid did not unfold cleanly. Mycin Amana waited until Minalan's teams were committed inside the castle, then activated a second, denser necromantic field centred on the central keep. This one was qualitatively different from the outer shield: it had a deep quantum and dimensional component, and it conjoined the central keep with a portion of the Otherworld. Inside it, necromantic magic was amplified and Imperial-style humani magic was crippled. Minalan, on the northern parapet, named it for what it was over mind-to-mind to Terleman: "It's a trap. And we walked right into it." He ordered withdrawal.
Minalan then made his way down to Mycin Amana's throne room personally, with Wenek, to parley. The conversation was the canonical Spellmonger-Nemovort exchange: Mycin Amana refused, Minalan offered to deal with whichever of her court would defect, sowing doubt for later use. Behind Mycin Amana's shoulder a translucent figure manifested in the Otherworld-conjoined field. Isily's ghost. She fixed Minalan in place and said, like a voice from the bottom of a deep well: "Minalan, you have to stop her!"
Mycin Amana's champion lunged for the Magolith. The Magolith's blood-coral defence blasted him across the room. Wenek, in the moment of confusion, hurled his mace at the visible apparatus generating the Otherworld field. The collision detonated the device. Every sentient in the chamber went down except Mycin Amana herself, whose Isily-body had enough Otherworld affinity to absorb the blast. Minalan, Magolith fluttering to the floor beside him, hauled an unconscious Wenek down the stairs over his shoulder.
Then Mycin Amana revealed Korbal's real new toy. Two Paranchek burst out of the ground inside the inner bailey, one of them pinning Azar's force inside the southern keep gatehouse. The Paranchek are not native to Callidore; they were bred by ancient empires as deployable shock weapons and Tuaa Folauga (the colonial-era warrior whose enneagram Minalan carries) had fought them on a dozen worlds. Each one had a forty-foot leg-span, sword-sharp scorpion-style front claws, a venom-tipped tail, and the intelligence of a human. They moved fast. Minalan, Terleman, and Wenek ringed the first one and held it off with fire and force while Dara was redirected to attack with a wand Minalan had specifically prepared against this contingency.
The Sky Riders broke the wyverns. The Paranchek were driven off, not killed; significant losses among them would come later, in Mycin Amana's subsequent attack on Castabriel. The prisoners were extracted through the catacombs Gatina had mapped. Tavard's Castali charge in the outer bailey was redirected by Dara's wing to give him a safer retreat, which the prince accepted with poor grace. Caerwyn began triage on the freed captives at the rendezvous point.
The Magelaw withdrew with all captives recovered. Several captives had been used in failed Nemovort host-body experiments in the dungeon and could not be saved. The rest were taken back through the Ways to Sevendor.
Darkfaller remained Mycin Amana's. The conjoining of the central keep with the Otherworld was, as Lilastien later confirmed, a permanent shift in that volume of the Magosphere; even after the raid, Darkfaller was not fully in the world. The political damage to Tavard was severe (the kingdom's great fortress was being run as a Nemovort court because he had emptied it for a petty proxy war). The political damage to Mycin Amana was also real: she had lost half her Paranchek to a rescue raid that should not have got near her. Korbal, when he awoke, was reported to be displeased.
The raid set up two distinct subsequent events: Mycin Amana's retaliatory attack on Castabriel through the Darkfaller molopor portal (which the Sevendor and Castali magi defeated), and the eventual Siege of Darkfaller, the actual reduction of the castle.
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