Siege · Book 5 · High Mage · Mixed
Sheruel's grand assault on the Alka Alon Lake City, broken on the day Pentandra melted the frozen lake under the gurvani feet and drowned a hundred thousand of them. The siege was a Magelaw-Alka Alon victory; the city itself had to be abandoned afterward because two uncontrolled dragons survived the drowning and could not be killed with the resources to hand. Aeratas evacuated his people through the Ways, magically sealed the Ghost Rock vein beneath the city, and went into exile. Sir Ryff saved Aeratas's life in the final harbor melee and was pledged Fallawen's hand for the deed. The ruined city was later occupied by Korbal and renamed Olum Seheri, the Lake of Death.
The Defense and Fall of Anthatiel is a famously bittersweet engagement: the largest single battlefield victory of High Mage in terms of enemy losses (over a hundred thousand gurvani drowned in a single coordinated working) followed immediately by the strategic abandonment of the city it had been fought to save. The army was destroyed, the city was lost, the Ghost Rock was secured. Lord Aeratas walked out a refugee.
Anthatiel sat on an island in the Lake of Rainbows, a great mountain lake in the deep valleys of the Mindens that fed the Poros river. The city was the seat of Raer Aeratas and the most beautiful intact Alka Alon citadel still standing in the modern era. Its central spire, the Tower of Vision, gave command of the valley. Songspell-woven rainbows perpetually hung over the lake, both ornamental and concealing.
The real strategic value of Anthatiel was a secret Aeratas guarded jealously: a lode of hapaxalite ("Ghost Rock"), a Sea-Folk-revered sedimentary limestone of vanishingly rare type, beneath the foundations of the Tower of Vision. Hapaxalite permanently absorbs enneagram-imprints. The lode under Anthatiel held a thousand years of Alka Alon lordly imprints, the cumulative knowledge of an entire civilisation. Lose the city and Sheruel's priests could plunder it for every secret recorded there.
Sheruel's plan was a long march up the iced Poros. His priests froze the lake from the southern shore; his army (gurvani infantry, hobgoblins, trolls, siege worms, two dragons) crossed the ice in a hundred-thousand-strong host. Korbal, contrary to common rumour, was not directly involved in this assault; the only Korbal-related connection is that Korbal's ancient tomb-prison lies in the Land of Scars (Asmadaralon) on the route Sheruel's army took. Sheruel's objectives were the destruction of Aeratas and the seizure of the Ghost Rock for the gurvani priesthood's use.
The natural defences were comprehensive: the lake itself as a moat, the rainbow songspell-net concealing the city from scrying, the multi-day waterfall climb to even reach the lake plateau, the great Alka Alon gate above the Land of Scars, the Tower of Vision's sightlines. Sheruel's priests held that great gate frozen open with a sustaining enchantment, defeating the city's primary land seal for the first time in millennia.
Lady Fallawen came to Minalan in despair before the assault. She had pleaded with her father to evacuate. He had refused: "Anthatiel will not fall while I am there to defend it."
The Alka Alon Council, convened in emergency session at Carneduin under Raer Haruthel, debated for days. Captain Arborn summarised the strategic position bluntly: "Anthatiel is doomed. I know not the full extent of the mastery of your kindred, Raer Haruthel, but I cannot foresee a victory here. Not unless the might of all the elders is united and dedicated to this purpose." The Council could not unite that quickly. The lake was already freezing as they argued.
Minalan refused to stand by. He assembled a coalition force at the lake's edge: senior magelords from the Wilderlands campaign, Kasari rangers under Arborn, Sevendori warriors, Lorcus, Sire Cei, Tyndal and Rondal, Sandoval, Forondal, Mavone, Wenek, Terleman, Azar, Bendonal the Outlaw, Sarakeem, Master Cormoran, Master Thinradel, Lady Ithalia, Lady Fallawen, and Onranion. Carmella and the Kasari built a flotilla of iceboat barges: large sled-like vessels with long iron skates, drawn by teams of the great Kasari wolfhounds. They raced across the frozen lake at speed.
The flotilla smashed into the gurvani siege line at the island's harbour-side, breaking ranks with broadside blasts, killing siege worms by the dozen (Sire Cei discovered that a single hammer-blow to the nosehorn would either kill a worm outright or send it charging blindly into its neighbours), and engaging trolls and gurvani in close combat among the wreckage. The Sky Riders under Dara harried the gurvani command from above with berserker globes and (when needed) by snatching enemy officers and dropping them into their own ranks from a hundred feet up. The Thoughtful Knife made its first major battlefield appearance under Dara's control.
The decisive move was not on the ice. Pentandra, working from somewhere far behind the line with Briga's help, executed the coordinated working that melted the entire frozen lake in a single moment. Everyone on the ice — friend and foe alike — dropped through into the freezing water. The barges floated; the gurvani who could not swim drowned; the trolls, in heavy armour, drowned; the siege worms drowned; the lake bottom was carpeted with bodies as far as the eye could see.
The Kasari, as a religious matter, all swam (Arborn was startled to learn the Spellmonger did not know this). The magi reached barges. Sire Cei was hauled out by a giant Kasari wolfhound that subsequently adopted him. The Alka Alon close enough to shore made it out. Most of the besieging army did not.
The siege was over. A hundred thousand of Sheruel's soldiers had been destroyed in a single working without the loss of a single Magelaw life to drowning. By any normal metric this was the greatest single-engagement victory of the war to date.
Then two of Sheruel's dragons surfaced. They had been on the island and the far shore respectively, awaiting their turn in the assault. Both could swim. Both came ashore. Both had lost their magical handlers to the drowning and were no longer being consciously directed; both were furious, soaked, and now bellowing free of any constraint over a ruined battlefield. One was loose on the island itself, perhaps three hours from the Tower of Vision.
The defending force, soaked and shivering and depleted, could not engage two uncontrolled dragons. Aeratas himself, exhausted from days of fighting and recovering from the earlier dragon engagement, had no power left to face another.
Minalan went up to the Tower of Vision and laid the situation out plainly. Aeratas, broken-hearted, finally agreed to evacuate. The revelation that the city sat over a major lode of hapaxalite — and that the Ghost Rock could not be moved and must not fall into Sheruel's hands — made the decision sharper. Aeratas left his post in person to oversee the magical sealing of the Ghost Rock vein before the evacuation began.
Fallawen and Ithalia ran the transport. The Waystones at Anthatiel could move only so many in a working window; by sunset most of Aeratas's people were gone, mostly to the Tower of Refuge or to Carneduin, with a substantial body resettled at Sevendor. Aeratas oversaw the evacuation of certain heirlooms and treasures of his house personally.
As the last hundred raiders prepared to leave, a final band of gurvani and trolls broke into the plaza and engaged. Aeratas, fighting in his unfamiliar humani-scale war-body, was pushed against a wall by a dozen gurvani and was being choked when Sir Ryff of Hosendor, a Riverlands knight in Minalan's tail who had long admired Fallawen, waded across the plaza with a greatsword and saved Aeratas's life.
Aeratas, climbing into the barge with the others, asked who the man was and was told. He pledged Ryff any boon in his power. Ryff asked for Fallawen's hand. Aeratas — astonished and trapped by his own oath — gave it. Fallawen, equally astonished, accepted under protest, on the basis of an obedience-pledge she had made her father earlier in the day to secure the evacuation. The match that produced the eventual Wedding of Lady Fallawen and Sir Ryff was sworn on the deck of a barge sailing through a lake full of corpses, under two contending dragons.
Anthatiel itself was abandoned to looting gurvani and the two uncontrolled dragons. The rainbow songspell-net failed (no singers left to maintain it). The Tower of Vision stood; the rest of the city was extensively damaged. The hapaxalite vein remained sealed under Aeratas's working.
In the months that followed the abandoned city was taken over by Korbal's Nemovorti, who had been moving into the Mindens for their own purposes and now found a ready-made fortress at hand. Korbal made the ruins his seat, established the host-body laboratory underneath, and the city was renamed in the gurvani tongue as Olum Seheri — the Lake of Death. The Ghost Rock vein remained sealed beneath it; Korbal's court spent years trying and failing to access it, until the Battle of Olum Seheri when Minalan's Scholars team finally retrieved the Handmaiden enneagram and sealed the chamber permanently with Aeratas and Hynalinae as its guardians.
For Sheruel, the loss of an entire grand army was catastrophic; he never fielded that much force again as an independent commander, and Korbal's subsequent absorption of his power left him a diminished entity. For Aeratas, Anthatiel was the end of his old life; he became a refugee, took shelter at Carneduin, and pledged he would not leave his humani-scale war-body until Sheruel was destroyed. For the warmagi, the lake-melting working with Briga became a famous teaching example of how a single thaumaturgic stroke could outweigh any field tactic. For Sir Ryff, a happy and bewildered marriage was now in his future.
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