The Fall of Darkfaller

The Fall of Darkfaller was the most elaborately staged engagement of Minalan's career. It was planned over weeks in dedicated war rooms at the new Sevendor Castle, deployed thousands of soldiers in coordinated cavalry charges through portal arches, used three independent special-operations teams (Fire, Air, Water), invoked weapons that had not been used in combat for centuries, and concluded with the deliberate awakening of Sheruel the Dead God. By the standards of Five-Duchies military history it has no real parallel.

The Briga's Day setup

The trigger was Korbal's personal inspection of Mycin Amana's Darkfaller court on Briga's Day. Korbal had publicly called Mycin Amana's leadership into question after the Yule disaster and was coming to inspect her troops in person. Mycin Amana planned a grand parade in Darkfaller's inner bailey, mustering nearly her entire deployable force in ceremonial formation, with ceremonial weapons, in the open. From Lanse of Bune's scrying dioramas Minalan and Terleman watched the formation come together and recognised a target too rich to pass up.

The parley

Minalan and his apprentice Ruderal portaled through Taren's aperture from the chamber of the Snowflake onto the roof of Darkfaller's central keep, the same place Wenek and Minalan had been ejected from during the Raid. Two bored hobgoblin sentries were put quietly to sleep. Avalanche made short work of the door wards. Minalan walked down into Mycin Amana's throne room mid-meeting and presented himself unannounced.

Korbal, sitting on a dust-shrouded second throne in a borrowed and decaying body, was at that moment dressing down Gaja Katar for the Castabriel debacle. Minalan, speaking unaccented Alka Alon, joined the conversation, calmly catalogued every one of Gaja Katar's strategic and personal failures in front of his masters, claimed to have been "invited" by someone in the room (sowing doubt in every direction), and offered to bargain for Korbal's life. Korbal rejected the offer and ordered the truce broken.

The Sheruel drop and the necromantic overload

Minalan reached out with Avalanche and lightly struck the connecting mechanism of Korbal's great Dradrien staff. The inert irionite sphere containing Sheruel's head, which had been mounted at the staff's crown, fell out of its cage and plummeted into the courtyard below. Korbal's strongest single source of necromantic power, and the lever by which he held the gurvani in obedience, was suddenly on the cobbles of the bailey.

Before either Nemovort could react, Minalan slammed the heel of Avalanche into the floor and triggered a meticulously prepared spell: a sudden, lavish flood of high-intensity necromantic energy that overwhelmed every undead-animation enchantment in the chamber. Every Nemovort and draugen present went down. Korbal dropped his now-impotent staff and clutched his chest. Mycin Amana clung to the rail of the dais while her knees gave way under her. For a single moment the yellow light went out of her eyes and Isily's face surfaced through Mycin Amana's. She crumpled.

Minalan considered pushing her off the dais with his staff. He hesitated, and later wrote in his notebooks that he never quite understood why. The Tera Alon warmage Tamonel's assault squad portaled in through the same arch Minalan had used and engaged Korbal's court. Ruderal got in several stabs at downed Nemovorti with his enchanted blade. Minalan and Ruderal portaled out through the Ways back to the chamber of the Snowflake at Sevendor.

The four-pronged ground assault

Phase Two was the assault on the open parade-formation in the inner bailey. Four separate cavalry charges entered through individual portals, each with roughly two hundred heavy lancers, hundreds of heavy infantry behind them, and a score of seasoned warmagi attached:

• Sevendori, west — Sire Cei leading.
• Castali, east — Master Loiko Veneran (Royal Court Wizard) leading.
• Vanadori, hitting the rear — Sandoval.
• Alshari, south — Rondal, with Count Salgo's Rhemes mercenaries and a Wilderlord greatsword company.

The defenders, in formation for a parade and partly armed only with ceremonial spears (their bows were back in their bunks), were obliterated in the opening cavalry charges. The Sky Riders engaged the wyverns overhead. Astyral commanded Minalan's bodyguard on top of the northern keep, where Minalan returned via portal to oversee the battle with a plate of sausage, fruit, and fried cheese.

Phase Three — the Paranchek trap

This was Taren's plan, and is the part of the engagement that most warmagi study now. Lilastien had earlier worked out that the pheromone secreted around Paranchek egg-sacks identifies friendly forces; every Magelaw soldier crossing the portal was sprinkled with a diluted concoction of it. The Darkfaller defenders were not. As the Paranchek emerged from their tunnels, they ignored the Magelaw and tore into their own allies.

The trap then progressed in stages:

1. Remeran heavy crossbows (a thousand professional mercenary archers hired from Duke Clofalin's elite units) fired volleys of bolts tipped with embedded knot coral into each Paranchek.
2. Warmagi chain-bolos, weighted at the ends with chunks of knot coral, were flung around the spiders' legs.
3. Once each spider had enough knot coral attached, the warmagi cast a simple telekinesis spell on the coral and lifted the Paranchek straight up into the air, up to a hundred feet, where their legs could not touch the ground and they were helpless.
4. Eleven Paranchek dangled suspended over the battlefield like nightmarish kites.

The Knife and the Needle

From the southern sky two specks arrived at incredible speed: the Thoughtful Knife, piloted by Dara, and the Unrelenting Needle, one of three sealed-arsenal weapons Minalan had recovered from the secret Alka Alon Council vaults and deployed for the first time. The Needle, a black, scalpel-sharp dart-weapon of incredible mass and speed, took the lead and plunged unerringly into the first suspended Paranchek. The Knife followed, sweeping through the third. The two then quartered back and forth across the line, skewering each of the remaining nine spiders in turn. Ichor rained down on the battlefield below. The eleven dead Paranchek were dropped onto the heads of the surviving defenders for additional effect, then the two weapons turned their attention to the remaining wyverns.

The Fire Team and the destruction of the central keep

Meanwhile, on Minalan's signal, the Fire Team activated their pre-planted ordnance. Weeks earlier, Mavone's shadowmage agents had infiltrated the catacombs beneath the central keep and quietly left behind small wands with hoxter pockets containing five barrels of thermite (rust + powdered elemental aluminium from the Vundel's snowstone-trade payment, packed in ice sheaths). The Fire Team, led by Teine the pyromancer (the same young Sevendori-Talented mage who had burned Tudry years before), triggered the wands.

Thermite ignites at twenty-five hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The wooden rafters of the central keep caught, the stone supports weakened, and the tunnels filled with fire and noxious gas. When the burning thermite reached the ice sheaths around each barrel, the entire central keep exploded. The flaming tower was thrust into the air and crumbled violently back to earth. Hundreds of Castali reserves and hobgoblins alike were killed in the collapse; a dust cloud blanketed the bailey; only the undead were unaffected by the sound.

The gurvani revolt and Sheruel

Through all of this, an Enshadowed sorcerer had recovered Sheruel's inert sphere from the courtyard and was trying to push his way to safety. The instant the surrounding gurvani recognised what he carried, they went mad with religious purpose. Hundreds of furry tribal warriors turned on their own draugen and Enshadowed officers to fight their way to the Dead God. They overwhelmed the rear of their own formation. A draugen was beaten to death by a dozen gurvani with clubs. A rugged-looking gurvan finally emerged with the sphere held triumphantly aloft.

As Tavard arrived through a portal at the head of his ceremonial cavalry to claim a share of glory at the last possible moment, Sheruel began to wake up.

Minalan ordered a five-hundred-foot general retreat. Astyral, on the northern keep, watched with horror. Sheruel rose from his bearer's grip, glowed brighter, and unleashed a concussive blast that disintegrated every gurvan within a circle of arcane power, knocked down knights on horseback five hundred feet away, and brought down several low-flying giant hawks. Then Sheruel's voice filled every magi's mind on the battlefield.

Outcome

By any military measure Darkfaller had fallen. The central keep was destroyed. The Paranchek were eliminated. The Nemovort court was dispersed; Korbal escaped through the Ways carried by his bodyguard; Mycin Amana also escaped through the Ways (and, later, abandoned Isily's body to crawl into the body of an elderly hedgewitch under the ruins, which she did not yet know). The gurvani recovered Sheruel. Tamonel's assault squad in the central keep lost nine dead and five wounded, including Tamonel.

By any political measure it was a triumph: Tavard had arrived in time to claim a piece of the victory and was politically rehabilitated just enough that the Family did not need to depose him; the magi's value to the realm was demonstrated past argument; the Royal Curia that followed delivered Mycin Amana's captured territories and most political concessions Minalan had been waiting on for the better part of a year. Castabriel was secure. Darkfaller was rubble, which suited everyone except Tavard.

The deliberate awakening of Sheruel and the recovery of the Dead God by the gurvani is the other half of the story. Sheruel's subsequent reappearance in the world is the central problem of the volumes that follow.