Chapter 139: The Troll and the Harbinger

The boulders tore through the winter air with a sound like the sky being ripped in half.

Two black masses, each the size of a watchtower, plunged toward the Bulwark of Ash with a force no siege engine ever built could have matched.

On the ramparts, in the galleries, on every ledge and stair along the great wall, faces turned upward and went white.

"We’re dead. We are all dead."

"What in the abyss could throw a mountain like a stone?"

"Not yet! Not yet, I haven’t earned enough points to die!"

"Run! Get off the wall, get off the wall!"

Then a thread of silver light flared from somewhere on the battlements.

It shot upward into the open air and resolved, at the top of its arc, into the figure of a woman.

A long silver robe and fitted armor of the same bright metal, black hair streaming behind her in the wind, her eyes clear and cold as winter water.

In one hand she held a slender blade the color of glacier ice, faint runes drifting across its flat like frost across a window.

She spoke a single word, and swung.

A crescent of white-blue radiance leapt from the sword and carved a long arc across the sky, bright as a rainbow, sharp as the edge of a star.

It met the first boulder, passed through it, and the great stone came apart. The second followed an instant later.

Even shattered, they were still enormous. A meteor shower of broken rock came down across the wall, hammering into the stonework with a thunder that shook the foundations.

Deep craters bloomed in the ramparts. Players and soldiers cried out as the debris struck, and for several long moments the whole stretch of the battlement was a storm of dust and falling stone and screaming.

On the back of his burning dragon, Kael felt his heart stutter.

He knew the woman in silver at once.

Isolde, the Frostblade. A level 96 Legendary guardian, sworn to the Bulwark’s defense, and one of the greatest swords the human race had ever produced.

If she hadn’t been standing on the wall, the whole western stretch would have been wiped from the map.

But boulders like that did not simply fall out of the sky. Something had thrown them, and something that strong could only be one of the Hollow Legion’s champions.

The ground trembled before he finished the thought.

From deep in the blizzard, a slow, enormous rhythm began to pulse through the earth: heavy, muffled footfalls, each one landing like a drum the size of a mountain.

The sound rolled over the snowfield in waves. Every step seemed to fall directly on the chests of the defenders, and one by one the voices along the wall fell silent.

The mightiest warriors of two empires and seven kingdoms stood with their breath held, faces turned north.

A giant walked out of the storm.

It stood nearly two hundred meters tall, so vast that the hundred-meter Bulwark came up barely to its waist.

Its body might have been forged from cold iron, every muscle drawn tight and hard beneath skin as pale as bone, scored all over with twisting crimson sigils that glowed dully in the gloom.

Its eyes were shards of ancient ice, utterly without feeling. In its right hand it carried an axe that could have split a hill, its blade so heavy that the air bent around it.

It could have knocked the wall down with an open hand, as a child might topple a tower of blocks.

Thrumgar, the Frostblood Troll. Level 95, Legendary, tenth among the Ten Great Bosses.

And on the crown of its head, small beside the monstrous bulk beneath him, a second figure stood.

He was wrapped in a heavy cloak the color of old blood from his shoulders to his heels, and nothing of his face could be seen.

Only one hand showed, a withered, bony thing furred with dark hair, curled around a crystal sphere that burned with a slow crimson light.

The sight of him did something to the defenders that even the troll had not done. On the Bulwark, the great warriors who had been silent now turned grave, their eyes going dark.

Vorlath, the Harbinger of Calamity. Level 96, Legendary, seventh among the Ten Great Bosses.

Two of the ten, in a single morning.

The weight of it settled over the wall like a stone. Neither of these was the sort of enemy that could be borne down by numbers or outlasted by patience.

Thrumgar threw back his head and roared. The sound rolled over the plain like thunder, and he hoisted the axe overhead, ten thousand tons of iron and fury, and brought it whistling down toward the wall.

Isolde was not about to let him.

She rose in the air with a sharp cry, her sword pointing diagonally toward the sky, and the full measure of her strength burst out of her all at once.

A shape condensed in the air at her back, wings spreading, taking form: a phoenix of living ice, translucent and brilliant, its crest and tail trailing shards of frost.

She swept the blade down, and the phoenix dove.

It struck Thrumgar’s chest with a ringing crash and burst apart, and the cold that poured out of it flooded the troll’s torso in an instant, forming a thick plate of ice across its ribs. The giant lurched and rocked.

Cannons answered from the wall. A line of crystal shells arced out and struck the same spot in a rolling chain of explosions, and the great creature staggered back several steps, bellowing.

Vorlath chose that moment to act.

From beneath the red cloak came a low, droning chant, an ugly, wrong-sounding stream of syllables that scratched at the ears.

The crystal sphere rose from its hand and hung in the air above him, pulsing crimson light.

Two vast circles of blood-red fire appeared in the sky, each dozens of feet across, humming with dark power.

From the first, a shriek tore out, and a flood of demons poured through: shapes that were almost human but never could have been, hideous and clawed, fanged, with great leathery bat wings sprouting from their shoulders.

Their eyes burned red. They howled and flung themselves at the wall.

From the second came a roar of savage hunger.

An ape the size of a house hauled itself through the gate, three heads snarling, six arms flexing, its flesh rotting and slick with pus, white bone showing through the wounds.

It seized the nearest dragon on the wing, an Imperial Dragon Knight’s mount, in a pair of its great hands, and with its other four arms it tore the beast apart. A rain of blood fell across the battlefield.

It dropped, still roaring, toward the Bulwark.

The direction in which it landed was the exact stretch of wall on which Elara stood.

Kael’s face went rigid.

"Damn it all," he snarled. "Every time. Does the quest have to make it this hard?"

There was no time for anything else. He reached into the deepest part of his bloodline and lit it.

Skyborn Awakening.

Crimson fire roared up around him, and he wrenched the dragon’s reins back, and the Frost Bone Dragon beat its flaming wings and launched itself off the rampart, straight at the monster.