Chapter 141: The Thorn Queen

The great golden dragon bellowed in rage and struggled against the coils that held it.

It was no use. The red vines were supple as rope and strong as iron cable, and every heave of its mighty body only drew them tighter.

Barbs as long as daggers sank through the golden scales one after another, and ragged crimson wounds opened across its flanks.

Thrumgar saw his chance.

The troll’s great axe rose and fell in a single brutal arc, and a gash opened along the dragon’s back that no mortal creature should have survived.

Bones broke inside it with a sound like green timber splitting. It cried out, a thin, shuddering note.

Thrumgar raised the axe a second time for the killing stroke.

Then the Imperial Dragon Knight, who had been trapped on the beast’s back, tore himself free of the vines with a roar of effort and flung himself between the troll and his mount.

His blade met the descending axe, and the world rang with the force of it. The blow did not land.Far across the sky, Isolde the Frostblade turned her head.

She had been locked in combat with Malachar all this time, trading strokes of ice and bone, and she saw at once what was happening at the dragon’s side.

Her face hardened. She struck Malachar back with every ounce of strength in her arm, hurling the Despair Knight clear for one precious breath, and went streaking across the sky like a falling comet.

The ice-blue sword flashed once.

A crescent of cold light sheared through Thrumgar’s wrist, and the great hand that held the axe came away, still gripping its haft, and fell.

Isolde’s eyes lit with cold fire. She pressed in for the kill.And then she stopped, because the air around her was blooming.

A flower the color of fresh blood unfolded in the empty sky around her, enormous and beautiful and wrong, its petals curling inward in layer after layer.

They closed over her in a single heartbeat. When they met, nothing remained to be seen but a vast crimson bud, hanging motionless in the air.

It was a trap, and it had worked.

But the time it had cost had bought the golden dragon a moment, and the defenders did not waste it.

Dragon Knights and warriors dove from every quarter, blades flashing, and one by one the red vines were hacked away.

The great creature drew gold fire around itself and heaved against the last of its bonds, and finally the coils burst. It rose, trailing blood from its torn wings.

On the Bulwark, a priest of the Solarian Empire lifted her hands and sang.

A bright white shaft of light fell from the heavens and bathed the dragon, and the terrible wound across its spine began, slowly, to close.

For a moment, it seemed that the line would hold.But Malachar, no longer pinned by the Frostblade, threw back his helm and howled. He drove his skeletal wyrm up and over the Bulwark and loosed its breath.

The torrent of frost struck the wall like a hammer. The ancient bluestone, which had stood for centuries against everything the north could send, blew apart in a storm of dust and flying stone. A gaping hole opened in the Bulwark’s face.

The Frost Bone Dragon hurtled through the wreckage, heavy and unstoppable. The wall, which had seemed so tall and so permanent, folded in front of it like a child’s toy.

A whole section crumbled with a groan that went through the soles of every defender’s boots, until a breach several hundred meters wide gaped open in the stone.

The undead roared. They poured toward the gap like a river bursting its banks.

But the Bulwark’s defenders were not beaten yet. A circle of mages joined their voices on the nearest rampart, and the ground heaved.

Out of the shuddering earth, a mountain rose a hundred meters high and closed the breach with a deep, grinding roar.

At the same moment, three warriors of enormous reputation dropped on Malachar together and drove him back from the gap.

In the sky, the great crimson flower shuddered.

Streaks of blue light burst between its petals, thin at first and then blazing, until the whole bloom shattered with a crack like breaking ice. Isolde stepped out of the wreckage with her sword in her hand, her armor ringing, her robe snapping in the wind.

Her face was grave. She did not look at the dragon, or the troll, or the fallen wall. Her eyes were fixed on the north.

From the far edge of the sky, someone was walking toward the battle.

A woman, tall and terrible, her bearing the casual arrogance of a queen who has never once been refused. A gown woven entirely of living vines clung to her, red as arterial blood, and the thorns on it caught the light.

Her long whip, studded with barbs, trailed idly behind her. Her eyes were the same blood-red as her dress, and when they turned toward the wall, they held the faint amusement of a cat watching mice.

Morgwyn, the Thorn Queen. Level 97, Legendary, fifth of the Ten Great Bosses.

A shudder ran down the length of the Bulwark. Even the greatest of the human champions felt their hearts go heavy.

The Hollow Legion was by far the largest enemy faction in the realm, but it did not own the Ten Great Bosses outright. Six of the ten belonged to it, six sovereigns whose names had made kingdoms tremble for a thousand years.

Now four of the six stood before the Bulwark. Malachar, Thrumgar, Vorlath, and Morgwyn.

Nothing like it had happened in all the Legion’s history.

This was no raid, and no probing strike. The dead meant to bring the wall down and march south, and they had come to do it.

Kael watched, and his jaw tightened.

He knew how this day ended. In his first life, the Bulwark had fallen, and the Hollow Legion had poured south through the ruin, and from that hour on, the front line of the living had moved to Frostwatch. He had lived through every hour of it.

Knowing did not change anything. He was a single player on a battlement, not a god.

The only thing in his power was to see his own part of it through: to keep Elara alive to the end of the event, to collect what points he could, and to claim the rewards that would prepare him for the Empyrean when it was over.

So he stayed beside her, and he fought.

The battle grew worse by the hour. Every kind of devastating power the dead and the living possessed was spent on that wall, and it showed.

Sections of the defense collapsed and sank. Several nobles from the lesser kingdoms, reading the signs, had already slipped away from the field.

Elara could not. She was a princess of Northvale, and Northvale lay directly behind the ruin.

There was nowhere for her to go. She stood on the rampart, gripping her staff, pale and unflinching, and held her people together with her voice, and every time a blade came near her, Kael was there.

A few times it nearly went wrong. Each time, they survived.A little before eleven, a crash split the air above them.

Something fell out of the sky, fast as a shell from a cannon, and struck the rampart not far from where they stood, throwing up a cloud of stone dust.

Kael’s eyes narrowed.

His heart seemed to climb into his throat.