For the forges that smoldered day and night on its western side, toiling to stock our forces. Not just for its location in the heart of the continent, but for the supplies it guarded. The keep looming at my back was too valuable to be yielded to the Loyalists. To falter here would have been the killing blow to our already-sundering resistance. We’d held the lines against Ravennia’s legions-hour after hour, we’d held the lines, as I had been ordered to do by my father, as I knew I must do. I’d spent the final hours fighting as the mortals beside me had: with sword and fist and brute, unrelenting focus. My own power had been depleted well before the carnage had stopped. It took most of my lingering strength to keep my wings from dragging over corpse and armor. I picked my way across the once-grassy plain, marking the banners half-buried in mud and gore. They didn’t differentiate between mortal and immortal flesh. Flies already crawled along eyes gazing unblinkingly upward. With the heat, despite the heavy cloud cover, the smell would soon be unbearable. The killing field was now a tangled sprawl of corpses, human and faerie alike, interrupted only by broken wings jutting toward the gray sky or the occasional bulk of a felled horse. The buzzing flies and screaming survivors had long since replaced the beating war-drums.
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