Aetheria

Willowbank finished its preparations after dark because there was nothing else to do with the hours they had left. The western road was blocked with carts, timber, stone troughs and whatever else the villagers could drag into place, while the defenders abandoned several outer houses so the first creatures would enter ground already cleared of civilians.

Aaron remained in the church tower until his legs stiffened beneath him. Ranger's Eye turned the darkness beyond the western fields into layers of movement, catching shapes where torchlight failed and separating the nearer trees from the mass still travelling beneath them.

There were hundreds.

He stopped trying to estimate beyond that.

The village had forty-six Outsiders capable of fighting, thirty-one local guards or hunters and another twenty adults willing to carry spears, bows or farm tools because their families remained inside the stone buildings behind them. Ronan's relief force had split again before sunset, leaving twenty-two fighters at Willowbank while the others raced north toward villages already reporting attacks.

That put Ronan in command of less than a hundred defenders.

The people coming toward them could hear the forest.

Branches broke under bodies large enough to push directly through the undergrowth, while smaller creatures filled the spaces between them. The corrupted animals no longer travelled with the quiet coordination Aaron had seen from ordinary predators, but their movement had a common direction that mattered more than cooperation.

Willowbank sat in that direction.

Aaron climbed down shortly before the first wave reached the fields. Jenna met him near the base of the tower with a charcoal-stained copy of the village map, and they crossed toward the western barricade while she explained which alleys had been cleared for retreat and where Miles's group would fall back if the road failed.

Priya was still inside the treatment hall.

Aaron had seen her only once since Briar Glen.

The black stains on her hands had come from patients rather than herself, and the skin around her eyes looked bruised from exhaustion. Lena Morris had taken the strongest healers north, leaving Priya under two native restoration specialists who had already stopped pretending they had enough beds for the injured they expected.

Ronan stood behind the first barricade with his tower shield planted beside him. The shield had changed since Aaron last saw it, with overlapping steel plates covering the front and a reinforced lower edge intended to bite into earth whenever Ronan needed to hold ground.

The first creatures entered the torchlight shortly after midnight.

They came through the wheat field rather than the road.

Level 11 and 12 scavengers crossed first, their bodies warped by the same black growths Aaron had seen near Briar Glen. Some dragged limbs that had already been broken, while others moved with enough speed that the defenders opened fire almost immediately.

Aaron worked from a grain shed overlooking the western approach.

His first arrows went toward creatures already wounded by the outer volleys. Ranger's Eye picked out damaged joints, exposed throats and heads turned at the wrong angle, allowing him to finish targets instead of wasting ammunition against bodies that would keep moving after ordinary wounds.

The first line held for twenty minutes.

Then something larger reached it.

A Blighted Marshhorn smashed through the field fence and entered the defenders at an angle the barricade had not been built to stop. Its swollen antlers caught one local guard across the torso and lifted him completely off the ground before throwing him into the side of a cart.

Aaron saw the man's body bend around the wooden frame.

He did not get up.

Ronan redirected half the shield line before the Marshhorn could reach the houses. Heavy shields drove against its flank while spears worked into the softer tissue around its hind legs, and Aaron concentrated arrows around one eye until blood obscured that side of the animal's face.

The Marshhorn died with three people beneath it.

One screamed until the others managed to roll enough of the carcass aside to drag him free.

His left leg remained underneath.

The bone had broken through the skin above the ankle, and most of the foot faced the wrong direction.

Aaron saw Priya arrive from behind the barricade with another healer.

He looked back toward the field.

More creatures were coming.

The western road disappeared beneath them by one in the morning.

The first barricade failed soon afterward.

Willowbank withdrew toward its central square in sections rather than all at once, with Ronan's shield groups holding streets long enough for ranged fighters and injured defenders to move through the alleys behind them. Aaron and Jenna crossed rooftops where buildings stood close enough, dropping back whenever the front line moved and marking routes that avoided the contaminated river.

The village changed around them.

Doors that had been open earlier were barred.

Windows disappeared behind furniture.

Bodies remained where nobody had time to collect them.

A Blighted Ridgecat died halfway through a doorway with its front claws buried in a villager's back. The woman beneath it was alive when Aaron passed, but too much of her side had been opened for the healer kneeling beside her to stop the blood with one pair of hands.

Aaron fired until the muscles through his shoulders burned.

His Warden Ranger advancement had given him several abilities after Level 10, although most had developed gradually rather than arriving as things he understood immediately. One sharpened his awareness of movement through an area he had spent time observing, and Willowbank had become familiar enough during the hours before the attack that he could feel pressure shifting through streets even when buildings blocked his direct view.

He used that awareness to choose where he moved.

When the north alley began filling with creatures, Aaron abandoned a better shooting position before anyone called for help and crossed two roofs to reach it. By the time he arrived, Miles's group had been pushed against a stone workshop by a pack of Blighted Hookjaws moving between carts.

Aaron shot the one nearest Miles through the cheek.

The creature staggered sideways.

Miles used the space to turn his shield and drive the remaining Hookjaws away from the workshop entrance, while two local hunters joined Aaron on the roof and began firing into the pack.

They held the alley.

Aaron left before it was safe enough to become quiet.

A pressure point farther south had begun collapsing.

The fighting stretched through the night until individual encounters stopped feeling separate. Aaron moved between rooftops, windows, wagons and broken walls, always looking for whatever section had begun losing ground and reaching it before a full retreat became necessary.

He started making decisions without checking who had given the last order.

A pair of young Rangers followed him after the third time he shifted positions ahead of the main call. They stopped asking where they were going once every move brought them to a place that needed arrows.

Aaron remembered both their names.

Lewis Grant, Level 13.

Maya Singh, Level 14.

Lewis lost three fingers before dawn.

A Blighted Carrion Kite came through a second-storey window while they were repositioning through an abandoned house. The bird's beak caught his bow hand before Aaron could turn, closing hard enough that blood sprayed across the wall.

Lewis screamed and dropped the bow.

Maya drove an arrow into the creature at arm's length.

Aaron helped kick the body away while Lewis stared at his hand.

The smallest finger was gone completely.

The next two hung from torn flesh.

Aaron wrapped the hand in part of a curtain and took Lewis toward the treatment hall himself because the boy kept trying to say he could still shoot one-handed.

They passed three bodies in the square.

One belonged to Silas Marr.

Aaron recognised the Grey Banner armour before he recognised what remained of the face.

Silas had been fighting beside Ronan when a Level 20 Blighted Stoneback broke through the western street. The creature died nearby with its skull split open, but Silas lay beneath a section of collapsed wall with his chest crushed flat enough that Aaron did not need to ask whether a healer had checked him.

Lewis vomited beside the treatment hall.

Aaron left him with Priya.

She had blood dried to both elbows by then.

"How bad?" he asked while she worked on the hand.

"Bad enough that I can't answer that right now."

Aaron accepted it.

He returned outside.

The first grey light of morning revealed the field boss.

Aaron saw it from the church tower after climbing back up to check the western approach.

It stood beyond the outer fields.

At first he mistook it for part of the broken treeline because the creature barely moved and dark growths rose from its back like jagged branches. Then it turned its head.

Ranger's Eye brought the label into focus.

Blight-Crowned Harrower

Field Boss

Level 34

Aaron read it again.

The Harrower stood on six limbs thick enough to resemble tree trunks, its body covered in overlapping black and grey plates that had grown unevenly around older scars. A long head hung beneath a crown of antler-like structures, and dark vapour poured from vents between the plates whenever the chest expanded.

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Several creatures moved around it.

Those labels were nearly as bad.

A Level 28 Blighted Ironmaw.

Two Level 27 Blackhorn Predators.

A Level 29 creature Aaron had never seen before, built low to the ground with an elongated body and four heavy forelimbs.

The western fields were already full.

Those creatures had not joined them.

Aaron came down the tower and found Ronan near the square.

The Bulwark had blood across one side of his neck and a deep split running through the centre of his shield, but he was still directing people toward the northern street where another pack had reached the inner buildings.

"Field boss west of us," Aaron said. "Thirty-four."

Ronan's attention stopped on him immediately.

"Distance?"

"Past the fields. Four elites with it, maybe more behind the trees."

"Moving?"

"Slowly."

Ronan turned toward one of his officers and ordered a runner toward the eastern road.

Highcrest already knew Willowbank was under pressure.

They needed to know what was coming next.

Aaron returned to the roof line.

The Harrower remained visible whenever smoke shifted.

Nobody had enough people to do anything about it.

Ronan could not leave.

Northbound could not leave.

Every fighter capable of surviving an approach to the field boss was already occupied preventing corrupted creatures from reaching the civilians.

The strongest players were elsewhere.

Damon had been sent north.

Sera was defending the larger settlement near the river.

Celia's scouts were spread between evacuation routes.

Aaron watched the Harrower take several slow steps toward Willowbank.

It would reach them eventually.

He went back to shooting.

The next wave broke the southern street.

A Level 18 Blighted Ridgebear entered first, followed by enough smaller creatures that the defenders were forced back through two rows of houses before Ronan moved half the central shield group to contain it.

Aaron reached the fight from above.

The Ridgebear's body had already accumulated arrows and spear wounds, but black growths around the spine tightened whenever the creature moved, forcing damaged muscles to continue working.

Aaron focused on the growths.

Ranger's Eye sharpened the way they joined the animal's body.

Several emerged around major joints.

Others disappeared beneath the ribs.

He shot one at the base of the neck.

The growth cracked.

The Ridgebear's left foreleg weakened.

Aaron hit another.

Then a third.

The creature stumbled long enough for Miles to take its charge across his shield without being thrown into the defenders behind him.

"Black growths!" Aaron shouted from the roof. "Break the ones around the joints!"

Other ranged fighters changed targets.

The Ridgebear died within another minute.

The same idea worked on smaller creatures.

Not perfectly.

Some growths could be destroyed without much effect, while others opened black fluid across the wound and made the animal thrash harder. Aaron stopped trying to predict which mattered beyond obvious joints and movement points.

His Essence dropped steadily.

Ranger's Eye had become expensive after hours of constant use.

The broader Warden awareness cost more.

Aaron reduced both whenever the fighting allowed and relied on ordinary vision until another pressure point demanded more.

By midday, the village smelled of smoke, blood and river rot.

A house near the southern square caught fire after a mage missed a charging creature and buried a flame spell in the roof. Nobody had enough water they trusted to extinguish it, so defenders tore down a connecting awning and allowed the building to burn.

The fire changed the battlefield.

Creatures avoided the hottest section.

Aaron used the gap.

He moved six archers to a stable roof beside the flames and turned the burning house into one wall of a narrow approach. Creatures funnelling through the remaining street entered concentrated fire from above while Miles's group held the far end.

For nearly half an hour, that became the strongest section in Willowbank.

Then Aaron ran out of Essence.

The last of it disappeared while he was tracking a Blighted Hookjaw moving beneath a wagon. Ranger's Eye faded, taking the sharpened outlines and subtle motion cues with it.

Aaron blinked.

The battlefield became ordinary.

Smoke blurred distance.

Fast targets became harder to follow.

The awareness he had grown dependent on over the previous months vanished from the edges of his perception.

A creature moved between two carts.

Aaron saw it late.

He shot anyway.

The arrow struck too far back.

The Hookjaw continued toward the shield line.

Aaron put the next arrow through its throat from less than fifteen metres.

He stopped trying to use Essence.

His bow still worked.

He had been shooting before Ranger's Eye became this strong.

He could continue shooting now.

Aaron left the elevated position once smoke made long shots unreliable and moved closer to the defenders. Without Essence extending his perception, he chose places where the battlefield narrowed naturally and used walls, doorways and carts to reduce how many directions required his attention.

His accuracy dropped.

He missed.

Several arrows struck armour that Ranger's Eye would have warned him away from.

Aaron adapted by shortening his range.

Fifty metres became thirty.

Thirty became twenty.

He stopped attempting difficult kills and concentrated on making easier shots matter.

An arrow through a leg slowed a creature for Miles.

A shot into an open mouth interrupted a charge.

One arrow struck the hand of a corrupted ape-like beast as it climbed a wall, causing it to fall back into three creatures beneath it.

Aaron kept moving.

Lewis's abandoned quiver remained near the treatment hall.

Aaron took it.

A villager handed him another bundle from a dead hunter.

His fingers split beneath the glove where the string had worn through old calluses.

He wrapped them and continued.

The field boss crossed half the western field during the afternoon.

Aaron checked from the tower whenever fighting eased enough to climb.

The Harrower moved slowly enough to make every sighting worse.

It was coming.

The elites followed.

The Blackhorn Predators remained close to its flanks while the Level 29 quadruped moved ahead, occasionally stopping to tear apart smaller corrupted creatures that crossed its path.

By then, Willowbank had less than fifty people still capable of sustained fighting.

Ronan had begun discussing abandoning the settlement completely.

The eastern evacuation road remained open.

They could pull everyone still alive toward Highcrest.

The problem was the treatment hall.

Thirty-six patients could not walk.

Nine could barely be moved without continuous healing.

Priya heard the discussion.

Aaron found her outside the hall when he returned for arrows.

"If we move them now, some will die," she said.

"If we stay and that thing gets here, more than some die."

Priya closed her eyes briefly.

Her face had become too tired to hide anything.

"How long?"

Aaron looked west.

"Maybe an hour. Maybe less if it starts running."

Priya returned inside.

Ronan gave the order twenty minutes later.

Willowbank would evacuate.

The defenders started preparing carts.

That was when the western pressure changed.

Aaron noticed because the next attack never came.

The southern street remained full of bodies.

Smoke moved across the road.

Defenders waited behind damaged shields for another corrupted pack to emerge.

Nothing did.

Aaron climbed the church tower.

The western field was emptying.

Creatures still moved through it, but they were running sideways.

North.

South.

Anywhere except toward Willowbank.

Aaron searched for the Harrower.

It had stopped.

The field boss stood near the centre of the field with its head turned away from the village.

One Blackhorn Predator was missing.

The Level 29 creature had disappeared as well.

Aaron leaned farther over the tower edge and brought the bow up despite knowing he could not shoot anywhere near that distance.

Something moved around the Harrower.

He could not see what.

His Essence had not recovered enough for Ranger's Eye.

The field boss shifted violently.

One of its six legs left the ground.

The movement looked less like walking and more like being struck from the side.

Aaron narrowed his eyes.

The Harrower turned.

Dark vapour exploded from the vents along its chest.

The remaining Ironmaw charged toward something hidden below the slope.

Then it vanished behind the tall grass.

Aaron waited for it to reappear.

It did not.

A sound reached Willowbank several seconds later.

The distance weakened it.

The impact still carried enough force to make birds rise from the southern trees.

Jenna joined Aaron on the tower platform after someone below told her he had stopped shooting.

"What's happening?"

Aaron pointed toward the field boss.

"I don't know."

The Harrower moved again.

This time Aaron saw its front half lift.

Its body twisted sideways.

One of the antler-like structures broke free and spun into the field.

Jenna stared.

"What hit it?"

"I can't see."

They stayed on the tower.

Other defenders began noticing the quiet.

Ronan eventually climbed high enough to see over the wall without reaching the platform.

The Harrower backed away from Willowbank.

That movement changed the mood beneath them.

Nobody cheered.

They watched.

Another impact crossed the field.

The Harrower's rear leg buckled.

Black fluid sprayed across the grass from a wound Aaron could not see being made.

The remaining Blackhorn Predator rushed forward.

Something pale moved near it.

Aaron caught only a glimpse.

Then the predator disappeared into the grass hard enough to flatten a long path through it.

"Did you see that?" Jenna asked.

"Something."

"What?"

Aaron kept staring.

"White, maybe."

The answer meant nothing.

The Harrower roared.

Its voice reached Willowbank clearly for the first time, deep enough that the tower timber vibrated beneath Aaron's hand.

Then another sound answered from the field.

Aaron could not identify it.

It was shorter.

Sharper.

The Harrower charged away from the village.

Aaron expected the western grass to explode beneath its weight.

Instead, the creature stopped after less than twenty metres.

Its head snapped sideways.

One of the heavy plates along its neck split apart.

The field boss staggered.

Everyone on the tower stopped speaking.

The fighting around Willowbank had almost completely ended.

Corrupted creatures were fleeing now.

Some ran past defenders without attacking.

Others turned back toward the woods.

One collapsed in the road after several steps, black growths along its spine crumbling into ash-like fragments.

Priya emerged from the treatment hall.

Miles came out of the southern street carrying his shield low against one leg.

More people gathered wherever they could see the western field.

Aaron remained on the tower.

The Harrower disappeared behind a shallow rise.

Another impact followed.

Then another.

The ground shifted faintly beneath Willowbank.

A column of dark vapour rose from beyond the field.

For several minutes, nothing came out.

Ronan sent nobody forward.

Aaron would have argued if he had.

They had survived too much to walk blindly toward whatever was happening because the enemy had stopped attacking them.

The sun began lowering behind the western woods.

The haze took on an orange tint around the edges.

One of the village scouts finally reached the tower with a recovered spyglass.

Aaron took it.

The lens narrowed the field.

He found the broken antler first.

Then a Blackhorn Predator lying on its side with most of the chest opened.

The Level 29 creature was farther north.

Aaron recognised only parts of it.

He moved the glass toward the Harrower.

The field boss lay beyond the rise.

It was still alive.

One front leg moved weakly against the ground.

Several of its armour plates had been torn away.

A deep wound crossed the side of its body from shoulder to abdomen.

Aaron searched around it.

Grass moved.

For a moment, he thought he saw three figures.

One stood close to the Harrower's head.

Another remained farther back.

The third was harder to separate from the dying light.

Aaron adjusted the glass.

The field boss convulsed.

Something bright crossed the ground.

Aaron lost the image.

When he found the Harrower again, its head had dropped.

The label remained.

Blight-Crowned Harrower

Field Boss

Level 34

He lowered the spyglass.

Ronan called from below.

"What do you have?"

Aaron looked over the edge.

"The boss is down."

A murmur spread through the defenders.

Ronan asked who killed it.

Aaron looked west again.

The field remained too far away.

The three shapes had disappeared from where he last saw them.

"I don't know."

That answer travelled through Willowbank almost as quickly as the first.

Nobody moved toward the field before dark.

The village had too many dead to collect, too many injured to move and too many streets filled with corrupted bodies. The planned evacuation remained in place, but Ronan delayed departure long enough to send two scouts only as far as the outer fields.

They returned without reaching the Harrower.

Both reported the same thing.

The surviving corrupted creatures had fled.

The elites near the field boss were dead.

They found tracks around the Harrower.

The tracks were difficult to read because the field had been destroyed.

One scout thought there had been several fighters.

The other refused to guess.

Aaron sat outside the treatment hall while darkness settled over Willowbank.

His hands had stopped shaking only after someone pried the bow from them long enough to clean the split skin across his fingers.

Miles sat nearby with his shield resting against the wall.

Jenna had gone to help the scouts compare tracks.

Priya remained inside.

A notification appeared near Aaron's vision.

Regional Emergency Update

Willowbank defensive line maintained.

Blight-Crowned Harrower neutralised.

Western pressure reduced.

Aaron read the words without opening anything else.

There was still no name.

Miles leaned his head back against the stone wall. "Damon?"

Aaron shook his head.

"He isn't here."

"Sera?"

"North."

Miles looked toward the dark western road.

"Stonegate?"

"They couldn't have reached us yet."

The treatment hall door opened.

Priya stepped outside carrying a basin stained dark red.

She emptied it into a covered waste pit, washed her hands from a sealed water jug and sat on the ground beside Aaron without asking for space.

"How many?" Aaron asked.

Priya knew what he meant.

"Seven more since morning."

Aaron looked down at his bandaged fingers.

Briar Glen had lost more.

Willowbank had lost enough.

The western field remained silent.

Several hours later, the first scouts reached the Harrower under torchlight.

Aaron was awake when they returned.

Ronan met them near the square.

Jenna came with them.

Her clothes were covered in mud and black fluid.

Aaron joined the group.

The lead scout placed a broken piece of the Harrower's armour on the ground and explained what they had found.

The field boss had been killed at close range.

So had the elites.

Several wounds looked like heavy weapon damage.

Others were too clean for the scout to identify.

One section of ground had frozen solid despite the warm weather.

Another had been burned deeply enough that the soil remained hot.

Water covered a shallow depression near the Harrower's body even though the nearest river channel lay hundreds of metres away.

Aaron listened.

The scout continued.

They found no bodies belonging to whoever fought the creatures.

They found no camps.

They found no abandoned packs.

The tracks led west.

Then they disappeared where the ground became stone.

Ronan asked how many people the scout believed had been there.

The man rubbed black fluid from one glove.

"Three, maybe."

Aaron remembered the shapes through the spyglass.

Three.

Ronan looked toward the western road.

Nobody suggested following them tonight.

Willowbank still needed defending until every injured person could be moved.

The catastrophe beyond it had not ended.

Seven settlements remained affected by the contaminated waterways, and reports from the north were still arriving.

Aaron looked toward the dark field one last time before returning to the treatment hall.

A Level 34 field boss and several elites had been coming toward a village already close to collapse.

They never reached it.

Somewhere beyond the ruined fields, three people had walked away before anyone in Willowbank could even learn their names.

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