Page 209 of Flame and Sparrow

Sensing this, the rest of us exploded into action.

Dravyn and Valas took to the sky and into clearer air, embers and frozen crystals falling behind them as they went. Moments later, a rain of Fire and Ice poured down upon the battlefield, carving an uneven path through the haze, being absorbed by it in some spots, overwhelming it in others.

Mairu wove in and out of the cleared spaces, advancing on the enemy line and using her magic to control weapons and bodies alike, causing knees to crumple and arrows to misfire.

I called Zell to my side and leapt onto his back, racing for a better vantage point—for the edges of the battlefield and higher ground—in search of weaknesses we could exploit.

I soon made my way to a hill adjacent to the one our enemies had fanned out upon. Below me, the haze of magic and fog was thicker than ever, but after a moment I began to pick out patterns and potentially useful things.

The plumes of debilitating smoke stirred up from the strikes of the arrows dissipated relatively quickly.

But the thinner, constantly drifting mist lingered, and it seemed to be coming from some source other than the arrows. It also appeared to be the harder of the two types to overwhelm with divine power. The gods and their magic were slowing the longer they moved through it; a few more minutes of dwelling in that ever-thickening mist and this battlefield would become nearly impossible to even stand within.

While I was trying to puzzle out the source of it, I spotted Mairu nearby. She beckoned me to her side.

“Look there,” she told me, pointing to a hilltop almost directly across from where we stood. It was difficult to see through the muddled air, but I counted three elves running along the length of it, occasionally kneeling to tend to some sort of apparatuses on the ground. “They’re setting off some sort of weapons, I think—that’s where all the constant fog is coming from.”

I focused on one of the elves, and quickly saw that she was right; after he’d tended to one of the devices on the ground—fed something into it, it looked like—the mist pouring out of it billowed bigger and thicker before drifting over the battlefield.

As this elf rose back to his feet, Mairu narrowed her gaze and pointed at him. He stumbled and slowed under the control of her magic. But I could tell she was struggling to manage even that, which—given the sort of power I’d seen her wield in the past—sent a fresh tremor of concern through me.

“Even their armor seems to be resistant to magic,” she said, her words faint and frustrated. Her fingers clenched and unclenched as though she was trying to determine whether or not to waste her energy on another spell. “I would normally be able to control dozens of these bastards all at once,” she growled.

The situation seemed worse the longer I stared at it. The weapons, the armor, the different, strategic toxins…

They truly had been preparing for a full-scale war.

What other tricks did they have planned?

And what if more and more soldiers simply kept piling in through more and more breaks in the veil? What if they flooded this whole realm with that toxic mist?

Running a soothing hand along Zell’s neck, my focus turned to the individual fog-dispensing weapons. There were at least a dozen of them, but only three soldiers tending them. They appeared small—built for ease of carry rather than for durability, I suspected. They didn’t expect the gods to be able to get close enough to destroy them.

ButIcould get close to them.

Zell seemed to be less affected by the poison they were spewing, too, so if we could be quick enough…

I made up my mind in the next instant.

“I’m going to destroy those devices and help clear the air.” Mairu looked ready to argue against this plan, but I kept going before she could: “I’m not divine, so their smoke won’t affect me the way it affects all of you,” I said, walking Zell in a circle to help calm his restlessness. “When the air begins to clear, you can all attack, all at once, with as much power as you can summon—overwhelm and overload their protections, their weapons, faster than they can absorb them or counter your attack.”

I’d inwardly recoiled when the Ocean Marr had suggested such a show of force back at Dravyn’s palace, but now it seemed the lesser of evils.

Mairu hesitantly agreed to my plan, and I galloped away without another wasted second.

The line of devices I was targeting stretched all the way across the hilltop. We paced at a safe distance until the soldiers tending them were all closer to the opposite end of the line. Then I urged Zell forward, running him straight at the first device.

I didn’t withdraw any of my own weapons, afraid the fog being spewed would ruin their magic and potentially render them useless. Instead, I relied on physical force to destroy the devices, guiding Zell so that his fiery hooves stomped on the entire apparatus itself. We moved cautiously over the first one, making certain this strategy didn’t cause an explosion or any other kind of blowback.

But the devices proved as fragile as I’d hoped, crushing relatively easily under Zell’s weight.

The poisonous smoke nullified the divine fires his hooves set in the grass all around it—but not quickly enough to protect the body of the weapon itself. The flames melted and further destroyed the casing, and the mist spitting out of it came slower and slower before stopping altogether.

We managed five more destructive stomps without interruption.

But the seventh device we came to had just been reloaded; the fog pouring from it rushed out fast and thick, blinding me to everything around it—so I didn’t see the elven soldier charging toward us until it was too late.

Chapter55

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