Alex Irvine - The seal of Karga Kul

A southwest wind curled over the passes at sunrise the next day, bringing with it smells of the lower territories where winter was forbidden. For nine days it blew. At the end of the third, each army sent scouts up the passes toward the gorge. Avalanches drove them back.

At the end of the sixth day, each army sent scouts again. They returned, most of them, reporting that the way would be clear if the freakish thaw held for another three days.

And hold for three days it did.

On the morning of the tenth day, the armies marched. On the morning of the twelfth day, they stood on either side of the bridge. By noon of the twelfth day, the bridge ran knee-deep with the blood of human and tiefling, dragonborn and dwarf. The fighting on the bridge went on into the night as both sides mustered sorcerous lights to guide their armies lest they wake up in the morning and find the other side possessing the bridge.

Centuries before, the bridge had been the Arkhosians’ mightiest work of engineering, a monument to the vision of their emperors and the building genius of the dwarves who lived in the caves along the gorge. It was a thousand feet long and wide enough for twenty men to walk across abreast, with buttresses curving down into the walls of the gorge hundreds of feet below. It was large enough that all manner of creatures had taken up residence in its stone eaves and crevices, its drains and arches. The tiefling shock troops of Bael Turath had long since slaughtered the Noon Gorge dwarves, keeping only those as slaves who might teach the Turathian architects the secrets of stone that dwarves seemed to be born with-yet the secrets of the bridge over the gorge remained known only to one man, because only that one man had performed the magics that bound its stones together. The bridge, too, had been a symbol of peace between Arkhosia and Bael Turath… or perhaps it had only come to seem such during a pause between two wars. When it did not carry soldiers, it carried caravans-and then in times of war, soldiers carried back as spoils what the merchants had once carried as goods.

The greatest wizard of the Arkhosians was Iban Ja, confidant to emperors, Seer of Infinitudes, and magical overseer of the dwarf engineers who had built the bridge. He watched the battle from a cliffside perch on the Arkhosian side of the gorge, participating as the battle demanded and commanding the ranks of Arkhosian wizards who found their way across the bridge with the armed soldiery. Iban Ja was a thousand years old, the stories went. Iban Ja had never been born, but made from the bodies of ten great wizards who gave their lives knowing that they would be part of the greatest wizard ever to walk the earth, the other stories went. None of them were true and all of them spoke the truth of the Arkhosians’ regard for him.

He looked down as dawn broke on the thirteenth day and saw the best of the Arkhosian troops, the mighty dragonborn warriors known as the Knights of Kul. A hundred selected from ten thousand, they were the finest foot soldiers in the known world. Any one of them could cut their way through ten men and be laughed at if they got a scratch in the fight.

In the darkness, the Knights had established a foothold on the Turathian side of the bridge. In the hours before dawn they had fought their way to solid ground on the other side of the bridge, laying waste to the Turathian opposition.

And as the sun shone from a bed of clouds in the eastern sky, Iban Ja found himself seeing a fresh new telling of a very old story.

The Knights drove forward, supported by sword and foot of the regular Arkhosian expeditionary force. Behind them, support units set up defensive positions along the ledges of the approach canyon to protect the way back to the bridge. Already that morning the Knights were five hundred yards up the canyon road that, in another hundred miles, would lead to Crow Fork and the market-where, it was said, some of the surviving Noon Gorge dwarves were building labyrinthine dungeons at the request of the market’s council. The Turathian forces were shattered and in full retreat.

But below the bridge, from the mouths of caves drilled out of the living rock so long-dead Noon Gorge dwarves could build the bridge’s arched buttresses, came Turathian sappers. Some of them were human. Some were tiefling. And some, saw Iban Ja, were cambion. It was not the first time he had seen cambion on the other side of a battlefield. He imagined it would not be the last. Yet seeing them there, at the footings of the bridge, Iban Ja felt as if something vital had escaped him and could never be reclaimed.

Clouds covered the sun and wind howled down the gorge from the north. The Raven Queen’s affections turned elsewhere as she saw that her favorites would be fed.

Iban Ja spoke instructions to a stone that carried his voice to every wizard who fought under his command. They turned as one and directed their attacks toward the sappers in the caves, besieging them with magical energies designed to kill the living without damaging the stone underpinnings of the bridge. At that moment, the Turathians played their last card.

On the walls of the gorge above the bridge, stones began to move. They shifted, spread wings, reared fanged heads on long necks, uncoiled tails tipped with hooked stingers. Ridden by cambion hellswords, these fell wyverns swooped down from the heights to tear into the ranks of Arkhosian wizards. The wizards fought back, but the distraction proved critical. Cambion magi worked magics upon the bodies of their tiefling servants while Iban Ja devoted all of his powers to destroying the wyverns. Incinerated, arrow-shot, lightning-struck, they fell from the sky to die on the stones of the bridge or in the depths of the churning river far below.

And as Iban Ja and the Arkhosian wizards returned their attention to the cambion magi, a great shudder ran through the stones of the bridge. Cambion magic drew the ghosts of dead dwarves from the stones and their spectral picks crashed into the most vulnerable seams, where buttress met cliffside and Arkhosian engineering met the ageless genius of nature.

Iban Ja called down a raven that wheeled over the battlefield. “It is your Queen that has done this, is it not?” he demanded.

The raven squawked but consented to speak. “Is this not an unnatural spring?” it answered. “And does not the wilderness rebel against the works of mortals? Beware your blame, wizard. Look you to yourself.”

It cast itself back into the air over the bridge as the last words left its mouth, and the great buttresses on the Turathian side of the gorge slipped, cracked, and fell with a sound like an earthquake into the misty depths of the Gorge of Noon. The span sagged, leaned, split two-thirds of the way across and carried Arkhosian support troops and the bodies of the fallen after the broken buttresses. Unsupported, the remainder of the span jutted creaking out into empty space for a moment longer than Iban Ja thought he could endure-then with a sound like a peal of thunder the entire span broke off and fell end over end into the gorge. The bodies of Iban Ja’s wizard corps fell with it. Those few who managed to fly, and managed to survive the barrage of tiefling arrows, returned to the Arkhosian side to watch in horror as the final part of Bael Turath’s great trap sprang.

From every cave, every notch, every sheltered space below a fallen rock poured tiefling and human, cambion and lesser devil. Like ants they poured blackly over the rocks, overwhelming the Arkhosian troops and closing like a flood around the island formed by the Knights of Kul. Rallying to a defensive posture, the Knights saw the collapse of the bridge. Instantly they knew what had happened. In the falling of the stones they saw their deaths, and with useless clarity they understood that even the most seasoned of soldiers can fall victim to the thrill of battle.