If it does, you will have to make a difficult decision: Do you open the gates for us, and save what you can of the army at the cost of letting in some of the dead, and perhaps losing all of Stag Court? Or do you bar the gates and defend the Antlered Palace above all else? Have your decision before the fighting reaches the walls, or I fear the slaughter will be great whether the gates are barred or open. Yours in fealty and friendship, Alluin

Dain fought through the night, and continued to fight even after the moon went down, disengaging from the remaining large constructs and assisting the army with the single dead and smaller constructs. In the morning, I took the reins back from Lady Yllatris, who gave me the overnight report with ferocity and glittering eyes. I faced the war room, looking across all those grave faces, and began to prepare the Antlered Palace for war.

I hadn't even needed to think about whether to leave the army with their backs up against our walls and the dead bearing down on them. The palace was a maze, with fallbacks and built-in defenses. It was made for wartime as much as for peace. We evacuated those few who were willing to leave, and armed the rest, building urban-warfare style defenses throughout the palace. I gave not one shit about the fine floors or furniture. If Dain and I lived in a half-wrecked hovel and it saved one life, it would be worth it.

The humans in the palace were an incredible boon in that effort. As it turned out, it was dead easy to make napalm, as long as we had some people willing to go acquire excessive amounts of gasoline and styrofoam from the mortal world. Which we did, of course, with no hesitation. Not to mention that we had a number of ex-soldiers rescued from various wars, and one remarkable felon who'd been involved in arms dealing, and could direct the fae to some suspicious warehouses to acquire a significant number of rocket launchers and a large quantity of other fun explosives.

Together, we turned the landscape around the palace into a death trap. I ordered the forest behind the palace cut down to a distance of five hundred yards, and we used the trees to build rough walls and baffles that we soaked with napalm. The horses and deer all got brought through the palace and into the gardens; no reason to leave them in harm's way. An incredible amount of C4 got buried in a series of long trenches, with remote detonators, and the walls were supplied with rocket launchers and grenades.