Harmodius rose to his feet in the real, and began to walk north very cautiously. He could hear the movement of large creatures ahead of him, and he climbed a tree with a little help from an enhancement, and then cursed when in the aethereal, the ripples of his working rolled away towards his enemies.

They froze—slick, green figures, outlined only in their use of the forces beyond natura. He guessed them to be a pair of shamans—linked by some dark ceremony, perhaps, or merely by birth.

Two would be very powerful.

He waited, silent.

Finally they moved. He felt them—felt the heat of their green presence, felt them searching—for him, for the Faery Knight.

To the west, horns sounded, and Exrech’s desperate defence was rewarded when the Dulwar and the Jacks came out of the woods into the flank of the foe and began to kill them.

Nearly at his feet, the wardens froze—and then began to move. They were the centre of a broad line of their own kind, two deep, fully armoured—a battle-winning reserve right in the gap.

Except that Harmodius had learned that in the Wild there were no true lines, nor weak gaps, but merely the fight of the moment, the slash of the claw.

He found the link between them. As they passed him, he reached out in the aethereal —and severed it.

Two twin minds, together since birth, snapped back in agony and bereavement, and he entrapped one, casting a quick working that left the nearest trapped in a wall of its own dark imaginings while Harmodius turned on the other. Suggestion, binding, ward and thrust—he flung them all in carefully selected order, undermining his opponent with the false knowledge of his twin’s humiliating death, binding his legs in a simple and confusing physik that caused the larger caster to collapse, warding the counter attack—powerful, over-slow and grandiose.

Harmodius stepped out of his ward of shadow and plunged a spear of lightning into his prone opponent, so close he could have used a dagger, and his prey spasmed and triggered a cascade of stored workings—

Harmodius turned them on a mirror and let them strike his horrified twin, just a horse-length away, and then stripped aside his working and his suggestion so that each could recognize the other in terror—flinch in horror—

Harmodius finished the nearer with a needle-tight bolt of ops.

The first victim slammed a heavy working that must have come from an artifact—like a fall of rock, it struck Harmodius’s wards and blew through them.

He fell—and only the sheer and wasted rage of his adversary saved him.

It screamed, leapt forward to finish him—