Too slow. Harmodius triggered a fire ball the size of a man’s head. Most of it caught in the creature’s wards, but some went through, and then they were pounding each other with ops —some raw, flung like children will fling water. It was the deadliest kind of hermetical combat—too close to parry effectively—

Harmodius was aware, too, that the woods around him were hostile. But something was happening in the real—and he could only cast, work, drink ops, make potentia and loose again, parry what he could on ever smaller shields and wards as his own workings drew too much—

And then his adversary ran out. One moment, he was a growing tower of puissance, his shields arcing into the trees, and the next he was a burning corpse. He stood for a moment, as if surprised.

Harmodius leapt forward and subsumed his essence like the predator he had become, drinking the alien creature’s soul and all his powers.

The charred corpse collapsed.

Harmodius came back into the real to find the wardens fleeing. In the direction from which he’d come, there were irkish knights on stags—but behind him there was a line of Outwallers, killing wardens and taking trophies. The wardens—daemons—were trapped.

The Outwallers began to shoot them down, calling out to them, mocking them.

Harmodius saw them flinch away and gather for a last charge, and then Mogon, her blue crest towering over their red ones, burst from the underbrush with twenty of her household at her back, and the forest floor shook.

The Outwallers fell back before the great duchess. She made an odd scent as she passed them, and Harmodius went forward with her, safe, or so he felt, at her tail. The red-crested daemons were in a cluster, perhaps as many as fifty—certainly the heart of the enemy force.

They were defiant, until Mogon addressed them. Harmodius had no idea what she said, but they flinched, and then let their weapons drop. One, a young female, said something in response.

Mogon nodded, and the young female came forward out of the knot of beaten wardens—one of her great taloned fists entwined with that of a young male, but at last he let her go. She went, her crest high, and raised her small, strong arms as she knelt to Mogon.

With one casual swipe of her razor-sharp bronze axe, Mogon swept her head off her body so that her inlaid beak bit into the leaf mould almost between Harmodius’s feet. Mogon subsumed her, ripping her essence from her body.

All the red crests flinched.

Mogon turned away. “That is done,” she said. Behind her, the red crests were picking up their weapons and slinking away into the bog.

Mogon made a sign. “Here is seed that has borne a fine fruit,” she said, and waved to the Outwallers who had trapped the wardens. “My Sossag.”