(a few minutes earlier)

"Birqu-Matraktu." Abandoning a spell, Tsia forced the lightning in the shape wanted, a flickering, ephemeral weapon of sheer electricity that hammered the brute in front of her. Despite the shocks that cascaded down its skin, charring and scarring wherever they touched, the stoneflesh's innate resistance to magic allowed it to keep moving, albeit at a sluggish pace.

Letting the lightning dissipate, she struck at the weakened bandit with a wind blade, twice, thrice in fast succession, and its movements finally ceased as its nearly severed head dangled from its stump.

"Behind you." Boosted by the wind, she leapt a dozen feet into the air at Jasper's warning, narrowly avoiding a monstrous, clawed hand grabbing for her spine. The brute behind her was another of the fallen - the term she'd started using to refer to those amongst the transformed bandits who had succumbed to cannibalism.

While the others seemed to mostly retain their intelligence, even if the owner of the slitted, yellow eyes was the true captain of their body, those that had dined on the dead seemed little more than animals, but the loss of intelligence seemed to come with a corresponding increase in strength.

The brute beneath her didn't even flinch as her lightning struck it, and before she could fly out of its reach, it jumped up and grabbed her by the ankle. She felt her ankle snap as it flung her fifty across the clearing, but, if anything, it had done her a favor by putting some space in between them. She stabilized her flight before crashing into the castle walls and, injecting a little essence into her ankle, healed the shattered bone.

In the meantime, Jasper fell on the brute. With those strange, white-hot flames that resembled the firebirds' spells engulfing his body, he seemed more fire than man as he sank his glaive into the brute's back. As the fallen spun round far faster than any creature his size should be able to imagine, the light of Jasper's flames reflected off the unnatural claws that had consumed its hands, a devastating weapon that would have gutted Jasper if it had connected. But, with a beat of shadowy wings, he lurched out of the brute's grasp, pausing above the stoneflesh's head just long enough to flick a pale, ghostly scourge into the wound he'd created.

She took off toward the fray again, as he disappeared behind the mob of howling spectres he'd summoned, but she had no doubt that the ghosts would tear the brute limb from limb. Instead, she descended on the nearest stoneflesh in a storm of wind and shock. Unlike the last one, he still had possession of his senses, and as she closed in, he nearly clipped her with his long, glistening halberd as he spun around.

Tsia darted back into the sky, frying him with a lightning bolt in an attempt to pin him in place, but, gritting his teeth, he forced himself forward, and she was forced to abandon the spell as the halberd whistled toward her. She darted to the side, nearly losing her balance with her clumsy flight, and fired off a frantic windblade as he closed the distance easily.

But the brute stumbled as an arrow struck his already injured thigh, burrowing itself inside and expanding with a red-hot blade that chopped his leg off. She pounced as he fell to the ground, hammering at his neck with her wind-blades until his writhing ceased.

There was a pulsing in her head by now, not the full-fledged throb of complete essence deprivation, but not too far from it, but with an effort of will, she picked herself up and searched for another target.

"Tsia, we've got to go." She spun around as someone shook her by the shoulder, lightning sparking on her fists and the girl jumped backward, hands held high.

"Whoa, whoa - snap out of it."

Blinking, the person in front of her solidified into Ihra, and she extinguished the spell guiltily. "Sorry."

The elfling shook her head dismissively. "Yeah, whatever, we've got to go," she repeated. "The wall is lost - Jasper said to grab whatever soldiers we can and retreat."

"We can't - we've got to hold them off for the villagers," she tried to argue, but the elfling shouted over her.

"Look around, princess - if we don't go now, we're all going to die."

She scowled, still ready to argue, but as she glanced around the battle, she saw Ihra spoke the truth. The stoneflesh now outnumbered the stoneflesh on the walls, and there were only a few pockets of resistance left. There was no hope of driving them off now, and another glance told her that the village was already beginning to burn. As much as she didn't want to retreat, she knew the elfling was right; she wouldn't do anyone any good if she passed out from essence deprivation on the battlefield.

"Got it," she bobbed her head sharply. "Need a ride?"

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"Nope." As Ihra took a step back, a pair of shadowy wings unfolded from behind her back. "Jasper's already got me covered."

Tsia watched with a touch of envy as the elfling soared off, flying far better than she herself could manage despite not having a flying spell of her own, but this wasn't the time to indulge in such petty jealousies. Flinging herself into the air, she shot off toward the nearest enclave of blue-backed soldiers she could find.

There were three of them left alive, their backs to the wall as they faced off against two of the brutes. The stoneflesh never saw her coming, and though her lightning was not enough to kill them, the brief moment of paralysis gave the soldiers the opening they needed to strike. "Aim for the necks!" she ordered, allowing them to finish the brutes off in an attempt to conserve her essence.

"We've been ordered to retreat - follow me," she told them and the soldiers were happy to comply. "Where's the nearest stairs?"

"The tower up ahead," one of them grunted, "But-ayeugh!"

Tsia spun around at his cry of pain in time to see a long, black boar-spear explode through his ribcage. She felt a flash of anger as the stoneflesh leered down at her, fury that he had dared to harm those she had decided to protect, as he ripped the spear free and tilted his head to look at the remaining two soldiers. Time seemed to slow as she raised her hands, her heart beating so loudly in her ears that all else faded away.

What came out of her was not a controlled spell at all, but a howling, raging tempest that picked the brute up and hurled him.

Her hearing snapped back in place as the brute vanished a hundred feet down the wall, but the two soldiers stood frozen in place, looking at her with a mix of fear and awe. "Come on." When they didn't move, she grabbed their hand and pulled them behind her, running toward the tower they had mentioned.

There was no one left along the way, but when she reached the tower, she found the door barred. "Open up!" She beat ineffectually against the door, but the only response from inside was the screams of frightened men. Cursing, she stood back and summoned Vāya. The door shattered beneath the blow, raining a storm of splinters on the soldiers huddled behind it, but she breezed past them with a growled command. "Follow me, or die."

She raced down the tower stairs with her two rescued soldiers close behind her, and a handful of new stragglers. The door at the bottom was barred as well, and she blew it open with a second blast, opening the path to the courtyard where the garrison received traders.

The situation was no better than that on the wall, with only a few groups of blue-clad soldiers still holding out against the rampaging brutes. But as much as Tsia wanted to rescue them, she knew she couldn't; she was running on dregs by now, her head throbbing with every step she took as essence deprivation set in. She didn't have the magic left to beat them; all she could do was run past them, yelling for them to follow.

By the time she reached the path to the village, a force of roughly ten had gathered around her, and those numbers swelled again as she spotted Jasper and Ihra ahead, hiding behind one of the village's cottages with a small group of soldiers.

"They've cut off the path to the keep," he greeted her grimly. "There's twenty of them guarding the entrance and, I don't know about you, but I don't have the essence to take them out."

"Me either," she shook her head reluctantly, her gaze turning to Ihra.

"Hey, don't look at me," the blonde shrugged. "I won't run out of arrows, but I can't take them all by myself."

"Does that mean we're trapped?" She was surprised when one of the soldiers found the courage to speak up, a sergeant, perhaps, judging from the slightly nicer armor he wore.

"I don't know; maybe we can figure out another way-" Jasper stopped talking as the ground beneath them buckled, sending them all into the dirt.

Tsia had never felt afraid of the earth before; while farmers might have prayed to Ummadammah in search of better harvests, it wasn't the sort of thing that had ever appealed to her. But as the ground beneath her rose and fell like waves on a stormy sea, as the soldiers she'd saved fell screaming into yawning voids only to be buried alive a second later, she found herself begging Ummadammah for mercy.

She snatched the two closest to her, holding them by the neck like a mother cat, as she hovered above the ground, but she could do nothing to save the rest, nothing but watch in horror as the earth swallowed them whole - and yet, that was not the worst of it.

While the earth writhed in agony, Tōrîl's keep crumbled. The broken walls rolled down the mountain slope in a rockslide, annihilating the village and all who remained in it, and exposing the keep's courtyard to view.

The blood mage hung suspended in the air, hundreds of blood tendrils swirling around him as he sucked the essence out of the villagers they had tried to save. The storm clouds above him glowed red, and the earth shuddered again as a crack appeared in the air behind him.

This was nothing like the minor portal he'd opened earlier. A swirling vortex higher than the donjon's tower formed around the crack in the air, pulling it wider and wider as the blood mage funneled his stolen power into it. The bloody portal expanded in short bursts, shaking the ground each time it advanced and destroying more of the walls. Stoneflesh and soldiers alike died as the castle walls collapsed, burying them beneath its rubble, but the Bloodspiller paid no heed.

The pounding in her head was unbearable by now; each beat of her heart felt like a nail driven into her skull, but she knew she couldn't release the winds holding her aloft, not unless she wanted to drop herself, and the two soldiers clinging to her legs, into an unmarked grave. Just…hold…on…just…hold…on.

Her concentration was broken as the sound of thunder tenfold rent the sky and, opening her eyes, she saw the portal stood complete. A shimmering red veil hung between the enormous arches like a bubble waiting to pop, a massive window into a ruined city and a sky full of winged monstrosities.

They had failed.

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