Seige on the Mountain

Alaine stretched her arms as she walked atop the wall of her little fortress. Toby was the one on watch now, but she liked seeing the world from so high. She looked down on the people in the little courtyard. Aoife and Naoise, under the instruction of Osney, were sparring with each other. Torvald was near him, staff at the ready in case there was a need for him. Jacob was watching, a tankard of beer in hand. He always had one in the morning, and he was never able to get drunk with it. James was probably reading one of the books he'd peddled for, knowing him.

"Oof!" Alaine bumped into a body, falling back in surprise.

"Easy there, boss," a strong hand gripped her forearm, catching her and pulling the mercenary back from her lean. Verana smiled before turning back to look at the breath-taking view. Her wyvern was flying lazily in the currents around the stronghold.

"Thanks," Alaine said, smiling softly.

Let's see, that accounts for... nine out of... right, we've got a new one. Eleven. Alaine thought as she continued around the wall. Terris and Pandora. My fellow fugitives.

#
"Okay, let me see," Terris was saying, smiling. She was showing Pandora some of her experiments. She picked up a vial filled with what looked like a black thundercloud. "I call this one 'Storm in a Bottle.' It's supposed to contain a storm within it, but all I can manage is a bunch of black fog. I just don't have that much power, I think," she pouted, looking at the bottle.

The dark mage looked over to her desk, her expression brightening. She picked up seven flat bits of hardened parchment. "I did succeed in putting a magic spell in these cards, though. The spells aren't that powerful, but they're for the non-magic-oriented. They can cast a spell through this, and once they do, their opponent should be surprised enough that they'll be blindsided, see?"

#
"Is that a Wyvern?" the man walking at the head of the column asked, holding out a hand for his spyglass. His assistant held it out and he closed his fingers around it, extended it, and looked at the beast. He was faintly surprised to find that it was. "Probably a stray. We are near the border," he muttered, putting the spyglass in the waiting hand of his assistant before starting to walk again.

"Lieutenant, how much longer until we can see the fort you spoke of?"

"Should be maybe half an hour, sir. And another ten minutes or so from when we see it to when we'll be in its gates."

"Good. The faster we get there, the quicker we can see to the defense of our people." The column of soldiers continued up the mountainside.

It had only been a little while, but the young girl known as Pandora actually found herself slowly becoming comfortable around the other mercenaries, especially around Terris. Perhaps her unusual expectations for behavior played in their favor, but in her eyes, a step up was a step up, and at least they didn't seem to judge her for who and what she was. That's always good.

Her less than gradual warming to Terris wasn't entirely unwarranted: Terris was kind, gentle, enthusiastic about her work, and unlike so many before her, didn't continually make mistakes concerning the way Pandora learned. Intentional or not, Pandora was learning more just watching Terris work than she had from every other attempt at teaching her before figuring out how she learned.

"Storm in a Bottle...?"

Pandora tilted her head somewhat quizzically, trying to take a closer look at the vial of what was supposedly just black fog. Her attention span wasn't exactly the best, though, and when Terris showed her the magic cards, she was easily enough distracted by those to forget about asking to get a closer look at the vial. Shiny magical things that she could actually understand because they were explained to her were something she took interest in. "Woah..." Looking at the cards for a while, weaving about to see them from different angles, she eventually asked the question that anyone would probably want to know. "How'd you get the spells to stay in there like that?" She'd heard of enchanted items before, but she'd never actually seen one...

Terris was glad Pandora took an interest in her things. She saw her glancing at the vial before being distracted by the spell cards. "Let me see... I chanted the incantation while I was suffusing the card with magic, but I left off the final syllable. That syllable can be replaced by the press of a thumb. Of course, the card needs to be facing the target, and it should preferably be held by someone without their own magic. Otherwise, it could explode."

Terris grinned sheepishly. "And I haven't perfected it yet; sometimes it explodes anyway."

She handed the imperfect Storm in a Bottle to Pandora, having noticed her interest. "There's supposed to be lightning, wind, and rain inside, too, but the fog's all my powers can produce now." She pulled an empty vial from the shelf. "I was going to make another, but I only just finished the preparations. The crystal needs to be reinforced before it can hold any spells, and the stopper needs to have a charm to set a spell in stasis. After that, a spell just needs to be cast inside of it and stoppered before it goes off.

"Wanna try it?"

#
Alaine sat on the edge of the wall, looking at Aoife and Naoise's sparring match watching intently. They were just about even in terms of skill, but Osney was running the match with a different intent than just them fighting each other. Aoife was to block all of her sister's attacks, with the goal of improving her defenses. Naoise's goal was twinfold: to be able to attack without pause, and to be able to see openings in her sister's defense.

Naoise's attack pattern was sloppy, but there were fewer pauses in it, Alaine thought. Aoife was barely managing to keep up her defense, and Naoise could see that. She knocked Aoife's practice sword away and brought her own up before her sister could recover. The wooden sword hit Aoife's elbow.

Both of them dropped their swords and clutched their right elbows, though Naoise seemed to be in less pain.

"Good showing, I think," said Osney, stepping forward and blocking Torvald's approach. "Let me see that, Aoife." He held her arm, examining it quickly. With great care, he stretched it out, and then quickly twisted it one way, then back around. "Ah, there we go. Your elbow popped out of socket for a second. How's it feel now?"

"Better. Almost like new," Aoife said, a shaky smile adorning her face. She hastily retrieved her practice sword, as did Naoise.

"Now, Naoise, you've managed to shorten the pauses between your attacks, and I think you are beginning to see the holes that can form in a defense," Osney began, critiquing the girls. "However, your attacks are sloppy at best, your center of balance is not centered, and you're footwork is atrocious.

"Aoife, you have managed to improve your defenses, and you also managed to maintain your center of balance fairly well. But, you flinched, and in so doing, closed your eyes. Naoise was able to take advantage because you couldn't see. Even a second of blindness is too much to give an opponent."

"Yes, sir," the girls sulked beneath the criticism.

"Cheer up," the armored man told them. "You did well, both of you. Tomorrow, we'll do the reverse exercise. Now, go and eat. Jacob's probably got lunch nearly ready." The girls left.

Alaine pushed off the wall, landing heavily fifteen feet down. "Oof. Well. That was a show," Alaine smirked, rising from her crouch. "Who's next, daddy dearest?"

The grizzled man looked at her over his shoulder, his grey eye highlighted between two dark locks of hair. "You are, little daughter. You've been neglecting your training, and that little stunt you pulled at Ashendale was a fool's gamble. You ought to have known better than to rush into that without a healer."

"Oooh, punishment round," Torvald smiled, rubbing his hands together. "Bets?"

James came out of his and Terris's room, a book in his hand, declaring, "Twenty on Osney."

"Fifty on Alaine," Verana announced, thoroughly interested now.

"Thirty on Osney," Toby called from the tower.

Alaine picked up a blunt practice blade as her step-father picked up a wooden lance.

Pandora spent a little longer examining the cards, though not daring to touch them lest they explode, before the distraction went back the other way as she was handed the Storm in a Bottle vial. Looking closely at the bottle while listening to what was inside (and what should have been but wasn't), her attention was once more diverted by the thought of having one of these bottles containing a spell of her own. But which one would she pick?

Sure, she was something of a shameless improviser when it came to developing her magical arsenal, but that didn't mean she could afford to just pick randomly. It should be something worth bottling. Ideally something that wouldn't be a near guarantee to kill them if something exploded. That'd mark two off the list.

Looking for a moment back at the already finished spell vial, a slight bit of inspiration struck. A storm needs lightning, wind, rain, and fog. The existing vial had fog, and she could provide the lightning or the wind easily enough. That said, the lightning spell she had in mind was an old favorite, so it'd likely have been a better choice than one that was still being tested. Besides, if they threw both at once, wouldn't they have something close enough to a thundercloud?

"...okay."

Waiting for Terris to be ready before the process could begin, because there was no way she was going through this blindly on her own if she even could, Pandora began the incantation for the crackling orb known to her as Black Soul Thunder. Thing is, trying to constrain that thing's blast radius was difficult, and trying to cram it small enough to fit in the vial...

Well, it's not known for its stability in cases like that, to put it lightly.

BOOM!

Alaine heard the sound of an explosion behind her as a door was blown off its hinges. She ducked as she turned, and was unsurprised to see a door fly over her head. Osney barely moved as the door smacked him, but he was a rockhead anyway. Terris emerged from the doorway, Pandora in tow, as black fog began to spread from the doorway. Light flashed from inside as the fog began to spread.

James ran to Terris as she laughed nervously. "Ah heh... perhaps that was a bit much?"

"Terriiis," Alaine whined. The fog quickly covered the inside of the fort. She thought she heard a "sorry" come from somewhere in the fog, but she couldn't see who said it. She could barely see ten feet in front of her.

#
"Well, the vial's not broken, but the enchantment is distempered," James announced, handing the vial back to Terris. "What were you trying to do?"

"You know that Storm in a Bottle I've been working on?" Terris asked timidly, pressing her pointer fingers together as a blush came to her cheeks. "I was going to try and put two spells in this one, one from me, and one from Pandora. It didn't quite work out how I wanted it to."

She smiled sheepishly as her face turned an amusing shade of red.

As probably should have been expected, control of the lightning sphere at that size got a little too difficult, and the orb shattered, spewing lightning everywhere, in addition to the fog from the Storm in a Bottle. Pandora's initial response was to hide behind something solid, just in case. That worked well enough as far as keeping herself from getting shocked was concerned, though she did have to wave the fog out of her face. Pfeh.

Chances were they'd both be in trouble for this, something that she assumed would become obvious when Alaine called in after Terris in a voice implying 'what did you dooooooo'. For caution's sake, she tossed out a "Sorry!" response, though she might not have been the only one to think of that.

It took a little while before the fog cleared enough that people could meet and figure out what happened, but once James had revealed the problem and Terris had explained the sequence of events, Pandora shrunk back, trying to make herself seem as small as she felt right then.

"It's... it's my fault. I should have known that spell would be bad for this." Then in a tone more squeak than speak, "...please don't hurt me..."

"Hurt you?" James repeated, shock coming over his features.

"It's okay, Pandora," Terris said, kneeling in front of the little dark mage. That terrified look had returned. What had happened to this girl? The woman could not imagine what sort of abuse would bring about this reaction. "It's okay. Mistakes don't matter here. You aren't going to get punished. Besides, the fog is my spell."

After regaining his composure, James nodded, crossing his arms. Comfort for the girl was in order. "After all, it was an accident. Not the first, and assuredly not the last that we'll have. I don't even think this is the worst, is it sugarplum?"

"Nope. That would be when I broke the wall by the cliff in the pantry," Terris said, her blush from earlier returning full force. As her cheeks passed the color beet, she was interrupted. "And that's why..."

"That is why Jacob is the cook," Alaine said, emerging from the fog. "And speaking of that, I think lunch is ready. Steaks from Riverton, I believe..." The mercenary walked back into the fog, her mouth watering. "Come on, you three. Lunch in the dark."

#
"What was that noise?" the commander asked, turning his head. His vision looked upwards, near where the small fortress was supposed to be. He thought he'd heard a 'boom.' Just a piece of debris falling? "Did it come from the fortress?" he mumbled. "Lieutenant, this fortress, has it been occupied by anyone in the past few years?"

The soldier looked up at the captain and responded, "Well, the deed to the land, and therefore the fort as well, was sold to an ex-soldier after the war, since it had fallen into disrepair and was no longer going to be used. The locals around here also say that there is a company of mercenaries holed up there. They're supposedly benevolent, but from what I've heard of some of their jobs, I think it's an image they cultivate."

"Jobs like what?" the commander asked, brows drawing down into a frown.

"Well, one in particular involved, I think, an unauthorized border crossing, another caused a bit of trouble with the Customs Officials in one town...," she began to list off some things.

"So, they're not afraid to go against the wishes of the crown, is that it?" He asked, drawing a few conclusions about the group already. "Not afraid to dirty their hands, then. Anything else?"

"Well, did you hear about Ashendale? It's that ruined place we passed through this morning. Apparently, the company evacuated the whole town, for free," the woman reported. "PR control, I think, but you know me."

"For free, hm? Interesting...," the man said, his mouth quirking into a lopsided smile.

The tension in the little mage's body visibly faded once the revelation that she wouldn't be punished for that mistake came up. That was a welcome reprieve from the norm, or as far as she was aware the norm was. Not the norm for the mercenary group, of course, but she hadn't been with them long enough to understand all the differences between them and what she was used to yet.

Terris's supposed worst mistake probably would have been more amusing to Pandora if mistakes held any sort of humor value for the little mage. As such, all it provoked was an awkward glance aside, trying to imagine said mistake.

Alaine's emergence from the fog, the cloud of which had evidently wafted in the direction of wherever they would be having lunch that day, drew Pandora's attention away from mistakes and toward the promise of food. Steak would be somewhat fancier than she was used to, but that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Just one more thing to get used to.

Sparing an idle glance off in the direction of downhill, she spaced out for a few seconds, well aware that there was nothing to see there from inside, but still looking nonetheless. Shaking herself out of her trance, she set her worries for the moment aside with a shrug, running along to catch up with the others. Probably just an idle premonition...

"Hey, boss, come up here. You need to see this!" came Toby's voice from the lookout.

Alaine twitched and immediately her mouth began running, "SonofabitchjustwhenIhavethechancetoenjoygoodfood..." She clenched her fists as she left, her grumbling growing unintelligible as her eyebrow and mouth pulled down into a scowl. Exiting the dining hall, she nearly didn't see the stairs in the fog still blanketing the inside of the fort, but she had lived here long enough to recall their place.

"What the fuck is it, Toby?" she asked, thoroughly annoyed.

The archer, however, did not pay any attention to her anger, and that in itself caught her attention. He was peering down the cliff. "White flashes behind the trees." The mercenary joined him at the edge, looking for them. "There," he pointed.

Light glanced off something in the trees, but Alaine couldn't make out what it was. It wasn't natural, but who was it? "Risen?" she asked, all business now.

"Possibly, but if it is, it's more than we can handle," Toby replied, "And more organized than I think they know how to be." He glanced in several directions, and then back to where he'd been looking. "As far as I can tell, whoever it is is following the path to the front gate. We can be ready for them before they get here if we hurry."

"Right. I'll bring you a quick bite once I give them the word," Alaine agreed.

#
"Up and at 'em, boys and girls. Something is nearing us, and we need to be ready when they get here," Alaine strode back into the dining hall and delivering the news. "Verana, call Amdusas out of the skies and into the courtyard. Torvald, ready your staves. Aoife, Naoise, get your swords, and then make damn sure that gate is locked. Os, you're with Verana in the courtyard. Terris and Pandora, behind them. James, you're on the walls with me, and Jacob, toss me a couple little steaks. I'm going light today."

The atmosphere changed the moment those orders were given. Once she had a steak, Alaine sank her teeth into it as she walked briskly back to Toby, carrying his steak with her.

While steak might not be that fancy to most, it was still more than little Pandora was used to, and she spent a disproportionate amount of time prodding it with a fork and looking at it strangely like she wasn't sure it was real. This behavior might have been amusing to her dining partners, but if so, she wasn't sure why.

She still wasn't speaking much to anyone, shy girl that she was. She only really knew Alaine, Terris, and James around here; everyone else was too much of an unknown to risk it. That said, when Alaine entered the dining hall and delivered the news that something was coming, followed by the inferrence that it might potentially be hostile and they should be ready for combat, Pandora was actually relieved, and one could see it in her posture, as her until-now hunched shoulders suddenly relaxed.

The change of venue from socializing, something she had little to no clue how to do, to potential combat, which was something she knew a whole lot more about despite her age, seemed to have calmed her for some reason. If such an attitude was actually considered normal among users of dark magic, it's no surprise the practice was so feared outside Plegia.

Looking around the dining hall, Pandora tried to locate Terris, murmuring an incantation or two under her breath as she searched as a sort of advance preparation just in case. If they were going to be partners for this, they'd have to find each other first...

Thankfully, the dark fog inside the fort was clearing up. Now it was 'moonlit night' dark as opposed to 'closed off room' dark. Alaine called to the archer and tossed him his lunch, claiming his spot on the watcher's nest while he ate hurriedly. The flashes seemed to have been glinting off the pauldrons of soldiers. They'd come into full view soon. The mercenary ripped another bite of the steak off what was in her hand, chewing voraciously.

She began to hear the marching drums. A small army, then? Or a contingent of one?

#
"Ah, Pandora, this way," Terris said, gesturing for the girl to follow her just outside the door. Verana was astride her wyvern with an ax in one hand and the reins in the other, and Osney stood next to them, his heavy shield and spear at the ready. James was just finishing the climb upstairs, and in front of Osney and Verana, Aoife and Naoise set a long, heavy wooden latch in place. Standing to the side of the wyvern was Torvald, who had set aside being a lech at the moment. There were other things to worry about.

#
"Hm. I think they know we're coming," the man in the lead remarked with raised eyebrows. "The wyvern's landed."

Alaine watched with a mix of apprehension and anger as a sizable regiment halted marching thirty feet away from her front door. A man with longish brown hair and wearing a mix of armor and robes approached, his authority palpable. "Hail, mercenary. To whom do I make audience?" His off-hand sat on his sword, and there was a book opposite that.

"I am Alaine, head of Alaine's Mercenaries and owner of this fort. Who are you, and why do you invade my lawn?" the redhead fired back.

"I am Captain Harold of his Majesty Exalt Chrom's Army. I've been ordered to fortify the border holdings, and this fort was once numbered among our own. As such, I am to take it and make of it a defense," the man answered, frowning.

"You what?!" Alaine's eye widened, before her face settled into a scowl. "I'm sorry, but you're not welcome here. Get lost."

"I can and will provide ample--"

"I said get lost! You don't understand what this place means to me. To us. Nothing you could compensate us with would assuage what we would lose."

"You are losing it whether you receive compensation or not. Will you willingly let go of the fort, or must I be forced to drive you out of it?" The man was now scowling as well.

"I am not going to lose my home! Never again!" Alaine raged. She'd seen just about enough.

"Then I am sorry, Alaine. Enjoy your afterlife as you will," he replied somberly. He turned and walked back. Alaine heard him say, "Shoot her." The archer corps behind the front line of soldiers all drew their arrows at once. Tobias and James were faster, however, and got off the first shots. A fireball exploded in between four archers, catching them all aflame and knocking them over, while a fifth fell to the ground, an arrow in his knee. Unfortunately for them, fifteen remained.

Alaine ducked the shots, vaulting down to the courtyard.

Osney frowned. "That could've gone better," he groused, ducking as the arrows fell beyond him.

"No time, Os," Alaine growled, drawing her icy sword.