Fanfic

The sight from the window made Dom smile. Hardy battle veterans were in the thick of the rural life, mucking in with eager energy. Wiry teens and female dressed simply, looking to all appearances like helpless refugees sheltering in the poorly defended castle. The walls were crumbling, the gate was rusty, they had no mages and the men at arms were almost non-existent.
Animals ran wild; the courtyard was a mess with hay and other litter.
Strangely enough, for a refugee camp of the helpless, the youngest of the inhabitants were about seventeen.
With a pang of sorrow, Dom reached out for a hand that was not there. Shutting off those thoughts, he made his way to somewhere his body could be of use and his brain could be asleep.

Neal wandered the wards, assuring himself he had done all he could. He wished once more that Laila was there; she could manage an infirmary with an air of calm that was beyond him.
But no. For reasons of security, Laila and her brother � the noble whose fief he now occupied � were safe in the capital. Laila was the only healer permitted near the royal baby with the threat of attack and assassination so high at the moment. Neal understood � Scanra was fragile, and so to lose all of it�s leaders would be catastrophic. Laila and Caul hadn�t wanted to go, but had seen reason with �persuasion�.
So Laila fidgeted in the capital, caring for a healthy, if premature, month old baby who had gurgled and laughed all the way through a dragon�s spiral spell. Shaking his head, Neal knew that the child wouldn�t be an ordinary royal.

Maggur watched Laila gently pull her magic from the child. Biting back a grin, he remembered his wife�s proud verdict � �Small, but perfectly formed.�
They had all been stunned when the child had been examined for magic and discovered to be just as strong, if not stronger, than the mother. The same frost white shone from the cradle even now in the bright globes above it that a small hand toyed with. Already those hands and eyes loved to watch the fire in the hearth, as though seeing something no one else could.
After a month of dithering and confusion, and after myriad suggestions with all types of meanings, they still hadn�t settled on a name.
With his thoughts with those in danger, the young Scanran King went to his newborn.

The castle was filled with tense waiting. They knew he was coming, but could do nothing but wait behind the Ekino walls. Watching the horizon, Dom waited on the signal.
A black, oversized hawk wheeled into view from the west, closely followed by a falcon from the north. Landing, or sprawling in the hawk�s case, a waiting attendant draped a cloak over the exhausted birds. Under these scant covers, one the same blue as the chill sky overhead, the other midnight black, they shifted until a smoky haired young woman and a much taller mage stood gingerly to their feet before being bustled away for food and heat.
Turning his attention back to the land before him, Dom thought of the others. Raoul waited in the woods with the cavalry, Buri the irregular cavalry. He watched as the winter sun bounced off many steel domes and sharp edges. Suddenly afraid, Dom watched as possible over a hundred killing machines ploughed through the snow towards the castle.
Fighting his fear, Dom forced himself to walk to the northern side of the wall. He stood alone staring at the approaching devices, this time accompanied by two men on horses � one tiny and the other tall. Dom froze, something inside him almost running at the scene. More than ever, he desperately wished she was with him.
�A nightmare and his dog,� a soft voice whispered in his mind with scorn, carrying the reassuring feel of a hot fire.
For the first time in days, Dom smiled honestly and fully. Although Giftless, he could reply through the link that had been forged by Old One�s magic between them. �You shouldn�t do that, love.�
A laugh that warmed him rang in his mind. �I know,� she said impishly. �And I do have to go now, but I just had to drop in. Stay safe, if you get yourself killed I will never speak to you again!�
Dom sent a laugh down the connection in reply. He didn�t speak again, but sent a wordless rush of feelings and felt it returned. With regret, the blaze in his mind retreated leaving an echo of a fire to keep him company.
Breaking his paralysis, Dom turned to the others on the wall and shook the man who held a forgotten horn in his limp hand. The soldier looked at it numbly, then shook his own head and blew the signal.
The �peasants� in the castle dropped everything and ran to the ramparts, shedding the thick overcoats and cloaks. Beneath them they did not wear simple peasant clothes.
Riders in bright orange, men of the Own in burnished blue and silver and Scanran troops in white flooded onto their places, pulling bows as they went. Already, magical signs were being received from the forest groups.
Within minutes, Blayce and Stenmun did not face a helpless fief full of vulnerable women and children, but a fortified castle ready with many warriors. Not that they knew, of course, that all their prey were currently enjoying royal hospitality.
As the first devices to the west fell into trapping pits and concealed ditches � far from the eyes of Blayce � the mages began to emerge. Waiting until as many of the machines were in the traps as possible, Dom raised his hand with a grim nod to his green-eyed cousin.
Quick and clean, Dom�s arm slashed through the air as a wall of rainbow fire erupted from the pits. How could the machines know that those pits had been filled with barrels upon barrels of blazebalm and anything else that would explode?
Even compressed flour from the kitchens had been buried, with fairly dramatic results.
To the north, Dom saw the archers begin to fire countless rounds of magicked crossbow bolts at the advancing metal army. The culled them row after row, but they seemed endless. Blayce had chosen to remain out of range, watching his army march into a hailstorm of bolts and mage blasts.
The archers were losing ground � the machines were advancing, some reaching the castle walls. Which, although they looked as though a mild breeze would topple them, were in actual fact reinforced with the strongest materials and spells two kingdoms could provide.
Yet still they crawled up the edges, only for the archers to draw swords, axes and nets to push them back down. Dodging the claws of a machine, Dom called to Neal to put out the call.
A bright flare of emerald grew and grew above the castle, the sound of hooves galloping through the trees, then suddenly the cavalry burst through the tree line and straight into the army of machines.
It was quick and brutal from then, for both sides. No one could be said to have won, although the humans obliterated the machines until not a single one �lived.� Not the titanic battle it had seemed to be, a distinct anticlimax, Dom thought as he helped carry the wounded and dead to the infirmary.
When he said that to the grizzled Brookwell, he simply smiled and told him �that was the point of all the planning,� whilst looking at him as though he was a child.
That peculiar prickling sensation tickled the back of Dom�s neck. Whirling around, he saw two horses gallop away from the battlefield. No, it can�t be� why can I see them?
Then he remembered. During a raid in a town called Owls hollow, Daine and Numair had found a baby griffin. Neal had made a band of it�s moulted feathers and given it to Dom as a Midwinter gift � to see through cloaking and illusions.
Briskly, Dom called for his horse. He still wore his armour and sword, but he was a little below top condition from the battle. Stenmun was the type that every little mattered.
Then he looked inside himself to that blaze and found his determination. He owed it to them.

They galloped, pushing their mortal horses as fast as they possibly could. From behind himself, Iorwyn heard the sound of a horse also being pushed to its limit. He looked at Stenmun, the mortal who had proved useful. Could he be useful again?
Stenmun dismounted and sent his mount to the far side of the small clearing and silently climbed a low branch at it�s edge. He nodded to Iorwyn and closed his eyes, listening to the beat of the pursuing gallop.
Iorwyn turned without regret or a care for the mortal he left behind. Galloping through the trees, aiming to put as much distance between him and the avenging men, he remembered all the men he had known and faced in his long history.
His name was an irony � in truth, he was nameless. Iorwyn was �fair lord� in a lost tongue that was spoken in antiquity, and given by an ignorant who thought him a god.
Fury laced through him � he should have been a god! Not that- that Hag! His sister dearest, both created in the very beginning by one of the original great gods of humanity, the Black God. Unfortunately, his appetite for souls had been more vigorous than his father�s, who had sought to unmake him.
And the oh-so cowled one told him Iorwyn had made mistakes?! Had he ever destroyed an era of a world? No, but daddy�s little experiment resulted in a world covered in fire � nature had been most �displeased.� The youthful Gods had learned that nature did not like people � be they divine or mortal � altering her balance.
In another irony, after the death of almost every mortal on the planet, Iorwyn had survived � in a manner of speaking. He was something in between, a shade of life and death.
Through his years of wandering, he had watched the world � and hated everything in it, from the blade of grass to the highest mountains. Then he had found out about his sister.
The Graveyard Hag gets an entire country and to be a goddess, but he � the first of the children of the gods � was doomed to never ending limbo.
Shaking away the confusion, he rode on, remembering when a young boy had stumbled into his hiding place and fallen on top of him. Both the blonde teen and the shade had been as surprised as the other when he had found himself in the Scanran boy�s mind.
After a moment of uncertainty, he made his choice and felt his soul change into something darker. He fed his appetites, most unsavoury, through his vessel. Bloodshed, pain.. he sowed them as his father reaped souls.
It was another irony, Iorwyn thought with morbid humour, that his tastes kept his father busy. He really did owe it to him, as a son, to help with the family business of death. And he had in his reach the ultimate death, within this Nothing Man.
The forests flashing before his eyes, Iorwyn enjoyed again the feeling of smoothly taking control of first the peasant and then his country. Now he ran like a fugitive. He had the magic, in this non-descript, sniveling coward�s body, to end it all.
Maybe he was being childish. Maybe he did hold a grudge a little long. Maybe he didn�t care if he did.
The necromancer known as Blayce was his pass to freedom, a release from limbo. The fact that he would also doom every inhabitant of every other realm didn�t concern Iorwyn, it simply added the icing to what was becoming an increasingly sweet desert.
The trees were thinning, and the sky was deepening to the steady grey that passed for night this far north. It would never be totally dark due to the display of lights in the aurora and the moon and of course the starlight. Inside it just seemed to be colourless, bleached.

Dom slowed his horse and quietly dismounted. Walking below the trees that led to a small clearing, he made no sound in his chain armour � plate was much too heavy.
Walking under a low branch, Dom grabbed the reaching arm and pulled Stenmun from his perch, drawing his sword at the same time.
The Scanran mercenary drew a broadsword from the shrubs below the tree and brought it into a two-handed guard position.
Dom carefully watched his chest for the tell-tale sign of his next move. It came, and the two blades met with a ringing clash.
The two opponents broke off and circled each other warily, the mercenary looking into blue eyes colder than the bitter sky above them.

The horse gave out, its knees buckling and sinking to the frozen forest floor. In the distance he heard the ringing sound of steel on steel. Deciding not to waste time killing the beast, Iorwyn ran into the clearing.
He tripped over a tree root.
In that bleached night, the world had no colour. The long grass seemed grey, the poppies of the field a deep black. Dim light was everywhere, but with no source.
Suddenly, Iorwyn froze. Hesitantly, he looked up. Two pillars seemed to be silhouetted against the velvet sky. Not pillars, he thought as he stood. Not silhouetted, he thought as they blazed with colour, almost blinding the shade in that shadowy land.
One flamed the colour of the brightest torch, the other a purer white than the moon.
As they slowly turned to face him, faces impassive, the only sound was that of crossed blades in the woods.