The battle worn spirits of the 900th did as promised – held the line as the 51st retreated into the Calceran foothills. Under the cover of the woodland east of the ranch, they were able to slip out of the harrowed land around the tear into the demonic homeland; a challenge for another time.
They were already deep in the Calceran foothills when the question of direction became unavoidable, having aimlessly walked for days just to flee. They paused to consider their next steps.
Smoothing out the map upon an outcropping of stone, the cartographers pored over their options. North appeared to be the obvious answer, at first. However, Senior Tamerlane sombrely reminded them that Coaleigh had been the first Jaegerhaus to fall, between here and there was bound to be a mess of consumed and demons not worth battling through, just to get to a lost cause.
It was the same issue to the south – Puente de Piedra. Two Jaegerhauses, gone. Somewhere in that number were names they knew, faces from training, seniors who had signed their papers and pressed the raven skull insignia into their hands. No one could bring themselves to say it aloud after that.
The decision was made to push east.
In doing so, the 51st entered the first village after leaving Cartos, where they were met with the soulless consumed husks of its inhabitants – young and old – who reached out with clawing fingers and yawning mouths, agape with husky pleas to put them out of their misery. The Jaeger fought them off, granting their desired ends and placing them upon pyres to quickly lay their bodies to rest – for Senior Reinhardt reminded them that there was no time for proper burials and rites.
Maester Marcos rejoined the 51st after hanging back at the base camp, successfully infiltrating to recover the radio and return it to the regiment. They tuned in every few hours, in the hopes of receiving better news. The distorted cries of those lost were all that transmitted across the airwaves that they can’t quite understand. He kept notes, but did not share his conclusions. The radio offered nothing new in the days that followed. Senior Arthur kept winding it forward regardless, as though the next frequency might be the one that answered back.
Demons lingered at their tails like scavengers. They were waiting for those too injured or too weak to keep up with the rest of the herd. If the regiment waited in one place for too long, they knew they would fall victim to their new entourage.
Despite that, as they passed desiccated and razed farmsteads and hamlets, they found solace in places expected; a chapel at the boundary of a burning orchard, untouched by the cinders falling all around it. Residing within, a single priest who had made his peace with being the last one left standing. He offered them tea from the last of his stores and kept the candles burning through the night.
In the midst of a dangerous battle against the consumed, the Paladins give their most resounding sermons, bolstering those of faith by blessing their weapons as they cleave through the consumed.
They also found rest in places most unexpected. A milk parlour, impossibly intact, where the surviving milk maids continued their routines with the steadiness of people who had decided that to keep working was the only available option. The 51st ate what was offered and did not ask about the others who were missing. They left at first light, before the shapes that had followed them in from the road could finish deciding what to do about the walls.
Later, a windmill, where the miller and his family bolted the door behind the regiment and would not unbolt it until full daylight. The miller’s youngest daughter had not spoken in days. No one asked why, no one needed to.
A pattern was beginning to emerge, it appeared that the consumed did not take all as some of the 51st had feared. The common theme from the priest, milk maids and millers were piety and old superstition, like the charm belonging to great-grand mama resting above the lintel. Whether any of it was true did not matter as much as the fact that the survivors believed it was the only explanation.
But there were also villages that had not fallen, or not yet. Barricades of overturned carts and salvaged timber held the consumed at bay. Pale figures watched from shuttered windows as they passed by, and none came out to speak to them. Raw survival instinct, stripped back to its oldest form, and it was hard to fault. The regiment cleared the consumed who hammered on their makeshift defences for them before pressing on.
During one battle, Sister Ursula is struck down by Greater Demons, and the 51st struggle to reach them. As they lay bleeding, they see a glimmer of the end – but it is not the end, it is the holy, righteous fire of the newly minted Nephilim banishing the fiends from this plane.
As the 51st continued to push east, it would not be long before the shadow of the Karaulik Forest would be upon them. From the foothills, they could see it ahead of them. A dark and dense smudge upon the horizon.
The scavengers behind them had diminished some, having likely found easier prey along the way, but not yet entirely gone. It was a quiet reminder that they needed to keep moving.
There had been other moments, harder to account for. The forces that had stood beside them at their lowest points in the weeks prior, Adonael, the Fateweaver, He of Many Faces, the Fae Lord, had not vanished entirely. They appeared at the edges of the worst of it, offering what they had promised without demand or consequence. The 51st accepted what was given and did not ask questions, knowing that they were not in a position to refuse.
Within camp, the strangeness had found them too.
One night the Viscountess was simply gone, her tent found with a doorway drawn in blood on the floor. The crossroads coven appeared to be involved, but offered no explanation. The regiment sealed them inside of the tent, suspecting foul play. However, upon the following morning the priests went to investigate and found the Viscountess and the coven taking tea together among the reappeared library of the 51st, as though nothing of consequence had occurred.
Even more suspiciously on separate mornings, Owain Merryck and Tamerlane were each found buried outside the edges of camp, alive and unharmed, with no explanation forthcoming. No one pushed the matter further, as there were larger things to attend to.
As they pushed further east across Calcera, the radio started to pick up a stronger signal – this time from Dolchzahnfurt, far away in Verda. There was something profoundly disorienting about learning what was happening right around the corner from somewhere so distant, as if Calcera had already slipped out of reach and the world had moved on without them. Beneath the distortion and the crying, fragments of the same story came from different directions. People were holding on, just not in any way that could last. The picture it painted of Bevany was fragmented and strange. Towns and cities had fared worse than the villages, the consumed spreading faster through crowded streets and close quarters.
Yet certain places had held, inexplicably. In Montbury, the whole city right up to its boundaries appeared untouched, word filtering through of an inn that had appeared overnight in the centre of town, sturdy and warmly lit as though it had always stood there, those sheltering within its walls calling it the Wooden Doll. No one could say with confidence what it was or who had put it there, only that the city around it remained whole.
In Bevanish Siresia and Tarquinian Agiz, it was the graveyards that had become surprising sanctuaries, with a mausoleum that appeared overnight in each place but looked as if established for centuries – but whose names were indistinct and illegible to those who went to investigate. A stillness spread outward from them to the very edges of each city that the consumed would not cross.
Where organised forces had managed to hold the consumed to something resembling a standstill, the full moon had ended that. On those nights the horns came first, echoing out across the dark from no direction anyone could name, and by morning there was nothing left of those brave lines but silence. It was The Wild Hunt, some said, though they said it quietly and others refused to believe it.
It was General Lucien who ranged ahead more often than not, reading the terrain before the rest and calling back warnings with an accuracy that had started to draw quiet comment among the seniors, as twice he had turned the regiment from a road before the ambush waiting on it had had a chance to spring. When asked how he had known, he offered nothing more than instinct and experience, and none pressed him in the interest of safe passage.
The Karaulik sat in the imagination of everyone who had grown up in Calcera as a place where the trees grew too close together, sprites would coax the unwary from the path with soft lights and softer sounds, deeper and deeper into the dark until the trees swallowed them whole. The legends of lycanthropes were old and embedded into the culture and history of the nation, emerging only to snatch the innocent and warp them into something dark and feral to add to their pack.
On the other side of the Karaulik, Villa Rossa awaited them. The seniors knew that it was the most likely place an emergency outpost would have been established, and the most likely place where they could finally restore their supplies and rearm themselves.
They would move carefully, and quietly. Together, they would come out the other side.
As they approached the great forest, they found solace in the arms of an old, abandoned hunting lodge. Its dusty, rusted signage on the gate welcomed them to Santuario De La Luna.
