Peter began his day with morning exercise, followed by a patrol along the top of the wall. He'd spent yesterday helping settle evacuees in their designated places, and this was a welcome relief. He liked to fight, not deal with normal people. If an attack were to happen soon, he would much rather be on the front lines than deep in the city with the women and children.
He was sixteen. A man! A soldier! Maybe not the tallest yet, but he could still grow some more.
The books of war he had read as a child had made it seem full of glory and duty. The rush of adrenaline he felt during a good spar felt like fuel to his soul. He was made for this, and now war might be on their doorstep soon.
He didn't want to be in the shadows if and when that happened. He needed to be in the midst of the action.
Looking out across the foothills surrounding the city, he saw nothing other than the rise and fall of the landscape. Looking down along the wall, nothing except the stones of Klain's defenses occasionally interrupted by a wooden door concealing places for archers, large fixed crossbows, and other siege-repellant measures.
He continued vigilantly searching as he walked. If there were something to see, he wanted to be the first to spot it.
Reaching the end of his designated route, he saluted the soldier who met him, and then they both turned back to back to march in opposite directions. The top of the wall was thus guarded in its entirety.
They were to sound the alarm for anything unusual or remotely concerning, but nothing had happened thus far. At first he had wondered what could be considered unusual. At this point, his duty had been so uneventful that even the sight of a bird or squirrel could potentially qualify as out of the ordinary.
It was a relief that the evacuees were all in the city. Fighting a battle now with only one place to defend would surely be much easier than trying to defend a moving caravan of civilians as they got inside the walls. They also could seal the city in its entirety now, boosting defensive capability.
Roving his eyes again across the horizon, and then closer, he still saw nothing. This waiting was aggravating. Couldn't Rhone just get to it, now that they were prepared? He sighed. War did not seem to move on a set schedule, at least, not a tight one so far.
He did not allow himself to relax, even though the likelihood of anything happening here seemed low. The wall was high, and the river cut a path between it and the hills surrounding the city. Of course, there was no particularly good place to attack Klain; you either had to deal with the lake, or the river, or somehow try and attack from the cliffs far above the city. None were practical.
He looked down the length of the wall again and something caught his eye. Below, and a short distance away, across the water, a lone figure stood. It was a woman, standing with a curved bow, arrows on her back. Where had she come from?
She was tall, and thin, in a long sand-colored gown that contrasted with her white hair. Her eyes looked soulless somehow, even from a distance. She raised her bow as she drew something from her quiver. She was facing him as she nocked the arrow. This was very odd indeed.
"Get down! Enemy archer!" He cried.
A single female archer was no threat to Klain. Even with extraordinary aim, she could only down one man at a time, and would be quickly dispatched herself if she attempted an attack. Was she a distraction, then?
A horn blew the signal of the enemy's presence, and soldiers flooded to his section of the wall.
They were missing something, Peter could feel it. He hoped the battle plan included plenty of lookouts in case something like this were a diversion. As the archers took their places on the wall, he backed away to take up a secondary support position. He was not particularly skilled with ranged weapons, and was a little disappointed that this single enemy would be easily taken down before he had any part in the skirmish.
Looking past the archers, he saw the woman aim and let her arrow fly.
It fell far short of hitting any of the people on the top of the wall, lodging about halfway up the vertical surface between two stones. A couple of Klain's archers laughed at her. She smiled at their mirth.
A second later, chaos erupted like a volcano. A sound greater than an earthquake accompanied the entire wall shifting beneath his feet. It rocked and began crumbling.
He scrambled along it away from the epicenter of the destruction, struggling to maintain a place on top of the wall instead of beneath its mighty stones. His mad sprint paid off as his feet found a more stable place to pause, turn, and reach to pull up others who were attempting to climb to safety.
Lifting them took all his strength as the stones gave way beneath them. What had just happened? How had a single arrow caused an explosion that brought down a large section of the city wall in the span of a few seconds?
He spared a glance at the woman, who seemed satisfied with her work. She raised her hand. Was she snapping? Several patches of darkness appeared around her, and Peter blinked his eyes hard to try to make sense of what he was seeing.
Wolves ran from the darkness, howling and barking as the white-haired woman whistled commands at them.
Almost a hundred wolves ran towards the breach the explosion had created, and Peter saw how the large remnants of the wall had fallen to make a sort of stepping-stone bridge across the river. It was practically a pathway directly into the city. An unguarded pathway.
Pulling up a final man, an archer whom Peter hoped could pick off a few wolves with his bow, he then scanned to plot a quick course down for himself. Jumping, scrambling, crawling, and occasionally slipping and falling, Peter threw himself ever-downward into the gap left in the wall.
He simply could not stand by safely high on the wall while the wolves which had killed his fellow recruits rampaged through his city.
He arrived in place before the wolves. Those archers with their wits about them were feverishly firing at the well-regimented beasts. One by one, the animals fell, but it was not nearly enough.
As the first of the wolves jumped its way across the river on the rock bridge, Peter drew his sword and held his prepared stance. He was confident that he could do some good. Even in his likely death, for every wolf he killed, lives would be saved.
He was ready.
Charging forward, he chose a place that served as a choke point where two large pieces of wall would funnel the wolves toward him without letting him be easily flanked.
The first wolf rushed toward him, snarling eagerly. With a deep breath, Peter engaged it. A forward lunge put the beast on the defensive, followed by a succession of three movements which stunned the wolf with a blow to the head, sliced its throat, and drove it to the ground for him to finish off.
Before he could revel in his success, two more wolves were upon him. He alternated between the two, trying not to be purely defensive in his strategy. It would only waste time. He concentrated on one first, and as soon as he finished it, turned on the other, barely dodging a set of snarling jaws that almost took off his arm.
He turned the dodge into a slash, catching the wolf's mouth in the center and killing it as the edge of his blade dug deep into the animal's face. Its death cries grated on his ears as he moved onward to the next opponent.
More and more wolves were upon him, and he fought wildly, knowing he couldn't keep this up for long. One set of claws mauled his left arm, and the smell of his blood seemed to drive the wolves to work that much harder to taste it. He wielded his sword deftly and quickly, using all the skills and maneuvers he had learned so far in his life. He did not think they would be enough to allow him to survive, but counted each downed enemy as a victory.
He registered the horn of war sounding again, summoning troops from within Klain to defend this portion of the wall. He looked past the pack of fur and claws for a split second back towards the woman that had summoned them to see men, soldiers, now emerging from the dark places she commanded.
It was terrifying, but he had no moment to be stunned into terror. Hesitation would mean death. Unblinking, he continued fighting for his life.