Earth was once one. They say it was thousands upon thousands of years ago that it was one whole globe split by nothing other than temperature and biome. A spherical home for all.
Then The Pulse came. It came from the core of the earth. A shockwave of energy that jumpstarted the flow of magic. The Pulse radiated through the cosmos and changed the function of everything.
High-Earth is closest to the sun. Burning so hot its enviroment is uninhabitable to all except the Fire-Speakers. They're like gods. Immune to flame— kin of it. Tamers of Dragons. They're expert blacksmiths, crafting legendary weapons with matching legendary heat and strength. Even more terrifying combatants, capable of martial arts that could split entire nations.
Sometimes they descend on Center-Earth for missions— to clean and restart sick forests with their heat, and expeditions where they find love. Where people like Ranger are born.
They don't usually travel to Low-Earth. They're more susceptible to the deathly cold. Ice is their weakness. If you could call it that.
That's what the men and women of Center-Earth are for.
Most will burn in High-Earth, but a war in Low-Earth is possible with enough High-Earth weaponry, pelts and leather..
And the Grove of Druids had more than enough.
Those that didn't, like Lucian who rode Hunter shirtless, could shapeshift into creatures born in Low-Earth.
It's like they were meant to go to war.
Thena didn't like that concept. There were many concepts spinning in her mind that she didn't like. Her mind took her places. Places far and wide where uncertainty reigned supreme and fear walked beyond the shadows brazenly—
"Miha, look." Ranger sniffed, telling her with what sense to view the world.
Thena regained focus. They were at the southernmost edges of Center-Earth. The lack of wood scent in the air told her so.
Valleys of green and intricate remote villages connected by beat in roads of stone ran for miles behind them. Ahead, the Black Threshold stood strong and ominous. According to Ranger.
"It looks different in daylight." The old Demi-god whispered as the Grove of Druids slowed to a halt.
It was only a few hundred feet ahead. She could feel the biting cold.
"How so?" Thena whispered.
"You only ever do perimeter runs at night. It all looks the same then, the difference is only felt when your close enough, no?"
Thena nodded. Fire-paw yawned and shook her desert fur.
"Well now, even in mid-day, Low-Earth is all shadow….. a wall of black completely ignorant of the suns warmth. Solari RaLug truly holds no power there." Ranger explained.
"Can you see inside?" At night, Low-Earth was impossible to gaze into. A whole world of monsters rendered invisible when they were most active. Seemed unfair. It was.
She could tell by the Druids silence that it was very visible.
"Yes, we see." Ranger replied. "Great glass and stone towers scraping the skies. Oceans of blood churning like caustic cauldrons. Streets made not of stone but human bones.There are forests but the trees wail like the living. They have ashen wood and red leaves. I'm sure they bury Thralls within the soil. What a bastardized way of living…."
Thena fought off a nervous shiver and itched the thick muscles of Titus's neck. "It's just like we've been told, brother."
"What if it isn't?" Ranger suddenly asked.
Thena was dumbfounded by his words, "What do you mean—"
"Druids! Ready your weapons and fortify yourselves. These lands are not welcome to Druids of Low-Mortal Cultivation Stages. If you walk into Low-Earth anyway and die, you will only be mourned by your parents. We are here to win a war— not prove our individual might. Die by the enemy, not your pride." Caspien announced.
The Grove of Druids all let off a series of acknowledging grunts before brandishing their weapons.
Lucien unsheathed his twin daggers, Natures Maw. His sister Leanna utilized a crossbow and whip laced with bramble poisons. Caspien of course had his sun-sword forged in High-Earth and Ranger used a wand made from supposedly the oldest tree on all earths. He called it Phoenix-Scribe.
Thena could smell the unsheathed steel in the air. It gave her a small adrenaline rush, making her mace, Craterborn, feel all the more weightless.
Caspien didn't need to say anything more. They had their weapons drawn and hearts lit ablaze. Everything else was left to the Roots of Fate and the gods that tended to them.
They entered Low-Earth at a sprint.
As soon as the Seer's passed the Black Threshold and the first wave of Druidic Warriors entered, a handful fell to diseases in the rotted air.
The smell was so bad, Thena almost fainted if not for Ranger's cleansing wave of fire he sent into the endless night with his wand. Their speeds slowed despite their increasing adrenaline.
"Low-Earth has higher gravity, it's what makes the Shadow-Kin and Moon-Born so powerful. Good thing we've trained for this." Thena thought as her shoulder guards dug into her skin more intensely than before.
After the first block, she grew comfortable, and the first of them grew aware.
They came from an alley of stone. Two Moon-Born of the Wolven breed.
They were huge. As large as the Seer's mounts with sabered fangs and Wolfish skulls bastardized by dark magics. Their clawed hands reached for the Seer's with a fiendish hunger.
"Left side!" Caspien threw his sword. A long silver blade engraved with runes that glowed like orange stars in the night.
It hit the first Wolven Moon-Born, a silver furred giant and severed its head instantly. It traveled into the alley, looping around to land back in Caspien's hands like an orbiting star.
Leanna handled the smaller black furred beast with three shots to the skull.
They never stopped moving. It was so quick it all happened in one stride. It started with a shout and ended before the following inhale.
After they took down another handful of roaming stragglers and survivors of old wars, Low-Earth silenced.
Not a true silence.
Not for Thena. She could hear the Thralls beneath powering the dark city-world on giant turbines and cables using the charge in their blood and mana to leave the city in dark-light. Humming with despair.
Thena tightened the grip on her axe as they made it to a central city of sorts. A massive stone cathedral loomed like a giant frozen by the serpent-hair goddess. Red light bloomed from deep black corridors and glass sculptures encased its body.
Footsteps echoed. Faint but impossibly quick.
"Incoming! Upper floors, at least forty….. more ….. too many." Thena alerted the others.
"Finally!" Lucian howled.
"What did I say before we left?" Leanna asked as they sprinted down the bone streets.
"I don't remember." Lucien was drooling.
Suddenly everyone could hear the horde approaching. It didn't take much longer for them to step out into the dark-light glow of Low-Earth.
There were dozens. Hundreds. They moved in a swarm, spilling from the corridors of the stone castle wearing nothing. Just black leathery skin, glowing tattoos and fiendish eyes.
They almost looked like man until they took to the skies on massive bat-like wings tipped by curved claws. The older warriors wings were full of holes. It gave their wingbeats a haunting cry that rode the winds. It became the music of the battlefield as they divebombed.
"Shadow-Kin!"
More specifically, Vampires. The worst kind. A whole coven of them. Maybe three. Such collaborations only happened before and after great wars. Caspien's vision was shaping up to be correct. They were preparing for an uprising.
"You come to my home??! It better not be in search of anything but your own demise. Your blood will power these lands for generations, Druids. My people are done starving and my people are tired of going to war— not with those that oppress us, but those that are forced in here beside us! I'll celebrate every one of your deaths." The Shadow-Kin Coven leader's voice echoed from everywhere.
Thena ignored it as the coven descended.
They moved like water. One body. One wave. Destructive in their mass and forward motion.
"Demi-god." Caspien said without looking away from the attackers.
Ranger raised his wand to his lips, taking a deep breath once before blowing a whirlwind of fire into the dark skies.
"Draconic Arts at such an old age! Impressive." One of the Druids commented.
"Not to mention he's sick. I wish I was half Fire-Speaker."
The flames split the swarm, incinerating a handful of Vampires upon impact while others crashed and burned, smashing into the bone streets with burned wings and arms.
The rest still in flight looped around them, spinning into a cyclone of screeching darkness. True darkness.
"Earthen Guard!" Caspien commanded.
The Druid Warriors dug into their satchels, pulling out handfuls of stone and seeds. Caspien held his sun-sword to the sky, giving the green the light it needed for growth.
The Druids threw out their stones and seeds, amplified with their own internal mana.
In seconds, a guard wall of stone and spiked roots surrounded them.
Immediately the Druids began manipulating the roots, sending massive wooden spikes out into the cyclone of Vampires. Fortifying the stone until it was stronger than steel. Making their skin match its aspects.
The branch blast was a unified forested explosion.
The pure wood pierced wings and hearts, killing Vampires in droves and sending others spinning down the bone-white streets.
It was then that Thena caught the scent. Immediately when the cyclone began to open up.
It was so strong she involuntarily threw up beside Titus. Immediately after, she wiped her mouth and yelled as loud as she could.
"ITS A TRAP!"
A construct of a flaming dragon spiraled from Ranger's wand, upsetting the dark cyclone that hid them from the shifting shadows of Low-Earth.
The curtain was lifted.
All around them, for miles, filling entire bone streets and hanging from crimson canopied trees, Moon-Born and Shadow-Kin stood ready for war.
There were so many more than any of them could've imagined.
In the brief stillness of the calm that came before a storm to rival all storms, Thena could feel the hairs on her arms stand. The sticky warmth of her visible exhales brushing past her face.
That hyper awareness ended in stride.
When they let off their battle cry, it hit Thena like an explosion. Her ears rang as true war began.
Her equilibrium went with the damage, making flipping off of Titus a task in and of itself.
She hit the ground feeling the vibrations and heat of Ranger's flames striking the cold earth.
Caspien's sunsword burned undead skin and bone as he cleaved through portions of the horde.
Lucian jumped forty feet into the air, snagging a Vampire out of the sky with his teeth as he seamlessly transformed into a giant sabertoothed wolf with metal fangs.
Thena charged ahead of the others, sliding under Caspien's searing swings as Titus jumped over the man, landing on three Wolven Moon-Born with a wet crunch.
Thena rose, surrounded by foul scents and heavy breaths.
She gripped her mace tighter, feeling the cringe of movement in the air behind her.
She ducked. Claws as sharp as nothing she'd ever seen cut strands of her brown hair clean off.
As she dropped low, she spun her mace with all the power available in her muscled body.
Craterborn gave as it blew through six pairs of legs.
She exploded back to her feet, swinging her mace in a wild uppercutting motion.
The Moon-Born ready to tackle her ahead lost all of its teeth as her weapon atomized its lower jaw.
The weight of the mace lifted her into the air with the beast.
She fell, landing back on Titus as he raged through the crowd working to swallow them.
She'd long since lost the detail of her hearing. It was all just one evershifting roar.
Hellish beasts lay skewered on Titus' massive horns. Intestines and bone fragments adorned Thena's mace as she ripped swathes of red through the horde.
"FOUL WITCH!" A Vampire charged from her left.
She spun and swung, hitting nothing.
Her nose told her right. She only then realized she was going deaf in her left ear.
The Vampire knocked her off her mount and sent her rolling. The feet and clawed hands of beasts ripped at her.
She dug through her belt, pulling out a handful of napalm pollen. The golden dust glowed as it covered her palm, charged by her internal mana. The higher the Cultivation stage, the greater the blast. Made the weapon more detrimental to upper class Druids than anything.
Thankfully she was being swallowed by a horde.
Her hand glowed a wicked fiery shade of both red, green and gold.
She aimed where the sounds and smells were worst and fired.
The magic in the air warbled as a massive green and gold blast of magically charged and explosive pollen swept the north end of the battlefield.
The recoil of the blast dislocated Thena's shoulder.
She sat up and slammed herself back into the floor, fixing her minor injury quickly. Painfully.
Then she was back on her feet. Suddenly the street was less congested.
"Thena!"
She spun around to face Ranger's voice.
"Go to the castle!"
"No! Stay with your fellow Druids! We can take them all here!" Caspien yelled from somewhere further away.
Lucien howled as he ripped a Wolven Moon-Born's throat out to Thena's left.
"Thena! You need to go!" Ranger protested.
"Demi-god I will have you banished! Thena—" Caspien trailed off as a group of Moon-Born swarmed him, pouncing from the tall buildings around them.
More were coming.
"Listen to your leader, foolish girl!" Leanna started from behind her, opposite from her brother across the street.
Before she could say anything more, a massive spear of dark ice fell from a rooftop and shattered on the ground beside her.
The new magic in the air made Thena's nose bleed.
"Alpha Moon-Born. Working with multiple covens. By the gods and rootings…" Thena mumbled as a deadly howl rose above the uneven staccato of war.
"GO!" Ranger yelled as he melted through the ice and enemies with swinging arcs of fire. "Into the castle, where the king resides. You are strong, Thena! But more so you are not a warrior."
"I am!" Thena protested.
"Did your visions tell you of an uprising, Seer?" Ranger asked.
Thena felt herself hesitate, still even as more beasts closed in around her and Titus.
"But they're preparing for something here!" Thena said.
"What did I say before, miha?"
His previous words echoed in her mind. "What if it isn't just like what we've been told?"
An ice spear fell from the rooftops, this time hitting the ground right behind Thena.
The glass-like shatter of heavy sharp ice sent her tumbling forward.
She landed in a roll and got to her feet, immediately settling into a sprint.
Titus ran beside her, huffing madly.
She reached out and grabbed his horn to swing herself onto his back.
They headed to the central castle of Low-Earth at a rushed pace. Chased by a growing wave of Shadow-Kin. And the warning yells of her fellow Seer's.
She felt guilt then. She couldn't see but she could hear the urgency in their voices. Feel the warmth of spilled human blood as Druids died, overwhelmed by the endless swathes of monsters.
But Ranger's words pushed her further from her people and deeper into the unknown.
It had been nagging her since the beginning.
The Seer's visions were always shared. Different means leading to the same foretelling.
So how did only Caspien know of this uprising?
Why did he see Low coming High but she only saw a boy with wings?