By Henry Hill (alias Montrose)

Word Count: 1166

Rating: PG for an intense battle scene

Summary: Cat-men warriors battle with evil forces.

Kerja grimaced, pushing himself through another patch of chest-high fern. Freezing droplets, dislodged from the wide leaves, clung to his fur, caking it in ice. For hundreds of miles in all directions stretched the sullen silence of the mistwood, the forest of Shadows.

The silence was near-total. The deep snow and the thick, milky mists seemed to prey upon natural sound, sucking it out of the very air. They saw few tracks, few birds or any signs of life. Occasional rustles in the canopy above made them freeze, but had not yet amounted to anything. The thick evergreens cloaked the forest floor in deep gloom. Deciduous patches provided more light, their nude, skeletal branches stretching spiderlike across the pale sky. For some reason, the light areas were no more comforting. Behind him, several hundred Felerian warriors picked their way through the undergrowth. Their natural affinity with woodland terrain was helping, and their skill with animals stopping them starving, but it was still heavy going. The mistwood lay across sharply hilly terrain, and contained only small animal tracks. The insects themselves built no roads, and their scouts were like ghosts, made known by the soft whispering of an arrow, if at all.

The noise of his soldiers made his skin crawl. Even with their skills, moving silently was
close to impossible for more than a tiny handful of men in so untamed and dense a landscape. He scrambled over some ice-slicked stones and paused. He’d crested a ridge, and before him the forest sunk away into a deep basin, mist even thicker than in the higher reaches. Kerja motioned his men on. A couple of hours downhill would be a good way to end the day’s march, and the basin would offer some shelter, and mask a little the light of their fires.

The basin was tough going, for footing was treacherous and tall plants masked sharp changes in the terrain. Very occasionally a cursing warrior would be sent tumbling down the hill, their passage marked by the crashing of crushed stems and a cloud of snow dust. For the most part, however, the agile cat-men proceeded at a good pace.

But something was wrong. He couldn’t tell what, but there was something wrong. A
suggestion, on the very edge of his senses, a break in the long-familiar pattern of tired soldiers and silent trees. He kept on. He was tired. It had been a long and difficult day’s march. They were much farther out from the Shadow hives than the usual point at which resistance amounted to more than the odd, glimpsed grey figure. But the feeling would not go away…

He froze, going deathly still as a hunter in sight of prey. He could see nothing, but his troops possessed enough training or instinct to copy him at once. Like a ripple, the entire Felerian pride froze and gently crouched, straining their ears against the blanketing fog.
For a moment, he heard nothing, the profound muteness of the forest rushing in to fill the vacuum left by his now-silent hunters. He closed his eyes, letting his ears adjust to the deeper quiet.

There. There, to his left, something barely heard through the trees. Cracks, the sound of
impacts, the faint echoes of bellows and war cries, so faint as to be imagined, conjured by paranoia.

Then, closer at hand, an agonized roar split the mist like a knife: the death-cry of a lion. Kerja was up, his soldiers likewise, drawing sheathed weapons and trying to draw a bead on the trouble. But it was everywhere, screams on the left finding their counterpoint on the right, flickers of witchcraft and balefire illuminating the mist, half-seen black shapes moving swiftly and purposefully through the cloying whiteness, suggestions of slaughter.

His remaining troops backed together as much as they could, a protective circle broken by the slope and the trees and the weed-tangled rocks. Their breath rose visibly before them, as if their own small contribution to their own blindness. The mists about them grew still and silent, the screams stopped, the dancing lights and figures gone. The long minutes stretched out, taught as a noose…

And then all was chaos. In short roils of flame, white-armoured Shadows flickered into
existence inside the circle, bathing nearby warriors in black fire. Daemons, shaped like pools of mist and oil, poured unseen through the undergrowth before rising to slash at the legs of the Feleri with limbs suddenly solid and icy cold. Black figures, not scouts but Shadow warriors, their unique armour and ant-head helmets rendering the true face of insect aspect, leapt into the fray.

Kerja let loose a roar, all thoughts of stealth gratefully cast aside. He tore through one of the deamons, watching it break apart and dissolve, smoking its way back to its own plane. He dodged a sword from one of the Shadows, raking his claws across its chest plate and casting it aside. Turning with his back to the trunk of a great pine, he raised his head. Before him, his surprised warriors fought dozens of desperate, individual melees. The pack-hunting instincts and mutual support they were used to was gone: almost every warrior stood alone, most against at least two targets, caught between the scissoring limbs of the daemons and the balletic stance-fighting of the Shadow soldiery. Bound together by bonds more primal than mere training, the Shadow cadres coordinated wordlessly, converging upon isolated cat-men before moving on to the next. The air was so thick with the tang of their pheromones that Kerja could almost taste them.

His hunters fought bravely, but even as he watched a dozen heroic last stands game to an end, hot blood steaming on the frozen ground. They were routed.

He toyed with the idea of retreat, but snapped back into focus. In front of him stood a Wight, chitin-like armour bone-white, insect-helm glittering with new-formed ice. An elegant sword was held in front of it, its left hand empty. He could not see its eyes beyond the grills of its helm, but there was no need. Hefting his weapon and letting out a ferocious howl of fury, he sprang forward, and disappeared in a steam of ebony flame.

The forest was still again, iced dew and fresh snow already claiming the vivid scar of the
battle site. The daemons had long dissolved, the few black-armoured casualties retrieved and carried home. Only the hunters remained, torched and sliced apart, frozen in grim tribute to their final fight until spring released them to the worms.

The survivors, scavengers and hunters mostly, some larger parties missed by Shadow scouts. They passed these frozen horrors in silence, the bodies and ground too iron-hard for removal or burial. They gradually converged into silent, haunted bands, fleeing the forest, glad of any hardship on the long march back to Feleria. Of the fourteen-hundred hunters who had set off in such high spirits, a bare few hundred returned.