Barlowe, Wayne - God's Demon

A roar of raw hatred shattered the air, easily audible to all in the front ranks of the charging cavalry. Eager for battle, Moloch gave voice as he slowly drew ahead upon his leaping Melding. Adramalik saw long streamers of flame trailing from his head and saw, too, that his field-baton was no longer in his hand; the commands were already firmly in place. Instead he rode with both arms extended outward at his sides, the two Hooks twirling in his hands; he would welcome his enemy with an embrace of shearing oblivion.

Reluctantly acknowledging the general's charisma, Adramalik began to feel the battle-ecstasy warm his own body, urging him to put the spurs to his charger. The battlefield around him became a blurred hurricane of sound and movement and fire with only the enemy ahead standing out in the sharpest detail. He focused on the olive-brown wall that now, oddly, appeared taller than he had first thought, but, undaunted, he galloped on.

The soul-steeds were howling wildly, a sound designed to wither the resolve of any enemy foolish enough to stand their ground. With a final rush, the cavalry closed the gap to the wall, and Adramalik saw an unusual and brilliant glyph flash upward from just behind Sargatanas' front lines and thought, peripherally, that it was issued by either a Lord Bifrons or Furcas. Splitting, its duplicates dropped like stones into the small souls and impacted with a roar atop the wall. To Adramalik's amazement, the wall rippled, began to geyser wisps of flame, and suddenly hundreds upon hundreds of arms extended from along its length. An instant later the upstretched hands of souls and bricks alike came alive with the glow of some kind of glyph-glove from which then blossomed what looked like fiery javelins. Adramalik could almost feel the collective disbelief of his fellow riders, a momentary wave of hesitation—more imagined than real—to which it was too late to pay attention.

For just the briefest moment, before the front rank of Dis' heavy cavalry crashed against the wall, the Chancellor General had the impression that he was leaping into the hot-breathed mouth of some enormous prone Abyssal, its awful gums lined with long, fiery teeth. And then he saw that terrible beast's teeth loose themselves and launch in short, fast arcs directly into the riders.

aimed, it seemed, at the soul-beasts they rode. And as soon as the hands had released one incandescent javelin another appeared. Some immediately found their mark, penetrating deep into the breasts of the oncoming souls, disappearing with a brilliant, orange glow within their bodies, and cleaving them from within. Their bubbling screams of pain rose above the sounds of the battlefield as they turned and twisted in agony. The soul-centurions were barking orders incessantly, guiding the blind weapon-wielding hands to their targets. Adramalik clenched his jaws as he wheeled his mount. This was not meant to have happened; we were

meant to have breached the wall and streamed into the enemy forces. He felt an uncontrollable mixture of anger and disappointment rising within him and found himself beating his moaning steed upon the head with the hilt of his saber in frustration. Furcas! It has to be Furcas the Pyromancer's doing!

The heavy cavalry was in complete disarray. With their forward momentum checked there was no chance of them bounding over the wall and into the ranks of troops beyond. Instead their bodies crashed into one another and the buckling wall and made turning extraordinarily difficult. But turn they eventually did, amidst a deadly rain of fiery missiles that took a heavy toll upon them. And from the corner of his eye the Chancellor General saw that even though it had suffered minor damage, the wall still stood firm.

A red command-glyph soared skyward and split into a dozen smaller replicas of itself. The command to retreat and regroup!

Within the tangle of demons and soul-steeds he looked for the order's source. He found Moloch by his size and brilliant sigil-corona, some distance away and visible in his own maelstrom of pivoting cavalry, spinning away as well, and Adramalik could only imagine the blinding rage that must have been filling the general. That the general, for all his boldness and ferocity, had been brushed so easily aside by a simple subterfuge spoke volumes about both him and Sargatanas. Adramalik's hatred for Moloch cut so deep that even as the cavalry began to regain a semblance of order he found this inglorious retreat an ironic, bitter pleasure. Favorite or not, Moloch would hear much about it from his Prince.