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Most people didn't know what the war really was. At least, most people in the city. They were removed from it- unaffected, at least directly. The people in the countryside knew what was at stake in general, but not precisely. They knew they needed the wizards' protection to keep them safe from evil wizards, but they preferred not thinking of the depravities evil wizards could come up with.

The mercenaries the city hired did not have that luxury. They could only live with the scar- how deep they filled it with alcohol was up to each one.

Bersi was a wolverine. He was born and raised with farmers who ran illegal substances around the state. When he found out how much mercenaries could get paid, staying wasn't even an option in his mind- it was an opportunity to pay off his debts and get a lot richer a lot faster. He chose to never regret it- he could either live a life of obscurity and debt, or a life where he earned something for himself.

But that didn't mean he didn't wander into his past from dream to dream. Sometimes, it was pleasant. Sometimes, it was not.

Tonight was not.

He was back on the border, just outside the king's white river. He and some other mercs he didn't know were patrolling a stretch of a creek's bank nobody had attacked in over three years, but orders were orders, and they only paid him to follow them.

Grond the lizard waved him over. He knew him by name, but nothing else. Bersi walked over to him.

"What's up?" Bersi asked.

"Moon's bright," Grond said. "Really bright. You can see the magic warping."

Bersi looked. Sure enough, just over the woods on the other side of the bank, a mini aurora borealis shimmered and dipped into and out of the canopy.

"Yeah," Bersi said, "but as long as we do what the wizards told us, we should be good, right?"

"Theory and practice are the same in theory, but different in practice," Grond said. "I don't know if they're going to attack tonight, but if I ever chose a night, this would be it. Be alert."

Bersi shrugged. He didn't know the lizard well enough to know if he was trying to screw with him or not, but even so, he knew he was right. He wondered why Grond was looking out for him.

The next two hours were uneventful. The magic wall danced like a stream, and the mercenaries absentmindedly walked along the creek bank.

Then, out of a black star, purple lightning struck the other side of the creek. When it hit, the thunder was mixed with someone screaming. If Bersi knew what it was when he first heard it, he still wouldn't have fled, but he wouldn't have had the spirit to fight.

The first ones out of the woods were the most degenerated- corpses of barbarians long ago dead. Their armor was rusted, rotting and falling off. Their eyes were lit with a purple and black glow, and they charged the creek and went under.

"Undead!" someone cried. "Defensive positions!" someone else shouted. The mercenaries weren't the most disciplined bunch, but they knew how to fight. Bersi held his bardiche toward the river. It was a long weapon- an axe with a narrow, long axehead, meant for opening gashing wounds in its victims and hacking limbs off. He watched the creek for any signs of ripples. When he finally saw them, he lowered his bardiche, ready to strike from the bank.

That was when the second bolt of lightning hit. Its thunder was drowned out by the screams of the dead. Unlike the first bolt, however, it didn't stop striking. The purple lightning bridged the heavens and the earth and brought with it the damned from hell. As it set the forest ablaze, a new kind of monster began charging out, screaming. They had no fur, not even skin- their red and brown rotting muscles were knit too tightly over their bones, and their hands were replaced with blades. Where eyes should have been, only black and purple flames burned. Before, they were men, women and children. Now, they were monsters who demanded the blood of the living.

Bersi looked back down at the undead still in the creek- they were waiting for something. He wasn't going to let them do whatever it was they were trying to do. He stepped forward and swung down. The corpses raised their weapons to block, but Bersi's bardiche was faster than their waterlogged arms. With three chops, those in front of him were dead.

To his right, another mercenary- a horse- was looking at the strange formation in the water, trying to figure out what they were trying to accomplish. One of the red, skinless ones leaped into the water. He didn't sink. He landed on his undead comrade's head, and kept running forward on its unbrethren's bodies. The horse raised his spear, and stabbed the undead straight in the chest, impaling it.

The undead kept running, spear punching through its body, and reached the horse. It swung its bladed arm and chopped the merc's head off. Bersi rushed it and swung down. It didn't see him coming, and bersi cleaved it down the middle. The undead joined the dead once more. Another one began charging from across the creek. Bersi wound up and swung at it as it leaped at him, and it raised its arm to block. The impact rattled Bersi to his core, but the undead just landed and swung at him.

It got too close for Bersi to use his bardiche, and nicked him through his armor. Bersi rammed his fingers into its eye sockets, extinguishing the flames and shoving it backwards. Disoriented and blinded, it swung in the air all around it. Bersi picked his Bardiche up and stabbed it. He looked to his right just in time to see another one trying to sprint across its brethren's backs.

He stepped down and felled that bridge of bones, despite its many heads' angry hisses.

All around him, though, the mercenaries were being overwhelmed by numbers and ferocity. They were armed to kill people, not destroy them- spears would normally poke holes in people and make them bleed to death if they continued fighting, and they were very hard to block, so they were what most people had. Now, though, some of the undead resembled pin-cushions with the remains of spears sticking every which way out of them. Even those whose heads had been removed kept trying to kill everything near them, sometimes hitting their own allies. He got so caught up trying to figure out what to do that when he turned around and saw a blade coming down at his face, he forgot to block.

Grond swung his sabre down, and disarmed the zombie. WIthout a word exchanged between them, they began fighting in tandem. Bersi swung at them from a distance, and any who got too close were chopped down by Grond's scimitar.

Even so, most of the mercenaries had already been scattered or killed, and were being chased through the woods by raging zombies. Bersi and Grond didn't have time to see that, though- they were too busy staying alive.

Bersi figured out early that very few of them were smart enough to block- if he timed his swings right, he could hack them in half before they reached the duo. Failing that, they telegraphed their attacks. Grond always knew the direction they were attacking from, so he parried their blows, chopped off their arms, or dodged it entirely and used their new-found imbalance to shove them into their brethren.

On the other side of the creek, two men watched them. The elder one was a tiger named Pi, and the younger was a raccoon named Skier. Normally, their two tribes were enemies. Tonight, however, both of them sacrificed their entire tribe to the fiend, a monster from the bowels of the earth who gave power to those who could reward it with suffering and pain. Having done this, they now belonged to a select cabal of warlocks who had been working on finding ways into the city for many years.

"I don't get it," Pi said to Skier. "Normally, the city has responded by now- what's keeping them?"

"I doubt they found out what we're planning," Skier said. "Even if they did, they would have dispatched a non-magical entity to deal with it. Not every monster they use relies on magic. I think it's more likely the moon is interfering with their communication," he said, fidgeting with a small talisman.

"Are you sure that thing works?" Pi asked. "I mean, being able to get into their communications would be amazing- you'd think that would be one of the biggest advantages we'd have."

"Yes, it would. This doesn't do that- it lets us know when they communicate, not what," Skier said.

"Well, how do we know when they communicate?" Pi asked.

"It glows," Skier said as white light filled it, "like this."

Within seconds, they could feel the atmosphere shift. The lightning bolt was snuffed, but the pile of corpses had already been animated- their response was too late. Of course, the warlocks only wanted to use the undead to get their attention. Now, their true targets- the city's magic defense- was coming to them.

From the other side of the creek, they could hear the noise deep in the woods- 'woomp,' 'woomp,' 'woomp.' With each blast, they could feel the vibration in their chest and see a pink flash light the canopy. A few seconds later, they could see them.

They looked like octopi, if octopi had no heads and glowed with vibrant, hot-pinkish purple lines down their body and had tentacles that could quadruple in length. Like the undead, they were moon monsters- creatures made by binding flesh under a full moon, using magical structures that couldn't exist under sunlight, held together by basic physics once they were made. Each one had a direct link to a battery of magic, meaning as long as the city had magic, they did, too.

As one leaped from one tree to another, its arm shot out faster than the eye could track. It stabbed its way down into in the zombie's ribcage, and it pulsed a surge of magical energy into it. Just as quick as it went in, it retraced. Less than a tenth of a second later, the zombie exploded into a brilliant purplish flash of energy, making a loud 'woomp.' The few times a zombie cut one, another picked up the parts and assimilated it. They stayed on the other side of the creek, not leaving the trees. The zombies were either all dead or being destroyed. This was the time to act.

Skier and Pi grabbed the skulls of their villages' elders, and spoke the incantation. All of the zombies in the water and all of the surviving zombies in the forests and all of the recently killed and slowly-being animated mercenaries erupted in masses of black, thorned, oily vines. The octopi, quick as they were, were not quick enough- they were impaled by the monstrous plant.

In less than a second, an entire network of a magic sucking plant expanded across the entire white-river flood basin's forest.

The warlocks spoke the second incantation, and the magical creatures were consumed. Their magical composition was completely broken down and digested, sucked toward the core of the plants. When a plant had sucked dry all of the magic around it, it was digested by the plant attached to it.

Grond and Bersi looked at the plant. It appeared behind them- they weren't sure when. Its thorns were as big as their heads, and the vines were more than twice as thick as their own bodies. They spread, up out and around them, but still so large that they didn't even risk scraping their heads on the underside. They watched as a black flower opened on top, and the moonlight pooled into it.

The plant evaporated from the root up, every bit of magical energy sucked up and into the ball of energy. It contained the energy from every zombie, functional and destroyed, and the energy of every magical creature it consumed that night. It was enormous.

Pi and Skier spoke the final incantation, taking control of the massive ball of energy. From their hands, whisps of magic flowed out, touching the black ball of fire. This was their murder plan- with the energy of the entire defense magic source sucked dry, the city could do nothing to stop them from dropping a ball of magical energy directly in the middle of their city. They would release the spawn of their dark lord on the peasants, creating a new source of eternal suffering and pain to feed his power- and theirs in turn.

Meanwhile, fifty miles away, twenty three stories up, sitting in a soft chair with three other wizards, grandmaster Kjorlen watched the scene. He was a squirrel- next to the Galumand the dragon, Pax the unicorn, and the Malay the phoenix, he should have felt inadequate. Instead, he gave them orders.

"Galamund, take control of that orb. Malay, find its source. Pax, send some harvester drones to collect the warlocks. The portal they used required extensive knowledge of the lunar energy's effect on our magic lattice's structures, and I want to know where they got that information." Without a word, each wizard began their task, working through the magic pool in front of them.

The first sign the warlocks had that something was wrong was that their wisps of magic failed to control the sphere. They tried several more times, but nothing worked. The second sign they had that it failed was when it took off, full speed into the mountains behind them, and disappeared. From miles away, they heard their dread lord scream as its own energy bomb was dropped down its maw, incinerating it. But they truly knew they messed up when they looked down and saw the harvester drones climbing out of the earth.

These moon-monsters had enormous torsos, two pairs of eyes, a mouth, and two ears. They resembled something like the warlocks' zombies, but with black flesh, exposed bones, and they crawled on all fours. Their ribs stuck out like small arms, each appendage ending in a tiny scalpel.

"Greetings!" one of them said to the warlocks. "The City of Kaeldonia now owns all rights to your mind, body and soul!"

By now, Bersi and Grond saw the two warlocks. They watched as they fired blasts of purple energy at the drones, destroying them. Two more filled their place, and the warlocks fired again- but nothing came out. Their dread lord was dead and gave them no power. The drones moved forward, and the warlocks fled, trying to use the creek to escape.

From the drones' mouths came long, thick tentacles, wrapping around each of the warlock's legs. They screamed for help, but none came. When the drones had them close enough, their small, knife-blade hands cut their brains and spines out in one piece. The drones' torsos opened up, revealing organs of its own. They connected to the brain and spines, then sealed their own bodies up. From now on, the warlocks could only perceive what the drones wanted them to, could only speak when the drones let them speak, and could only have enough oxygen to be awake when the drones needed them to be. And they only needed them to be when their master wizard fed them magic.

Grond and Bersi both threw up. The drones stopped by on their way back to the city and asked if they needed help. Grond fainted, and Bersi could only manage to slowly shake his head, 'no.' Which was a lie- after this, he was going to need a lot of help. Preferably the cheap kind that came in bottles. But he'd be damned before he let some monster of a coward wizard see him faint.

After that, the mercenary unit got back together under a new command. Grond and Bersi stuck together. Other people didn't understand why they didn't trust the wizards, and they didn't feel like explaining it. After several other battles with bandit warlocks, they earned enough money and fame to qualify to guard a top-secret base. They were told that why it was top-secret was confidential, but once they arrived they would be told.

When they arrived, they were told that this was the place that provided the mana need to power all the magic the city-state used, and if word got out on how they did it, the barbarians could replicate it. So they couldn't tell anyone- not their families, not their friends, and especially not anyone who said they were from the city. They were told that the city-dwellers were the most likely to be spies, since they had the least reason to be out here.

But Nal told him a different story. If it got back to the city, might be the end of the magic source- surely, they would never support lying to people to set them up in a rape camp. He didn't know what to do.

Grond walked to his buddy, asleep in a hammock. His expression was worried, or sad about something. He grabbed the bottom of the wolverine's hammock, spun it, and dumped Bersi on the floor.

Bersi woke up.

"Augh! What the-" he looked to his right and saw his friend. "What was that for?"

"It's time for work and you were having a nightmare," he said. "We came here to get away from those, remember?"

Bersi chuckled, and put his face back on the floor.

"Yeah," he said, "yeah we did."

After another moment of lying on the floor, he got up and shoved his lizard pal.

"I don't know if we can outrun the nightmares," Bersi said. "but maybe we'll have a headstart if we get them really drunk first."

Grond laughed at his friend's not-joke, then helped him suit up for patrol. Bersi mentioned introducing him to someone last night when he was drunk- he hoped he'd forgotten about whoever she was. He didn't want his brother in arms to be wooed by some prostitute- wizard magic was cruel, but its power over a man's mind was limited. A woman's magic had no such limits.