The stench of spilled blood within the Veynar ranks was no longer of an honourable battle fought against an external foe; it was the foul, suffocating odor of the civil war raging inside the Veynar ranks.

Every strike between clansmen felt like an axe-blade cleaving the soul of the tribe itself.

The loyalists, though fighting with a wild, grief-stricken fury, were dying.

They were sandwiched between the merciless desperation of Thorne’s traitors from within and the unrelenting, grinding pressure of the Coalition from behind.

"Hold the line!" a Veynar veteran screamed, his face completely painted in the hot crimson spray of his own comrade’s open throat.

He brought his axe down with a sickening thwack, burying it deep into a traitor’s shoulder, only to be run through from behind by a Coalition spear.

He didn’t even drop his blade as he collapsed; his dying weight pinned his killer to the earth, giving a fellow loyalist a split second to crush the traitor’s skull.

The narrow gap in front of Warchief Veylara had transformed into a bloody meat grinder.

A loyalist Captain, whose chest was gashed wide open by a spear wielded by a man who had sat beside him merely two days past, spat a mouthful of dark, clotted gore directly into his executioner’s face.

"Traitors!" the captain choked out, his fingers digging into the traitor’s eye sockets as both men collapsed into the churned, limestone mud.

Around them, the loyalist shield wall was shrinking with terrifying speed. What had begun as a fierce, unyielding semicircle of thirty battle-hardened veterans was rapidly whittling down.

They fought like cornered, rabid wolves, their eyes wide, bloodshot, and frantic with despair. Every time a loyalist thrust his spear forward, he was forced to look into the eyes of a lineage brother, or a comrade-in-arms.

The emotional agony of the betrayal cut far deeper than the blades tearing through their bodies.

"Why?!" a young loyalist warrior screamed, his voice cracking as his bone sword locked against the heavy axe of his own uncle. "We are the Veynar! We bleed for the tribe!"

"The Veynar is burning, boy!" the uncle snarled back, his face a mask of cold, frantic desperation as he drove his shoulder forward, snapping the young warrior’s guard. "There is no glory in dying for an already down chief! I have to survive and live on!"

With a brutal, downwards chop, the axe split the young man’s collarbone. The loyalist fell without a sound, his blood pooling with the dozens of others forming a slippery, gruesome barricade around the paralyzed Warchief.

It was an absolute slaughterhouse... a meat grinder fueled by madness and broken oaths.

The loyal wall protecting Veylara shrank with every breath.

Where there had once been thirty men, now stood fewer than twelve, their shields shattered, their bodies bleeding from a dozen shallow cuts, their eyes wild and hollow.

Thorne stood just behind his guards, his chest swelling with an intoxicating, hysterical glee.

His ears drank in the wet, crunching sounds of bone breaking and the agonized shrieks of his former clansmen.

The long, suffocating decades of playing the submissive, cautious elder... of bowing his head to Veylara’s absolute authority and enduring Zephyra’s silent, penetrating scrutiny... were being washed away in a flood of crimson.

"Yes! Break them! Kill them all!" Thorne screamed, his curved flint dagger trembling in his hand as he pointed toward the kneeling Veylara. "Clear the way! Show no mercy to those who choose to die by themselves!"

Veylara’s vision swam with dark purple splotches.

The toxic resin in her veins had reached her shoulders, radiating inward toward her sun core with the agonizing, biting cold of a deep winter frost.

She felt as though her internal organs were being slowly coated in liquid lead that hardened with every passing second. Yet, the physical pain was nothing compared to the excruciating torture of her own powerlessness.

She, the Warchief of the Veynar... the woman whose spear had once turned back the terrifying tide of the Great Swamp beasts... could only sit frozen in the dirt while her most faithful warriors were butchered like livestock to protect her paralyzed body.

"Stop..." Veylara choked out, her voice barely a raspy whisper. A thick, dark thread of poisoned blood leaked continuously from her bottom lip, dripping onto the sacred charcoal markings on her chest. "...Stop... don’t... kill each other..."

Her pleas were swallowed entirely by the chaotic roars of the civil war.

Across the wider battlefield, the sight of the inner circle turning upon itself acted as an absolute poison to the morale of the remaining Veynar line soldiers.

....

Above the screams of dying brothers, a sound began to resonate across the battlefield... a low, rhythmic rumble that made the loose white limestone gravel jump and rattle on the ground.

THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.

The desperate shouting of the Veynar warriors slowly died down, replaced by a cold, suffocating dread.

The chaos of the outer perimeter began to part like water before a bowsprit.

The Coalition soldiers, who had been hacking away at the Veynar flank with feral abandon, suddenly backed away in disciplined, terrified silence, lowering their weapons and forming two massive, unbroken walls of stone and bone.

Through the freshly opened corridor stepped the leaders of the Great Orrath Coalition.

At the absolute vanguard walked the Grand Chieftain of the Gray Marauders.

The twenty-foot-tall behemoth was an absolute nightmare made manifest. His massive, granite-like muscles flexed beneath a harness of dried skull trophies.

The heavy, bone club he dragged in his right hand cut a deep groove into the ground.

Blood of Veynar warriors he had casually crushed along the way dripped steadily from his hands pooling around his feet with every earth-shaking step.

Directly behind him walked Chief Vane of the Zharun Clan, his sharp, hawk-like eyes burning with a mixture of raw grief and triumphant malice.

His hairs were matted with sweat and dried blood, but his posture was straight, his long curved obsidian blade held casually in his left hand.

Beside him were the elders of the Zharun and Zerith tribes... men who had watched their sons, grandsons, and elite vanguards torn to pieces by Sol using Golden Dominion, but who now walked forward to claim their prize like vultures descending upon a rotting corpse.