Keev’s origin as a demi-god of heroics was simple, though that doesn’t take away from his achievements. He grew up the son of a wealthy merchant, but strove to use his position to help others. When it became clear he had no penchant for commerce, his father squired him to a knight of the kingdom of Avinor, with whose king he had a trade relationship. Keev distinguished himself in saving the king of Avinor from an assassin at a banquet and was fully knighted at the age of fourteen. From there, Keev went out as a knight errant, helping any and all he saw. He slew no dragons, and won no wars, but he travelled the world humbly doing good, until one day he ascended after rescuing a child’s cat from a tree.
-Excerpt from Wicket’s Guides to the Pantheon.
Kole ran as fast as he could back towards his friends, once again grateful in the moment for all the torture Zale and Tigereye had forced him to endure these past months. For not the first time he vowed internally not to grumble as much during those training, but he suspected this vow would be as effective as the last few.
By the time he made it back to the hill, what little that had construed their camp had been packed up and everyone wore all the gear they’d taken off over the past week.
“You did it!” Zale congratulated him as she saw him approaching in her Willsight.
“It worked?” Kole asked, banishing the spell.
The sight of Zale brought flashes of the spider voidling he’d just killed, and he grimaced at the memory.
Doug nodded at the question and a rock he held in his palm vanished.
“What’re we waitin for?” Rakin asked.
Zale moved to pull the handle open, when suddenly the ground around them shook.
“Uh oh,” Rakin said, looking at the ground.
“Something is happening!” Doug shouted, as if they didn’t all feel the shake. Then he added to clarify “Something Spacey!”
They all turned toward the camp, and watched as a tear formed in reality. It began as a flickering in the sky above the camp, but elongated toward the ground, replacing the alien sky full of floating islands to the familiar blue sky of their home. Not only was the sky familiar, but so was the skyline. The rip revealed a view of Edgewater as seen from the harbor, the tower of the Dahn soaring high above everything else.
“I think I know why they were blocking the Font of Space,” Kole said, putting the pieces of what he saw in the came together in his mind.
He’d at first suspected the block was to prevent attacks, but now realized it was meant to prevent the rift from opening prematurely. They were staging an invasion, but weren’t yet ready to attack.
“Ye think?” Rakin said.
Zale opened the door, and turned to Rakin
“We have to warn the city!” she shouted. “Go sound the alarm.”
Rakin took off, drawing on both his Ki, and his Earth magic to propel him along. He disappeared down the hall and out of sight.
“What do we do?” Amara asked.
They looked out over the camp, and saw the rift opening up further and further, inching towards the rivers on either side. As they watched, it touched down. The unarmored worker ants that had been digging fled from its descent, but they were too densely packed, and those that were touched by it passed out into the Material Realm.
As the rip descended, they saw the harbor market below, the people’s morning of trading suddenly interrupted by the rift in the sky. Everyone ran in panic, fleeing towards the safety of the city’s walls.
The ants that went through looked just as panicked as those on the receiving end of the invasion, and they too cast about looking for safety of their own.
“Follow me!” Zale said, taking charge and leading them through the door.
After the last of them was through, she took the rod, sealing the path back and led them through a series of doors until one of them took them out of the magically lit Dahn into the dark familiar damp of a cellar.
Kole summoned an orb of Light in his hand, lighting up the small space.
“Is this another tavern cellar?” Kole asked.
“Yeah, mom says they make good places to leave doors,” Zale said, drawing her sword and shield and making her way up the stairs as she spoke. “Limited foot traffic, easy to blend into the crowd and hide you just came out of nowhere, and most tavern owners are open to keeping secrets for coin.”
She stopped at the door listening, and then nodded.
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“We are in the dock district,” she said, “I don’t hear chaos up above, so we can’t be too close. Everyone ready?”
They all nodded, and exited the cellar. The tavern above wasn’t yet aware of the chaos unfolding above. An older man with an apron turned at the noise of their exit, and held his hands up in surrender.
“I work for Shin,” Zale said, listing what Kole assumed to be yet another alias of her mother. “The harbor is under attack, send people through the door in the basement to safety!”
At the name, the man settled until the rest of the statement caught up to him.
“Everyone to the cellar!” he yelled, and to his credit he went towards the front door.
They followed, exiting out into the street where people were standing in silent awe of the rift in the sky. It was far enough away that only the floating islands and orb of light could be seen, and not the army of giant ants down below.
“It’s an invasion!” Zale shouted, “There’s safety in the basement here!”
Kole and his friends didn’t wait around to see if anyone listened, but ran towards the rift.
I need to run more, Kole found himself thinking as he began to flag.
For all the improvements he’d made in the past months, he had nowhere near the endurance of Zale who’d trained her whole life.
He turned to Amara, amazed she was able to keep up, and saw her pulling a yellow potion out of her belt.
“Endurance. Potion,” she said, panting between each breath.
“Can I have one?” Kole asked.
“Shouldn’t,” she said, pausing to down the small vial. Here exhaustion vanished, and her breathing steadied and she finished. “They don’t mix well with clarity potions.”
“Ah,” Kole said, suddenly remembering all the horrible deaths he’d learned about the previous semester in alchemy.
He did a quick internal count of his morning's events and determined he’d spent 26 Will, leaving him with about 22 before he needed to take the potion Zale had gifted him. As they rounded the block to gain a full view of the harbor, he was suddenly very certain he would need it.
A giant tear in reality, a mirror to the one they’d seen on the other side rose from the street that lined the harbor, up into the sky, the real sun rising behind it, casting the sky in a crimson red. The orb of light that acted as a sun for that otherworld was visible through the rift, giving the appearance of a malevolent vertically slitted eye, the floating islands making up its iris. The sight sent chills through Kole.
In the time it’d taken them to get here, the soldier ants had gone from a confused force to reluctant invaders. The soldiers were creating a perimeter, pushing back all the stalls and buildings immediately around the portal, and were already at work ripping up the stones of the market to pile up ramparts around the breach.
Kole and his team stopped, looking over the surroundings for some place they could help. People were still fleeing, and the ants were sending advance parties after them. The ally they’d exited before was one avenue of escape the ants had yet to control.
“Doug and Amara, can you find a roof?” Kole asked, pulling his quarterstaff off his back sling. “Thunderwave works too well on these for me to stay at range.”
“Follow me,” Doug said, taking Amara by the hand, and heading into a building beside them.
Zale looked at Kole, and nodded. “Let’s go.”
Zale and Kole planted themselves in openings between buildings only ten feet across. As fleeing survivors saw them, they redirected toward them. The ants followed. By then, the friends were not the only people standing to fight. All around the harbor pockets of resistances had formed, the city guard having pulled together, joined by sailors who’d not had the fortune of being aboard their ships. The ships by then had all left dock, floating out a safe distance from shore carrying with them anyone who they could pull aboard. They now sat in the middle of the river, watching the battle unfold.
Archers and wizards on deck fired occasionally at the shore, but the ants showed no desire to push out toward the water. A perimeter was forming between the buildings, but it wasn’t even or complete, and the ants were pushing up some streets unopposed while stymied at others.
The first soldier ant, clad in familiar armor and wielding two swords and a shield with the fourth hand free, ran at Kole and Zale.
“I got it,” Zale said, and Kole took a step back, Thunderwave at the ready.
“Be ready for a bang,” Kole told her as she ran to meet the ant.
The enormous soldier held a shield out toward Zale as its two arms swung down on top of her.
Zale vanished into black mist for a moment, the unexpected lack of a target causing the soldier to fall forward. She reappeared an instant later, and spun around, stabbing her sword into the back of the ant’s neck, in the gap above its armor and beneath its helm.
“Gods be praised!” a woman shouted as she ran past them in the opening they were protecting. Kole noticed then that there were people all around watching them and waiting for openings to flee into.
“Come on!” Kole shouted, encouraging them to come before the next attack came.
Having seen the death of their eager companion, more soldier ants followed, this time keeping rank. A group of four approached them in a steady march, shields held up in an interlocking manner with small gaps perfect for quick jabs of their swords.
“I think maybe you should take this one,” Zale said, falling back to within the ally.
Kole looked from side to side, and saw the gap was just narrow enough for his Thunderwave to fill.
Zale held her ground as the four approached. Kole risked a glance up at Doug and Amara and saw them surveying further out, selectively firing at soldier ants as they got close to fleeing civilians and leaving Kole and Zale to their own devices until they needed help.
“I'm going silent!” Zale called as the ants were a few paces out of the alley and then the shifting sounds of her armor, already hardly audible over the battle, vanished entirely.
She stood her ground as if ready to fight to the death and the ants came to meet her. Kole didn’t give them a chance to make a single attack, and unleashed Thunderwave on the pair. Three of the four flew back out into the open market clearing, while the fourth—the one directly in front of Zale—only took a step back before recovering on a knee.
Zale capitalized on the stumble and took a step forward into its suddenly open guard and pierced it between a gap in its armor. Despite the wound, the ant stood fully, lifting the sword out of Zale’s grasp.
“Cheese” Zale cursed—sort of—and stepped back drawing her short sword up into a guard position with her shield.
“Cheese?” Kole asked, even as he cast a Radiant Bolt, sending it into the face of the ant soldier before them.
The sudden flash of light—and likely also the searing pain of the attack—left the soldier reeling, and Zale quickly finished it off.
The pair was amassing quite the pile of dead soldiers, and it wasn’t going unnoticed. Beyond, the soldiers grouped in much larger numbers, and Kole caught sight of something he’d forgotten about.
The earthen men had come marching out of the portal, all four of them, each mounted atop an armored scalequin, and the ramparts around them quickly transformed from piles of dirt, into gleaming stone walls.
