Three Broken Kingdoms-Book 1 of the Lost Continent (Completed)

Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Shield

Myra's Point of View

They were trying.

The gods knew they were trying, each valkyrie warrior striking again and again, hour after hour as their comrades fell. They knew only exhaustion, only pain and aching bones. Their world became a flurry of steel and bow, their aching limbs from sitting on a gryphon or wyvern or horses' back. With every breath they fought against exhaustion, as they struck again and again with steel, shot again and again, their hands on their bows. They knew only war, only constant shifting and the blood covering them.

But they were trying. Trying, and striking again and again against a wall of soldiers, burning and aiming against a wall of flesh that never stopped coming. For every one they struck down, another took their place, but there were only so many to take a valkyrie warrior's place. They held back the hordes, day after day, holding their ground but nothing more against an endless threat. Each day they lost inches and each day they lost lives. The Empress had thousands of soldiers to spare-but every loss burned for them.

They were all buying time and they knew it. Buying time for the elves to finally break through the shield, buying time for their generals to figure something out to save them.

Myra spent less time on the battleground-or battle-sky she supposed-than the other soldiers. She would spend hours in war meetings with the elfin generals and her fellow valkyrie leaders as they tried to find a way to break magic past the shield. Then she would spend the rest of her time astride Caelia, warring against the inevitable in a race against time.

So she ended up with less sleep than all the others.

If this had been a human army, than even with the valkyries' skill they would already have collapsed. The valkyries also possessed an endurance not only trained into them young but born to them, allowing them to battle on in the toughest conditions for days and days. More than anything that was the reason they had survived against the elves, and it was the reason they were still fighting now. The Isthmus also provided an advantage. Unlike the valkyries, the humans struggled to negotiate the charred, broken land that had been the victim of elfin sorcery at the height of battle. Whilst the valkyries could use it to their advantage with practiced ease-a hole in the earth gouged out by elfin magic could stop the Kallians in their tracks-the human army was hopeless.

The valkyrie generals still had tricks up their sleeves, too. War tactics allowed them to constantly outmanoeuvre an army twelve times their size. Valkyrie warriors cut through Kallians like wheat and the aerial legion ended up slaughtering hundreds.

But the fact remained that they were fifty thousand against an army of twelve times that number.Myra entered the war meeting ragged and exhausted, catching Viktoria's worried eye.

"The dome is impenetrable," Diaz snapped at Talia. "No amount of throwing flames and lightning at it is going to break the damn thing down. If it hasn't yielded already, then the elves will run out of magic wearing it down."

"I believe you're unaware of the principles of elfin magic. Even if we need a week, a month to recover, we always do. Food and rest rebuild it all. And that's a whole lot better than sitting here whilst the valkyries exhaust themselves and slowly lose ground." Talia hissed right back.

"At some point, you're just going to misfire and hit the valkyrie legion," Diaz replied. "And we can't afford to lose a hundred warriors because one of your idiots scorches a bunch of us by accident."

"The shield must break," Talia protested. "For the Empress to block out all the power we've thrown at her, she must be exhausted. At some point, she'll run out of energy and even if it's only for a moment we can hit then and hit hard."

"That's elfin magic," Calais argued. "We know next to nothing about Witcharian principles of sorcery."

Talia went silent at that, but then frowned.

"Where is all the energy coming from, though?" Talia wondered. "Our energy comes from ourselves. It's not limitless."

"Then how do explain your niece?" Ruby asked. Talia stiffened. "Her magic is immense. That can't all be her energy."

"Well, no. We have our own energy, and then we have our magic's energy. We mostly take from our magic, which is limitless, but some from our own energy, which eventually runs out. Your power depends on your ratio. The more you take from your magic, the more you can wield. Layla's ratio is just almost purely her magic."

"So maybe Medea's ratio goes one step further. Maybe her ratio is solely her magic." Calais considered.

"If that was true she could have wiped out everyone on this field without blinking years ago. No, she can't have a pure ratio. She wouldn't have to bother with an army if she had a pure ratio."

"So maybe she's playing with us?" One of the other elves said nervously.

"She's lost thousands." Diaz snorted. "The shield is breakable, then. So throw everything you have at it."

"Bad idea," Talia counseled. "She'll just start it up again before we can regenerate our energy."

"What if it's alchemy?" Myra asked. "What if they're just pretending it's magic to distract us?"

There was an awkward silence. They knew even less about alchemy than they knew about Witcharian magic.

"Then we break through it," Talia said, stubborn as a mule. "We'll double the firepower tomorrow. See how that goes."

"Wait," Ruby said. "The Witches were said to bend the laws of magic. That was what they did. That's why they needed conduits like Medea, and why the only people who could fight them were the gods-because Elena messed with their magic. What if Medea bargained for more than just the magic they know of? What if she bargained for the shield as well? To create a place with no magic at all."

"There's no way to confirm that." Diaz said briskly. "Nor is there any way to confirm if it's alchemy."

"It's the only thing that makes sense, though." Myra argued. "She has one shield, so she can't undo the ice."

"All this theory amouts to nothing if we can't confirm it." Viktoria reminded them all. "So the elves keep flinging magic at the shield, because we don't have a way of knowing whether it makes a difference."

That silenced them all.

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Myra

It went on. And on.

The valkyries fought and fought and fought, blades striking against blades again and again until even when they did sleep they could hear only that constant pounding of steel on steel. The elves trained from dawn till dusk, exhausting themselves day after day, trying to form some semblance of an army. Myra wished they could send the elves onto the front now, but if they sent them too early they would all be slaughtered.

It was such a delicate balance: too early and they would all die, too late and they would have no valkyries left to fight beside.

They just had to hope the valkyries to hold back the Kallians for a few months whilst the elves tried to figure out how to hold a blade right. She'd already sent the few who made hobbies of learning to wield swords and shoot to the front, and anyone else who could fight without magic was conscripted to at least train the other elves.

It was not enough. There were a dozen valkyries training the elves; they should be making faster progress than this. The reality was that the Asrieli had relied for centuries, for millenia, on their magic to protect them, and faced with a world where their enchantment was useless, they could not cope. Imagine if the valkyries had managed to neutralise their magic. We would have conquered them in an afternoon. Less.

Myra was beginning to understand why the elves had so much trouble. Not only was everyone here unsure which end of the sword to hold and which one to stab with, they weren't selected for natural talent as other soldiers might be. Unlike the valkyries, the elves didn't care if their soldiers were feeble and weak, or even missing a limb. If they could cast magic, they could cast magic.

Myra still felt like it was her fault when a valkyrie managed to disable two dozen elves without breaking a sweat. Two dozen.

They were so, so doomed.