mages living inside a city of that size, quite enough to call the clouds above closer. He would cause some damage certainly, but not enough to risk being plucked from the air and smashed on the rocks below. No, he would resist the temptation, just as he would the growling animal in his gut that wanted to attack, to dive screaming onto the enemy and cut them to pieces before the rest of the army even caught up.
From the city below he detected a vibration in the afternoon air: a subtle, gentle stroke of magic, soaring up like the first notes of a symphony. It was joined by others, though most lacking the finesse of the first, a few exceeding it for power, and each a variation on a common theme.
One of their mages knows what he’s about, Styrax thought approvingly, pushing briefly on the wyvern’s neck to send it into a long, shallow dive. You could have taught the Farlan boy a thing or two; the elements are to be cajoled, not compelled. A mortal makes demands at their peril.
He could almost taste the thin streams of magic rising above the city. The air whipped past his face until the wyvern banked of its own accord and the buffeting lessened. A sparkle of energy tingled over his skin, adding renewed vigour to the breeze and sending a familiar frisson down Styrax’s neck.
Styrax peered down at the defences below as a few hopeful archers fired up at him, but their arrows fell hopelessly short. Now the wyvern had carried him down, closer to the city, he could pick out where the enemy mages were located.
I could pluck out your hearts right now, burst them like overripe fruit and leave you dead on the ground as a warning to the rest, he thought grimly. From the lower plain he surveyed the staggered defences of the causeway: earthworks flanking a long stone building that was built around a central archway straddling the road. A pair of guard-towers were set behind the earthworks, but they were small, barely big enough to hold more than two squads, and the Tollkeeper’s Arch itself would prove little more of an inconvenience.
The causeway defences had been built for commerce, not war. Further back, strung between buildings, was a hastily built defensive wall - it was feeble enough to show they didn’t really believe anyone would make it that far. On either side of the road the ground was broken up by angled ditches, and at one point between the wall and arch, a small canal allowed shallow-hulled scows to pass between the lakes. Though the two bridges across the canal had been dismantled, it was small, and anyway, the Menin Army had their own bridges to hand.
It would be a slaughter ground if the artillery barges were allowed free reign, but with a little help from Aroth’s mages, those would be dealt with before the troops arrived.
Didn’t you hear? Styrax asked the distant mages below, I’ve already conquered Ilit’s chosen people. The wind is mine to command now.
He turned in a long circle, following the perimeter wall of the city and noting what he could of the defences. The bulk of their soldiers were mustered in ordered blocks in the southwest of the city, where the ground was most open. From the air Aroth looked kidney-shaped, with a mile-long jetty protruding into Lake Apatorn. From here it was impossible to make out the delineation between the part built on stilts hammered into the lakebed and where the foundations were dry ground. But soon enough that wouldn’t matter.
Guiding the wyvern lower Styrax placed his unarmoured hand against the Crystal Skull in the centre of his cuirass, the one named Destruction. He’d found the differences between them were small, like the minuscule flaws that made each of a dozen gems unique.
Styrax could name each of his Crystal Skulls solely by the way it caught the light, but from his experiments he believed the only one markedly different was the last; Ruling. That one would be a handful to use in battle, he suspected, but the rest had only slight tendencies towards certain magics - tendencies that made Destruction less effort to use now.
He drew energy into a ball around the Skull and heard the thump of his heart echo through the magic. The bloody stains underneath his fingernails seemed to lighten and come alive as a smooth lattice of red-tinted light formed around the magic-scarred hand. Even as his