General Bitterthorn thought, This place was beautiful…once.
Once, this part of the Dryad Kingdom had been home to the huge, golden-leafed Gleaming Trees—towering colossi with trunks as tall as a palace and as wide as a watchtower. Once, the entire forest canopy here had shimmered like molten topaz in the summer sun, and his people, the Dryads, had taken their ease beneath it. Once, before the fire and the iron, before the Empire’s cannons had turned the ancient glade into a shattered ruin, the song of this place had moved through Bitterthorn as music: the movement of root and branch, in the sound of flitting hummingbirds, in the voices of Dryad saplings playing in the springy carpet of moss.
It had been so very, very beautiful.
Once.
Now, the Gleaming Trees were charred black spires that protruded from the ground like the stubs of rotten, shattered teeth. Now, their blackened husks lay fallen everywhere like toppled monuments. Now, the bones of the ancient forest had been plowed into a killing ground, the ground itself churned to mud and blackened by rivers of blood and gunpowder. Now, the air here burned with the stink of burning wood, the copper tang of sap and iron, the oily ghost of old smoke that never quite lifted, the sickly-sweet stench of rot and death that only grew stronger as the dryads and their hated enemies butchered each other to lay claim to the ruin around them.
Hatred for these wretched humans made Bitterthorn’s sap boil as he shifted his seat astride his monstrous toad-mount, Acidmaw. The bastard Imperials had battered the Dryads here for three full moons, encircling this forest pocket by pocket and hurling muskets, grenades, and their new infernal fire-launchers into every ancient grove they could find. Three moons of losing ground, three moons of making the enemy bleed for every inch.
No longer. The line would be drawn here. This far, and no further.
Bitterthorn gripped Acidmaw’s reins tighter with the jagged nails on his knotted fingers and scanned the churning fronts for any movement that might signal the Imperials’ next push. The humans always attacked in the dawn hours, when the ground turned to sucking clay and the sun, a distant rumor behind three layers of smoke and fog, barely licked the treetops. The mud retarded the treant heavy infantry, but the humans, with their larded boots and their oxen-drawn cannon, fared no better. Bitterthorn knew this, and they knew he knew, and so all their battles in this long war resolved to blood and grit and the will to suffer longer. Neither side would let the other have the advantage of choosing the terrain, so they fought on terrain that was terrible for everyone.
A sally of muskets cracked out, and a volley of iron shot rattled the amberite shields of Bitterthorn’s army’s center. Amberite, made of tree sap worked and ensorcelled for strength and durability, was what the Dryads used in place of steel, for they would suffer no fires within their domain. Not for them were the forges and workshops of humans. They used what their home gave them, and in ways more elegant and refined than humans could ever imagine.
Bitterthorn watched, jaws grinding, as the Dryad troops recoiled under the impact. Orange firefly flashes dropped some, but others remained standing, protected by their shields and by their own thick, wooden flesh. Bitterthorn’s own heart thumped out a battle drum behind his ribs. Always, always, some would die. That was the contract of resistance. But the Imperials were not pushing here; the shots were a feint, as plain as the false blossom on a venomous fungus. They had a plan. So did he.
Bitterthorn had chosen this battleground carefully, and the humans had been all too willing to follow him onto it.
The Dryads did not let the Imperial volley go unanswered. As the humans ground forward in big, square-shaped blocks bristling with pikes and halberds and musketry, the dryads let fly with devastating volleys of poisoned arrows. Catapults and trebuchets formed of living vines at the rear of Bitterthorn’s position bombarded the humans with thorn-clusters that shattered to spray arm-sized barbs in all directions, caustic seed-pods that burst to unleash acidic spores or flesh-eating worms, and nests of hand-sized fire-wasps whose poison liquefied their victims from the inside out.
Bitterthorn relished the devastation. Humans screamed as their faces melted off their skulls. They shrieked as carnivorous, writhing maggots burrowed into their flesh. They gurgled and fell as their innards turned to slurry and broke formation to run screaming, waving their arms like windmills as clouds of furious insects stung them to death.
He turned to one of his officers. “Order the spider-riders forward,” he rasped. “Divide them into three columns as they move through the trees. Have them position themselves on the flanks and to the rear of the enemy and await my signal. We will encircle the humans and annihilate them. Sound the general advance for our lines to move forward and engage. They must hold out until the trap can be sprung.”
The officer bowed and hurried off to relay the orders. The Dryads had long made use of the enormous forest-spiders found within their kingdom; taller than a man, armored in thick chitin and with venomous fangs as long as an arm, they were the terror of the Morghastian infantry. When mounted atop them, Dryad spearmen and archers were formidable indeed.
Acidmaw croaked, a low, mournful rumble that vibrated through Bitterthorn’s hips and up his spine. He patted the monster’s armored pate, streaked with smoke and dark-clotted sap where two musket balls had struck in the last skirmish. “There, old friend,” he murmured in the language of frogs, “just a little longer and you’ll have your fill.”
A horn made from the shell of an enormous snail blared a deafening, brassy call, and the battered warriors of the Dryad army locked their shields and advanced with a ragged cheer. Amberite spear-tips glinted in the light of the fires raging across the battlefield as they slogged through the muck to close with the humans. Beside and around them lumbered the hulking treants—mobile, semi-sentient trees that walked on myriad legs made of thick roots, their trunks armored in bark thicker than ship’s hulls, their branch-arms swatting aside arrows and shrapnel and reaching like grasping claws as they closed with the humans. Some of them had already lost branches and bark, and their wounds exposed the shimmering veins of sap that pulsed beneath, but still they advanced, undeterred by wounds that would have felled anything born of flesh.
The Morghastians roared their own challenge in reply and leveled their weapons to meet the onrushing foe. It reminded Bitterthorn of a grotesque, oversized sea urchin lowering its myriad spines. Musketry rattled, and blooms of fire punched through the gloom, and cannons roared, but the Dryad shieldwall still pushed forward step by slogging step. They would not break, not even as their comrades fell dead and dying around them. Each loss fed a silent, rising madness among the bark-skinned, leaf-haired warriors. Their sap-blood, viscous and iridescent, spattered the muck and sprayed in the air, but they were as implacable as the change in seasons. No army could stop the press of fifteen thousand dryads with hate for their enemy poured into every step.
The Morghastian lines stiffened as the two sides met with a deafening CRUNCH. This was war at its most personal and most brutal: spears impaling, amberite blades gouging, the ring and crack of shattering shields, the noise and stink and claustrophobia of bodies pressed tight as logs. Human screams interlaced with the roars of dryads as they battered each other to splinters and gristle. Some of the younger saplings might lose their nerve in such a crush, but Bitterthorn’s veterans kept formation despite all. Amberite clashed against steel, and the reek of blood and burst sap filled Bitterthorn’s nose until it drowned out all else. The old general’s arms ached with the urge to leap down and join the press himself, but he forced calm, watching for the moment his trap would close. His warriors were dying out there—gods, they were dying in swathes—but they gave as good as they got, and every fallen dryad drew a price as it fell. Every time an Imperial bayonet found its mark, a Morghastian’s skull was pulped beneath a spiked wooden club. Every time a pistol or musket shot at point-blank range felled one of Bitterthorn’s soldiers, a Morghastian vanished under a hail of toxic darts.
The slaughter was of a sort only the bitterest, most hateful foes could wreak upon each other. The Morghastians, fueled by the belief that they and they alone were natural masters of the world, gave everything they had. The Dryads, desperate and vengeful to save all they could of their ancient home, gave everything they had to stop them. The Imperials' discipline, their iron and powder, met the Dryads’ ferocity and ancient cunning.
A fresh cannon volley hammered the left of Bitterthorn’s battle line. He saw a dozen of his best warriors in the Fifth Splinter instantly torn apart, their bodies thrown high and scattered like kindling before the surge closed ranks over their corpses. Muskets flashed, thick banks of white sulfurous smoke obscured everything until the smell of death became a miasma so thick it seemed to slow every movement, dragging every swing and lunge and bellow into a viscous, sucking nightmare.
The barrage was followed by another horn-call. Not one of ours, Bitterthorn thought. He knew that sound. It meant the elite Imperial cavalry was joining the fray, and there they were now in all their martial finery. Thundering from the Morghastian rear, where they’d no doubt been deployed as a reserve force for just such an occasion, they were an awesome sight. Their armor gleamed to a mirror-shine and blazed in the sun, and their karkadann mounts—larger than horses, and far more durable—shook the earth with the thunder of their charge. They surged forward in an arrowhead formation to drive straight through the carnage and split the Dryad line in two.
Bitterthorn’s mouth turned into a bitter grimace. He’d seen this tactic before: the Emperor’s finest formed a living wedge, their shock and mass sundered lesser foes on the spot. Last time, at the Battle of the Weeping Pines, it had nearly worked.
But at Weeping Pines, the ground had been firmer. Here, the mud was mulched by weeks of constant rain and rotten with the runoff of the slaughter. And there, as Bitterthorn had hoped, the elite found no traction. The charge lost its unity and momentum as karkadann hooves sank or slipped, monstrous riders pitching forward or sideways. Some mounts bogged nearly to the chest; others reared and flailed, prying their iron-shod feet from the sucking morass. The gleaming wedge fanned into a shambles, but some of them did manage to reach their targets and killed Bitterthorn’s warriors as best they could.
A score of the Imperials let off a volley of pistol fire as they plowed into a section of the line, and even slowed by the mud, the impact was still devastating. Fragments of amberite, shards of bark, and sprays of sap flew in all directions. The armored hooves of the karkadanns crushed the skulls of those who fell. The lances of their riders impaled two, sometimes three defenders at once, and pistols and blunderbusses, fired at spitting distance, ripped holes through shields, heads, torsos, and limbs. Yet the knights were vulnerable now—their great weakness was that, robbed of speed and the cataclysmic first impact, fighting in small groups rather than together in one massed formation, they could be surrounded and overwhelmed. Which, one by one, they were.
Then the treants smashed into them.
The treants were slower than the regular Dryad infantry, but almost impossible to stop once they got going. They hit the Morghastians like an avalanche. Men literally flew screaming through the air, knocked aside like ninepins, and crushed to smears. Severed limbs pinwheeled through the air, blood geysered, helmets and breastplates crumpled like tinfoil, and horses and karkadanns alike were smashed pancake flat. Bitterthorn watched as one treant, an old one called Ironroot, waded into a crowd of Imperial pikemen and, heedless of the dozens of wounds on its trunk or the small forest of spears and arrows sticking of it, it seized a karkadann by one of its legs and began to use it as a bludgeon, slamming the beast again and again into the packed mob of humans until both were a pulverized, seeping pulp wedged into the mud.
Another treant called Thunderbark took five cannonballs to the trunk in quick succession. Bitterthorn saw it shudder, sap gushing from craters in its belly, before it bellowed like a landslide and collapsed with deliberate aim onto a score of men, crushing them to paste with its final death-throes. The other treants, battered and riddled with shot, moved with a ponderous brutality, stomping through the Morghastian lines, uprooting men and beast and hurling them through the haze of battle like children’s toys.
The Morghastians responded with grenades, fire-bombs, and concentrated cannon fire. Patches of lichen and moss combusted instantly, and ancient wood pulped and splintered, but the bark of the treants was thick from centuries of slow, steady growth, and even as their leaves burned, their tough wooden hide smoldered and held fast. Some of them had already fallen, but many more remained upright and fighting. Some of them fought on for quite a few minutes even after being engulfed from branch to root in flames.
To the right, Bitterthorn saw the Morghastian reserves and a second unit of heavy horse pouring into the gap created by Thunderbark’s fall. The humans meant to exploit the opening and drive through, splitting his army in two. The old general grunted, spitting a knot of sap onto the ground. Good. Let them come.
His eyes traced the battlefield for the sign he expected. There—the spider-riders, scuttling in wide arcs through the upper boughs and scuttling around the blackened remains of the trees. The sound of battle drowned out their approach, and with their focus on the fighting in front of them, the Morghastians had no idea their doom was already sealed.
Bitterthorn gave the signal with a single burst of his war-horn. The trap was sprung, and the spider-riders attacked.
They poured down from the trees and out from…well, from nowhere, at least from the humans’ point of view. They hit the Morghastian army from multiple vectors, surrounding them and hemming them in like the dirty animals they were.
No, Bitterthorn thought. That was an insult to animals. Animals killed to eat, to mate, to defend themselves or their territory or their mates or their young. But not for the love of killing itself. Not for the lust of it.
Only humans did that.
Only humans destroyed for the sake of destroying. Only humans burned for the sake of burning. Only humans hunted but did not eat the animals they killed and cut down trees to build things they didn’t even need. Only humans were self-deluded enough to believe all other living things were put on this earth for their use, and only humans were ingenious enough and egotistical enough to justify their savagery and aggression on the grounds of progress and destiny. Only humans had the self-absorption necessary to think they were the superior beings, and everything and everyone else was lesser. Inferior. To be used, or broken, or buried.
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Only humans could steal and murder and befoul all around them and call it glorious.
And these murderous, vicious apes had the nerve to call Dryads abominations. To think the Morghastian nobles whispered absurd stories of child-stealing, meat-eating wood demons in their nurseries and court salons.
The arrogance, Bitterthorn thought darkly. The sheer, unbridled arrogance.
It was an arrogance the Dryads were all too eager to dispel.
Battle cries turned to shrieks of terror as the Morghastians realized what was happening to them, but even then, the Empire’s iron discipline held firm. Trumpets blared, officers shouted orders and laid about them with whips and cudgels to restore order until the humans closed ranks and formed up in a defensive circle, ends bristling with bayonets like a hedgehog. The clever bastards had even managed to drag a pair of lightweight cannons to the center and started hurling grapeshot at point-blank range. Bitterthorn watched a spider-rider blown to pieces along with his arachnid as a lucky shot found its mark; the fragments rained down on the panicked humans below, scattering blood and the glinting shards of amberite mail.
But numbers and terror were on the side of the Dryads now, and even Imperial discipline had its limits. Bitterthorn saw the line begin to waver—but then it held as a man in ornate steel armor, as proud as a peacock with a plume of bright feathers in his helm and mounted atop a magnificently armored warhorse, bellowed at his men to stand or die. That was what Bitterthorn had been waiting for: for the enemy commander to reveal himself.
He spurred Acidmaw into action at last, and the huge amphibian gleefully bounded off his vantage point and down into the fray. Bitterthorn felt a surge of ferocious, vengeful joy as he laid about him left and right with his amberite greatsword, cleaving heads and lopping off limbs but never slowing as he closed in on his quarry.
“YOU!” Bitterthorn roared in challenge, leveling his blade at the man. “You mewling, useless member of a craven, puny race! Stand and face me!”
The Morghastian wheeled his horse about and answered the call, as Bitterthorn knew he would. The pride of these Imperials, particularly their leaders, was such that they never turned down a challenge. Doubtless, the man was already thinking of the glory he’d earn by slaying the infamous General Bitterthorn in single combat.
“Inferior wretch!” the Morghastian bellowed in reply. “It is my honor and privilege to strike you down and end the crime of your unworthy existence! You are not worthy of breathing the same air as your betters, you vile creature! This land and all lands belong to Morghast!”
He spurred his horse to a gallop, and Bitterthorn laughed madly as he raised his sword high and charged to meet him. Time seemed to slow to a crawl. The man’s bright, feathered helm flashed in the haze. It felt to Bitterthorn that he had time to take in every detail: the drooping, cultured tufts of his long walrus moustache, the arrogance in his bearing, the snarl of hate that twisted his mouth, the gilded gorget around his collar, the fine sable-cloak now reduced to tatters, and the crisp velvet of his officer’s sash, now splashed with gore.
This was a man who expected the world to bend before him. He’d slaughtered countless Dryads for the glory of Morghast and would do it again, a thousand times, if left alive.
No more.
They met in the churned quagmire left by a fallen treant. The Morghastian general, his own sword arm bristling with medals and epaulets and the hard muscle of a lifelong killer, swung with a speed Bitterthorn might have respected had he not loathed the human so utterly. Steel met amberite in a shriek that set Bitterthorn’s bark-plates a-tingle, and sparks flew as the blades collided.
The duel was a brutal, inelegant thing—two butchers hacking at the meat in front of them. Bitterthorn’s amberite blade hooked under the human’s gorget, ground along the steel, and chopped hard for the throat. The general blocked the cut with the flat of his saber and hammered a mailed fist at Bitterthorn’s temple, nearly staggering him, but found his follow-up strike thwarted when the cross-guard of Bitterthorn’s weapon locked against the hilt of his own.
For a moment, they grappled, bodies pressed close, faces snarling inches apart, and eyes blazing with mutual hatred.
“Abomination!” the Morghastian raged, his nose almost touching Bitterthorn’s face.
“Barbarian!” Bitterthorn hissed back, with venom more caustic than that of any snake or spider.
Acidmaw sprayed caustic bile at the man’s mount to break the deadlock. The warhorse reared, almost throwing its rider, but the general held fast, boots jammed deep into the stirrups. He whipped a flintlock pistol from his belt, aimed, and fired.
Bitterthorn whipped his head aside at the very, very last minute. He heard the click of the hammer and the crack as the powder ignited, felt the searing heat of the bullet as it missed him by a hair’s breadth. The Morghastian shrieked with frustration, and his blade came scything down, but Bitterthorn had the measure of him now and parried the blow.
“You monkeys!” The Dryad general raged. “Two hundred years of this and still we defy you! Still, we endure! How many more of your wretched kind must die before you learn that the Dryad Kingdom will not break?"
He lashed out with a gnarled fist and landed a blow that shattered the man’s jaw. The sound of his bones breaking was music to Bitterthorn’s ears—or it would be, if he had any instead of the small holes on either side of his head. “All we wanted was to be left alone!” he bellowed. “You started this! You came here with your fire and your armies to attack us! Greed has burned a hole in the hearts of all your kind that can never be filled! You will never have enough, will you?!”
He lashed out blindly with his sword, but Bitterthorn easily dodged. “There is nothing here for you humans, you monkeys, you vermin, you swine! The Dryad Kingdom stands! It stands! It stands, and it defies you! Your kind will never rule here!”
The Morghastian general lunged again as he retched and spat blood, lips puffy and black with bruising already. He tried to retort, but his jaw only hung and flapped. Still, he fought to the very last. Bitterthorn felt the human’s sword cut a deep gash in his thigh; bark split, and sap oozed. He drove forward, though, heedless of the intense pain. The human’s strike had overextended him, and that created an opening Bitterthorn was eager to exploit. He caught the general’s wrist in his own gnarled hand and wrenched it back savagely until the bones snapped and pierced the skin. The human’s blade fell from his fingers. Not a word escaped him, but his eyes rolled wildly in their sockets as he writhed and tried to pull free.
Bitterthorn yanked him close, so they were eye-to-eye. He wanted the man to see who and what was killing him. He wanted him to choke on his arrogance and conceit in his final moments.
“Before you die, know this, you squirming little parasite,” Bitterthorn said softly. “We will prevail against you. We dwelt here ages before your kind first emerged from the primordial ooze, and we will still be here long after you return to the muck that spawned you. Your army will die here. Not a single one of your men will leave this place alive. We will leave them where they fall. Their flesh will sate the hunger of the birds and beasts, and their blood will quench the thirst of trees as it sinks through the soil and into the roots below. You brought your soldiers here to destroy our home. Instead, they will nourish it and make it stronger. But you will not live to see it. Of that, I will make certain.”
Bitterthorn rammed his blade into the narrow gap between the Morghastian’s breastplate and fine gold-inlaid gorget, straight into the throbbing artery, and twisted.
The human’s blood pumped hot and foul against Bitterthorn’s face, splattering in thick arcs, staining his bark black. He savored the terror in the man’s eyes until the light left them, savored the gurgling noises he made as the life left his body. When the Imperial finally collapsed, Bitterthorn let him drop into the dirt like a sack of garbage.
"Filth," he said, and spat on him.
The horse reared again, wild now, and in the confusion Acidmaw’s tongue lashed out and snatched the dead human. With a flex and squelch, the thick tongue yanked the limp general's corpse from the mud and gulped it down in three wet, convulsive swallows.
The death of their commander finally broke the Morghastians. The Empire didn’t exactly encourage initiative and independent thinking among the ranks, and in the absence of someone to tell them what to do, the army’s cohesion dissolved like morning mist in the sun. Dozens, then hundreds of soldiers turned and fled in panic.
Bitterthorn saw it happen—how the humans dropped their banners, how they threw down their weapons and ran, eyes wide with animal terror, but the encirclement was complete, and there was nowhere for them to run. Some of them even raised their hands and screamed for surrender, but the dryads, enraged at the continued destruction of their home and the deaths so, so many of their kind over the course of this wretchedly long war, gave them none. Mercy had been burned out of Bitterthorn years ago, and he doubted many of his warriors even remembered what the word meant.
“Don’t let a single one escape!” Bitterthorn bellowed.
None did. The battle descended into organized butchery. Spider-riders scythed the humans down, fangs plunging into backs, dryad archers picking off stragglers with methodical precision. Amberite swords sliced off upraised hands and silenced pleas for mercy. Amberite spears plunged into backs and bellies to cut off screams. The carnage was so total that the ugly slurry of the battlefield slopped up to the ankles as it overflowed with heap upon heap of ruined flesh. The mud turned to a pulp of bone fragments and shredded meat and sodden, blood-mired leaves.
For hours, the massacre continued. Even after all the powder and steel had been spent, even after the last banner was trodden into the dirt and the last officer’s head had been torn from its shoulders, even then, the killing did not stop. The Dryads moved among the fallen humans and made sure they stayed that way. The spiders drank freely, green-glowing venom bubbling from their fangs as they feasted on the slain, and the treants lumbered sluggishly now that their fury was spent.
The only survivors of the Morghastian army were their animals, their horses, karkadanns, pack mules, and others. Whenever possible, the Dryads allowed them to flee instead of killing them. They were not to blame for the deeds of their masters, nor had they had a say in serving them. They were innocent in the way all animals were, and Bitterthorn’s people never harmed beasts unless there was need or reason. Bitterthorn watched a karkadann stagger away, crippled by a gash in its flank but limping gamely into the safety of the ruined grove, and felt a distant stab of something like sorrow. Such loyal and devoted service was wasted on the likes of humans.
Only when silence finally reigned did Bitterthorn finally sit down, hunched and exhausted and filthy, upon the gore-soaked earth. Fires still burned here and there, and clumps of white powder smoke drifted through the killing field, mingled with the stench of smoke and the cloying smell of ruptured intestines. He removed his stag-horned, T-visored amberite helm, exhaled, and fought down the urge to close his eyes.
He was so tired. His wounds stung with every breath; sap beaded on his thigh where the general’s saber had pierced the bark. The air tasted of blood and cinders, and by the Great Mother Tree, he was so sick of it all. Sick of the filth and the blood and screams and fighting, fighting, always fighting.
Victory today belonged to the dryads. But the humans would send another army soon enough. And another. And another after that. And that was why, for all the slaughter he’d wreaked upon the enemy today, Bitterthorn felt no sense of triumph. His warriors could kill and kill and kill, but humans bred faster than fungi and, worse, believed in the rightness of their own ascendancy with religious conviction.
And that is how the Dryad Kingdom will fall, he thought. Not for my people a glorious last battle, a heroic last stand worthy of remembrance. Despite what he’d told the Morghastian general as the man died, Bitterthorn knew the hateful truth: unless something changed, his world would be slowly but surely ground to mulch. A slow, drawn-out, agonizing fall—the most ignominious end Bitterthorn could think of. Certainly not an end befitting the Dryads.
He shook his head and fought down the surge of despondency. No. No. He would not—could not—let that happen, not while there was life left in his body. There had to be something out there that would change the calculus of the war—he just needed to figure out what it was and find it.
He heard footsteps in the muck. A smaller figure, battered and sticky with sap and blood, limped to his side. Leafblade, his second-in-command. Her left arm was a ruin, jagged splinters protruding where bark had once grown seamless. She cradled it with her working hand and looked over the field without blinking.
“Orders, sir?” She didn’t address the wound, even though she was surely in great pain.
“Gather our fallen and leave the humans where they are,” Bitterthorn said. “Order scouting patrols into the forest to ensure no stragglers managed to reach the Imperial border. When you’ve done that, I want you to divide our fasted mounted troops into flying columns and level every Morghastian village and town within riding distance of it. Spare none and leave not one stone atop another. Leave not one eye open to weep for the dead.”
The female Dryad’s eyes widened. The Dryads almost never struck out beyond their own borders—even before the war, it was a rare thing indeed to see one abroad. But Bitterthorn had had enough of waiting for the enemy to come to him. Now it was the Dryads’ turn to pay the humans a visit.
“Sir,” Leafblade finally managed. “With the greatest respect, does that not seem…excessive?”
Bitterthorn almost laughed. The Morghastians wanted to wipe his people out on principle, every last one of them, and this youngster wanted to talk about excessive?
“Were you there, Leafblade, when they charred three thousand of our young ones at the Willow Marsh?" Bitterthorn murmured. The words tasted foul, conjured up the memory of that fire-stained sky, the smoke rolling for miles, the screams that went on for hours. "Did you see the stacks of saplings cut root and branch and given over to their pyres? They started this war, and for too long, they have not felt its impact on their own doorstep. It is time for them to feel what they have made us feel for so long. There is no room in this war for restraint or mercy, and if there ever was, that time has long since passed. The order is given. See to your arm, then carry it out.”
Leafblade nodded, her jaw set. If she still had reservations, she didn’t voice them further. Good, Bitterthorn thought. He was in no mood to hear of it any further. "As you command, General,” she said, then turned on her heel and marched off.
Bitterthorn looked over the battlefield again. He looked upon the death and gore and fire and the ruin. He looked upon it all and remembered a time, impossibly distant now, when this place had looked very different.
Peace was a distant memory for him. Some of the younger Dryads didn’t even remember it all. But Bitterthorn did. He remembered the time before the war as one remembers a dream: warm, fuzzy, half-real, but so perfect it ached.
Another lifetime, it often seemed, lived by someone else entirely. But he clung to what scraps of it he could, because they reminded him of what once had been and what he fought to restore. And every time he left the escape of his memories, his hate grew blacker, and his rage burned hotter.
He wondered, not for the first time, what sort of creature he was becoming, and concluded after a moment that he simply did not care. All Bitterthorn wanted was to ensure the survival of his people. If he had to damn his own soul to make that happen, he would, and without hesitation. The general was quite aware that the villages and towns he’d just condemned contained not just fighting men but human females and offspring. Once, that would have given him pause. At one time in his life, Bitterthorn would have recoiled at the idea of such things and spurned such cruelty, but the humans had taught his people cruelty's meaning and its usefulness. They were excellent tutors in that subject, the humans were, and Bitterthorn was an even more excellent student.
A pair of soldiers, barely out of saplinghood, still adolescents by Dryad standards, stumbled by. They were dragging a third between them whose torso was a slashed-open ruin. The wounded dryad’s face was a mask of disbelief, framed by hair tangled with matted leaves; the yellow-green sap leaking from the gash glittered in the waning light. Children should not have to learn this, Bitterthorn thought. That, he reflected, was the greatest and most precious thing the war had taken from his people: their innocence. Mushrooms sprouted from spores of dead ones, and new trees sprouted from the seeds of fallen ones, but innocence, once lost, was gone forever. It was fragile, finite, and irreplaceable.
A wind, cold and sharp, sliced across the churned earth, whistling between the stumps of the fallen Gleaming Trees. Bitterthorn shivered and reached down to grasp a handful of stained, charred dirt. He remembered when it was rich and earthy brown, so full of life you could actually smell it. He didn’t know if this place, or so many others the humans had ravaged, would ever look that way again. Probably not.
The Dryad general let the dirt fall from his fingers. Surrounded by devastation, he let out a long, mournful sigh and buried his head in his hands.
This place was so beautiful…once.
