King Lohsa finally took advantage of the one trick he managed to hide from Ronela, which he developed after she had fled the country because he anticipated that there was some chance she might be heading for the Country of the Olden and that she might betray some of the plans in progress she might have overheard or seen at the castle. King Lohsa called on newly bred fire-breathing beasts that had been trained by a unit of flight experts. These new units flew in from the caves outside of Tur and swooped down on the aerial fleet of the Olden, overwhelming a few of their fire-breathers, and then taking out some of their key vessels.
Seeing these complications, Sergeant Gerp foresaw a bad end to the battle if the Olden failed to take extreme measures to turn the tide. Sergeant Gerp beckoned Ronela to follow him, and the two of them flew over to the ship where the chief Olden magicians and commanders were giving orders to the units.
“We must execute the strategy that you warned me can only be taken if all else fails,” Gerp said upon bursting into the meeting room.
“No. Everything is fine. We just broke through the castle’s side wall. We’re entering and they can’t hold out in the castle biding for time. What makes you say that it’s time to take such drastic measures?!” the Chief Magician exclaimed, frightened by the thought of going to such extremes.
“I’ve had a vision, and all things remaining equal, I foresaw that we will fall, and that our brethren Olden will suffer more at the hands of the Kyllary that have been persecuting them than ever before. Lohsa will use our failed war to argue that he’s in the right. We must stop this outcome at all costs.”
“If we win this way, we’ll never be in the right. We’ll be blamed by future generations for being what we’ve condemned the Kyllary for over the generations.”
“Be it as it may, we must win this war. The alternative is unthinkable.”
The magicians, commanders, assistants, and all others in the meeting room looked at each other, trying to find a face that had some concrete objection to raise, but only found the same questioning eyes looking back at them.
“If we have to take this solution, we must execute it flawlessly. Recall all of our units from the battlefield. Do it immediately. We can’t be surprised in the middle of this operation.”
Messengers were sent out to give signals for an immediate and total withdrawal, and Kyllary knights were surprised when all of the Olden knights, beasts, and vessels withdrew from the field of battle in the middle of leveling enemies or executing crafty naval maneuvers.
King Lohsa saw the withdrawal from his meeting room’s window, and his council immediately began throwing out possible reasons for the withdrawal, but none of these struck as likely reasons.
“They’re running away. They’ve learned that we outnumber and out-spear them!”
“They’re going to beg us to accept their surrender.”
“They’re leaving to attempt a battle at a different port.”
Before the speculations were over, King Lohsa suddenly felt the floor trembling, and at first he assumed that he might have been trembling due to fear and only perceiving the whole floor as shaking instead. But, when he looked closely at the floor, he saw that the floor was indeed trembling, as was obvious from the small knocks that were being made by the tables and chairs against the stones of the floor. The advisers also noticed this initially minor shaking. Suddenly, the shaking intensified, so that it was impossible to doubt that an earthquake was shaking the entire city of Tur. King Lohsa looked outside, and witnessed that a few of the small huts at the outskirts of the city were collapsing in shambles. Even some of the larger buildings were shaken until their walls collapsed on each other. When the king looked over at the sea, he saw that Olden ships were hovering in the air above the waves, as the waves went from being a calm receding tide to enormous tidal waves, and then turned into a series of tsunamis that made a rapid approach towards the rocks at the bay. These waves crashed into the rocks and kept going, as they were taller than the tallest rocky borders blocking Tur from the sea. These waves hit the Kyllary’s infantry and naval armies and swept hundreds of men into the sea, as if they were toy soldiers on cardboard. The earthquake continued to shake the land, and a few fires started across several buildings in Tur, when lamps or fireplaces must have been disturbed, and flames flew onto furniture or wooden floors. The clouds of smoke rose up, and they were joined in the air by gathering thick clouds that together blocked out the sun and cast Tur into a night-like darkness that was only broken by the sight of the continuously burning fires. The castle’s shaking intensified, so that King Lohsa and his advisers had to rush out of the castle on their flying beasts to avoid being caught by the stones of the castle’s walls, which crashed and collapsed around them as they flew out.
The shaking of the ground suddenly stopped and the clouds started receding and clearing the sky, so that some visibility returned. This let King Lohsa reconvene the meeting with the Great Council and they decided to rush into the Tower of Tur, which had survived the quake, to plan their next move. The surviving Kyllary knights and other military men joined King Lohsa and either remained on the lower levels of the Tower or Tur or surrounded it and made temporary encampments to defend this position.
“Maybe that was just an earthquake?” a Great Council member suggested once they had resumed the meeting in the observatory meeting room atop the Tower.
“That was no natural earthquake. It’s those Olden magicians, they brought it on us!”
“It’s inhuman! What kind of monsters would do a thing like that!?”
“This is why we’ve been trying to exterminate those vermin from our land!”
“Gentlemen, stop, stop,” King Lohsa exclaimed. “We have to think ahead. How can we defend ourselves against it, if they do it again? Can any of you think of a counter-spell to stop it?”
The Kyllary magicians in the room were all stumped. “How can the earth under all of Tur shake? And those waves… the force it would take to cast them… And it would be even harder to stop either the waves or the shaking because we’d have to know the exact position of the shaking or the exact force of a wave,” one of the magicians summarized what the others were thinking.
“We should just lift a flag in surrender. If we can’t win, it would be mad to hold out and pretend as if we’re about to strike back.”
“No,” King Lohsa shouted. “We’re not surrendering.” He knew that if they surrendered, the first head to roll would be his own.
Before King Lohsa could present his proposed method of defense, Olden ships landed back onto the calm waves, and Olden’s infantry and aerial teams resumed their attacks of the bay. They had waited for a few moments after the earthquake stopped to see if there would be a call for surrender, but since no such sign came, they assumed that they had to finish the battle with a massacre to see the victory that was finalizing. Kyllary’s knights could barely stand up from where they had fallen during the earthquake, and most of them raised their hands in surrender as they saw the Olden approaching, even if they didn’t hear their leaders issuing orders for surrender. The Olden made quick progress through Tur, and they quickly realized that the final spot the Kyllary were defending was the Tower of Tur.
The Olden gathered their forces around this Tower. Gerp and Ronela were among the commanders that were charged with the siege of this great historical tower, which had held prisoners of war and powerful magicians that were judged to be the chief enemies of the kingdom before it was utilized as a place to hold a final stand in this battle.
There was a brief battle with the knights that were defending the tower on the ground. Then, the strongest Olden knights fought their way up the winding stairs of the tower through levels with scores of defending troops, until they made it to the topmost level, and a great battle ensued, as King Lohsa and his magicians cast spell after spell, and threw all other available magical and metal objects and ideas at their attackers.
Finally, most of them were overcome. King Lohsa found himself
fighting with a dozen Olden magicians, who were deliberately avoiding making a killing strike because they felt the odds were too skewed for such a blow to have been excusable. Seeing that all hope of a sudden victory was lost, King Lohsa surrendered his sword.
“Are you formally begging us to accept your unconditional surrender?” the chief Olden magician asked, accepting King Lohsa’s sword.
“Yes, I do surrender… unconditionally,” King Lohsa coughed out.
King Lohsa was imprisoned in the basement dungeon of the Tower of Tur, while the Olden leaders decided on the best approach to handling their victory. They decided they had to put a provisional government in place that would make sure that all persecutions of the Olden in Kyllary stopped, and that would help to police all Kyllary from the sorts of crimes against the Olden that had made that war a necessity even to the most peace-loving Olden. Ronela and Gerp were nominated to stay to help guide this provisional government, as Ronela was familiar with the people of Tur and Gerp was a multitalented man that was likely to help bring warring sections together. King Lohsa was given a small castle far from the gates of Tur, where he lived out a peaceful life into his old age, an odd occurrence for a Kyllary king. The war brought a temporary peace to all four continents of Laruta, as the devastation of the war frightened warmongers away from the temptation to renew hostilities at least for a short bit of time, while the memory of these events was fresh in the people’s minds.
Gerp and Ronela began a happy married life during their supervision of the provisional government, but as soon as a new king was put in place and a new Great Council convened, they asked to return to their jungle house in Olden, and built that little haven into a retreat where they raised a large family of brilliant magicians that moved the magical craft forward for Laruta as a whole with their innovations and inventions. It was from this place of peace that Ronela spent her life writing about the history of Laruta and studying the distant stars. Troubles came again, and when they did Ronela could only put her faith in people spinning around other stars, where the problems of Laruta were too foreign for censors to block their free expression.
The End
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Table of Contents
Title
Copyright
Newsletter
Description
Translator's Note
Chapter 1: Assassination, Coronation, and Marriage
Chapter 2: Levies, Land, and Bondage
Chapter 3: The Bewitching Power of the Land
Chapter 4: Persecutions of the Olden
Chapter 5: The Invasion
The End
The Kingdoms of Laruta: Book 1: Campaigns Against the Olden (Grim's Labyrinth Series) Page 8
