If you’re waiting for some more heroic accounts of me doing incredible things, albeit fueled by cowardice, then I can only say you’ll be disappointed. The only incredible thing to happen that day was the continued existence of idiots simple enough to send us into that fight in the first place.

  A fighting retreat wasn’t on the table anymore though, within a minute our enemies encircled us to keep that from happening. Then they unveiled the teeth of their trap, and all the hope in our formation dissipated at once to be replaced by molten dread.

  Gargoyles. Horrible creatures, the gargoyles. Most people’s only exposure to them is through the mockeries carved atop towers and paraphets, the statues made to show off the legacy of a family that can claim to have killed one.

  The reasons most people’s only exposure is that are twofold; because gargoyles are rare, and because the survivors of gargoyles are vastly rarer still.

  Gargoyles are not that much bigger than us most of the time, perhaps double or triple a man’s weight and sharing our space in that grey point in the spectrum between small and large animals. It isn’t size that makes them so deadly, however.

  I saw that much myself when this gargoyle leapt thrice its own height without the barest effort and came down hard behind our ranks. Several shamblers were in its path as it headed for our backline, and it swept the rotting corpses aside with one lash of an arm. Dessicated though they were, the bodies it tossed yards across the room were each man-heavy all the same. As were its first victims.

  Armour didn’t do much when two-inch claws raked against it with twenty times a man’s strength, and the sound of shearing steel even cut out over the agonized screams of those who wore it. This was the only thing I could track the fighting by as more shamblers pressed towards the middle ranks and split my attention.

  By the time I’d bought myself some breathing room by fighting up to the front and putting a few shamblers down with snarling sword-blows, the gargoyle appeared to have killed its own way almost half into the ranks. There it met Gruin, and things really kicked off.

  The Grynkori and the gargoyle didn’t have some isolated duel among the chaos, real battle—even on the skirmish scale—just doesn’t allow for such dramatic convenience. Their bout began with Gruin ambushing the thing, hammering the side of its head as he leapt out from behind a falling man and blindsided it.

  I’d seen plenty of skulls break open from hits half as solid as that one, but Gruin hadn’t struck anything as tough as that gargoyle while I was around yet. The creature, seemingly a mutated half-breed caught between bat, man and wolf, barely took a step to one side before rounding on its attacker. Gruin didn’t relent of course, cracking his hammer up into its chest this time and delivering every ounce of his inhuman strength to drive the thing back another step as iron rebound from bone. I’d have expected half of the ribs to break if a human took that blow, but by the looks of things not a single one so much as cracked now. I started wading to aid the Grynkori right as the gargoyle reached him.

  Easier said than done, even if it was my own side I stood surrounded by. Every step was a struggle won against several times my own weight, limbs snagging on limbs and fallen men making a barricade of their bodies. Half the ones I stumbled over weren’t even wounded or dead, just knocked down by the chaos elsewhere.

  Not for the first time, I envied Gruin and his stubby fucking limbs. He could go just about anywhere with those, my approach was slowed enough that he was already losing before I’d half-finished it. Gargoyle claws raked against the haft of his axe and snagged chain links in grazing contact. Grazing, but enough to shred them.

  I saw blood peek through the split armour and watched as Gruin swung again for the gargoyle’s head, his hammer doing no more this time than it had the last. I was close now, a few paces away, but still he was driven away and back, stumbling, defence failing. The gargoyle raked him with a far cleaner connection right as I reached it, opening the Grynkori’s side up and drawing enough blood that its puddle extended well past his feet.

  Then my sword found its neck in a sharp thrust.

  Leathery skin met the blade and halted it less than an inch into the viscera, sending a shock right up my arm.

  If it sent one down the creature’s neck, too, then it didn’t seem bothered by the fact. I had about a quarter-second before the gargoyle twisted around to lash its claws out for me, adjusting to its new attack in no time at all. I’d barely started moving by the time those gnarly talons met my breastplate, leaning and stepping away to put bare inches more between myself and the blow.

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  Those inches are what saved me, for the steel gave in fast and the claw-tips opened up my chest beneath. I snarled, chopped for the gargoyle’s face and felt a satisfied sneer bubble across my features as I watched my sword gash the skin right above one eyebrow. A living thing would’ve had blood foam up from that wound and blind the eye. That was how I knew the gargoyle, despite appearances, was not among the undead. Because though the blood was black instead of red, it came all the same.

  Not that one eye being closed by irritation did much to even out my odds of course, I was still fighting something about ten times my strength with a speed advantage and skin better than most armour. It was all I could do to stay alive, even stumbling back. Fencing practice did little to aid me, the experience was so dissimilar to any contest of technical skill and dexterity as to defy comparison.

  Here was an animal attacking me, magnified in every way. The sheer savagery made my eyes water, and if it hadn’t then the feeling of skin ripping at half a dozen glancing cuts would have done so anyway.

  Fortunately I was due a bit of luck, and the stupid fucking thing drove me right into a cluster of men who, until a second proper, seemed to have been trying to break out of the fighting and desert. The gargoyle quickly changed focus to them, letting me breathe as I stumbled back.

  I was left to breathe for no more than a second of course, the creature had overpowered Gruin in half a minute flat and was hardly pressed to dispatch a few disorganized cowards, but that time proved critical enough as it let me circle around and stab its neck right at the spot I’d first hit. With the skin already broken, and my aim true, this wound actually fazed it, bringing a true grin to my face as I watched the steel sink in.

  More blood soaked out of the gargoyle’s neck as it rounded on me, shrieking with a sound that wasn’t like any I’d heard before. It was wrong, it was jagged, like all the killing things of an animal’s cry stripped of all life and vibrancy. It actually sent me back a step.

  That was when Gruin interjected with his hammer, landing the most devastating blow I’d yet seen from him anywhere. Clearly the man was angry about his original loss because here he was putting enough strength behind the swing that I feared he’d hurt himself with the strain of it. The gargoyle wasn’t happy about it either. Between a gushing neck wound and what had to be at least a mild concussion, its previously unending aggression seemed muted, defanged.

  I saw the creature start stumbling away on somewhat unsteady legs, though I knew better than to risk it being deterred for long. With a wordless cry I leapt forwards and slashed my sword across its leg, drawing another shriek from the gargoyle and melting back from a clumsy slash for my face.

  That opened it for another blow from Gruin, and then another flurry of strikes from what was left of the men around us. Anger seemed to have grown stronger than fear, now that the gargoyle was wounded, and their blades came down like a storm of steel to etch open its skin and wound it more.

  More slashes from those talons blurred out and ended several more lives, but the gargoyle was slowing more with blood loss by the moment. Gruin and I shared a look, a silent communication, then we threw ourselves at it in unison. Hammer and sword split the air and found flesh. The gargoyle screamed.

  When it finally died, dropping down hard enough that I imagined it crushed the corpse caught below, I still found myself staring at its twitching form for signs of continued life, convinced the unkillable thing would rise again and tear me apart beyond its own death.

  But in the end it died like anything else does, more animated than most, by weight of sheer strength, but a living thing all the same. And living things didn’t take long to become dead.

  That went for the soldiers too, unfortunately. While we were busy stabbing the gargoyle to death, a whole chamber full of undead were busy stabbing everyone else. They’d done about as good a job as we had, too, because between the gargoyle hitting our flanks and the sustained combat, it looked like almost half the soldiers’ numbers were either lying dead or lying wounded near the centre of our formation.

  Of course the undead had bled out many of their number too, but that didn’t go so far towards their defeat as our losses. Undead were practically made to die in droves, and unlike human soldiers they didn’t much care about the fact. Not a single shambler was less eager for blood now than before their casualties.

  “Hold fast men!” screamed one of the officers, an idiot in full plate, of course, though even his heavy armour looked dented and dinged where harder blows had caught it. Fighting him now was a ghul, compensating for protection with sheer physical strength and not doing a half bad job at it.

  That was about where the advantages ended for us, though. Bodies still closed in and the defense we were mounting was still boasting more cracks by the moment. I was forced to accept, at that point, that I may very well have been staring at the end of my own life as it happened. A surreal and disembodying sensation that struck me deep.

  I was going to die. Some men have epiphanies when that thought strikes them, they grow and change, become more than they were. You don’t win anything for guessing whether I’m one of those wiser types. All I did was start screaming and get angry at the fact that my pitiable existence was ending sooner rather than later.

  But I’m too much of a cunt to die, and this was doubly true back then. Right when it seemed things were over, that our wall was going to break, the air started screaming and burning with arcane power the likes of which I could only compare to…well, the single other example of arcane power I’d actually witnessed by then.

  The air cooled, all at once. If I’d been paying attention that would’ve warned me about what was about to happen. I felt like some great wind had rolled through and just sapped all the heat away from me and the men crowding around. Then, a moment later, the fire came.

  More fire than I’d ever seen in my life, descending like a tidal wave.

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