Midnight Alarms

“They came in the night like rats, scurrying across the open plains. There were thousands of them, blotting out the landscape.” -Excerpt from The Journals of a Warrior-King

That night, I sat awake at my table. I had designed our bedroom to match my specific tastes, but it was easily the least used room in the castle—content filters made the room largely useless in-game. Now, however, Margaret lounged in the bed in black negligee, kicking her feet and twirling a glass of red wine.

“Will you join me for a drink, my husband?” She asked. Margaret had been like that in-game as well. She was serious when the situation called for it, but she was nihilistic and pleasure seeking above all.

“Now is not the time for hedonism,” I said, rifling through the papers before me. Each was a detailed report from my commanders. “The gates have been sealed, and there do not appear to be any hostile forces nearby.”

“So what’s the problem?” She asked, setting the glass on the floor. She rolled over, and stared at me upside down, pouting.

“The crop fields didn’t transition,” I said, reading a report. “In addition, there are no large bodies of water nearby. There is some hope for drilling wells, but without a lake or river, farming will be much more difficult.”

Margaret sighed, and rolled off the bed, padding her way toward me. She slipped into my lap, and took the parchment from me, reading for herself. The hedonistic look was gone from her eyes, replaced by serious contemplation. “What are the chances we simply have not looked far enough afield? The land around us is too green to be totally devoid of water.”

“You’re not wrong, but I had the Stalking Pack scout in a 2 mile radius. If there is a source out there, it’s far enough away to be impractical for everyday use.”

“I see,” she said, tapping her finger against her lips. “And the food supply?”

“We have enough for five months,” I said, digging in the pile of papers for a different report. “If we ration, we could push that to seven months, but much of our supply is perishable so we have a hard time limit.”

“Feeding ten thousand people overnight will be difficult, especially without plantable grain,” she said, and sighed, leaning against me. “What of the local wildlife? Could we hunt to supplement?”

In the game, hunting and gathering was an early game process that was inefficient, but necessary. However, most players shifted away from it once they had established their demesnes, and with it went the skills among the population.

“I’m sure we could add a small amount of time that way. There are deer and wild boar in the woodlands to the east of us, and large animals akin to bison on the plains. For the deer, I’m sure some hunters in the fief are capable enough hunters to take them down, but the other two options are far too dangerous prey.”

“Why not have us handle it?” She asked. “The garrison is more than capable of hunting a few boars.”

I thought about it for a minute, then shrugged. “We could. It’s better than doing nothing, at least.”

She smiled at me, and ran her fingers through my beard, then grasped it and pulled me into a deep kiss. My mind went blank—in my past life, my sickly body had made anything like that impossible, and in the game it was banned. This was a first for me.

“You need to take a break,” she whispered, her forehead against mine. “Just because you don’t need to sleep doesn’t mean you cannot get exhausted.”

I sighed and closed my eyes, trying to calm my raging heart. “Of course. Care for a walk around the castle?”

Margaret huffed and pinched my cheek, then sighed. “I had hoped for something else, but fine. Let me get dressed.”

We climbed through the hatch to the tower top, and closed it behind us. The night air was dry and cool, with a slight wind that carried the scent of woodsmoke.

The city sprawled below us, dotted with flickers of firelight spilling from windows. Most of the residents were abed, but some still bustled about.

The city itself was enclosed in a circular wall, with gates at each cardinal direction. The houses looked like they came from a medieval Bavarian town, and the streets were wide and paved. I had worked hard to create a city that felt clean and safe, going so far as to reinvest almost all the tax money we collected back into infrastructure projects. It had yielded good results, repaying me with a prosperous city full of happy citizens.

“I’ve been to many kingdoms in my two-hundred years of life,” Margaret said, leaning against the ramparts, staring at the city. “But none could compare to this. Gran isn’t the biggest, but it’s by far the most beautiful.”

I smiled, and put my arm around her shoulder. “You flatter me.”

She nestled into my arms and sighed. “You care about this place, even though it was fake not long ago.”

I nodded. Gran was my escape from a hellish reality, and even when it was just a game it had become more real to me than my flesh and bones life. “I owe this city and her people more than you could ever know. It’s my responsibility to pay them back for saving me.”

Margaret looked up at me, then kissed my cheek. “You don’t have to tell me anything, but I hope someday you will.”

I patted her head, scratching behind one of her ears. She nuzzled my hand, and I laughed. “It's not like I’m hiding anything. In my previous life, I was bed bound and dying. I created Gran as a place where I could live a proper life.”

“I see,” she said, and her eyes glazed over in the way they did when we was deep in thought. “So you created all of us?”

“Hum?”

“I mean, every citizen is your own work?”

“Oh, no not at all. You, Denma, and Frejya are the only ones I personally created. The others I recruited. This was before I made any of you three, but Gran started as a village of refugees. A war in one of the neighboring kingdoms had driven out most of the therian people, and some of them ended up in my care. I honestly had not intended to found a city at all, but seeing them…”

“You always did have a big heart, idiot,” she said.

“After that I decided I wanted to create a place where all the refugees and outcasts could create a good life for themselves. Being isolated is painful, whether it’s disease or discrimination that drives you into a corner. It took about two hundred years in-game for our tiny village to grow into what you see now.”

“My first memory of this place isn’t much different from how it is now, though everything before this morning is somewhat fuzzy.”

“You were my final creation, my magnum opus perhaps,” I said, and laughed at my own grandiose words. “Freyja was first. I created her just to have a human I could talk to. I created Denma shortly afterward, so that the people of Gran did not think I was playing favorites with humans over therians.”

“And me? Why did you create me?” She asked.

“Part of it was because Freyja and Denma have such cold personalities. I made them to be loyal servants, both to me and the people—they have a programmed desire to help even at the expense of their own well being. I wanted someone I could just be friends with. But I also needed someone who could command my forces. By the time I created you, we had established ourselves as a city-state, but we were small and vulnerable, and many of our neighbors sought to take Gran for themselves. I needed someone better at leading a military than myself, and the lineages we had welcomed into the city up to that point had little in the way of military pedigree.”

Margaret thought for a moment, then smiled. “So a touch of selfishness and a touch of pragmatism,” she said.

“Just like your personality,” I said, and pinched her cheek.

“Uh huh, that’s why you love me.”

A bell tolled out across the nighttime city, startling both of us. A split second later, Margaret grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the hatch.

“Thats the alarm bell, we’re under attack,” she said.

We raced down the stairs and toward the throne room. Along the way, a squire met up with us, carrying our armor and weapons in an awkward bundle.

The throne room was empty save for Denma, who stood at attention by the throne itself. The squire helped Margaret and I don our armor—an arduous process that involved several layers. Gambeson and chausses first, then hauberk, then plate, and finally the waffenrocks bearing my crest. Both of us forwent our helmets for the time being, but we clipped them at our hips just above our rears so we could access them at any time.

Emile came into the throne room and knelt before me. “I have a report, Your Excellency,” he said.

“Skip the formalities.”

“As you wish. During our scouting expedition, one of our teams encountered a large group of unknown humanoid beings. After some deliberation, they attempted to make contact with the locals, but were captured in the process. We aren’t yet sure what has become of them, as the other team paired with them returned to us to report, but we do know that the unknown entities are coming this way. They’re armed and appear ready for combat.”

“When you say unknown humanoid entities, what does that mean? Are they therians? Faeling?” Margaret asked. I glanced at her, and she scowled. Therians were well known in-game for possessing greater physical prowess than humans, and though Gran started as a therian village it had since grown more diverse—if we were preparing for battle against a large force composed entirely of therians, we would be at a significant disadvantage on an open battlefield.

“The scouts described them as bipedal creatures of medium height, covered in black fur. They have beastial countenances, but they possess enough intelligence to speak and use tools,” Emile said. It was a remarkably well considered report, and it gave me pause. In OW there were only three distinct races—humans, therians, and faeling. Humans were the least diverse and weakest of the races, but they tended to learn new skills most quickly. Therians were the middle ground, weaker than faelings but stronger than humans, and capable of learning. Faelings were the most diverse group, composed of all the fey descendants—elves, gnomes, fairies, satyr, and dozens of other groups fell under the faeling banner. They were the strongest magically and some possessed physical abilities that outstripped anything the other races could do, but they were born with a type of ancestral memory that caused their society to stagnate. Each of them had many of skills, but they learned at a very slow pace, particularly anything completely new to them.

“Are these beings faeling then?” I asked.

“If they are, they’re a new type I’ve never heard of,” Emile said.

Just then, Gerard stormed in wearing his full plate armor. He held his wolf-faced helmet under one arm, and his breathing was ragged like he’d run. “Your Excellency, the enemy is in sight. They fly unknown banners, but the group appears to be largely disorganized.”

“Emile, get word to the scouts still outside the walls to find somewhere safe to weather the storm. I don’t want anyone else getting captured,” I said. He nodded and sprinted out of the throne room, likely headed for the Stalking Pack’s headquarters in the west wing of the castle. “Gerard, what do we know?”

I began walking toward the rear of the castle, where the outer Bailey connected via bridge to the city walls. I needed to see the enemy with my own eyes.

“Your Excellency, it seems the creatures are capable of speech, but we cannot understand their demands,” he said, walking just behind and to the left of me. Margaret did the same to my right. “What we do know is that they have executed the scouts, and have their heads on pikes, held aloft beside their banners.”

“Straight to violence then,” I mused. “Perhaps they are an isolated tribal race, and we have encroached on their territory.”

“Their current forces are not overly large, and their weaponry is rather primitive, but the scouts that returned ahead of their march indicated that they were gathering more troops as they went. It could very well be that they intend to strike once they have assembled.”

“How is it that they knew were the city is?” I asked.

“We aren’t sure. It’s possible their own scouts discovered us, but it’s equally likely that they tortured their prisoners for information. I have heard that some mental magics can bypass the need for mutually intelligible language.”

That was true, it was a skill I possessed as well. If we could get our hands on a prisoner of our own, I could find the answers to my questions.

“How large is their army currently?” I asked.

“Just under a thousand, at least that we can see. It’s possible they have reserves hidden somewhere, though considering their disorganized state I find it improbable that they have designs on any grand strategy.”

A thousand was roughly the size of my own available force at its maximum. The garrison accounted for a third of that, and the Lupine Guard another third. The last 300 were not truly soldiers, but instead city guards that maintained order in the streets themselves, and were overseen by the Lupine Guard. We could theoretically hold the city itself against far superior forces because of the inherent advantage our walls afforded us, but a protracted siege would put strain on our already burdened food supplies.

“If we strike now, what are the chances we win?” I asked.

Gerard was silent for a moment, then cleared his throat. “I suspect we would win a melee with few casualties, even outnumbered, but the terrain is not favorable. They have taken residence upon a hill east of the city, and while they have yet to entrench themselves, the natural defenses offered by the location put us as a disadvantage.”

“Have they shown any proclivity for magic?” Margaret asked.

“They have not. In fact, when our scouts were captured they resisted with magic and the creatures were startled by the flames they used to fight.” Gerard said.

We crossed the bridge to the city walls, and made our way toward the eastern gates. Freyja met us along the way, clad in her armor. “Your Excellency,” she said, putting a hand over her heart.

“Any movement?” I asked.

“Yes. Their force has swelled at an unprecedented rate. They now number just over two thousand, and more are tricking in every minute.”

“Two thousand? Where in the bloody hells are they coming from?” Margaret asked.

“We don’t know, but they must have a town or city nearby,” Freyja said.

“Have they shown any indication of attacking?” Margaret asked.

“None yet.”

“Alright. Gerard, gather the Guard and assemble near the southern gate. Freyja, pull troops from the ranks of the city guard and man the walls.” Margaret said.

“What are you planning?” I asked, uneasy. I always let her take command of important military strategy—she was better at it than I was, but I did prefer to be included in her decision making.

“We’re going to strike. If we sit behind our walls and allow them to amass, we will be overrun,” she said.

Gerard split from the group to go about his tasks, while Freyja delegated her orders to several subordinates. We reached the eastern gate moments later, and I looked out across the rolling hills.

Firelight twinkled in the distance, resting high on a hill. I estimated they were 400 meters away, and though the hill was not terribly steep I could see how assaulting it would be difficult.

“Freyja, what distance do you estimate them to be at?” I asked.

“We have already confirmed with spatial magic, the fringes of their encampment are 384 meters away, and the far end is just over 500 meters away.” She said.

“They really aren’t familiar with magic, then,” my wife mused. “Alright I’m going to meet up with the guard. I want you to give us an hour, then begin a magic assault on the camp. We will circle around and assault them from the rear while they are distracted.”

“I am going as well,” I interjected, and put a hand on Margaret’s shoulder.

“You intend to participate personally?” Freyja asked, horrified.

“Of course,” I said. Neither women gave an objection, but I could tell they were both uneasy about it. “Margaret, you will join me. Freyja, send a runner to fetch Demna, I need her.”