Arc 4: Chapter 3: The Aspirants
The behemoth loomed over the street. It seemed a living fragment of the storm, all smoky black and deep gray, crackling with fulgurous strength. It had a tusked maw, cavernous in size, and its perfectly round eyes didn’t seem to blink.
A storm ogre. How?
It had fallen out of the sky. It must have been the presence I’d felt in the storm, I realized. I’d faced ogres before, of varying kinds. We had them in Urn, but ours were mostly Sidhe who’d taken monstrous forms. I knew a war ogre, Karog, whose kind had been molded by continental alchemists.
This was no homonculus or chimera. This was an ancient spirit of wrath and ill omen, a dark godling of the west. I felt its power like a sudden squall, an invisible pressure against my soul.
Impossible. The Onsolain protected Urn from these sorts of incursions, guarding the seas and skies. Edaean monsters slipped through at times, but nothing this big.
I had no time to understand then. It stepped forward, a deep rumble building in its chest. The priorguard snapped out of their own stupor. The two surviving adepts stepped forward as the rest lifted their weapons defensively. One of them cried out.
“What do we do?!”
Another answered in a gravelly voice. “Secure the targets. Get them out of here. Let the city guard handle this.”
I saw several move to obey. A few hesitated, seeing the same thing I did. There had been people in the home the storm ogre had destroyed. Candles and lanterns flickered to life in windows all across the neighborhood. Someone was screaming. Doors were opening, voices calling out into the night.
Many priorguard had been recruited from common folk, taken in by promises they could protect their families where the knights and soldiers of the king were not, make a difference. They weren’t so quick to abandon people in danger.
The ogre took another impossibly long stride forward, the street shuddering with its movement.