Chapter 6
Holding the Fort

    Though stunned by the new enemy he now faced, Tymat kept his wits about him. Hundreds of ghouls stormed off of their ships; some clumsily, some falling face first into the salty sea, but most charged madly into a barrage of flaming arrows. Griffin Riders soared overhead, releasing their own arrows into the inferno of chaos below. Tymat gripped his sword tightly as he cried out in anger, stabbing skillfully at ghouls that fell to either side of him.
    Slowly at first, Tymat’s skin began to tingle dully. He looked at his hands. Once smothered in his own blood, his hands slowly began to heal. A bluish aura now surrounded him. Looking around, he noticed that all of his allies also had blue, soothing auras around them; each one glowing likes a sapphire against a warm fire.     Mortally wounded elves rose from their sandy graves to fight once more.
“What kind of blessed wizardry is this?” Tymat thought. Suddenly he noticed the fiery rain had stopped. “Could this be a spell cast by the high elven mages?”
And indeed it was. The mages had switched to a defensive strategy. The fire rain had only caused the ghouls to become more infuriated, causing the elves to retreat. Tymat began to fall back with the elves. The gates of the huge stone wall opened to reveal a second layer of defense.
    Once most of the elves and their Rilitorian allies had been secured behind the wall, the gates groaned closed. On the inside of the wall, a stone staircase led to a platform on the top of it.
    As soon as Tymat reached the top of the wall, he looked down at the battle below. His eyes became huge as he saw the intensity of the fight below. Hundreds of ghouls and elves lay slain in the sand. Cannon fire was all around him, his face covered with blood and soot. Flaming arrows soared over his head, embedding themselves in the bodies of the hellish creatures below.
Now a giant battering ram came forth from within the fleet of ships. Orders were heard being shouted amongst cries of agony and anger to reinforce the gate. Archers concentrated their aim at the battering ram’s carriers, but as each carrier fell, another seemed to appear out of no where to pick up where the last left off.
    CRASH! The battering ram struck the gate with intense force. A blood-chilling cry echoed through the cold stone stairway in back of the gate as a deadly splinter impaled an unfortunate elf through the eye. Coldly, the lifeless body fell to the ground as the gate exploded into hundreds of tiny pieces. Ghouls poured into the flight of stairs, slaughtering the dense fighting force of elves and Rilitorians.
    However, as the Ghouls rampaged up the staircase, the mages had already prepared for the onslaught. As soon as the first Ghoul reached the top step, the fiend erupted in an infernal flame while getting stung with a dozen arrows. The rest of the Ghoul army stopped dead in their tracks, hissing and cursing behind the flaming wall in front of them. A barrage of arrows seared the flesh of the Ghouls as they passed through the burning barricade. Left and right Ghouls fell by the hands and at the feet of elves and humans. Finally, the enemy began to retreat back to the ships from whence they came as the mage’s mana depleted and the fiery wall dissipated.

Main • Introduction • Chapter One (Struggling to Start) • Chapter Two (Mutineers)
Chapter Three (A New Life) • Chapter Four (In the Court of the King)
Chapter Five (Good Night…It Will Be Your Last) • Chapter Six (Holding the Fort)
Chapter Seven (The End of an Alliance) • Chapter Eight (Journey to the Pirate Islands)