CHAPTER 238

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CHAPTER 238

296 AC

POV THIRD PERSON

a/n: I couldn't release two chapters this week, so I will release two more next week.

The defenders, realizing the futility of the first skirmish, fell back to Stonehold, the main stronghold of Pebble Island. Aermir, sensing their desperation, knew that this battle would determine the fate of the island.

As the Northern forces approached Stonehold, Ser Reynard Stonegate, bloodied but unyielding, stood at the battlements of the walls. He was the one acting as the leader since Lord Pryor was dead and his son was still a six-name day old babe.

Aermir's voice was like a crackle of lightning,

"Your defiance only prolongs the inevitable; bow down to your new lord, help will not come, and let's not waste more lives on your part."

Ser Reynard defiantly shouted,

"Come and see how many men you are going to lose just to get this castle; we are all ready to die in the light of Seven!"

Aermir decided to make an example out of them. He was going to conquer this castle by himself, and he was going to do it with a thousand cuts. In the castle, they still had 4 thousand men, but in the face of Aermir's magic, they were nothing but sitting ducks. In this war, Aermir realized one of his greatest weaknesses was the lack of bombardment spells. Almost all of his spells worked on line of sight, or they were linear.

Since the first battle at Longsister 5 moons ago, he has been working on two new spells in his training space. Bombardment spell that worked like mortar shells. Right now, he could fly onto the walls and cast a Jelmōñe Jelmior: Prūmia Hen Sōnar (Northern Winds: Heart of Winter) without getting interrupted, but he needs to be ready for the future; he never believed himself to be the only caster on this planet or there could be more powerful warriors clad with enchanted weapons and armors he couldn't always fly onto the enemy castle.

Aermir stood at the front of his army, his eyes fixed on the castle's imposing walls. He first ordered Poe to dive bomb inside the castle and fired some Earth Shards onto the towers inside the castle so the citizens would run into the keep; he wanted to kill as few smallfolk as possible. Then he turned his eyes to the sky right on top of the castle. He raised his hands to the sky and started casting fireball spells.

"Daomio Perzys (Rain of Fire)"

They had half a meter radius; crimson red fireballs started to form, but rather than releasing them, he was combining them with each other. As the fireball started to grow, his men couldn't handle the heat and started to step back. Because it was only made out of a level 1 spell and only had one spell in it, Aermir was able to combine 10 of them into one. When he was ready, he released this 3-meter radius fireball into the air.

It was giant and slow; slowly, it reached the top of the castle, and when he was ready, Aermir reactivated the magic, and the giant ball burst into ten smaller fireballs. 

Eradicly, they darted into different parts of the castle. This was a really taxing combination spell, and Aermir couldn't spam it like his normal spells, so he had to wait and rest his conciseness for a few minutes, and every few minutes, he recast the spell eleven more times, engulfing the castle in an inferno.

They could hear the screams of agony rising from the castle the first few times. In the castle's halls, the cries of anguish mingled with the crackling flames coming from the outside. Stonehold now stood vulnerable, its wooden structures consumed by the elemental onslaught. 

The screams had ceased after the 6th spell; they had taken cover inside the keep and stone structures. The good part for the Valemen was that the Stonehold was made entirely of stone, as its name stated. The bad part was that other than the keep and the walls, every building was burned; every building's roof was made out of wood, so the constant rain of fire burned all of them.

Aermir's fireballs were not as hot as dragon fire to be able to melt stone, but they were strong enough to damage it. as he wanted; it was like doing a thousand-cut torture to the castle; every fireball was withering away a small part of it bit by bit. By resting, he could bombard the castle two times a day.

On the next they, Aermir ordered a fake assault on the wall and pulled all the soldiers from their hiding places, but as his men were getting close to the walls, he released his next bombardment spell,

"Suvion Caligo (Icy Mist)"

This spell was like the heart of Winter spell was shrinking into a snowball; he trapped icy cold mist into tennis ball-sized snowballs and combined it into a giant snowball, looking so unassuming and like a giant fluffy snowball. You almost wanted to touch it. 

He released this spell like a mortar shell, too, and when it was on top of the walls, he burst it. With it, tens of tennis ball-sized snowballs fall to the castle. They were not hard; the second they fell on top of someone or something, they burst into an icy mist. But as the snowballs fell, the agonizing screams of the soldiers started to ring throughout the castle. The second this spell touched someone, it sucked up all the heat on that part of the body, setting a frostbite in seconds. In 5 minutes, many hands, ears, and legs started to turn black from the cold. After eleven more Suvion Caligo (Icy Mist), a dense mist, colder than the coldest winter, enveloped Stonehold. Since it was because of a spell, it only lasted for 10 minutes, but to the soldiers, it felt like an eternity. He wasn't aiming at the keep, so the smallfolk were mostly safe, and the keep was not big enough to fit thousands of soldiers into it.

Aermir planned to methodically wear down the defenders, weaken their resolve, and make them face the wrath of nature itself. Within the castle walls, conversations among the defenders hinted at the toll the relentless assault was taking. "We can't endure this forever. The Druid is relentless," remarked one weary soldier. Hearing this, Ser Reynard Stonegate ran towards the soldier and pummeled him with his sword,

"How dare you try to break the indomitable resolve of the Faithful? We are the believers of the Seven. We will not bow down to the dark magic of those tree huggers."

Another knight, clinging to the last strands of defiance, joined him, "Yes! We will not bow to this sorcery. We must find a way to withstand the onslaught!"

...

For a week, he continued pummeling them down with his two bombardment spells; from the initial 4 thousand men, only 1500 of them had died, but because of the constant bombardment, all of them were on edge. Thanks to the lord and his knights' constant rallying, they stayed strong. At night, he would bombard them with ice and then 6 hours later with fire. The atmosphere of the castle started to change; even though they were in the middle of summer, the nights were passing as cold as winter. At least, that is what they felt like.

Aermir had finished his experiment, and he realized he needed a more destructive bombardment spell than those two; rain of fire was good for destroying wooden buildings, and icy mist was good against the soldiers standing on the walls and was a good psychological weapon, but none of them were enough to destroy the defenses fully.