Alessia Rezalla-Rhidian was far from home. She had never travelled much beyond the Kalesian capital city, and now she was not only travelling to new lands, she was conquering them. It seemed that her life was destined to only get stranger now that she was an evoker. [i]Evoker[/i]. Even now, two years after the fact, applying that term to herself seemed strange. She had never wanted power. Not like this anyway - she had been quite content serving the Empress, may she live forever, through the pursuit and application of knowledge, a long standing tradition carried out with vigor by at least a third of the Noble population in the Empire, and many common citizens too. Of course she had had some degree of influence and political power, just like all Kalesian nobles, but now her power and influence was very much literal.

And she was about to wield that power, not for the first time ever, but for the first time with malicious intent. She stood now in the streets of the city of Amaryth, the city marked to become the latest addition to the Empire. She had been told that the battle had gone extremely well so far, that it was relatively bloodless. That may have been true, but she was still not entirely prepared for seeing the many corpses of the soldiers, from both sides, that had died for this city. Her stomach turned in revulsion at the death and she had to fight her instinct to flee to safety. After all, this area [i]was[/i] safe, it had been among the first secured by the Imperial troops. She would not do dishonour to her name by fleeing, or even displaying her feelings for it all publicly. Between her training as a noble and the reassuring thought that, ultimately, the people of this city would be much better off under the benevolent rule of the Empress, she was able to put aside the worst of her feelings and focus. She needed to be ready. The moment the signal was given, she would have to bring down the Dread Omen on the heart of this city.

~|~

In a rare event, Katarína Kovac, processus of the Imperial Army, smiled. The city was not theirs yet, but soon it would be. Imperial forces now had control over every sector of the Outer city. As she stood there, mauler cavalry were rapidly finishing the process of encircling the lake. They would be spread a bit thin, but the troops marching at their rear would fill those holes within a day or two. It did not matter in the long run whether a few escaped, so long as the majority did not. Once their capital falls, which she knows well it will, the nation as a whole will be demoralized. Much the same way people everywhere in the capital soon will be. All in all, a good day.

She turned to the latest notes concerning civilian distribution, assimilating them quickly into her city overview. Troops were rapidly emptying the region around the inner city of civilians, getting them to a safe distance. She had personally felt the power of Dread omen, and it was not pleasant. Keeping civilians relatively safe from that would go a long way towards bringing them into the embrace of the Empire. 

Seeing another note, she decided it was time to initiate the first stage of the play. Turning to a messenger, she started speaking. “Get Commander Jahoda to send a few squads to start beating on the Inner city’s western gate. Let them go at it for a while.” The messenger nodded, then ran off to deliver the command. It did not matter much whether they actually managed to damage those gates. As with so many other operations, that was only a distraction. While she would prefer not to damage the walls, she was fully prepared to unleash a crew of tunnelers to burn straight through the hills and into the fortress itself. The tunnel running beneath a part of the outer city was particularly useful for that.

~| An hour or so later |~

The processus imagined she could hear the beat of the ram against the gates of the inner city, though she knew it was far too far away to be heard here. Especially with the pitched battle between imperial archers and the defenders on the inner walls. She had ordered a few ladder squads to begin, but she had no illusions about any of them succeeding in actually taking any significant part of the walls. The royal architects of Othea were renowned for their skill at making hard-to-take fortifications. Katarína had not seen fit to put any of the imperial evokers into the action yet. In fact, she had ordered the shadoweaver to cease his illusion any moment now. Combined with the seeming success of the sudden return of sunlight, the fact that a few soldiers were slain would at first boost their morale. The drop when the Dread rose would be so much greater. It was unfortunate that loyal Kalesian soldiers had to die, but it was also necessary. Shortly after the rise of Dread Omen, the imperial evokers would begin their work. Without warning, as it was meant to be, the sunlight suddenly flared through as the cloak of darkness tore apart. Thankfully the Amarythian civilians were already out of the way. The escape from the dread ought to make integrating them into the Empire somewhat easier.

“Alessia Rezalla-Rhidian. It is time.” She did not say anything more. It was unnecessary. The Evoker knew her job. Katarína Kovac did not look forward to the Dread Omen, but at least she was prepared for it.

“Lady Alessia” Was Alessia’s annoyed reply. Just because Kovac was a processus did not give her the right to ignore formality, especially since they were hardly in a pitched battle right now. Alessia had been listening in to the orders given, and in the short time she had been near this processus she had already decided she didn’t like the women. She was too cold, and seemed to ignore the fact that the Kalesian troops under her command were actual people too. Her tactics might be effective, but they called for good Kalesian men and women to die needlessly in endless diversions. It was one thing to die heroically for ones Empress, but entirely another to throw lives away in hopeless battles just to scare the enemy. She knew better than to question the processus though. It was not her place.

She placed her hand on the small unassuming book that held so much power - an unnecessary gesture, but one a reassuring one, and with a thought began to summon the Dread Omen. She had learned of its effects, as she always did, first from the book. One day she had been able to comprehend the page that the book had opened on, for no reason apparent to her, and upon reading it found the knowledge within burned into her mind. A few moments of focus on the area she wished to affect and the spell came into being. The sun appeared to morph into a crimson wound in the sky, bathing everything in a light that somehow drained all the colour from the world and awakened an almost primal dread in the pit of the stomach.

Or at least thats how everyone had described it to her. She was never affected by the Dread Omen, for what reason, she knew not, only that that seemed to be one of the rules of this relics functioning. In such an unfamiliar land, the effect would spill over outside the inner city a moderate amount, which was why the civilians had been moved. The Kalesian infantry would of course be just as affected as the defenders in the city, but they were both trained to fight under the effect and expecting it to occur. By mutual recommendation, Alessia and the various processes’ of the army had ensured that while the army had been preparing, they undergo a number of drills and small scale training battles while under the effect of Dread Omen, in order to harden them and ensure Alessia’s most easily applicable combative spell was still an actual advantage for the imperial forces.

Of course for Alessia, maintaining this spell was no more effort than studying from three separate tomes or scrolls at once, and so she made herself comfortable and opened her book to continue studying its enigmatic pages. The processus at her side would need no words to know it was in effect after all.

Mere moments after she issued the order, Katarína began to feel the Dread. Light grew dim, the sun turned red and everything began to feel hopeless. Only because she was prepared did she resist it at all. From her small vantage point, she could see how Kalesian officers were doing their best to boost morale flagging among those who were too close to the Inner city.

The rise of the Dread Omen was the signal to all the Imperial evokers currently near the front lines. A signal to begin their work. The effects were seemingly without pattern. She had heard in a lecture that there was a pattern to the relics, but not really understood what that pattern was. One evoker approached her. The woman’s channeled her power upon a small, angled table, and an image of the battle appeared. It wasn’t detailed. Or rather, there were too many details even for her to catch. The image simply wasn’t large enough to convey them properly. 

She recognized a few positions, like those of major archer companies and the gates. colorful fields appeared before a few of them, arrows passing through those fields changing. In one place, into bolts of fire, in another into what might have been shiny metal. “Close up on the western gate, Evoker.” The image blurred as the evoker changed its focus. As ordered initially, the few remaining members of the ramming squad had already thrown their ram to the side and were running back towards the front lines in a zigzag pattern, avoiding the rain of arrows and worse. Right then, as if on cue, the front lines broke apart, letting what looked not unlike a massive, metal-plated, upside-down boat through. What lay beneath it was impossible to see, but the two kalbeasts pushing it were readily visible. The processus knew that one of the rarest evokers in the entire empire walked beneath it. Not even a boulder thrown from the top of the fortress walls could crack the roof protecting him. Halfway to the gates, the procession halted, and the kalbeasts were turned about, leaving the hull behind.

Just then, a massive boulder flew from the fortress walls, as if on cue. It struck the side of the hull, but bounced off, landing on a fleeing Kalesian soldier. She could not see whether the boulder had dented the hull. It did not matter, for the Evoker had begun his work. It was barely imperceptible at first. Faint ripples in the ground, moving for the gate, steadily increasing in strength. Soon enough, the gates would topple. It was only a matter of time.