The cages stank of rust, sweat, and despair.
Captain Darran sat with his back to the warped timbers, hands bound before him with coarse goblin rope that bit into his skin. The hundred soldiers crammed into the surrounding pens were little better off—faces pale, lips cracked, eyes darting toward the towering walls beyond.
The main goblin camp sprawled far wider than he had imagined. Crude fortifications loomed thirty feet high, stitched together from rough-hewn logs and rusted scrap. From the battlements above, goblin archers leered down with yellow eyes, bows in hand, while shamans muttered to unseen spirits, their bone fetishes clacking in the wind.
The gates, banded in iron, remained shut tight. Somewhere beyond them, the world carried on—mockingly out of reach.
A shadow fell across the prisoners.
The chieftain—an enormous brute, nearly six feet tall with knotted green muscle and jagged teeth—grinned down at them. His tusked mouth curled into something halfway between a sneer and a leer.
"Too bad," he rumbled, his voice like gravel dragged across stone, "none of you brought any women for us to play with. But…" His eyes swept across the caged men like a butcher surveying meat. "…at least we'll eat well tonight."
Some soldiers spat at his feet. Others looked away.
The chieftain laughed and lumbered off, leaving the air fouled with the sound.
Darran knew that slipping free of the rope would be the easy part. The real problem was the cage—and the thousands of goblins beyond it. Even if he cut himself loose now, they'd have to wait for the dead of night to make their move, when the camp's watch grew sluggish and the shadows deepened. Midnight would be their moment to act. And if it failed… they would die trying.
But fate didn't wait for nightfall.
A horn blared—loud and sudden—followed by guttural shouts from the wall. The lazy jeers of the guards snapped into sharp, panicked orders.
Then came the sound.
A deep, shuddering impact—BOOM!—and the gates didn't simply open. They exploded.
The reinforced timbers disintegrated into jagged projectiles that tore through the front ranks of goblins, impaling some outright and flinging others screaming to the dirt. A choking cloud of dust and smoke surged inward, tinged faintly with the metallic scent of ozone.
Silence followed—broken only by the crackle of splintered wood and the whimpers of the dying.
Even the chieftain froze, ears twitching, eyes narrowing toward the breach.
Darran's breath caught.
Through the drifting haze stepped a single figure.
Tall. Straight-backed. Her stride unhurried.
Golden light pulsed faintly beneath her skin, tracing veins that flared brighter with each step until they glimmered like molten metal.
The chieftain's grin faltered.
The prisoners stared, unsure whether to praise or despair. Something about her presence pressed against the chest, raised the hairs at the back of the neck—a weight both alien and sacred.
She stopped just beyond the wreckage. No words. Only stillness—yet that stillness carried the weight of a sentence already passed.
The chieftain recovered first, snarling to mask his unease.
"Kill it!" he barked, stepping back even as his hands began weaving a crude spell.
Archers nocked arrows. Shamans shrieked incantations. Hundreds of goblins surged forward in a black tide.
The woman inhaled once—barely a second.
Then she was gone.