As I watched the Coinchenn beach themselves, I began to prepare an attack. Water was the bane of fire. Enough of it could quench even the most out-of-control blaze. But in the process, torrents of steam, scalding temperatures of water vapor would be released. And that assumed the fire was natural and not fed an increasing source of energy or magic to maintain shape and intensity. When magic was factored in, the caster's strength was the over-riding consideration.

I thought about unleashing Beleros' fire at the Coinchenn, using heat to boil blood, and set their stores of blubber into smoldering grease fires. The tactic was workable, but just as fire was susceptible to water, water gave way to ice. And I controlled both elements. It would be more efficient to freeze their blood solid, instantly, than to spend time cooking them.

My decision to intervene and help out Duchess Wynne was untimely. Her next action proved that my aid was not only not needed, but not necessary. Where before she had released a dozen, metal constructs to deal with the waterspouts and the rising waves that had followed those tornadoes path, this time she released a swarm of metal objects. A cloud of metal spheres and cubes so dense that they created shadow and eclipsed the segments of the sun's rays.

This new release of metal objects helped me identify the Duchess' domain, her affinity was metal, she was able to control it as easily as I controlled fire and ice. Her affinity contained an elegant logic. Knockers were tinkerers. They surpassed Blacksmiths with their ability to utilize and innovate using metal, to have an affinity and power to shape and control that affinity would make for only more powerful and adept tinkerers.

Her domain allowed her to innovate, create, and actualize her ideas almost instantly. The swarm of metal spheres and cubes that she released were inert, nothing more than purified metal of differing types. But to her, they were anything she could imagine, her ability to mold and transform their shape allowed her to respond to battle conditions as needed.

Artillery, shields, fortifications, given enough metal she was a one-woman army able to create bulwarks for fortification and automatons to attack.

She was imaginative in her attack. Nothing as mundane as spears, swords, or arrows, instead she created towering golems, each equipped with serrated spinning saw blades, and metal teeth strengthened by tungsten. Impervious to water they began slashing and tearing, their arms burrowing deep within the bodies of the Coinchenn.

She was methodical in her approach, attacking the largest first. Normally those on the front line would be targeted first, but they had beached with no formation, no strategy, they were an unorganized mass of undulating blubber. That they were Lord Ranked spoke to the sheer destructive power behind the attacks they could unleash. As long as their tentacles could grasp and crush, they were unstoppable.

But Duchess Wynne was uniquely qualified to counter those tentacles, severing them easily. Her golems were then forced to spend time and energy to decapitate those Coinchenn that were denuded of tentacle and attack ability to bring true death. Duchess Wynne was relentless, and as the ocean began to turn red with the blood of Coinchenn, the smells also changed, the brine of the sea giving way to the copper scent of blood.

For all their size and ferocity, the Coinchenn had no other attack or defense abilities; they relied on their prodigious strength and size to terrorize and command the field of battle. In the depths of the Ocean those tactics might have worked against the Duchess, but on land, without the water to stymie or slow her golem constructs armed with circular saw blades, there was nothing to abate or protect the Coinchenn from the killing field they had entered.

The smell from the battle became cloying as more and more Coinchenn were vivisected. The viscera, the remnants of fish guts, combined with the smell of excrement as these giant beings voided their bowels when they sacrificed their lives added to the horror. Their death compounding the bitter taste of copper that permeated the air forcing those standing, witnessing the carnage to breathe through their mouths to ignore the taste of the horrific stench.

Blood, viscera, and shit, nothing about the battle or the aftermath was dignified. Those who glamorized the art of war, who made scenes of carnage poetic and inspiring always left out the reality. Those that gave their lives were creatures of flesh and blood.

Aspen and Pine were new to the reality of war. Newly born children of Danu, they had not yet acclimated to the realities of the Sidhe experience. They were innocent and horrified at the carnage that was taking place.

I wished that I could shield them, allow them to retain their childish innocence, but it would be a disservice if I did. This world was going to be hard enough for them to navigate, it was best if they woke to certain truths in my company, where I could protect them, explain, and ease the transition between innocence and cynicism.

I hoped that their education didn't destroy the fresh eyes and unblemished perspective they could bring to a world inured in outdated morays and unrealistic race distinction. They were created to bring hope to the world, to repair and guard the fields and forest that Danu claimed. Talahm was her body made incarnate, and they were her caretakers.

For the Sidhe to dam the ley-lines and reroute those energies, to harm the planet only further demonstrated how desperately these new children of Danu were needed. What had been done should not have been conceivable for Seelie or Unseelie. The Sidhe were created as children of nature. Our magics, affinities, and domains revolved around the natural order of things. For them to ignore these precepts, to steal energy for the sole purpose of empowering a few, was anathema.

The killing field that Duchess Wynne had created soon came to an end. None of the Coinchenn survived. The area where the water met land had been transformed becoming nothing more than a slaughterhouse. The Selkie Lord that had begun this, that had attacked without provocation, had overplayed his hand, certain of his invincibility, he had never considered that Rank was more than a title. A Duchess was exponentially more powerful than an Earl, and with the right techniques and affinities, capable of disabling or destroying hundreds of Lord Ranked opponents.

It was only when the last Coinchenn had been slaughtered that the Selkie decided that escape was preferable to death. But by now it was too late. The Duchess was in full fury, her metal devices transforming from circular saw blades to chains, each chain culminating in a spear point.

Her attack against the Selkie Lord was reminiscent of whale hunting, harpoons of metal and chain, targeting, and penetrating his extremities. His attempt to shift to walrus form successful but fruitless, as more harpoons penetrated the water shield he erected, and the blubber that protected his core.

She hadn't killed him, but she'd wounded him so severely that there would be no escape or further attempts at battle. He had been powerful, but her display of ability and affinity countered his physical-based abilities and attacks. Even those magics he used in the beginning, the control of water to form spouts or shields were of no use against her onslaught of metal.

Once fully hooked, his attempts at escape fruitless; the Duchess began reeling him to shore. Coinchenn body parts made this more difficult as chunks of their flesh often drifted into the path forcing the Duchess to exert more energy and strength before finally landing the Roane.

"Explain yourself," she demanded once she had finally beached the man, her diminutive size was more prominent standing next to his walrus form, a size not much smaller than the Coinchenn that had attacked. He was easily thirty feet in length while transformed, were all that mass went when he assumed his human form seemed to belay the conservation of mass theory, but on Talahm spatial storage and anomalies had been ignoring the rules of creation, so the conversion of mass between two disparate forms made as much sense as anything else.

The reason was simple. The same explanation for all those breaks in reality. Magic broke the rules. There was nothing of the scientific principle required to explain the process, no formula or Universal Law that would explain the dichotomy. This was what made magic and science competing archetypes.