“You ingrates better kick yer asses into gear if you hope to make it into Fólkvangr, let alone Valhalla!” Ivar’s gnarled old hands gripped the edges of his wheelchair, while his aged veins throbbed with rage.

Scores of dead men and women lay in the courtyard outside his manor, while his personal guard fought desperately to hold the inner gates against a contingent of the baron’s soldiers and assorted brigands.

“Next scroll! NOW, I SAID!” Ivar bellowed at his servant, eyes bulging red with fury as he reached out with his demanding hand.

“This is the last one, my lord.” The servant bowed, as he quickly placed a finely wrapped piece of parchment in the minister’s handing.

“Tch.” Ivar clicked his tongue in frustration, as he deftly unwrapped the scroll, revealing its ornate texts and layered magic circles while he bemoaned his plight in a thick Nordic accent. “If the king’s damned brothers hadn’t started their stupid war, I’d have stockpiled enough scrolls by now to withstand an entire damn siege.”

“My lord, should I bring out the support scrolls?” The servant asked nervously, his eyes jumping back inside the manor spoke of his hope to minimize how long he needed to be this close to the fighting.

“The hell kind of stupid question is that?! Of course you should!” Ivar spat back, the servant readily dashing back inside the halls.

With a deep breath, Ivar channeled his mana into the scroll and focused carefully on the frontline. The concentric circles glowed a deep azure, as he aimed for a target in the gap between his frontline guards and the assaulting usurpers.

“Back into Hel’s grasp with you, bastards! Lightning Spear!” The scroll burned into ash as a bolt of lightning formed itself into Ivar’s hand. He launched it the moment a sword pierced through one of his guards, aiming for the enemy rushing to fill in the freshly vacated position.

With a crack, the bolt tore through another half-dozen men, leaving naught but a clear, seared hole carved through everything in its path.

Steam glistened off his flesh, as he chugged the last blue vial on the small stand next to him. A dozen others lay scattered and empty around his chair. He eyed his personal guard captain stumbling to the base of his perron.

“My Lord! The mages cannot hold the shield wall up much longer! Permission to pull back inside the manor!” The guard practically begged, his voice haggard with exhaustion.

“I’ll be damned first! The moment that shield wall drops, half of you will die before you even make it up these steps! This is our last stand, so take as many of those bastards down with you as you can!”

“Yes, My Lord!” A hail of spells and arrows slammed the translucent shield, sending rippling impacts and cracks almost to affirm both points. The mages were barely able to keep up maintaining the shield wall.

Out of the corner of his eye, Ivar spied movement across one of the neighboring rooftops, followed by the silent drop of bodies from some of the flanking archers.

“M-my Lord, I have brought-“

“Hold just a moment! Nightvision.” Ivar cut off his returning servant, arms bundled with several old bundles of scrolls.

“Damn, it’s just one… wait…” Ivar’s eyes narrowed as he focused on the man, the hat looked damn familiar. Then… they shot wide open as the man was fully illuminated by a flaming arrow.

“Give me that, now!” In a panic, Ivar and shot his hand into the bundle of scrolls, aiming for the most elaborate one he had. In his haste, he knocked the rest from the servant’s arms and across the floor.

Ivar’s eyes leapt back to the battlefield, ignoring his servant’s protests, as he watched a blue bottle sail through the air. Whatever it was, he didn’t want to find out the hard way.

“Greater Shield Wall!”

He didn’t even look as he flung the scroll open, pouring everything he had into it. Ivar coughed out blood as steam burst from his wrinkled flesh, while a wall of blue mana interlaced with the translucent shield wall and stretched across the gate entrance.

Then, as if he felt time slowed down, he saw the flaming arrow arcing through the air. The blue liquid inside swirled violently, sending out an almost starry glow. He focused on it, enraptured, as the arrow shattered through the bottle, unleashing the stars into the night sky.

And what stars they were! Ivar gasped at the beauty of the white and blue gems erupting forth, taking the arrow’s flame within themselves and rejoicing in the fire as if each was its own small sun. Slowly expanding, their lights casting wild shadows across all directions, and the looks of wonderment on all the soldiers below.

Then, the stars fell, and with them came the screams.

The first was a soldier who reached to sky in praise, the ecstasy of the moment crumpled faster than a house of cards as the star touched his hand, followed immediately by a terrible shriek.

The armor melted and fused into flesh as the star roasted into the man’s arm, panic spreading like wildfire far too late.

Ivar had seen many things in his life, and had fought in many battles. His enraptured joy soured into abject horror, as his violently trembling hands tried to shield his eyes. But he couldn’t look away as he bore witness to the massacre.

His heart beat furiously as time and sound returned to the world, filled with the shrieks of men roasting alive from within and without.

Over a hundred men were out there, and most weren’t killed outright, and it was far too late to escape the reach of the deadly rain. The most fortunate were the soldiers who turned to look back, just for the ball of light to scorch its way through their eyes and into their brains.

The unholy shrieks as their eyes melted from their sockets was short lived, and they no longer could feel the flesh scorching away from their faces as they accepted death’s unforgiving embrace. They were the lucky ones.

For the others, the hail melted through arms and armor, limbs melting apart at the seams of impact and falling apart, the flames smoldering and spreading across every inch they touched.

Desperate mages flung spells summoning ice and water only fueled its spread, shattering the stars only for the fragments to reignite the moment the water washed away.

It burrowed into their flesh. It dug deeper and deeper into the body of anything it touched, sizzling and searing that which didn't outright melt. Anyone who tried to wipe it off, spread the flaming stars onto their hands and across their bodies. Through their faces, their eyes, their mouths… slow, horrible, burning deaths.

“It’s Hel herself…” Bile piled into Ivar’s mouth, even as he tried to repress it. The shrieks of the dying tore into his heart and soul, making even a banshee’s wail sound like a pleasant day at the park. His whole body trembled. His own men dropped to their knees and wept, as the shield walls fell.

Others stood and stared listlessly through the flames, their swords falling from their hands, while yet others fell into crazed laughter.

The line of white and blue flames across their base was the surest sign of their own salvation, as well as their greatest curse.

D carefully plotted his way through the fresh hellscape, stepping across all manners of melted flesh puddles and limbs deprived of their respective corpses.

He scrunched his nose and covered his mouth, the stench of seared flesh and other acrid odors filled the air with impunity. The flames were rapidly diminishing, with only a few spots still burning.

The few survivors looked worse than zombies, it was impossible to tell where the burned flesh ended and their armor or clothes began, yet their screams continued through broken vocal cords and scalded lungs, cracked and eerie.

“Get yerselves together, lads! Praise the Thunderer that you aren’t amongst the dying!” Ivar bellowed out to his men, having steeled his heart and eyes to project his strength.

He decked one of the listless guards in the face, shocking the man back into reality, as if to emphasize his point. Ivar fought to suppress a wince with the sounds of cracking bone, and one of his fingers failed to straighten out as he grabbed hold of his wheels and turned to face D.

“Well now, if it ain’t the son of Hel himself. Tell me, what devil possessed you to concoct that hellfire?” Ivar stared sharply into D’s eyes, without a hint of relief nor thanks.

D glanced back at the devastation. Only the worst kind of monsters would make something like that… and to give it away with such reckless abandon too…

Still, he had just saved their lives. D stared down his nose at Ivar, and answered dryly. “The same one that convinced me to waste a perfectly good bottle saving an old goat pretending to be a sophisticated bureaucrat.”

Ivar leaned back into his chair, resting his face on the hand with the twisted finger and shot a twisted smile at D. “Ah, so the mystery man looks to engage in a game of words with me? Rather bold of you, I presume, doing so in the midst of all my men at arms.” He waved his free hand, motioning towards his contingent of guards and sorcerers, the thick Norse accent evaporating in a moment’s notice.

Ivar waited just long enough for D to step back into a defensive stance, before breaking into a bout of laughter, and then pivoting into a relentless series of commands.

“Now get yer asses back in line, you yellow bastards think this is over with just the fight here? Are you proud sons of Odin or are you trying to go on a picnic with the cheatin’ lass down the street?!”

D practically snapped at the whiplash, as the guards pick up their comrades swords and shoved them back into their listless hands, forcefully dragging each other out of their thousand-yard stares on sheer, drilled-in instinct as they got into formation.

“The hell’r you standin’ around for? Only the devil’s worth pushing my chair, so get to it.” Ivar shot D another cruel glance, making clear this wasn’t a choice to begin with.

The fuck is wrong with people in this city?!

D sauntered over, and gave the wheelchair a rough shove as he reluctantly pushed it along, his temples throbbing ever so slightly more than they should, all the while a speck of doubt wormed its way uncomfortably into his brain.

“So, where to?” D asked pleasantly, smiling prominently in response to Ivar’s steely glare.

“The hell else, to go get my ships. You showed me your hellfire, so I thought I may as well show you mine!”

In response to Ivar’s freely sadistic smile, an incredibly unpleasant knot twisted itself inside D’s stomach, as he was having a harder and harder time discerning between monsters and men.

Perhaps… I’ll hold off on judging the boy just yet… at least until I can really be certain he isn’t just a genius asshole.

D repressed his fury, as the wheelchair jostled over a loose foot and prompted another barrage from the minister. “Any of those fuckers who raised you ever taught you how to push a damn chair? How damn hard could it be?!”

Not just his temples, but any vein that could manage it throbbed violently. I really should have left this bastard to die.