The Battle of Winterhold (4) : Hour of the Deaf
The Phenomenon known as the 'Unmusic' was something so dreadful that it became a nightmare for every enemy of Winterhold since this day.
The Deaf Battle, the Day of the Unmusic, the Unrecorded… too many names to describe an artificial event equivalent to a natural disaster.
How exactly does it work? No one knew.
Actually, no one could know.
The Area of the Unmusic was a cursed place that would snare all the colors in the world. Jon may laugh it off and call it the 'Lag' but he knew the truth. He was the architect of that forbidden magic after all.
The music is everything in the world. The Heart of the World, which is the Heart of Lorkhan, is also called the Heart of Music.
Music means existence in this world.
This Music is created by everything that happens and gets recorded in the Elder Scrolls whose number is uncountable and existence is as non-linear as time in the world of the Elder Scrolls.
Manipulating the Music of the World with Magic is known as the Tonal Magic.
Overdoing it has consequences and that's what Jon did, he found a hole in the rules and used the power of the Elder Scroll to erase the music in a certain area causing no magic or any sort of power to be used. Only weak mortals with thin layers of armor on their bodies walked on the edge of the Old Knocker's knife.
To explain this phenomenon, it is an Artificial Quasi-Dragon Break.
The Dragon Break is called the 'Untime', an event where the 'Dragon' (aka Time) breaks into realities that all happen at the same time and when it ends, all the realities come true even if some realities opposed each other. [A/n: Hint: that's how the dwemer disappeared.]
Still, this is not the relationship between the 'Untime' and the 'Unmusic'. The two phenomena share one similarity and that is the two of them can't be recorded by Elder Scrolls as events out of the world's control.
Being out of the divines' protections, the souls of men shivered as they lost connection with their Patron Spirits. They didn't know the feeling but their souls knew it.
The Dragon Hunt Alliance soldiers were already between the points of 100 and 200 meters from Neo Saarthal's first wall, there was no going back by all means.
To motivate them forward, Alina ordered the bombardment.
"Open Fire!"
Her voice somehow moved through the soundless zone unheard yet it reached the ears of the other people of the Alliance on the other side of the area.
Expecting to see some sort of great fire, the heart sunk faces of the alliance commanders jumped of its places when they saw the scene next to appear.
Beams of blue energy came out of the barrel-shaped objects fixed on the second walls, those beams traveled in an instant and landed on the bodies of the soldiers and the ground near them causing a terrifying scene to unfold.
As each beam landed, it disappeared and cluster eruption accompanied by a shock wave occurred in where it landed. The effect was soul crushing.
None of the soldiers that were hit with the beams survived.
Broken limbs.
Blood mess.
Fragments of bones and iron.
It was not a battle, it was destruction.
The battle didn't even start and a thousand died in less than a minute. That was how grim it was.
The soldiers ran around like rats and hid where they could hide. Those on the ground withered in agony and those who could run hid behind rocks and covered areas.
It worked.
Cannon fire was effective on tight groups and not on wide loose formations. Those who could take cover, crawl prone on the ground, run out of sight or blend with surrounding were safe for a moment.
Still, they were way too close to death and literally playing on its palm. The cannon shots were descending on every corner on the land. The snow that settled on the land for years was jumping up with fierce eruptions that most likely was accompanied by someone's death.
It was as if a gate from Oblivion opened wide on Nirn.
Neo Saarthal's Magicka Cannons didn't stop until five minutes of constant bombardment emptied the charges of the Magicka Reactors in these cannons. They needed at least a day to recharge or a change or reactors.
From the point of view from the second wall of Saarthal where the cannons are position, the rocky plain of snow in front of the first wall was completely covered with a cloud of fine snow. Nothing could be seen until a couple of minutes later when it all settled down again.
The image unfolding was hellish.
The Dare Troopers kept looking in frigid hearts at what happened to the enemies.
Walking silhouettes, staggering figures, ones kneeling and wailing soundlessly to the skies, ones lying broken, ones barely mustering the courage to look around them and beyond their covers at Saarthal.
From the 5'000 Alliance Soldiers that started the siege, half of them perished under the Magicka Cannon Fire.
Stillness and silence overtook the air both in the inside and the outside of the soundless zone. All just waiting to see what happens next.
Whose turn was it again?
None could tell!
Should the Dare Troopers on the wall start hunting the enemies with their crossbows?
None could know!
What now?
Jonrad looked at Alina and wanted to say something but Hilda glared at him not to utter a word. Even Nurina was having an inner conflict with herself.
In her entire life, her first student was Jon and her second was Alina. She enjoyed teaching the two prodigies quite a lot but her teachings led to such death and destruction.
War was never like that in her head, it was about skill and tactic yet now, things were rather depressing.
She kept her magic up to detect any change of energies around so that she can protect Alina and also tell Jon's location. At that moment, she felt a strong heartbeat-like pulse from Jon's direction and her eyes widened.
All her depressing thoughts went away.
Those who would want to harm her son would all go to hell as far as she could care whether it is a thousand or a hundred thousand. She felt ashamed feeling sorry or responsible just a second ago.
Hilda was already hell-bent on murdering that whole army just for Jon's sake. Such a counter was sudden and shocking but it brought joy to her heart.
Alina was narrowing her eyes as she kept looking at the future, many possibilities could happen in the next moment. She kept looking at a certain boy across the battlefield right next to Orga Stormfist and kept saying "Do it! Do it!"
It was the butterfly effect she needed to start the next phase.
That boy was looking at someone in the middle of the battlefield with sorrowful eyes, a brother if Alina could guess right. That brother seemed to have lost his legs and was looking back at his brother with tears flowing from his eyes.
"Do it! What are you waiting for?"
In her future vision, the brother on the ground will bleed out and die leaving his brother to kneel on the ground and cry but that wasn't what she wanted.
She wanted a different scenario to unfold.
Pressure, shock, mayhem. She wanted chaos in the enemy lines.
There were only ten seconds for her the butterfly effect to expire, she jumped off her place and ran to the nearest Magicka Cannon pushing the trooper on it away and aimed the Cannon to position charging it with her own Magicka.
"Alina, what are you…"
"Just one more."
As she said so, the Magicka Cannon started to glow and the shot was unleashed. Strong gasps escaped from everyone as the recoil of the cannon hit Alina's body and she flew back to the crash in the battlements.
"Lady!" "Alina!"
The Troopers ran to her and so did her relatives on the Gatehouse. A thin line of blood appeared on Alina's body as she staggered up and ran towards the front with everyone trying to support her.
"Yes! Yes! It happened! Now! Do it! Haha!"
A crazy laugh escaped her as she saw the present unfold to the future she sought.
On Orga's front, she was frigid still from the sight of the bombardment and barely looked forward at the sorry sight of her men. Beside her, the leaders of the other clans were in a sorry sight themselves.
Such a tyranny was something unprecedented in the world of those people.
As they sank into dread, a sudden eruption in the snow not far away from them woke them all up. The looked forward to see where it landed but no one could point out the odd about this eruption other than it came a bit later than the other ones.
Not until…
"BROTHER!" A boy shouted with all the pain and dread in the world then charged forward towards the soundless zone.
"Harmi!" Orga shouted at her bodyguard that left his position and charged forward like loosen arrow.
Her hand barely hung out as she jumped off her frightened horse. She wanted to stop her friend but he has already run deep in the soundless zone. He could never hear her.
But that wasn't all there is to it, something unexpected happened.
The sudden charge of Harmi caused the lines of the Dragon Hunt Alliance to fall restless. These people were all from the Clans of Skyrim and when a clan goes to war, brothers and parents fight shoulder to shoulder with their siblings and children. Just how many son, brother or father were in the first half of the army, the half whose half is lying on the ground struggling between life and death.
A lot!
Too many!
That last shot took the life of a brother in front of his brother and the latter ran forward.
This was the straw that broke the camel's back or in Alina's vision, the first action that will move the rest of the army.
"MURDERERS!"
"SAVE OUR BROTHERS!"
"KILL THOSE BASTARDS!"
The sudden change brought all the chaos in the world not only to the Soldiers but to the Clan Heads.
Orga saw Alina run to the side just a few seconds ago but to think that she…
"Impossible!"
That ice queen staring on top of the wall was now grinning madly as she looked at the enemy falling in chaos.
"We can't sit around anymore! Forward." The Ironblood Clan head had a lot of men in the field, there was no way he can control his men anymore while they saw their brothers dying.
"The horses will be of no use, put the ladders on them and just run forward!" The Far-Winter clan head was in the same position.
Gradually, all the clans started to fall to the chaos.
"Wait, you can't…" Orga shouted to the clan heads.
"Shut up, girl. This is no longer a fight. Loose Formations! Never form groups." The Nikkr Clan head shouted at her and kept giving orders for the rescue.
"We can't go in without a plan." Another Clan head spoke, "We need to take them then charge forward or they will kill us all with their magic."
"We can only take cover behind the first wall, they don't shoot that magic from the first wall and they can shoot at its base. We need all the shields and the ladders with us. It is all or nothing."
The plan went loose and the fight was no longer for raiding. It was vengeance, survival and a must.
Every clan realized what does it mean if those weapons were taken out to offense rather than defense. It would be the end of the fucking world.
An unforeseen charge occurred from the Wind Wolf Clan who was on the far north all by their own and every other clan started to follow one by one.
The true number behind Orga was barely 300 men, she did well keeping her family forces of 2000 spread around the other fronts but that was already very exposed.
"Milady!" An officer of her spoke up.
"No! The Stormfist Brigade is all that our clan has left. We need to do something different." Orga looked right and left then pointed out. "That mountain valley south to Winterhold, if we go there, we will break from beside the Shrine of Azura and reunite with our men from the raiding teams. If we took over the Dunmer Mining village on the other side of the mountain, we will be able to negotiate with that woman. Now!"
The sudden change of plans meant a lot to the future. Whether to live and die today meant nothing compared to the fate of tomorrow. The attackers were now struggling on the defense.