When the Moat Runs Dry

The seventh night fell without omen or fanfare. A strange stillness had settled over the battlefield, thick and unnatural, like breath held too long. Zhong's eastern wall stood in stoic defiance, torches flickering, guards pacing atop the ramparts, unaware of the breathless tension coiling beneath their feet.

Six days earlier, Altan had given no orders to charge the walls. Instead, he called for the geomancers and siege engineers—not to raise towers or ladders, but to reshape the land itself. Deep beneath Zhong's foundations, the moat had always drawn its water from a series of natural underground springs. Altan's engineers found those veins, then rerouted them.

It wasn't a quick task. Laborers worked day and night under canvas to stay hidden, hammering copper-lined channels and anchoring stone glyphs into the bedrock. The geomancers walked among them, murmuring earth-prayers, directing the diggers when to shift soil and where to seal off the old flow. Once the tunnels were complete, ritualists marked them with sigils—simple-looking, but precise—and the aquifers that once fed the city's moat were diverted miles eastward, vanishing into new reservoirs.

Then came the Weather-Speakers.

They didn't need picks or tools. Dressed in sky-dyed robes, they moved in silence, placing clay drought tokens along the dry edges of the moat. These talismans had been baked under desert sun and etched with wind-borne script, each one designed to leech moisture from the surrounding air. On the seventh evening, they stood in formation around the perimeter, and began their chant.

It started as a whisper. Barely audible. But soon, the air began to tighten. The humidity that once hung over the grass vanished. Dew stopped forming on blades and boots. Breath felt drier. Even the torches dimmed, as if the very fire struggled to breathe. The soil cracked open like old bark. The last puddles of moatwater hissed into vapor.

By morning, what once had been a defensive ring of stagnant water was nothing more than a dry trench of brittle clay.

The Zhong defenders readied for the assault. Archers kept their bows strung. Mages stood with hands glowing faintly. The first wall braced itself.

But nothing came.

The Gale banners stood motionless in the distance. No horns. No drums. No towers. Just silence.

It was worse than attack.

That night, tension wound like wire through the city. Sentries gripped their spears tighter. Messengers ran tighter patrols. Officers kept watch until dawn.

Then the scream came.

It broke the quiet like a blade through silk—a raw, desperate cry from the East Gate tower. It ended too fast. Another followed. Then three more.

Messengers sprinted through the courtyards, breathless, faces pale. They shouted warnings, but the generals in the lower wall defense barely had time to listen before a second wave of screams tore through the dark.

The Whispershell had arrived.

They did not climb walls or batter gates. They rode the wind.

Barely seen in moonlight, the whisper-wasps floated like drifting ash, gliding through arrow slits and seams in armor. Each insect carried venom refined through decades of internal cultivation, its sting halting breath and nerve in seconds. The wasps found eyes and ears, mouths and nostrils, embedding paralysis with each bite. Dozens fell without a sound, weapons frozen mid-draw, faces twisted in the instant of death.

Then came the venom-moths. Large as a man's hand, their velvet wings shimmered with powder. One flap loosed clouds that shimmered gold under torchlight. The dust did not burn or cut. It dissolved the barrier between flesh and spirit. Soldiers inhaled and convulsed, some tearing at their own faces as visions clawed at their sanity. A man screamed about flames crawling in his bones. Another struck his comrades, screaming they were hollow. One jumped from the wall, laughing as his skull cracked against the stone.

Carrion beetles followed. Palm-sized, bronze-backed, and stinking of rot, they crawled toward the scent-bait sewn into the guards' uniforms. They didn't swarm. They infiltrated. A soldier turned to speak and collapsed as beetles erupted from his throat. Another clawed at his breastplate while a dozen insects gnawed at his lungs. Blood pooled at their feet. Flesh vanished from faces and fingers. Helmets filled with clicking, wet hunger. Within minutes, the East Gate's upper rampart stood corpse-still, lined with guards whose armor gleamed but whose eyes no longer moved.

But that wasn't the end.

Deeper within Zhong's outer barracks, where the third and fifth cohorts slept in rotating shifts, a low vibration began. Faint at first. Then louder. Then breaking.

Stone split.

From the cracked earth crawled a new terror.

Soldier ants. Bred in the bloodsalt trenches of the Qorjin-ke, each one the size of a man's hand, mandibles serrated like forged blades. They rose in waves, armor-red, eyes blind but senses sharp. There was no warning. One man awoke with no legs, his body already halfway consumed. Another sat up and screamed as an ant clamped onto his ribcage, snapping bone through muscle.

Tents collapsed as beams splintered beneath the weight of moving tide. Ants surged through canvas, chewed through boots and thighs, split necks in single bites. The sleeping quarters erupted in chaos, but confusion cost lives. Hundreds died before their swords cleared scabbards.

A junior officer tried to cast a ward glyph, only to watch his hand vanish into mandibles mid-gesture. Screams filled the camp. Torches fell. Flame caught linen and flesh alike. The stench of blood and scorched silk clung to the air.

Fire mages arrived moments later, unleashing gouts of flame that turned tents and ants alike to ash. But the swarm was already finished. When the smoke cleared, nothing remained but bones, shattered armor, and the scent of burnt marrow. Five hundred soldiers dead. No survivors. No bodies whole.

Zhong stood over the reports the next morning. His face was ash-pale. Fifteen hundred total dead. Nothing had climbed the walls. No warhorns had sounded. And yet, they had suffered the worst losses in a single night.

He stared at the map. His generals argued over tactics, but their voices sounded far away. Zhong's hands trembled faintly as he lowered them to the table.

In the quiet of his thoughts, he recognized what many feared to say aloud: this was not war. It was dismantling. Soldiers muttered in their bunks, some begging for the Gale to strike directly, to bring forth siege towers and battering rams. "Let them face us," one had whispered in tears. "Let them storm the gates. Not this... not again."

Sleep became a stranger to the capital. Zhong's eyes, red with strain, caught glimpses of his men flinching at shadows, clutching their weapons in restless grips. The torches seemed dimmer. The walls colder. The silence louder.

Yet amidst all this destruction, something strange was reported by fleeing civilians: the insects did not attack them. In multiple accounts, those who escaped the outer districts described moments of frozen fear—only for the soldier ants to pause, click their mandibles, and crawl away. One household told of an ant halting at their doorway, mandibles twitching, before turning and vanishing into the earth. The swarm had come for soldiers, not for the people.

Of the fifty thousand who fled Zhong in the first mass exodus, many were civilians, but among them, scattered and disarmed, were soldiers who had shed their insignia and followed their families into the plains. Some carried wounds, others guilt. All carried silence.

Veterans trembled in corners. Some prayed the Gale would just storm the gates. That they would send rams, fire arrows, brute force. Anything but this.

In the higher courts, General Lian collapsed into a seat, his face pallid.

"We're not fighting an army," he whispered. "We're fighting extinction."

Stormwake stood silent beside Altan at the ridge, both watching the glow rise from the barracks. The screams had faded. Only the wind carried the tale now.

"They counted fifteen hundred dead so far," Stormwake said. "Gate captains are gone. Eastern command broken. We hit them clean."

Altan's face remained unreadable. His eyes fixed on the city, where torches flickered in confused patterns and banners lowered in disarray.

"And the swarm?" he asked.

"Withdrawn. Burrowed before the mages arrived. Exactly as planned."

Altan's fingers brushed the carved insect totem at his belt. Whispershell bone. Old and inked with memory.

"They'll think this was the siege," he said. "That this was the worst of it."

He stepped forward, boots pressed into the cracked earth, and looked toward Zhong's rising walls. The scent of fear had reached them. He could feel it now, in the restless fires and erratic drumbeats.

"They're wrong," he murmured. "The gates are dry. Their hands are trembling. Now we build the towers. Let them see us in daylight."

He paused, voice low with iron certainty.

"Tomorrow," he said quietly, "they'll beg for siege towers."

Stormwake bowed low and turned.

Behind them, the Gale Army stirred again. In silence. In rhythm.

The siege had not begun with fire. It began with poison, silence, and precision.

Now, it would end with flame.