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//Author’s Notes: Written in 2014. A thunderstorm while I was cooped up in a hotel room at a veteran’s reunion made me think of a battle I’d fought in a Total War game. My mind asked what would drive the AI to defend a town to the death in the face of overwhelming odds (beyond gameplay rules stipulating it). Context of the ancient time period and the perceived divinity of royalty was my answer, but I wanted to answer it through fiction from the POV of the town’s defenders.
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There was a rumbling. It felt and sounded like a storm from inside the nearby forest. Muted thunder and rustling leaves. The rumbling forest was distant though, and her leaves carried far off voices. They could not hear the words where they stood in the town square. They would not understand the words if they could have heard them.

One of the tribe’s guardsmen turned to another who stood watch with him in front of the butcher’s shed. Patrols for the night had been doubled from all the rumors flying about after the last council meeting. Rumors the guardsman now asked his stoic comrade about.

“They say they can bring fire down from the air itself. Is it true, you think?” Silence was the answer. “I heard that their armies can even kill Gods.”

At this, his brother-in-arms turned to face him. “Nothing can kill a God. I will not hear such blasphemy. If this army is anything other than the over exaggerated fears of farmers, it is an army of men. And we have the blessing of the Divine.”

All they heard was the sound of a fall, not unlike a tree after its final cut, finding its resting place on the earth. This sound though, was much longer. Their necks craned in its direction. It was quiet, but as it grew louder, they saw a swarm of orange orbs in the sky. It was only a matter of seconds afterward that they came crashing to the earth like so much felled lumber.

There is no word in Thracian for ‘explosion’. Those that survived would later struggle to describe what they had witnessed, and would only be able to tell of seeing miniature suns splashing their village like drops of water set alight.

What they could not vocalize was the bombing of Odessos. The ceramic explosives first landed in front of the town. The guardsmen watched the gate and wall of their village fly into splinters. Blood and shreds of wood decorated the square, where soldiers were gathering to hold off the invaders.

The invaders, however, were nowhere to be seen. Instead, another barrage of missiles landed past the gate, catching thatched huts on fire when they weren’t outright obliterated. The men of the village began to move back, until their prince marched forward on his horse, with the royal cavalry in tow.

“I, like my father, carry forth the blessings of the Gods! These heathen enemies cannot carry their blasphemous acts to completion so long as I stand in your defense! Were my father here, he would say the same. Instead, he charges now on  their flank to cut off the head of this foul snake!”

Cheers supplanted murmurs of fear and doubt, and even the war machines in the distance seemed to grow silent. The Thracians heard the snapping of the onagers loosing their payload, but saw no balls of fire. The thought that their Gods had spared them another explosive attack was crushed under what had been sent in their stead.

The corpses of their livestock were the first to land. The sick splattering of spoiled meat turned their stomachs, but the arrivals of their dead soldiers turned their hearts. The last arrival was their king — stuck through his shoulders were his spear and sword. He wasn’t dismembered like the rest, though the fall from the sky was not kind to his body. The prince rode forth to his father’s side, his retinue following solemnly behind.

Off in the distance the sound of cracking wood came once more. The ballistae were bombarding again. As sure as the Gods had abandoned their king, they’d abandoned the prince as well. Blazing death rained down on the square, and separating the gore of man and horse would have taken the effort of sorting wheat from chaff. There was naught but three riders still alive, trying to bring their animals under control. The prince was killed when one of the bombs landed betwixt his noble steed’s hooves.

If the horses were wild from the latest assault, the villagers were feral with recreancy. More than a dozen lives were lost in the stampede away from the town square. The market and most of the buildings in the village were smoldering ruins, or else threatening to collapse from the flames licking their wooden beams. The townsfolk who still had their lives and their strength ran to the shrine at the far side of the village.

The two guardsmen who had the night watch in front of the butcher’s stall were among those that survived the newest blasts and subsequent trampling. When the more verbose one tried to run not to the shrine but to the woods, his quiet partner seized his tunic.

“Stay. These are our people. Even if the Gods have abandoned them, we cannot. It is our duty to stay.” He motioned with his neck to the small stone amphitheater where no more than fifty of the hundreds of villagers were huddled and weeping.

“Duty? To what? Our corpse king? His -” and the stoic struck him. He hoped to silence the panic before it spread to the civilians. He hoped in vain. “His corpse son, our dead prince?” The younger man spat blood at the feet of his calm fellow. “No! I won’t die here like them! Come with me, we’ll throw ourselves at the mercy of those who the Gods have sent to punish us. I’d rather live as a slave than die as a fool!”

The older guard tried to stop him. When the coward eluded his grasping hands, he yelled after him. He screamed that demons took no slaves, though his words were but whispers in the pandemonium of roaring fires and cracking wood.

For his cowardice, the younger guard did live longer. Those who thought their temple too sacred to be a target of the artillery were proved fatally wrong when more explosives fell from the sky, bringing rock down on bone and killing all but a few. The elder soldier gave his life pulling a fragment of a statue off a young boy who escaped to safety as another idol fell on the guard and crushed his chest.

The younger soldier, now the last of his order, felt quite wise for his decision to run. Each time the snapping sound echoed through the night and brimstone fell, it was deeper and deeper into the village, pushing everyone he knew to the ocean’s shore — and certain death. By choosing to run through the smoke and destruction, he was, in effect, running directly away from the immolating that wrought their doom.

He didn’t know if his lungs burned from the heat, the screaming, the exertion, or all of these. He only knew he couldn’t let the pain stop him. He ran until he heard voices. They were shouting commands in a foreign tongue, a language that sounded civilized yet frightening at the same time. It was clipped and abrupt, robbed of beauty, to his ears, in the name of efficiency. Truly these were not men. They were devils.

He heard stranger sounds as he moved closer. He could see the torch light just past the crest of the hill outside his village. The echoes in the night air sounded not unlike a thousand quiet blacksmiths gently striking their anvils, or coins falling into a leather purse. His mind could not solve this acoustic riddle before his eyes betrayed the truth.

Hiding in the treeline under the cover of darkness was six score of the enemy. A full unit of armored soldiers, simply waiting for some fool to make a desperate run at their camp. As the last living guardsmen saw their shadows and realized what he was gazing upon, their commander barked a single order and they all rose in perfect unison.

He froze. There were lethal odds stacked against him, and he was questioning his judgement. He announced his surrender and immediately realized that it was very unlikely that any of these… things, if they were even human, spoke his rural dialect.

They all moved forward in perfect step, and the faint light from beyond the hill illuminated the source of the strange clinking noise. These were surely not men, for they were made of metal. Not even iron, like his spear, but steel like the late royals’ blades. Even more terrifying was that they all wore the same face.

As they drew closer he realized they wore steel masks of a singular design, further convincing the young deserter that they were hiding their inhuman features under the alloy he thought only wielded by those blessed by the Gods. That they wore steel, of all things, surely meant they were unholy beings sent to punish his village.

The last thought to pass through his mind was that he was going to die, at the very least, at the hands of creatures possessing a particularly sinister elegance. The last thing to pass through his brain was a masterfully crafted and aimed pilum.