Alaric and Dawn held the center, a whirlwind of rose-gold fire and silver moonlight that kept the Weaver of Carrion pinned to its plinth, but the real war was being fought at the periphery.
"Break the tethers!" Sir Kaelan Tidestride bellowed, his voice amplified by the magical resonance of his Dweomerstele Full-Plate.
Kaelan and Knight-Sergeant Marik led a thunderous wedge toward the North-East pillar. Their armor, several grades above the castle-forged steel of the Empire, hummed as it deflected the Lich's necrotic lashes. Marik's squadron moved with the practiced lethality of men who had trained under the shadow of the Archive, their heater shields locked and their shortswords finding the gaps in the shifting wall of zombies.
To the south, Knight-Sergeant Thodin and his knights rallied the twenty-odd survivors of the Militia. Their castle-forged chainmail was heavy with grime and blood, but as they saw Thodin's golden-tinted breastplate leading the way, their fear turned to a grim, desperate resolve. They slammed into the southern melee to assist Sergeant Thorne and his Knights Gallant, their pikes forming a bristling thicket that held the undead tide at bay while the elites focused on the objective.
The resonance is shifting, Alaric, Alanor's voice sang, a triumphant chord in the Prince's mind. The elven blade finds its mark!
Elyndor Faelith moved like a streak of moonlight. The Arcane Bulwark leader didn't use brute force; he used the Bladesinger's precision. With a low, melodic chant, he drove his moon-blade into the crystalline node at the base of the North-East pillar. Simultaneously, the combined weight of Thorne's Gallants and Thodin's Militia hammered the South pillar into a heap of white marble dust.
The Lich let out a hollow, rattling screech as two of its primary power sources vanished. The emerald fire in its chest flickered, and the zombies connected to those anchors slumped back into the mud, their necrotic tethers severed.
"One left!" Kaelan roared, turning his focus toward the North-West.
But the Weaver was not defeated yet. Sensing its imminent disconnection, it poured its remaining essence into the two Unforgiven Sentinels guarding the final anchor. The timber-and-iron constructs tripled in size, their rusted joints glowing with a sickly green light as they stepped forward to block Kaelan and Marik's path.
"Marik, on me!" Kaelan commanded, bracing his shield as a Sentinel's massive timber club descended like a falling tree.
The impact of the blow cracked the very ground beneath Kaelan's boots, but the Dweomerstele held. Marik's squadron swarmed the second Sentinel, their blades sparking against its iron-reinforced ribs. They were pushing with everything they had, the twenty-fourth century tactical knowledge of Alaric guiding their every strike through the Weave, but the North-West pillar remained standing—a final, defiant beacon of the Lich's power.
The battlefield was a cacophony of grinding metal and necrotic shrieks, Alaric felt a new surge of disciplined momentum from the south. Knight-Sergeant Thodin, his Dweomerstele breastplate slick with black ichor, led his squadron of knights in a brutal, low-profile charge. They didn't just fight the zombies; they dismantled them, their mastercrafted blades severing the reinforced spines of the undead with surgical efficiency.
"Clear the path!" Thodin roared, his voice amplified by the Archive's resonance.
His knights struck the flank of the two massive Sentinels guarding the North-West pillar like a golden hammer. The timber-and-iron constructs, already straining against Kaelan and Marik, groaned as Thodin's fresh reinforcement shattered their structural poise. The twenty surviving Militia, inspired by the sight of their Sergeant's unstoppable advance, leveled their pikes and drove them into the Sentinels' glowing knee-joints, pinning the behemoths in place.
Sir Kaelan Tidestride saw the opening. He didn't hesitate. He stepped past the reeling Sentinel, his heater shield held high to deflect a desperate, mid-tier necrotic blast from the Lich. The Dweomerstele absorbed the blow, the golden-tinted plates glowing white-hot as they dispersed the energy.
With a guttural shout, Kaelan swung his heavy mace in a massive, overhead arc. He didn't strike the pillar's shaft; he struck the crystalline node at the base—the "Historic" battery that fed the Weaver's famine.
The impact was not a mere crash of stone. It was a magical implosion. The marble column shattered into a thousand glowing shards, and the North-West anchor died with a sound like a snapping harp string.
The effect was instantaneous.
The two Unforgiven Sentinels, deprived of their necrotic lifeblood, simply collapsed into heaps of rusted iron and rotting wood. Across the marsh, the remaining eighty zombies fell where they stood, their emerald tethers vanishing into the grey fog. The silence that followed was deafening, broken only by the heavy, ragged breathing of the Starfall men.
On the central plinth, the Weaver of Carrion let out a final, hollow rattle. The emerald fire in its ribcage guttered and died, leaving only a withered, skeletal husk draped in moth-eaten silk. Its obsidian staff clattered to the stone, the dark mana within it spent.
"Is it done?" Dawn asked, her spectral wings fading as she drifted back to the mud-slicked ground.
"The anchors are gone," Alaric replied, his eyes scanning the ruins. "The Lich is silenced... but the Vault is open."
Kaelan, Marik, and Thodin converged on the central plinth, their armor battered but holding. They looked at their Prince—a boy who had just coordinated a multi-front assault against a legendary threat—and then at each other. The respect in their eyes was no longer born of duty; it was born of witness.