The Covenant's retaliation came at dawn, three days after the granary raid.
Thousands of diggers swarmed the western plains—orc laborers, stone dwarves, earth mages, every soul they could pull from rear-echelon duty. A bloated porcine overseer sat perched on a wooden platform at the dig site's center, his voice booming across the fields like a cracked bell.
"Quit your dawdling!" he roared, jabbing a fat finger at the dirt. "His Highness has spoken! Find one tunnel rat, ten gold coins. Find ten, promotion to temple acolyte. Find a hundred? You become his personal envoy! Now dig!"
Shovels bit into the soil. Earth mages chanted, heaving great slabs of dirt aside. The ground sank three feet in the first hour alone. They were determined. They were furious. They would dig the whole plains flat if they had to.
One of the orc diggers grunted as his shovel struck something hard and ceramic. He brushed the dirt away and found the rounded top of a great clay jar, half-buried in the soil.
"Sir!" he yelled, over his shoulder. "I found something!"
The porcine overseer practically waddled down from his platform, his eyes gleaming. This was it. This was his promotion. He leaned in, his great belly hanging over his belt, and peered into the jar.
Red powder. Fine as dust. A thin wisp of acrid smoke curled out of the crack the shovel had made.
All up and down the dig line, similar shouts went up. Jars. Dozens of jars. Hundreds. Buried in neat rows just below the surface.
The overseer sniffed the air. His brow furrowed.
"Wait a minute," he said, slow and stupid. "That smell… is that—"
The first jar blew.
Then the next. Then all of them, all at once, a chain reaction running through the buried line like fire through dry grass. Fire slime residue and crushed rock slime detonated in a single, earth-shaking roar. The whole plain lifted half a foot and dropped back down. Dirt and stone and shattered ceramic rained from the sky.
When the dust cleared, the dig site was gone.
Two thousand diggers, overseers, mages—gone. Scattered. Buried. Blown to smithereens. The whole field was a crater field of smoking dirt and splintered wood. Not a single tunnel rat had been found.
General Varg, the silver-fang wolf captain in charge of the western theater, arrived an hour later at a dead run. He stared out over the smoking crater field, and his lips pulled back from his teeth in a snarl.
Two thousand of their best sappers. Gone. Wasted.
"Cowards," he snarled. "Filthy, skulking cowards. Hiding in the dirt like worms."
A scout came skidding up beside him, breathless.
"General! The north cave network—we sent five thousand men in at dawn. None have come back out. The tunnels are a maze. Every turn leads to dead ends or cave-ins."
Before Varg could answer, a second runner arrived, pale as ash.
"General! Southwatch keep fell an hour ago. They hit it from inside and out. Whole garrison wiped out. Stores taken."
A third.
"West grain convoy ambushed. Every cart gone. No survivors."
Bad news piled up like cordwood. Varg's head throbbed. He had fought in a dozen border skirmishes. He had charged enemy lines, he had held walls against beast waves, he had won battles where his men were outnumbered three to one.
He had never fought an enemy he couldn't see.
They were everywhere and nowhere. They struck from behind. They came up through the floor. They vanished before you could draw your sword. It was like fighting smoke.
"Pull the Third Battalion back," he said, jaw tight. "We consolidate at the central keep. No more scattered outposts. No more digging. Not until we have a plan."
The shadow behind him shifted.
Varg's head snapped around.
One of his own lieutenants stood there—pale, slender, hooded, a face he'd seen a dozen times that morning. Except the eyes were wrong. Glowing pale violet.
A spike of solid ice erupted through his chest before he could scream.
He stared down at the shard protruding from his ribcage, disbelieving. Then his legs gave out, and he collapsed face-first into the dirt.
Chaos erupted. The wolf guards howled and drew their blades. But the illusion melted away from the intruder, revealing a frost wraith in tattered grey robes, her hand still outstretched, frost curling off her fingertips.
More wraiths stepped out of the shadows all around the camp, silent as ghosts.
Fire bloomed in their palms.
Not ice. Fire.
Balls of roaring orange flame arced into the ranks of the stunned guards, tearing through tents and armor and flesh alike. The camp dissolved into screaming, burning chaos in less than a minute.
When the last guard fell, the wraiths fanned out, dousing the bodies with pale blue soul-flame that burned clean and left no trace.
"Make it fast," Lirael said, wiping frost from her sleeve. "Reinforcements will be here within the hour."
One of her lieutenants kicked a charred wolf corpse, frowning.
"Fire magic, matriarch? It feels… wrong."
"Good," Lirael said, calm as ever. "That's the point. They think we are stone lizards, apes, and frost wraiths. They think fire is our weakness. Let them wonder who else is out here. Let them suspect each other. Let them suspect the Tide Pact. The more they doubt, the slower they move."
She glanced down at the dead wolf general, his eyes wide and staring, and turned away.
"Burn it all. Nothing left to trace. We go back underground."
Ten minutes later, the camp was nothing but ash and smoldering wood. The wraiths were gone. There was no sign they had ever been there at all.
That night, the Covenant's war council seethed.
Four lords sat around the great table in Murong Xue's pavilion, their faces dark with rage and suspicion. The western army was in disarray. Their best sappers were gone. Three outposts had fallen. Their top field commander was dead, killed by magic no one could explain.
"Fire magic," one of the lords, a grim dwarf thane, growled, slamming a fist on the table. "Fire. From the tunnel rats? That's impossible. Everyone knows their core is ice and stone and brute force. This was the Tide Pact. They've been raiding our coasts for months. Now they're sneaking agents inland."
"Or it's a traitor," another lord snapped, an elven matron with a face like flint. "Someone in our ranks feeding them information. Someone with fire mages of their own."
"Accusing each other will get us nowhere," a third said, his voice tight.
Murong Xue sat silent at the head of the table, her fingers steepled beneath her chin, her gaze fixed on the smoldering ruins of the western camp glowing on the scrying stone.
She did not believe it was the Tide Pact. She did not believe it was a traitor.
She believed something far more unsettling.
These were not scavengers. These were not a ragtag band of refugees hiding in the dark.
They planned. They baited traps. They used psychological warfare. They deliberately used magic no one expected them to have, just to sew doubt. They did not fight fair. They did not fight honorably. They fought to win. And they were very, very good at it.
Whoever this god was, they had not just trained their subjects to fight. They had trained them to think. To adapt. To learn magic no one expected them to learn, just to confuse the enemy.
That was not the work of some backwater fringe deity. That was not the work of a lucky scavenger.
That was professional.
"Enough," she said, and her voice cut through the arguing like a blade.
The room went quiet.
"We do not blame the Tide Pact. We do not hunt for traitors. Not yet." She lifted her eyes, cold and sharp. "This is them. The tunnel rats. They want us confused. They want us fighting each other. They want us chasing ghosts."
The dwarf thane blinked. "But the fire magic—"
"They learned it," Murong Xue said, flat and certain. "They are learning everything. Every trick, every spell, every tactic we throw at them. They don't fight like gods' subjects. They fight like soldiers who have had to earn every bite of food their whole lives."
She leaned forward, her voice low and dangerous.
"They are not pests. They are not rats. They are an army. And we have been treating them like a nuisance. That ends now."
She traced a line across the map, straight through the western plains.
"We pull back all forward outposts. We consolidate. We stop digging for them. We let them come to us."
A cold smile tugged at her lips.
"They want to hide in the dark? Fine. We will burn the dark down."
Up in the observation booth, Laia stared at the replay of the ambush, her pastry halfway to her mouth.
Okay, she thought. Okay. So they didn't just rob a granary. They assassinated a general. They blew up two thousand diggers. They framed another alliance for it.
She slowly lowered the pastry.
She should probably be horrified. She should probably be panicking about how much trouble she was going to be in.
Instead, a tiny, very stubborn part of her was kind of impressed.
It was smart. Ruthless. Way smarter than she would have been.
She sighed and took a bite of pastry anyway.
Well, she thought. At least they're winning. Probably.
She just hoped Murong Xue didn't figure out who she was after all this. Because if she did? Apology letter probably wasn't going to cut it.
Somewhere deep below the earth, three clan leaders sat around a stone table, counting their loot and planning the next raid.
The war had only just begun. And the dark was full of teeth.