Battle of the Candlmoor Line

Corporal Kievar Wranhana slogged through the mud of the communications trench; it squelched beneath his feet, trying to drag him down. He held his helmet tight to his head, as it was prone to falling off; he’d had to scavenge it from another soldier last month when they’d been ordered to go over the top. When they’d faced more enemy than they’d expected. Wranhana had lost his helmet during that retreat. The other soldier had lost his life.

When he stopped at the front line, his boots were caked with mud. Three soldiers, two men and one woman, sat with their backs against the steep dirt siding, keeping their heads down and sharing a smoke. They saluted him but didn’t rise. A fourth soldier was filling sandbags and yet another was placing them along the top of the wall. No one was talking, not because there was too much noise to be heard – though that might have been true – but because no one had anything to say.

Wranhana stepped up onto the fire step and looked out onto the battlefield. It was strewn with bodies, from both sides of the battle. He could see flames streaking across the skies; it would be pretty if he didn’t know that death lay where the streaks landed. The enemy was active tonight. He could see their helmets bobbing over the edge of their trenches when they fired. He ducked down quickly as a burst of flame shot over his head. It broke against the open ground behind him.

He turned to check if anyone had been injured. Luckily, it had hit the soil. This time.

Before he could relax his guard, he noticed one of the boys who’d been smoking earlier stand up and take aim with an unwarded Chassie. “Jenkins, down!” Wranhana yelled. The startled young man froze, then dropped like a stone from the urgency and command in his voice.  

He stomped over to the boy. “They have their fire mages out today, you nitwit! If you had fired that gun you’d be eating your own gunpowder flash right about now.”

Wranhana pulled out a trench knife from the sheath at his belt. He’d had it since training four months before as a private. The Arcane instructor, an old friend of his father’s, had given it to him. Things had been simpler back then, when he’d been following orders instead of doling them out.

But his lieutenant was dead, torn to bits by frost bombs; and his sergeant was in a Papaver stupor back beyond the rear trenches in a hospital tent somewhere, his legs torn off by a spell he didn’t know the name of. Thus, Wranhana was now in command of what was left of this unit.

Still holding his knife, Wranhana grabbed Jenkins’ rifle and began to draw runes into the stock, where Jenkins would shoulder the gun, carving out fine lines and circles. He put the knife back in his sheath, placed his hand on the symbols, and closed his eyes. He then whispered, “Praesidiuma Magicae.”

The runes lit up bright silver against the black rifle, and he knew it had worked. He’d always had enough magical talent for warding spells, though no more than that.

“There. Now at least you won’t die by your own hand.” He handed the rifle back to Jenkins.

Jenkins climbed the fire step and mounted his rifle between two freshly placed sandbags. He sighted an enemy. He aimed. Shot. Pulled back the bolt. Discharged the casing. Reloaded. Pushed the bolt forward again. Aimed. Fired. He repeated this five times.

On what would have been the sixth shot, an enemy shell soared toward them and detonated a few yards in front of Jenkins. He fell back from the concussive force, off the step, and into the trench. He landed hard against the back wall and slid down to the duckboards. His face was slashed in multiple locations from bits of shrapnel, blood dripping down over his brow. It looked like his ear was hanging by a filament. The most concerning was the laceration on his neck, though it had missed his jugular. That would be the most likely to get infected. His face, where it wasn’t bleeding, was burned raw. Blood seeped from under his helmet.

Wranhana rushed over. He grabbed the man’s chin and tilted it up, looking the man in the eyes. They were dazed, not yet registering the pain or the close call he’d faced. He removed Jenkins’ helmet and found a large hunk of metal embedded in the top. It was still hot. He could smell burning hair and glanced down. He could even see small tendrils of smoke rising off the sergeant’s head, concentrated around a laceration where the metal must have poked through. He could not tell how deep the cut was, for it bled profusely as head wounds do.

Jenkins was lucky. The helmet had stopped all but the edge of the shrapnel. He will have scars, for sure – that gash will pucker and his face will never be what it was. No amount of magic could undo this degree of damage. But he was alive, and that was more than many.  

Wranhana whistled the call for a medic. While waiting, he rushed to a dugout nearby and grabbed a medical kit. On returning, he pressed gauze against the scalp wound to stem the flow of blood. “Hold pressure there, Jenkins.”

Once Jenkins pulled together enough to hold the gauze against his own wound, Wranhana grabbed a burned piece of wood. With the charcoal tip, he inscribed a crude rune on Jenkins’ chest to ward against infection. “Tutela ex Contagium.” It wouldn’t hold long, or even that well, due to the haphazard nature of it, but it should do for an hour. Until the young man could get into the hospital tent and someone with more experience could work proper magic on him.

Two medics, crawling through the mud to get to them, showed up with a stretcher. One of them, an older medic, took one look at Jenkins’ terrified face and patted his shoulder. “You’ll be ok, kid.” He drew a rune in the air over Jenkins’ head. “Tutela ex Dolore.”

The medics carefully picked Jenkins up and placed him on the stretcher. They gave a curt nod to Wranhana. Crouching as low as they could while carrying the stretcher, they scurried back the way they had come. Smoke from exploding shells swirled around the field, and the two men carrying Jenkins faded into it.

“May the daimons keep you safe, Jenkins,” Wranhana whispered, then returned to the battle.