Heroes of Newerth Story: A Time of Heroes (part 5/7)
Amidst her snarling, whimpering, keening Horde, Ophelia paced and gathered her thoughts. Her shamans grunted their plans and visions in her ear, their schemes to envelop and annihilate the Legion once and for all. They spoke of predators' blades sunk deep in human hearts, of hunters gliding like death itself across the enemy ranks. They hooted of smoking Hellbourne monstrosities blasting the battlefield with fireballs and hewing through the lines of Legionnaires, as once behemoths and tempests might have done if they were not so few, so diminished. Above all, they set forth a vision of annihilation.
Ophelia paid them no heed, wrapped as she was in her own more subtle plans. Unlike Jeraziah, Ophelia had never lost her faith, for she felt in her very bones the suffering of the Goddess Earth. Each smoldering Hellbourne footstep, every forest hacked down for siege weapons, every battlefield blighted by their endless warring was like a wound unto her own flesh. In this suffering her faith redoubled, and so she believed the past night's dream to be a vision, a promise, or, at least, a possibility for a Newerth reborn.
Like Jeraziah, she knew that whoever won the day's battle would find themselves overwhelmed by the daemons. There was a time when she, too, might have embraced the inevitable oblivion and sought only to end her life atop her fallen foes, rather than beneath their boot. But that had passed.
She sent the shamans to prepare the Horde for battle and sat alone among the ancient trees. The season had long since turned and most of the branches were skeletal and bare. Ophelia rustled her fingers idly through the parched, crimson leaves that blanketed the ground. Beneath them, she scratched the rich soil into which they would decay, from which would spring new growth when winter's pall had passed. She smiled. Her fingers wandered to the pouch that hung around her neck, the pouch that held the holy seeds the shamans had given her when they proclaimed her Priestess.
The lore of the shamans said that they came from the Holy Ark -- a place of refuge in some distant land where once the beasts had wandered when first they came to know themselves. Its location was lost to time, for the Beast language leant itself more to poetry and song than precision. The seeds, called Sefir, could not be coaxed into growing; they were merely symbols of a time of peace and life. But, with the vision still seared in her mind, Ophelia knew they were something more.
She lay back, surrounded by autumn's metamorphosis, hangingin the threshold between life and death, and opened herself outward into the world. Her thoughts raced through the woods and over her war-frenzied Horde, along the treetops and into the ashen sky, a solitary bird in the silent dawning. She looked down upon the human army -- tiny, from such a height, ill-kept and tarnished toy soldiers. She felt their fears and wrath and resentments, their love for those left behind -- at home, on other battlefields -- felt their adoration for Jeraziah and their hatred of him, felt their exhaustion and hopelessness. She winged through this mass of broken men until she found her brother, the Prince.
He was as alone as she was. But as she looked down upon him, he raised his face as if to meet her eyes. Prince and Priestess broadened, met minds, and understood, for just an instant, each other's hearts.
At that moment, Ophelia awakened to the clamor of the Beast packs, driven toward battle by the Hellbourne. She knew that the moment was upon them.
HoN Story: A Time of Heroes Part 1
HoN Story: A Time of Heroes Part 2
HoN Story: A Time of Heroes Part 3
HoN Story: A Time of Heroes Part 4
HoN Story: A Time of Heroes Part 5
HoN Story: A Time of Heroes Part 6
HoN Story: A Time of Heroes Part 7
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