Battle of the Glass Plains
A Beast-Caller's Testimony from the Severance Front
Archivist's Note: The War of the Shifting Throne was defined by its unconventional battlefields. The Great Silence had unmade the laws of magic, and nowhere was this more apparent than on the Severance Front. The following is a transcribed account from Fenris of the Glass-Pack, a Beast-Caller of the Living Tide. It provides a visceral, ground-level perspective on the clash between Concordian order and Garden chaos in a world where the ground itself had gone mad.
The land was sick. My hounds felt it first. The Glass Plains weren't born of rock and soil, but of a wound. After the Great Silence, the magic here... curdled. The very ground crystallized into a forest of razor-sharp shards that sang a thin, screaming note in the wind. Light didn't behave right here. It fractured, creating a thousand glittering mirages. The air tasted of ozone and regret. A terrible place. A perfect place for a war.
The Concordians came as they always do: like a nail being hammered into the world. Their Adamant Phalanx marched in perfect, hateful lines. From my perch on a crystalline ridge, I watched them through the eyes of my alpha, Glass-Fang. Their famous discipline was a weakness here. Their heavy infantry slipped on the smooth, uneven ground. Their massive Logic-Engines, those abominations of brass and certainty, got their legs caught in crystal fissures. They were trying to impose order on a place that had forgotten the meaning of the word.
Our War-Bloom, the "Sun-Eaters," did not meet them. That is not our way. We became the land. My Glass-Hounds, their paws padded with moss we'd nurtured to be tough as leather, moved like smoke through the shards, their grey hides a perfect camouflage. We were not an army; we were the land's immune system, and the Concord was the disease.
They formed their "Iron Tortoise," a dome of shimmering law. Safe inside their box. But their Scribe, their spider-mage, was their true weapon. We felt his mind reaching out, a cold, gridded thing trying to map the chaos. The refracted light confused his mundane scouts, but his Formatted Magic-Vision was beginning to cut through the shimmering lies of the plains, tagging our positions with cold, orange glyphs.
That's when Lyra, our Pathfinder, gave the signal. She didn't shout; it was a feeling, a tug of rightness. From a satchel, she released her secret. Not a beast of flesh and blood, but something stranger, something born of the Silence's madness. A cloud of Chokmah Star-Moths.
They were beautiful and terrifying. Each one was a fleck of night sky, a living paradox. The dust from their wings wasn't matter; it was pure possibility. A storm of "what if." To my eyes, it was a cloud of shimmering, harmless glitter. But Glass-Fang showed me what the Scribe saw: a hurricane of conceptual static, a denial-of-service attack on his perfect, logical sight. The orange glyphs mapping our positions flickered, glitched, and dissolved into nonsense. The spider was blinded.
/s2-chokmah) Star-Moths scrambling a Concordian Scribe's magical vision.](/build-wiki/static/chokmah_star_moths.svg)
And with the spider blind, the Champion charged. Orin Wildhand, a wildfire in human form. It was the Flash Flood. He and his heart-guard didn't charge the front of the Tortoise, but a side where a Logic-Engine had become mired. My hounds and I were the distraction, a flurry of feints and howls on the opposite flank, drawing the Judicators' fire. We used the Plains' own illusions, darting between mirror images of ourselves, a pack of ten becoming a hundred.
Orin's charge, fueled by the raw passion of Netzach, hit the compromised shield wall like a thunderclap. The ward, already strained by the unstable terrain, shattered. The battle was short, brutal, and ours.
We did not wipe them out. We broke their perfect machine, bled them, and then melted back into the glittering madness of the plains. They hold a few hundred meters of useless, glittering hell. We hold the rest of the valley. They call this a stalemate. We call it a lesson. The land is sick, but it is our sickness. And it does not suffer nails to be hammered into it.