Heroes of Newerth

King Jeraziah watches the piles of his soldiers burn — men and women, humans and beasts, killed defending one another, their beliefs, their homes, and their king. Martyrs and a blood-matted shamanic ape sing prayers for the fallen as the priests work to ease the dead into whatever afterlife awaits them, and to make sure the corpses won't have to be killed again. He recognizes faces in the flames — friends he shared a meal with the night before leading the dawn raid — but he does not look away. Separate fires consume the daemon dead of the Hellbourne, whose bodies, often born in fire, burn stubbornly and demand the attention of the Pyromancers. The raid was a success — one of several initiatives brought by the Paragons, whose arrival has shifted the tide of the war even as it has strained alliances within the Legion. The Paragons' elemental sorcery has muzzled the URSA Corps, but more valuable still is their knowledge of Newerth: through the crystals in their bodies, they commune with the land itself and sense the spreading corruption like a bloodstain soaking through a white shroud, knowing always where it is and where it can be thwarted. They have revealed to Jeraziah an ancient hidden path through the supposedly unscalable Ardu foothills west of the Blight Fields — a route toward Hell's Keep and the Scar that could spare him catastrophic losses — though their cryptic, riddling answers test his patience. Then the veteran Legionnaire Cutter brings word of prisoners: a score of Bloodthirsty led by half a dozen Acolytes — humans who follow Dampeer's path of blood-craving, and others who sold their souls to Hellbourne masters. Royal policy is to ship such prisoners home for exorcism and reintroduction to society, but Jeraziah, hardening with the war, instead orders them executed — all but the youngest and least corrupted, whose hands are to be cut off before he's sent back to his new masters as a warning. Cutter obeys, grieving the change in the king he has guarded since boyhood, and thumbs the edge of his axe, knowing it will need sharpening before the work begins.