Night became the only honest hour of the war, because the sun was a liar that healed as much as it revealed.
By day, wounds knit themselves with obscene speed beneath open skies, bullet holes closing to angry seams of flesh while broken bones re-aligned with sickening, visible certainty, and men who should have been dead dragged themselves back into formation with blood still wet on their uniforms but strength already returning to their limbs.
By night, the lie fell apart.
The darkness stole away the unnatural mercy from both sides, and so the attacks came in waves beneath the stars, quiet marches that ended in sudden rivers of fire and screaming, because every commander understood that a man who fell at night was far less likely to rise again at dawn.
In shattered villages and half-buried trenches, soldiers of both banners stumbled blindly into one another at arm's length, bayonets flashing once, twice, until one body fell and stayed down, and every survival felt stolen in a way daylight never quite captured.
On one moonless ridge, a Hohenzollern platoon crept forward through knee-high grass slick with dew and old blood, boots wrapped in cloth to mute their step, muskets held tight as though the weapons themselves might betray them with a careless sound.
A young corporal whispered, barely louder than breath, "Hold until you see the light of their spells," while his fingers trembled around the trigger guard despite the discipline drilled into him since boyhood.
Across the field, unseen in the dark, Tsardom soldiers lay pressed into the cold earth, listening to the enemy's breathing before the enemy ever saw their faces, waiting for the faintest glow that would betray a spell being formed.
When it came, it came all at once.
A sudden blue flare tore through the grass, and the ridge erupted as rifles cracked in violent chorus, orange muzzle flashes strobing the night into a series of frozen nightmares where bodies were caught mid-fall and mouths were open in silent screams.
Men fell on both sides and did not rise, and the only light came from fire and spell-work, brief and merciless, painting everything in harsh truth before withdrawing again into darkness.
…
By dawn, the field was quiet but never peaceful, and beneath the returning sun, survivors from both armies crawled from hiding as their wounds began to close once more, eyes hollow with the knowledge that healing did not undo the memory of the wound.
"Up," an exhausted Tsardom sergeant rasped to a man whose shoulder had been shattered hours earlier and was already sealing itself with wet, visible seams, "If the sun wants you alive, you will bloody well stay alive."
The war became a cycle of this cruel rhythm, night for killing and day for rising again, until the land itself seemed unable to decide whether to rot or recover.
As the counteroffensive gained ground, the reclaimed territories turned into a labyrinth of broken lines and hurriedly rebuilt defences, with units pushed forward too quickly to rest and reserves dragged from every corner of the Tsardom to hold what had been retaken at such cost.
The Hohenzollern forces struck back whenever they could, but their thin spread now betrayed them again and again, and each night assault carried the bitter risk of being swallowed whole by a counter-charge guided by spell-light and desperation.
…
In one reclaimed town, Tsardom infantry held a captured warehouse against repeated probing attacks, the walls riddled with bullet scars that no amount of daylight healing could erase from brick and stone.
A young soldier pressed his back against the wall, breath shaking as flames danced faintly in the distance, "How many more nights like this can there be," he muttered, more to the dark than to anyone around him.
An older man beside him tightened his grip on his bayonet and replied without looking over, "As many as the Tsar demands from us."
The town held until dawn, and by sunlight the living stood again among the dead with wounds closing and hands already trembling with the dread of the next night.
While the front obsessed over what had been lost and reclaimed, while every map was redrawn again and again with shifting lines, no one noticed the storm gathering far beyond the contested territories, where the land had not yet been blackened by cannon or spell.
…
Far to the east, the earth began to glow.
It was not the scattered, exhausted light of Rank 1 spells that flickered on familiar battlefields, but vast, disciplined formations of power that rolled across hills like rising suns, flattening forests into ash and glass in their passing.
Villages vanished in minutes, not through siege or struggle, but through raw, overwhelming force that left no room even for resistance to find its footing.
By the time the reports reached the Tsardom high command, they came as fragments carried by broken men who had watched entire garrisons erased without ever firing a shot in anger.
…
In the midst of a hard-fought push to secure a reclaimed river crossing, another Tsardom soldier felt the wrongness in the air long before he understood it.
Aleksei stood on a half-rebuilt embankment, scanning the horizon for signs of another night raid, when a distant glow bled across the sky in colours no Rank 1 mage could ever have produced.
"That is not ours," he murmured, squinting as the light pulsed once, twice, like the slow heartbeat of something vast.
Around him, men paused in their work, following his gaze, unease spreading through the camp in a whisper that needed no shouted warning to move from soul to soul.
Moments later, the ground trembled.
Not with the familiar percussion of artillery, but with a deep, rolling force that seemed to come from beneath the world itself, as though the land were being pushed aside by sheer will.
Scouts returned at a dead run, faces drained of colour, one of them gasping through torn breath, "Magi, not like ours, not like anything we have ever seen."
Aleksei felt a cold knot tighten in his chest, 'We are fighting one war, and another has been marching toward us the whole time,' he thought, dread settling with awful clarity.
The horizon brightened as the enemy emerged in full, ranks upon ranks of robed figures advancing in ordered silence, spell-light marching with them in disciplined, devastating waves.
Where they raised their hands, the earth shattered; where they looked, fortifications folded; where they walked, resistance simply ceased to exist.
These were not skirmishers or support casters but a moving wall of devastation, Rank 2 and Rank 3 Magi in numbers that mocked every hard-fought balance of the existing conflict.
Aleksei heard one of the officers whisper in horror, barely able to shape the words, "Who in the world commands such power."
The answer came not from the advancing force itself, which spoke only in fire and annihilation, but from the sick certainty settling over the Tsardom ranks as truth aligned with rumour and old geopolitical dread.
"Kalmar," someone breathed, the name passing through the line like a funeral bell.
As the first wave of spells struck the outer trenches and erased them in a storm of heat and light, Aleksei understood with terrible clarity that the war they had been barely surviving had just been eclipsed by something far worse, and that the land of the Tsardom, already bleeding from one enemy, had now been opened wide to another with strength enough to tear it apart entirely.
Word Count: 1254 words
{AN: Another few chapters before the war comes to an end. I hope you all liked this bit. It has a bit of extra description that normal, but the story keeps flowing. Kalmar has apparently joined Hohenzollern to beat up the Tsardom together. Now we see the Tsardom bleed... while James enjoys the Collective Energy surplus.}