Battle of the Marshes

The Battle of the Marshes was a battle between the forces of the coalition under Emperor Athdus III and the Cosmovore swarm. It took place in the far southern marshes of Asmocaria, in an unknown location across a large front. The Battle of the Marshes was the first major victory for the forces of the coalition in the War for the World.

The coalition army at this point was busy escorting refugees to Avamorica, which had finally relented and given the coalition forces permission to temporarily settle refugees in their land. Approximately 200,000 refugees travelled with the army by land, with a further 70,000 trailing them at sea, tightly packed aboard all the ships the coalition could muster. The refugees made progress slow and the Cosmovores soon caught up with the army. Athdus ordered half of his soldiers to make a rear-guard action to delay the Cosmovores as long as possible, depressingly aware of the fact that he had just condemned them all to their deaths to save the rest. Duke Velu the Stag volunteered to command this rear guard, promising to retreat as soon as he had felt a large enough gap had been created between them and the refugees. Queen Rixa the White-Eyed and her entire Dark Elf contingent insisted upon staying behind as well, and Athdus was not in a position to stop her.

Whilst Athdus commanded the force escorting the refugees, another force of Cosmovores was spotted; a small one, but a threat nonetheless. High Lady Savira Asvari took the forces under her command, many of which were her Vampire kin, to intercept and destroy this Cosmovore force.

The representative of the Cisens in the coalition, Tik Skeera, then approached Athdus and asked if there was anything he could help with. Upon seeing him, Athdus suddenly recalled what Tik had told him about the large quantities of natural gas lying under the marshes. When asked, Tik confirmed that natural gas did lie under the marsh, and that bubbling pools signified that a deposit of gas lay under the water. Athdus ordered Tik to take this information to the rear guard, mumbling that "Rixa is a clever woman and will know what to do". Tik did as he was asked, and Rixa understood.

Queen Rixa the White-Eyed demanded that the entirety of the rear-guard retreat, and they did so under Duke Velu, who led them back to the main force. The Dark Elves reluctantly followed, but four - Rixa's closest friends - stayed behind with her and refused to leave. The narrative of what then follows comes from several eyewitnesses who managed to see what was going on behind them as they fled.

Rixa spotted one of the breaks in the Magestream that were so common in the southern marshes, but it lay well within the swarm of Cosmovores, so she had to advance forward into the group to reach it. Her friends accompanied her, and two of them died protecting her. Rixa took hold of the raw power of the Magestream, filling her body with its energy, but she knew her body was now a ticking time bomb as she did not have long before the magical energy would melt her body from the inside out.

Rixa recalled seeing a bubbling pool, signifiying natural gas, and she headed towards it - but that would entail going all the way back through the Cosmovore swarm they had just fought through. The other two friends accompanying Rixa perished here, as they lacked the magical energy which Rixa now possessed, which enabled her to simply fly above the Cosmovores to her destination.

Once Rixa reached the bubbling pool, she made a crack in the earth straight into the gas deposit, releasing it with a hiss. The Cosmovores charged upon her, and she bellowed a string of curses before gathering an immensely powerful bolt of plasma magic and sending it straight into the natural gas, igniting the entire deposit. What then commenced was the largest recorded explosion in the history of Inecuria.

The immense shockwave knocked the fleeing soldiers to the gorund and caused landslides in the Avamorican mountains over a hundred miles away, and the sound travelled even further, reportedly heard as far away as Akkanur in Calsunaria. The explosion tore a giant hole in the land, creating an irregularly shaped crater approximately a mile wide. The percussive force of the explosion and the extreme heat of the blaze wiped out almost all of the Cosmovore swarm present and made the survivors flee in panic, the sheer terror overwhelming their senses and overpowering their telepathic link with the Cosmovore Queen. Queen Rixa, who stood virtually at the epicentre of the explosion, perished.

Emperor Athdus knew what had happened as soon as he felt and heard the explosion. That evening, he held a funeral ceremony for Queen Rixa as well as all the soldiers who had died in the battle. Few of the casualties were actually from the rear-guard action; most were from the force under High Lady Savira which had successfully destroyed the small secondary Cosmovore force.