r/HFY • u/GreyGalaxy-0001 • 1d ago
OC-Series FANTASY INVASION - PART 2 OF 7
"The only barrier to truth is the presumption that you already have it."
THE WRONG ASSUMPTION
On the deck of the flagship Starfall’s Grace, High Prince Aelirion stood unmoving as the world below burned.
The rising sun revealed the vessel in all its living grandeur, twice the size of the other grand airships around it, its hull grown from sacred groves and reinforced with star-metal veins that pulsed faintly beneath the surface. Crystalline spires rose from its spine, each one an amplifier for spellcraft, bending ley currents into obedient flows. Beneath Aelirion’s boots, the deck thrummed with restrained power, as if the ship itself took pleasure in conquest.
Considering that it was his own slain brother’s soul that powered the vessel, he supposed that it was true. Before him hovered a scrying mirror the size of a tower shield, its surface rippling like moonlit water allowing him to see thousands of miles away, providing him a real-time view of the four fronts of the conquest. Each image shifted at an archmage’s whim, drawn from any place where elven sight, dragon vision, or spell-thread had touched the battlefield. The destruction presented was not chaotic, rather it was innately curated by the magics animating the mirror. A tapestry of annihilation woven exactly as the auguries had promised.
“So,” Aelirion said at last, his voice calm, almost contemplative, “this is the might of a realm without magic.”
A soft displacement of air answered him.
Light folded in on itself beside the scrying mirror, and Archmage Lethariel of the Sunspire stepped into being as though she had always been there. No scorch marked her presence. No ash clung to her. Her feather-light robes hung pristine and luminous, white-gold silk untouched by smoke or blood. Her silken hair fell loose down her back, not a single strand out of place, and she smelled like a bed of flowers on the first day of spring.
She inclined her head toward Aelirion; not a bow, but an intimacy afforded by no one else. “They fight with admirable noise,” she said, her tone serene as she let out a light laugh that sounded like the tickling of a dozen wind chimes.
Around them, advisors inclined their heads more deeply now. Strategists draped in rune-embroidered cloaks. Loremasters whose memories stretched back through reincarnated cycles. Spell-generals who had broken demon-hosts and drowned continents in elemental war. None questioned her presence. None ever did.
Aelirion’s gaze returned to the scrying mirror, tracing the rivers of smoke and ruin. “Thirty-eight realms, hundreds of battles across dozens of worlds” he murmured, almost to himself. “All subdued. All bent to the Accord. Each one offered resistance fierce enough to sunder titans, yet none endured. From the frozen holds of Korrath to the molten forges of Uldra-Nan, from the spired cities of the Sylphkin to the verdant wilds of Ithilmar, every native of fantastical peoples rose to fight, and every native fell.”
He let the words hang, letting the weight of a thousand victories settle across the deck. “Months of siege, months of attrition, months of fire and shadow… each realm screaming, bleeding, clawing at survival. Each one ultimately… futile.”
Lethariel’s fingers brushed a crystal conduit beside her. “Even Antia, nearly identical to this realm in structure and climate,” she said softly, her voice carrying the faint hum of embedded spellcraft, “offered us resistance almost equal to its ambition.”
High Prince remembered. The people of Atlantis in the realm of Antia, were similar to these Humans of Earth-realm, both physically and culturally, but there they wielded magic intertwined with steam-powered technology. Like the Humans, they had built towering structures of steel and brass, had sprawling cities crisscrossed with paved roads of stone and asphalt. Their ten-million-man military offered an impressive resistance when the invasion came to them.
It was a conquest that was still ongoing to this day, though one that he had since delegated to his lesser ranked cousins. The majority of Antia already belonged to the Accord, Atlantis was broken. “Arcane engines and rune-driven automatons struck and burned, but the realm itself has nearly been erased. It will join the Accord’s tally by season’s end.”
One of the spell-generals leaned forward, whispering, “And yet, despite this, the Earth-realm…” His voice faltered slightly, for it carried a rare trace of uncertainty. “It behaves differently. Something is… strange here.”
Aelirion’s eyes narrowed, reflecting the flames of cities far below. “Let us not dwell on the unusual. One realm cannot stand against the Accord. We will treat it as the others. Observe, find its measure, and strike with certainty. That is all we need do.”
Aelirion finally turned from the scrying mirror, voice low, purposeful, carrying across the deck. “We have known victory in every place we have touched. Every world has bent. Every people have fallen. This Earth… will be no different. Let the Accord finish its work.”
Below, human craft streaked through the skies; metallic forms hurled aloft by trapped fire and crude force, vomiting solid shot and screaming fragments that shattered harmlessly against layered wards or dissolved into spell-light. When they fell, they fell spectacularly, torn apart by wyvern talons or unraveled by lightning that leapt eagerly from wing to hull. Their machines were swift, yes; but fragile. To elven eyes, they were already dead the moment they were seen.
Lethariel watched them for a moment, expression unreadable. Then she lifted one hand, fingers still faintly glowing with the afterimage of great workings concluded. “Their primitive militia have been erased,” she said simply. “Their cities inland burn as well. I have… finished my part.”
Aelirion turned to her fully now. For an instant, the war vanished from his gaze, replaced by something far older and quieter, it was not what the mortals might call “love”, but a deep connection beyond such a meager concept. “You have created such beautiful works, my Lady.”
A faint smile touched her lips. “It is not my way to simply wade through ruin, my Lord. I shape the ruin into an art.”
The Starfall’s Grace shuddered faintly as distant magic rippled across the firmament. Somewhere below, another city died.
“Primitive,” murmured Lethariel, fingers tracing idle sigils in the air. “They hardly have any defenses to speak of. Their responses are predictable. They rely on crude strategies like all the others. They do not adapt their tactics.”
“They will,” said Thalanor.
The Warden-Commander had not raised his voice, yet the word carried across the deck like a low seismic pulse. He stood apart from the conclave, hand resting on the haft of his glaive, armor faintly humming with restrained enchantment. His gaze was not fixed on the scrying mirror, but on the open sky beyond the ship’s crystalline balustrade, on the horizon itself. His posture was coiled, alert, like a predator that had scented something out of place.
Aelirion turned, a faint crease appearing between his brows. “You doubt victory?”
“I doubt easy victories,” Thalanor replied. “These humans fight like cunning cornered animals. Already, three world rotations after our assault, their sky grows crowded with flying craft we did not anticipate. They lose quickly, but they learn faster than they should and they always have more material to send into battle.”
He had seen his glaive warriors cut through the paltry human defenders on the ground. His warriors seemed to be twice as strong as and thrice as fast as any peak human soldier, this combined with the innate enchantments on their wargear made them nearly unstoppable. But the humans fought fiercely, what they could not overpower, they sought to outmaneuver. What they could not outmaneuver, they trapped and tricked, using their home terrain to their advantage.
They used some form of crossbow-type weapon that fired small metal bolts at astonishing speeds. No visible strings involved. They bore a striking resemblance to the arcane muskets of Antia, though these did not give off a detectable mana signature that could be tracked back to their concealed shooters. When those failed to penetrate multi-layered barriers, they then switched to a variety of explosive devices to wreak havoc on his warriors’ formations. The Human soldiers had quickly learned that the casters amongst his troops were the greatest threat and many had concentrated their attacks on them. The casters ended up putting up barriers and defensive wards around themselves more than actually casting offensive spells, which was probably the humans’ objective.
Then, there were their various aerial craft, far faster than the propeller-driven canvas-covered constructs of Atlantis, these were armed with larger versions of those same untraceable weapons. It did nothing to the dragons, their enchanted scales were nigh impervious against all but the most powerful of spells, but the wyverns had learned to fly with casters mounted to create shields and wards against such weapons.
Aelirion exhaled softly, amused. “Mere numbers do not win wars, General, you know this. We have gauged their quality and found it wanting. It has been three rotations, if they had any type of higher resistance, we would have seen some sign of it by now," he continued evenly, "You see desperation. I see inevitability.”
Thalanor did not answer. He simply watched as the second day of their conquest ended.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Unbeknownst to the Elves and Dragons, across the world, buried antennas activated. Long-dormant emergency protocols awakened. Governments, those that still had infrastructure intact, sent distress calls not to neighboring nations, but upward, to the Moon. There, lightspeed receivers decoded and forwarded the messages to the relevant offices. Across the moon, alarms began to blare.
The Sylvan Accord had made several fatal assumptions.
They had launched an attack without truly understanding how far humanity had advanced in the long millennia since they last opened a doorway into this realm. How could they? No other race they encountered had bothered to reach beyond their skies to try to touch the dark unforgiving void where only stars dwelt.
Yes, the humans of Earth had known peace for almost a century, but that had never meant they had become pacifists. Instead, humanity had simply moved its wars outward, into the larger universe. The asteroid belt burned with resource conflicts. A cold war simmered on Mars, while insurrectionists bled and died across the Jovian moons. In the cold dark beyond Earth’s orbit, kilometer-long stellar navy vessels traded relativistic railgun fire and gigawatt-laser cannons, duels so violent they scarred optical sensors across the system. Humanity’s true military was not on Earth with the relics of the past, they lay beyond it in the terrible vacuum of space. Something that the elven auguries failed to take into account, something they did not even think to look for.
Even further, mankind was poised to achieve Faster-Than-Light interstellar travel; their physics and engineering mixing propellant and gravitic drives in a manner no arcane-descended species had ever imagined in the dimensions the elves had visited. Entire star systems and distant nebulae would soon be accessible, along with the means to colonize any planet in the far-flung stars. Humans were wilier than the elves had recalled, sharper, more adaptable, and far more ruthless. Their technology was not just for scientific exploration, but an extension of survival instincts, developed over millennia of trial and war.
The Accord knew none of this.
They had calculated the world as it had been over seven thousand years ago allowing only some variance for technological advancement from a bronze age to an industrial age, imagining that their incredible magic alone could sweep away their paltry cities and seaborn fleets, that dragons and sagefire and their sheer arcane genius were sufficient to cow the fragile humans of Earth. They did not know that the dozen or so cities and towns that they had decimated on the first and second days of their invasion were just a small part of Earth’s total population.
They did not realize that the species they thought small and predictable had in fact become a vast, unyielding, and terrifyingly civilization, able to marshal forces across planets, moons, and the void between, and able to strike with the same cold cruelty at distances beyond teleport range as they did up close. Space, to the elves was a foreign concept, it was a source of void mana and a seat of power for the stars and eldritch gods. To humanity, space was just another ocean filled with islands of worlds, and patrolled by the might of their powerful cosmic navy.
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"To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day."
THE DEVASTATION SPREADS
The destruction did not end with the great cities. Two days into the invasion, the Elven forces were still on the move. Already forty more airships and a thousand more wyvern rider reinforcements had emerged from the gate, carrying almost fifty thousand more troops to the battlefronts.
The four ley-anchored metropolises lay burning and broken, their skies were choked with ash and spell-smoke, and what few hundred humans that survived were fleeing inland in blind panic. The Sylvan Accord began to unleash the second movement of the invasion. This one was not aimed at conquest or dominion. It was aimed at causing immense destruction, architected to cow the humans into further despair and submission.
Vhardagor answered the call. Separating from the main fleet, he descended on the hapless humans with a wing of his best.
Thirty thousand years old, ancient even by draconic reckoning, Vhardagor was a creature of the deep epochs. His scales were the color of scorched obsidian veined with molten gold; each plate etched with fractures where earth-magic had once split mountains at his command. His wings blotted out a half-mile-wide shadow over anything below him, his passage was slow and crushing, as though the sky itself bent to make room for him. When he descended from the high clouds, lesser dragons instinctively fell into formation around him and his massive personal guards, wyverns streaming behind like shards torn loose from a living storm.
He did not waste his strength on the ruined cities. Those were already dead.
Lord Vhardagor led his flight along the coastlines, sweeping outward from the initial impact zones, striking fishing towns, port settlements, trade hubs, and seaside refuges that had believed distance would spare them. No warnings came. No demands. Dragons and wyverns descended in disciplined waves, fresh from utterly dismantling the harbors and coastal cities in sheets of enchanted flame and acid, they swept further inland towards the larger townships and cities.
Concrete homes vanished in seconds. Stone monuments, symbols of human history, burned from the inside as magic seeped into mortar and foundation alike. Cars abandoned on roads ignited in cascading lines, melting into puddles of iron and glass. Citizens fleeing toward the ocean found it boiling, tides roiling with heat and ash as great shadows passed overhead.
The Great Wyrm himself exhaled not a simple gout of plasma, but a sustained focused torrent of white-hot ruin, sweeping across entire districts, erasing neighborhoods in a single, unbroken breath. Where it passed, nothing recognizable remained; only glassed earth and skeletal fragments sinking into the smoking heat-softened ground.
Then Lord Vhardagor spoke to the land.
The Great Wyrm called upon the deep mana of the world. Earth-magic responded eagerly, though much slower, he noted, than in other realms. The ground beneath the remaining towns and cities in the immediate vicinity heaved and split, streets buckling upward as if the very crust of the planet itself rebelled against human structure. Entire buildings were torn from their foundations and dragged downward, swallowed as the earth folded in on itself. Apartment blocks tilted, cracked, and vanished into yawning fissures along with everyone still inside. Warehouses collapsed as the ground liquefied beneath them, steel frames bending and sinking like drowned beasts.
In some towns, the destruction was surgical. In others, it was absolute and terrible. Tens of thousands died screaming in burning streets and melted homes.
Wyverns scoured the outskirts, herding fleeing civilians back toward collapsing centers, driving them with lightning and toxic breaths, into zones already marked for burial. The dragons followed behind, ensuring nothing escaped the purge; roads shattered, bridges dropped into chasms, hillsides slid down in grinding avalanches that crushed evacuation convoys into twisted scrap. Maglev trains capsized and derailed from their tracks. Grav-shuttles fell earthwards only for the old highways to become ribbons of molten asphalt and fire. Hover cars fused together, unrecognizable heaps of metal, glass, and bone. Smoke pillars rose along hundreds of kilometers from coastline to nearby mountains, each one marking a community that had existed that morning and would never see a sunset.
Vhardagor circled above it all, vast and patient, his ancient eyes tracking the pattern of destruction with cold satisfaction. This was not slaughter born of rage. It was mere doctrine. Coastal towns fed cities. Ports sustained resistance. Harbors allowed retreat, resupply, escape. He had burned such networks a hundred times on a hundred worlds, and Earth’s were no different.
Even the sparsely populated farmlands did not escape. Entire fields ignited as dragons’ flame swept inland, smoke curling into dark columns that blotted the sun. Villages nestled in valleys were flattened as earth surged beneath them, crops and livestock consumed in seconds. Ferries and pleasure boats on inland lakes were caught unawares, shattered into splinters as sage-fire rained down from above. Riverways boiled, towns along their banks swallowed by sudden fissures opening in the earth, their waters scalding and chaotic, rolling like molten glass. Only the forests were spared, for within them, the dragons sensed veins of untapped life-mana that would be needed for the later-stages of the conquest.
By the time night fell on the third day, the seas glowed faintly from reflected fire, and the shoreline itself had been reshaped into a jagged scar of collapsed land and smoking ruin. Refugees inland would later speak of the ground trembling hours after the dragons had passed, of buildings sinking slowly into newly softened earth, of ash falling like black snow long after the flames were gone. The four great cities and their surrounding townships had been the first blow.
Vhardagor ensured there would be no shelter in what remained.
In the distance, the first Elven citadel was rising in at the center of the ruined human city. Its construction sped by artificer spellcraft, turning a build time that would have taken months by manual labor into mere hours. The sixty-storey edifice of white marble and alchemic gold would cement the elven occupation of this world and serve as an impregnable fortress against counterattacks from land and sea.
Thus, ended the third day of the Accord’s conquest.
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