The Battle of Vinefield Ridge was the battle where the shamans showed the Threian battlemages what shamanic magic could do when the shamans stopped defending and started attacking.

The king had positioned twelve thousand soldiers on the ridge overlooking the barbarians’ approach route, the elevated position chosen because previous engagements had demonstrated that the side holding high ground held the advantage. The thundermaker batteries were positioned at the crest, their crews acutely aware that each ball they fired was a ball subtracted from a stockpile that the dwarves would never replenish. The battlemages were arranged in the protective formations that the previous engagements’ magical reversals had taught them to adopt.

The barbarian shamans adapted to the adaptation.

Seven shamans stood on the opposite ridgeline, their chanting synchronized in the harmonic pattern that concentrated their combined power. The effect was atmospheric. The sky above the king’s position darkened. Not clouds. The air itself thickened, moisture condensing into a fog that descended on the ridge like a falling curtain, visibility dropping from five hundred paces to ten in thirty seconds.

The thundermaker crews fired blind. The dwarven-forged balls flew into the fog and struck nothing the crews could observe. Each ball wasted was a ball from a stockpile that was fifty-three percent and dropping. The boomstick infantry aimed at shadows that the fog created and fired at shapes that were fog rather than barbarians. Each powder charge wasted was a charge from a stockpile that was sixty-one percent and dropping.

The barbarian infantry advanced through the fog their shamans had created, the fog that blinded the defenders and hid the attackers. They advanced without concern for ammunition because their ammunition arrived on the next dwarven wagon.

The first contact was sudden, close, confused. A Threian soldier felt the fog thicken in front of him and then the fog was a barbarian in dwarven armor whose boomstick was aimed at his chest from three paces. The boomstick fired. The ball struck the soldier’s breastplate and the Threian armor held because Threian armor was the older, heavier dwarven model designed for durability rather than the lighter barbarian model designed for mobility, but the impact drove the soldier backward off his feet and the barbarian behind the boomstick was already drawing the hand axe that highland warriors carried for close combat.

The hand axe caught the fallen soldier in the neck gap between helmet and gorget. Blood sprayed into the fog and the fog absorbed it, the visibility of the killing reduced to arm’s length.

"Close combat! Drop boomsticks! Swords!" The officer’s command carried through the fog with the muffled quality that fog produced. The battle fragmented into individual engagements, each soldier fighting the barbarian in front of them without knowledge of the soldiers beside them, formation coherence destroyed by the fog’s elimination of the visual contact that discipline required.

The fog battle demonstrated the specific vulnerability that finite ammunition created in defensive positions. A force with unlimited ammunition could afford to fire blind because the wasted shots were replaced. A force with finite ammunition that fired blind was consuming its most precious resource against targets that were not there, the shots disappearing into fog that absorbed them the way the Tohr’terra absorbed arrows, but the fog did not produce the casualties that the expenditure was supposed to produce.

The Threian thundermaker crews, trained to fire at observed targets with the accuracy that the weapons’ limited rate of fire demanded, found themselves firing at the fog’s general direction because the alternative was not firing at all while the barbarian infantry advanced through the fog toward the defensive positions. Not firing meant the infantry arrived unmolested. Firing blind meant the ammunition was consumed without effect. Both options were losses. The only difference was the type of loss, and the thundermaker crews chose to fire because firing was what they were trained to do and training did not include a protocol for sitting quietly while the enemy advanced through supernatural fog.

* * * * *

The battlemages attempted to dispel the fog. The counter-magic struck the shamanic field and the field absorbed the energy and fed it back into the fog, the battlemages’ power sustaining the thing they were trying to destroy.

A senior battlemage named Caelith recognized the redirection pattern and targeted the ground beneath the shamans’ position instead of the fog itself. The earth shifted. Two shamans lost their footing. The chanting disrupted. The fog thinned for thirty seconds.

Thirty seconds. The thundermaker crews fired three aimed volleys into the barbarian formations the thinning fog revealed. Three volleys at close range into compressed formations. Three volleys from a stockpile that could not afford to be fired at fog and that could only be fired at targets the crews could see, and the targets were visible for thirty seconds.

The fog returned. The shamans recovered. The battle resumed in blindness.

Threian soldiers died in the fog fighting enemies they could not see. Barbarian hand axes found neck gaps and arm joints and the spaces between armor plates that the fog’s close-range combat exposed. Threian swords found barbarian bodies in the fog and struck dwarven iron that the swords could not always penetrate because the dwarven armor was good armor, better than the barbarians deserved and exactly what the dwarves’ price had purchased.

The king ordered withdrawal at the sixth hour. The withdrawal through fog was disorganized, confused, units separating in the reduced visibility, soldiers walking in the wrong direction and discovering the wrong direction by encountering barbarians instead of friendlies.

Three thousand two hundred dead. The barbarians lost approximately twelve hundred, the estimate imprecise because the fog prevented accurate observation. The king’s thundermaker ammunition was now at forty-six percent. His boomstick ammunition at fifty-four percent.

The king’s thundermaker ammunition stood at forty-six percent after the ridge battle. Forty-six percent of a stockpile that would never be replenished. The boomstick ammunition at fifty-four percent. The numbers decreased with each engagement at rates that the engagement’s intensity determined, and the intensity increased as the desperation increased, the spiral that commanders with finite ammunition faced: fire faster because the situation is desperate, which consumes ammunition faster, which makes the situation more desperate.

The shamans’ fog had introduced a new dimension to the ammunition problem. Fog caused the crews to fire at targets they could not see, which meant balls struck fog rather than barbarians, which meant expenditure increased while casualty production decreased. The shamans had found the method that consumed the kingdom’s finite ammunition at the fastest possible rate: make the enemy fire blind.

"Three more engagements at current casualty and expenditure rates reduce us to twelve thousand soldiers and empty thundermakers," Fairfax calculated. "At that point we fight with swords against an enemy that has boomsticks. The arithmetic is terminal."

The barbarian advance continued. The Snowe dominion was forty miles south. The fog lifted over the battlefield but not over the campaign. The kingdom was running out of the things that kingdoms ran out of when their weapons supplier had been alienated and their enemies’ weapons supplier had not.

The distance between the ridge and the Snowe dominion was now forty miles. Forty miles of open countryside that the barbarians would cross at their standard advance rate of five miles per day. Eight days. Eight days for the barbarians to reach the earthworks that General Snowe had built with the engineering lessons the Horde had taught him, the earthworks that were holding against the barbarian siege with the ammunition that was counting down from twelve days and was now at nine.