Lies of the Augers

Tim (Orcs) vs Wood Elves (Gill)

For a long time, the Wood Elves had remained neutral in the war between the Dwarfs and the Orcs, watching callously as the two races viciously battled one another.  But the augers read by Maglar Telemnar’s Coven of Sorcerers scried that the time was right for expansion. In a great expanding circle stretching out from the Wood Elves’ realm of Linwe, the fey warriors descended into the realms of their enemies.

But perhaps they moved too soon.

Near the ruin of an ancient manor house, the Elves staged a point of attack, slipping into Orc-held land, then waited for the horde to come.

And come they did.

Raging and roaring, the Orcs poured into a narrow channel between the woods and the rocks in the valley, sending their faster troops wide to race round and cut the Elves off.

The Elves steadied their bows and let fly, sending a gargantuan tree man crashing through the foliage to meet the Orcs and sending out their own flankers: Warhawk and Glade Riders, all of them equipped with bows and letting out streams of arrows.

But the Orcs were fast and, despite some bickering in the ranks, they crowded into the passage to assault the static Elven bowline. Bellowing Trolls smashed clubs of stone into their Dryad opponents as the great Orc Warboss rode his wyvern hard into Dryads coming up the centre. He ripped them into kindling in seconds but they dragged him down off the Wyvern and killed him in turn, even as they were broken and destroyed.

The battle between the Trolls and the Dryads was not a quick one, both sides whittling away at their opponents, neither side taking any particular advantage; but the flanking forces of the Orcs were closing on their rear. The Glade Riders threw arrow after arrow at the advancing Giant and Orc Boar Chariot, using their speed and manoeuvrability to stay out of harms way, but their arrows didn’t have the strength to bring down the powerful units.

The raging riderless Wyvern tore through the Glade Guard, sending them fleeing and the Chariot ran them down as they sped away. The Warhawk riders performed well, using their bows to snipe from a distance then swooping in with spears outstretched to skewer their foes but there weren’t enough of them and they slowly got knocked from the sky.

The Wyvern leapt up onto a rocky plateau then glided down onto the Glade Riders. Fast though they were, they couldn’t avoid the mighty beast. It devoured half of them then ran down the rest as they tried to escape.

The Treeman, the one element of the Wood Elf force powerful enough to deal with anything meanwhile, was tied up against a never-ending swarm of Snotlings. By the time it broke free it was surrounded by the majority of the Orc army. All around it the battlefield was covered in the lost limbs of dismembered Elves.

There was a dreadful pause. Then the Orcs descended on it in a mighty wave and hacked it down to firewood.

As news of this devastation reached Linwe, Maglor Telemnar raged, calling for his fell Sorcerers. Why, he demanded, had they lied to him. Why had they told him that victory was assured.

But all they did was smile and stare, then one of them; the oldest and most capricious; said “We only said the time was right for expansion. We never said you would win.”