Ascalon

Frye and his warband watched, unable to turn away. Soon after the gates fell, the imperator stormed into the city's main square. Adelbern, the Sorcerer-King, stood defiant on the parapet of his tallest tower with his magical sword in his hands. It burned with a fire that swirled around its blade as if it were alive. He shouted at the soldiers below as they fled before the Flame Legion's forces, some of them escaping through the holes the charr had made in the walls.

"Retreat?", the Sorcerer-King shouted. "Retreat is not an option!"



With the Flame Legion flooding through the city's defenses, Ascalon City had already been lost. The human soldiers ignored their king's complaints as their retreat transformed into a rout.

The insane king raised his sword—a relic from the ancient land of Orr—over his head and bellowed down at his men, "We will never surrender! Never!"

Then he plunged his sword downward. As it struck the stones beneath his feet, a gout of white fire shaped like a blade shot from the tower's roof, enveloping Adelbern. The tower collapsed then, its very stones unable to withstand the power of the Foefire. Adelbern rode the battered rocks all the way down, disappearing in a cloud of shattered stones and dust.

The mystic light from the Foefire burned without abatement. When the last stone of the tower stopped tumbling, the light intensified for an instant, then burst out and engulfed the entire city. The wave of destruction spread out from there, soon engulfing nearly all of Ascalon.

The charr nearest the tower—the imperator and his victorious guard—were immolated in a heartbeat, their fur igniting like tinder, their flesh blasted by the unearthly flames. Yet, what happened to the humans in the blast was infinitely worse.

The air in Ascalon City rang with a choir of their screams as the humans died in their tracks. Their bodies were blasted into burning fragments, but their spirits remained standing. Their mortal forms were reduced to broken skeletons but their souls remained, eternally bound to Ascalon. Only the charr close to the city were destroyed in the blast, but every human for leagues around was suddenly transformed into a ghost.