"Ride, brothers!" the Olmae shouted as he rode his Canidorhino over the gap, wielding a thick sword the size and heft of a cliff. The plantlife scum squealed as his men trampled their woody bodies, turning them into pulp, and his sword cleft more than one in twain. This would be their last barrage, the final clearing before the Firesetters would appear at their backs to let the world turn to cinder. The adults were felled, their hefty bodies unable to stand the might of so much metal, and the trees shook and withered. They pushed towards the village center, a hall of vines where the youngest shoots were.
"Round up the rest for firewood," the Olmae captain commanded as the last of the forest's warriors fell to the blade, and his men began to round up the saplings that were left. They whimpered quietly, some of them making noises that sounded like wind through a notch in a wall, and the Olmae fidgeted aboard their mounts with discomfort as they looked to their captain.
"Captain... you're not --"
"Where's Firesetter Madulai?"
"He is... afar," said one of the Olmae reluctantly as he glanced back at the green shoots toddling about, their parents long slain. They had not even left caretakers with them. After all, the driftwood needed no real parents, a fact that used to fill the lieutenant with rage, but now, seeing them look up in innocent wonder in what accounted for a nursery, there was a niggling of doubt.
"Then someone go get him," the captain grunted, shoving one of the younger men to do his duty.
The lieutenant pulled beside his captain, overshadowed by his tall head-dress, and he lifted his chin in deference.
"Sir. I do not know if this is wise. They are but seedlings -"
"They will overgrow," the captain interrupted, glaring at the tiny dryads that waddled towards some of the privates' snorting Canidorhinos. They put their hands on them with awe and stared up in wonder, while the Canidorhinos sniffed them with curiosity. "They will learn to hate and uproot our people. Every one of them will go."
The lieutenant's eyes narrowed as the captain rode out to meet the Firesetter, an Olmae in an ornate robe hunched over a log with a sacred flame within. He looked back at the small group of child trees, and he sighed through his nose raucously.
As the troops left the nursery ablaze, the smoke curling up in the sky, the lieutenant kept a hand on his bag, a tiny little, woody hand gripping his pinkie finger as he rode.
