Varen committed his mages on the fifth day because the arrow supply was depleted and the spear wall was holding and the ford was contested and the upstream crossing had cost eighteen hundred dead and the combined force's forty-seven thousand soldiers were being fought to a standstill by eight thousand orcs at a river that should have been a minor obstacle.
The mage corps advanced to the eastern bank's forward positions in the formation that magical doctrine prescribed for concentrated assault casting. Forty-three practitioners, the combined force's full magical complement after the losses and equipment destruction that the campaign had produced, arranged in the circle patterns that allowed their power to be concentrated and directed in the area-of-effect spells that battlefield magic used to break formations and destroy fortifications.
