Arklow Knights

Led by Laban, the Arklow Knights emerge during the Kushan occupation of Midland. Their defining act is helping organize the flight of Wyndham's population just before Emperor Ganishka reduces the city to ruin.

The knights row quietly into a fog-shrouded Wyndham and link up with the anti-Kushan resistance. A meeting with the former minister Foss inside an aqueduct breaks off when crocodile pishacha attack, and an elephant one soon boxes them in. Arrows from a rooftop cut the crocodile down, revealing Irvine, while Locus, riding below, kills the elephant creature with a hurled lance and urges them to stay calm, warning that a coming wind will lift the fog and that the Falcon means to take Wyndham.

Word later spreads of the deadlock treated as a Kushan defeat, of Charlotte's survival, and of the resistance groups springing up across Midland. Plans to free the women held in the castle are interrupted when Foss's daughter Elize describes a shared dream of the Falcon of Light foretelling that the fog, and the possessed animals and Kushan soldiers within it, will vanish by morning, forcing an overnight evacuation. Laban gathers the populace at the cathedral, splits his knights between guiding the escape and entering the castle, and finds the Kushan guards reduced to empty garments. Discovering the imprisoned women, the knights unlock cell after cell and free hundreds, then disguise everyone in discarded Kushan uniforms to slip through the enemy army.

Laban stands as the group's leader and the voice who directs its every move, from the cathedral gathering to the castle rescue. After Shiva's advent, Griffith charges the knights with shielding the pontiff and the citizens of Wyndham, and they go on to witness the onset of Fantasia.