Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

Outside the dimly lit tent, Alpheo stood with arms behind his back, staring at the canvas like it had personally offended him.

From within came the wet, meaty sound of something chewing—no, crunching—followed by the unmistakable crack of bone giving way under teeth far too determined. It was not a pleasant sound, and it certainly wasn’t the kind of welcome most would want after a war meeting.

He parted the flap with a single motion.

Inside, the air was thick with the scent of roasted meat and animal fat. Hunched over a plate stripped bare of dignity was Marcus—second-highest among Alpheo’s agents—teeth clamped around a glistening pig bone, now snapped clean through. His face was smeared with grease, his fingers slick and glistening like he’d gone to war with the meal and barely survived it. The gluttony of it all would’ve been obscene, if not for how pathetic he looked.

To his right, Lucius stood, arms crossed and expression contorted in a portrait of refined disgust. He leaned ever so slightly away from his companion, as though afraid proximity alone might coat him in lard.

The moment Marcus saw Alpheo enter, he rose—abruptly, too fast, the motion nearly sending the tray of bones crashing. He stood at attention, what remained of his dignity scraped together, though the remnants of his feast still glistened on his chin. His tunic clung to a frame that looked thinner than it should’ve—his cheeks hollow, his jaw tighter than before, and beneath his eyes hung two bruised shadows like the aftermath of a sleepless war.

All that feeling of patheticness disappeared when sighting his figure.

”I’ve seen better looks from corpses,” Egil, who had followed Alpheo after the meeting, muttered, just loud enough to be heard.

The prince’s eyes snapped to Egil with the cold sharpness of a dagger’s edge—just long enough to shut him up without a word being spoken, and perhaps feeling the mistake of having allowed him leash to follow.

His gaze then moved on Marcus, as if seeing him for the first time again—not just a bone-crunching madman fresh from feasting, but the ghost of a mission long thought failed.

He had sent Marcus north nearly two months ago, tasked with a delicate, dangerous operation: infiltrate the rebel camp and guide them into an ambush in the southern valleys, into the maw of death laid by his command.

And for a moment, the plan was perfect. Under the right spark of chaos, Marcus would slip out during the confusion, vanish with the smoke, and deliver the rebels straight into their funeral pyre. It would have worked, should have worked—if not for Robert.

Damn Robert.

The man had sniffed something foul in the wind, thrown the whole command into caution, and the rebels never moved an inch south with their true power. That was the last Alpheo had heard of Marcus. For two months, nothing. Not a message. Not a whisper

Until today. Until this grease-slicked revenant stumbled back into camp like a man who had chewed his way through hell.

”I apologize,” Marcus said, lowering his head, voice rough and hoarse from weeks of bad sleep and worse food. ”For being gone so long. I had trouble... finding your Grace.”

Alpheo felt something stir in his chest. Guilt, perhaps. A rare thing for a man whose death of the field were just simple numbers .

He had, for a time, believed Marcus dead, believing him caught and flayed somewhere in a rebel pit.

”You did your duty,” Alpheo said, his voice low, calm. ”The fact you’re standing here means more than the silence ever could. Sit. Speak.”

Marcus nodded, the shadow of exhaustion still dancing behind his eyes. ”I watched them,” he said. ” I broke bread with them on dinner .” He paused, licking dry lips. ”They hate each other.”

Alpheo raised a brow.

Marcus leaned in slightly. ”The magnates, they despise the priest. He’s not just a voice of the gods to them—he’s a leash. He preaches unity, purity, but they only hear the mumblings of a mad-man ”

Alpheo’s eyes narrowed slightly, the first glimmer of interest sharpening his features.

”And it’s not just him,” Marcus continued. ”The great houses—the ones with real troops and land—they’re at each other’s throats half the time. They whisper of unity, but all I saw were fractures.”

Now that is interesting, Alpheo lampooned.

The fracturing among the rebel lords? That was expected—inevitable, even. Alpheo had counted on it since the war’s first breath. These weren’t men forged in the fires of shared purpose. They were wolves leashed only by common spite, each snarling at the other from within their gilded corners. With no true central figure to command them, only pride and paranoia kept their lines from unraveling—and both were brittle threads.

No, that wasn’t new.

But the priest?

The notion that the spiritual spine of the rebellion—the one figure who might’ve bound it with doctrine where swords failed—was himself resented, despised by the noble houses? Now that was something else. Something useful.

Alpheo’s head dipped in a slow nod, his lips curling into the faintest smile. ”You’ve served me well, Marcus,” he said, the words quiet, but not soft. ”Rest. You’ve earned it.”

Marcus bowed, the motion clumsy with fatigue but full of the old discipline that hadn’t yet rotted away. ”I will, Your Grace,” he murmured, his voice like gravel scraped across wood.

’’Good dinner, happy to see you kicking!’’ Egil said

Alpheo turned on his heel, sweeping aside the tent’s flap as his entourage fell into step behind him like shadows stitched to his back.

’’Wel good dinner then , happy to see you kicking!’’ Egil said as he followed Alpheo out.

In moments, they were gone—their steps fading into the deeper dark beyond the tent.

The silence returned, save for the gentle clatter of bone against plate and the rustling of canvas.

Marcus sat back down with a grunt, his ribs protesting the motion, and looked over to Lucius, who still stood arms crossed, eyeing the pig carcass with a frown that could curdle milk.

Marcus smirked tiredly. ”What? You’re looking at me like I just married the pig.”

Lucius rolled his eyes and took a seat beside him. ”I don’t know if I should be more disturbed by the amount of fat on your chin or the fact that you’re still alive.”

Marcus chuckled, low and dry. ”Yeah, well. I had bet I’d meet you again, didn’t I?”

Lucius looked at him, something softer flickering behind his eyes. ”You always do.Thought this time you would lose the dice ” he continued, tone dry but curious, ”how hard was the mission?”

Marcus paused, bones in hand, swallowing down a bite of salted flesh with the struggle of a man unused to chewing. He gave a scoff, licking fat from his lips. ”Hard?” He let out a huff of air that wasn’t quite a laugh. ”It was all going according to plan. I had ’em believing I was just another pompous brat in a fancy cloak, nodding with the rest of those half-witted lords while they dreamed of carving the kingdom like a roast.”

He tossed a bone to the side, where it clinked against a tin plate.

”And then,” Marcus continued, raising a greasy finger for dramatic effect, ”that old fart had to show up. Silver-haired, wrinkled like a shriveled grape, and with just enough brains left to smell something was off. He starts sniffing around, looking at me like I was a goat dressed as a noble.”

Lucius chuckled under his breath.

Marcus wasn’t done. ”Son of a whore. I swear, if it wasn’t for him, we’d have had their entire army marching south with their pants down, ready to walk into Alpheo’s blade blind. But no. Everything went to shit in an hour. I had to run—in daylight—through the camp, all the while praying no one would notice that my noble accent slipped every time I talked.”

Lucius whistled low. ”Dramatic.”

Marcus gave him a look. ”And if they’d caught me? They’d have peeled me like an onion just to find out why some lowborn rat was pretending to have a family crest. I’d have been spread across three trees and a dinner table.”

He let the silence linger a moment, then jabbed his thumb toward Lucius. ”And you? What grand horrors did you face while I was being hunted like a fox?”

Lucius gave a shrug, deliberately casual. ”Took three hundred men. Attacked an unprepared force of two hundred. Caught them asleep. Most surrendered, some died. Didn’t even need to lift my sword much. I’d say it went... smoothly.”

Marcus blinked at him. There was a beat of pure silence.

Then came the stare. Blank, neutral, slow-blinking—the expression of a man calculating just how badly fate had bent him over. He chewed slowly, deliberately, as if each bite was fueled by spite.

”So,” he said flatly, ”you had a picnic with swords while I was nearly filleted and served with lemon?”

Lucius gave a small smirk. ”Well, I am a better talker than you.”

Still Despite it all, both men chuckled—because they were alive, battered, exhausted... but alive. And in a war like this, that counted as a luxury.

”Well,” he muttered, patting his stomach, ”at least after this godsdamned war is over, I’m finally getting a long rest. Somewhere with wine, bread that doesn’t fight back, and maybe a woman who isn’t trying to stab me.I still haven’t got a wife”

Across from him, Lucius stared.

Not blinked. Not nodded. Just stared.

Marcus squinted. ”What?”

Lucius winced, running a hand through his hair like a man bracing for a storm. ”So... I had the pleasure of speaking with His Grace earlier.”

Marcus raised an eyebrow. ”Yeah? And?”

Lucius leaned forward a bit, lowering his voice like someone about to break bad news to a widow. ”Do you remember when we helped those rebels against the Herculeians?”

Marcus froze. Blinked. ”Of course I do,why?”

”They were under-equipped, poorly trained—”

”Lucius—”

”—and generally smelled like goats and bad decisions.”

Marcus leaned forward, eyes wide, face suddenly pale. ”Lucius. Are you telling me... we’re going to help another bandit lord and his flea-bitten parade of idiots?”

Lucius chuckled, shaking his head. ”No, no. Not at all.”

Marcus slumped with audible relief, like a sack of flour collapsing into peace. ”Thank all the gods.”

Lucius smiled faintly. ”We’re becoming the bandits.”

There was silence.

Absolute silence.

Marcus’s mouth opened. Closed. Then opened again, this time with the expression of a man who just learned the gods were real and very, very petty.