Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

Weary and hollow-eyed, Mavius let his gaze fall upon the result of the enemy’s work.

So sudden, it seemed to carve open the marrow of his fear and lay it bare for the vultures.

He had believed, with the quiet stubbornness of hope of a man drowning who still yearn for a rope, that he had more time. Not much perhaps, but enough to maneuver, enough to prepare, enough to breathe between one crisis that had just ended and the next he knew was coming.

Yet now, as he stood before the raw wound carved into the fortress of the Fingers, he understood he had been living inside an illusion. Time had not been thinning. Time had been long gone.

Before him stretched the result of the enemy’s work : boulders, shattered beams, slabs of limestone, and beneath them the red, twisted remnants of the men who had been unfortunate enough to stand where the enemy chose to strike. A single, monstrous collapse had devoured them whole, swallowing stone and flesh together and spitting them out in one mangled heap.

The sight tugged at his skin, made him feel as though invisible hands were pulling him backward toward his childhood tales when he heard of the results of a head of state being captured.

He had thought little of it then.

Now that taste sat heavy on his tongue, and he realized that he may very soon be part of it.

His stomach began to churn. A faint tremor ran through his fingers as he looked toward the breach, the raw, gaping wound along the right side of the defensive wall. The opening was not wide yet, but wide enough for what mattered: a place where hundreds could die in a single morning, where the fate of the realm would be decided over a handful of blood-soaked meters.

They had been fools. He had been a fool.

Like a blind man led by the hand, he had chased the feints on the left, where he had poured manpower, tools, urgency, fear, only to discover too late that the real strike, the real doom, had been nurtured in the shadows of the right flank, where he had left but token guards and an idle sense of confidence. He had allowed himself to be shepherded by an enemy who hid behind silence, an enemy whose shovel was sharper than swords.

The Fox had played him with all the ease of a street urchin luring a pigeon with crumbs.

Realization sank in with a cold, nauseating weight.It made his breath hitch.It made bile rise in the back of his throat.

He scanned the faces of the soldiers gathering in disbelief around the collapse, young men hardened by months of siege now suddenly reduced to the expressions of frightened boys. Their fear mirrored his own so perfectly that for a heartbeat he felt stripped of his title, his cloak, his crown.

And as he looked upon them, as he watched their eyes widen and their knuckles whiten around spear shafts that would soon be slick with blood, a lesson long buried resurfaced, spoken by the very man whose death had driven him from home, whose execution had cast him into exile.

”The Gods give something to all, but they always make sure to take two-fold.”

He had been given what he begged for, reinforcements at last.

And the cost?

Only everything he had hoped for.Only the future he had clawed for with all the desperation of a starving wolf.

The gods had delivered their gift.And in return, they had taken the ground beneath his feet.

-----------------

He rode down along the parapet beneath the weight of a thousand eyes, eyes that only a few days earlier had regarded him with the distant calm of roosting pigeons perched upon an ancient branch, aloof, superior, certain of the stone beneath their feet and the myth of its permanence.

Now those very faces had transformed.

They now resembled instead a vast pen of sheep awaiting the butcher’s cleaver, too stunned even to bleat.

”It seems the bastards look weary...” Edric muttered as he approached, his boots crunching upon dust that reached them. He came to stand beside his prince and followed Alpheo’s gaze towards the mass of laborers below, hundreds of them toiling in frantic drudgery to turn the gaping, jagged wound in the wall into something resembling a slit rather than the open, ragged maw of doom that it presently was.

There was no possibility of launching an assault until the ground had been swept clean of shattered stone and until a crude wooden bridge had been raised to span the unevenness left behind.

The breach, for all its horror, was not yet a doorway; it was a trap that would break ankles, hamstring momentum, and invite massacre if soldiers tried to storm it in its current form.

For the moment, the only barrier shielding the Fingers from the advancing storm was a hastily erected palisade of rough, sharpened posts, wooden teeth set before the fangs of stone. The enemy had built it after losing the first ring, a precaution born of their own desperation, knowing well that if the outer walls fell, they would need something to choke the momentum of Alpheo’s forces.

They now worked ceaselessly to close that wooden ring around the collapsed section of stone, to patch ruin with timber, to craft a temporary womb from which resistance might struggle to be reborn.

Alpheo intended to stamp that womb flat before it drew breath.

”They just stood there and watched as we battered down their last true door,” Jarza said, his voice rumbling like old iron dragged across wood. He took his place beside Edric, his heavy brows narrowing as he followed the frantic movement of the enemy soldiers on the far side of the breach. ”I would not be surprised if those poor devils are already imagining us pouring through their lines, boy.”

”They have known nothing but defeat since we set foot on this field,” Edric continued, folding his arms across his broad chest. ”I aim to keep that record pristine.”

In any other man, Alpheo would have taken that final word as simple and vain boast.

With Edric, he did not.

A stone would have been more likely to lie or boast than the legate of the Fourth. In a world that had become increasingly defined by misdirection, spies, riddles, and fox-minded foes, honest men were a rare comfort. Honest men reminded the world what duty looked like.

”Are you going to give the order for an assault by sundown?” Asag asked lazily. He scraped at the grime beneath his nails with a thin stiletto, as if grooming mattered on the eve of such carnage.

Alpheo lifted his gaze to the sky, measuring the angle of the dying light. Not much remained. Then he surveyed the feverish efforts at the breach. They would not finish in daylight. They might not even finish by dusk.

”Soon we will give a probe,” he answered at last.

”A probe?” Asag echoed, unimpressed by the answer.

”I will not squander our strength today,” Alpheo clarified. ”The full hammer must be reserved for sun rise.

Today, we shape the ground upon which our man shall fall. The enemy will do as desperate men do, they will stack one wooden wall atop another, drive spikes until the entrance looks like the maw of a hedgehog, and choke the breach with anything that might slow our advance. They will do all within human ingenuity to harden that space.”

”Wood burns quickly,” Jarza reminded him, though without presumption. ”We have oil and hay enough to turn half that hillside into a pyre.”

”And so we shall,” Alpheo said, nodding. ”All through the dusk we will remind them of that truth. We have hundreds of bodies willing to charge forth, to scorch every timber they dare to raise. Let our allies do something useful for once. When the hour comes, when the path is carved by fire and smoke, we shall take the honor of the final blow.”

”Speaking of final blows,” Jarza said, a slight edge of amusement sharpening his tone, ”to whom will you grant the honor?”

At once every ear seemed to tilt toward the prince.

”Oh, piss off!” Edric barked, stepping forward and thumping a fist against the giant’s breastplate, recognising what he was trying to do. ”I was promised the handle of that blow, and no one’s taking that from me.”

”You’ve been pampered too long for your own good,” Jarza growled, glaring down at the younger man with the same thunderous authority he had once used to corral him as a green officer barely able to carry his own kit. It had worked then. It did not now.

”And you’re old meat, father,” Edric shot back with a grin sharp enough to slice. ”Leave the glory to the young, eh? Wouldn’t want you to strain your knees—”

His jest dissolved into a strangled croak as Jarza’s massive hand clamped around the front of his collar and hoisted him clean off the ground. Edric’s boots kicked at empty air while the older man lifted him with the casual ease of a man testing the weight of a sack of grain. Whatever Jarza’s years had stolen from him, it certainly had not been the steel lattice of his arm.

’’ALfh heck me’’

”Not going to fight for the honor?” Alpheo asked, turning to Asag and ignoring the request for help

.

Asag merely snorted, flicking a speck of dirt from his stiletto with a practiced breath while two steps from them Edric could take no more of it.

”Not particularly. Glory’s never sat too well on my shoulders. And besides” he cast Alpheo a sideways glance, ”I doubt you’d have given me the chance.”

Alpheo nodded once, conceding the point. ”You think correctly You fight without shields, and the Romelains would drown your men in arrows before you even reached the breach. I’ve no intention of wasting good soldiers on the altar of ceremony.”

”Honor is nothing more than a shout tossed into the wind,” Asag mused, slipping the blade back into its sheath. ”And we, my prince, are nothing more than a passing breeze.”

Alpheo fixed him with a stare. ”You’ve been reading.”

A grin spread across Asag’s face, sharp, smug, and mischievous. ”Surprised? I believe it the duty of every man to keep sharpening himself. I tend to the body every day, I would be a fool not to carve a bit of edge into the mind while I’m at it.”

”Philosophy next?” Alpheo asked with raised brows, genuinely wondering if Asag’s sudden introspective would streak to common subjects

”Gods, no,” Asag replied with a scoff. ”Philosophy’s for men with too much time and too little sense. What I do enjoy, however...” He tilted his head as though weighing a confession. ”Are novels.”

”Novels?” Alpheo echoed, half incredulous.

Asag nodded and repeated the world.

He paused then, his gaze drifting toward the reddening sun sinking behind the distant ridges, the broken city beneath them catching the dying light like a bowl of embers that had long since burnt out, leaving out only a tasteless stubborness of what it once was and represented.

”This,” Asag murmured, voice settling into a quieter register, ”would have made a fine one. At the center of civilization, bringing down the castles forged by the Gods.... that would have been something worth putting to paper.....Hey Alph?”

’’Mh?’’

’’Ever thought of hiring a recorder?’’