Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

With the great Bastion having fallen the Usurper Mavius had been hounded back to the Red Rose, a less a sanctuary and more a shark tank where treachery was already beginning to scent the blood of his failure.

Alpheo had notched every objective of the campaign into his belt like a hunter counting pelts. With Mesha firmly seated on the Romelian throne, Alpheo had secured a grateful diplomatic buffer state, buying the years of peace necessary for Yarzat to harden its skin.

With the campaign done, he could not finally find refuge to his family once more.

”Your Grace, I thank you for this honor,” the voice of Edric echoed in the prince’s ears, muffled slightly by the helmet.

”Your legion was the heart of this campaign, Edric. Its merit was forged in the breach, not in small part due to your personal steel. The honor is not mine to give; it is yours to lead,” the Prince replied. His feet dangled loosely from the stirrups as his steed, a massive war-beast now weary from the road, wheezed and rested one hoof in the dust of the road.

Around them, the Legio IV assembled with the terrifying precision of a clockwork engine. They were the honorary guard, the banner-bearers of the Royal House for this parade, having earned this honor for their meritorious service during the breaking of the Fingers.

The legion’s standard-bearer had surrendered the banner of the fire to hold the great falcon of Yarzat, passing the original colors to the commander who now stood beside the Prince. His officer’s armor, scoured now of blood, was polished to a mirror sheen, seemingly to glow as his chest puffed out with a pride that transcended exhaustion.

A thousand men stood in ordered files.

The honor of the parade was not for the common ranks the lords had brought with them, but instead for the legions alone, and in this case for the Voghondai auxiliarii who had been given permission to partecipate in name of their service during the final week of the siege.

They waited outside the city gates in a silence so absolute it felt like a physical weight. Not a single man engaged in idle chatter; not a single scabbard clattered. They were a forest of iron, rooted and waiting.

It was only when the long, mournful note of a horn shattered the air that the silence was squashed beneath the raucous, rhythmic thud of two thousand boots pressing onto the cobblestone road of the Rising Gem of Yarzat.

The city had been waiting for them.

As Alpheo nudged his stallion forward, the stallion’s hooves began to trample a path of petals, vibrant, multi-colored flowers thrown by children from the windows of the narrow houses overlooking the road. The scent of crushed blooms rose to meet the smell of sweat and iron.

Alpheo gazed up, his eyes locking onto a young boy leaning dangerously far over a wooden sill, he was not a peasant or even a poor one, his cloth revealed him to be of a merchant family or, seemingly a well-endowed one, as the structure of the house proved.

The child was mid-toss, holding a handful of those common yellow wildflowers, the kind children often chewed on in the meadows. As the Prince’s eyes met his, the boy’s face turned a violent shade of red. He stammered, his small hands opening in shock, and the flowers fell in a disorganized flurry.

Even in his weariness, He noted the way the houses crowded the road, their eaves nearly touching. The architecture must be revised, he noted mentally. The houses are too close. If a single spark takes hold, the city will be a funeral pyre.

Below the balconies, a sea of humanity surged.

The people of Yarzat pressed in from all sides, their revelry held back only by the straining line of the city garrison.

The cheers rose in waves, a thousand-throated roar that sounded like a storming sea crashing against a cliff. They did not shout the formal titles he had inherited, nor the name he had carried when he felt that all life’s good had deserted him. Instead, they screamed the name he had earned through fire and subversion, alternating it with the not-so-official rank he had redeemed.

”FOX! PRINCE! FOX! PRINCE!”

The chant became a heartbeat.

It vibrated in the stones beneath the horses’ hooves and thrummed in the metal of Alpheo’s breastplate.

Alpheo felt a small, uneven wheeze of breath drawing closer to his ear. He didn’t flinch, half-expecting the traditional whisper of the commander regarding the fleeting mortality of pride,and that in the end he was too, just a mortal.

He didn’t need the reminder. The ache in his joints, despite his age, told him that truth every morning.

But the voice that spoke was not delivering a lecture on the vanity of kings, or in this case princes. Edric leaned in, his eyes going glassy, his voice cracking with a softness that seemed out of place amidst the thunderous cheering of the city and that of a man who had earned a new nickname.

”Egil would have liked this,” the commander muttered, looking out over the sea of worshipful faces.

Alpheo felt the air leave his lungs. ”He would have,” he replied, his voice a low rasp that hit the tumolt inside of him. ”He would have reveled in the attention for all of an hour, preening like a peacock, before dozing off in the arms of whichever girl caught his eye in the crowd.”

The memory hit Alpheo with full force. He could almost see it: Egil, leaning back laughing at the stiff-necked solemnity of the Legions who tried thier best to ignore the advances of girls from the crown, leaving Alpheo with the exhaustion of cleaning up his messes.

He imagined that in the years to come Yarzat would be populated by a suspicious number of priests, bureaucrats, and stable-hands all bearing a certain roguish tilt to their brow and a reckless glint in their eyes.

A small, genuine smile touched the Prince’s lips, but the gloom of the present killed it before it could truly bloom.

Egil had been a nightmare to manage. He was a man composed of equal parts vice and valor, a rogue who treated responsibility like a disease and dumped the consequences of his appetites onto everyone else. Alpheo had spent half a lifetime grumbling about him, cursing the day they met, and cleaning the stains of Egil’s life off his own reputation.

But now that the man was gone, every one of those old complaints felt like a betrayal. Every moment spent being irritated by Egil’s nature now seemed like a grotesque injustice to his memory. The ”troubles” Egil caused were no longer burdens; they were the vibrant, chaotic brushstrokes of a life that had made Alpheo’s world worth living in.

And now the world was grayer without it.

A sudden, fierce craving for the man bloomed in Alpheo’s chest, a hollow, aching hunger for a single, ribald joke or a dismissive shrug from the one of the few who never looked at him as a ”Prince” or a ”Fox,” but simply as a friend.

He looked back at the petals on the road, seeing not the beauty of the flowers, but the silence where a laugh should have been.

Memento mori, truly...

As the stallion’s hooves reached the transition from the paved urban road to the grand Court Way, the city’s cacophony began to soften behind them. Here, the dense, leaning houses gave way to the great green expanse that cushioned the royal estate, a parkland of manicured hedges that breathed a cooler, cleaner air.

Alpheo raised his gauntleted hand, signaling the halt. With a brief, knowing glance toward Edric, he gave the formal permission for the legions to peel away. The second march of the parade was for the men, a victory lap that would lead them back through the heart of Yarzat, where the wine was flowing and the ladies of the city were waiting with open arms to reward the heroes of the breach.

Even the meritorious Fourth, for all their discipline and pride, could not help but renounce the somber honor of escorting the Prince to his doorstep. Their eyes were already wandering back toward the city’s lights where the victorious lay awaited them. With a series of sharp commands and the clatter of turning shields, they broke formation, leaving Alpheo behind.

Now, only his private guard remained. They formed a tight, protective diamond around him as he pushed his horse into a slow walk toward the palace. The roar of the ”Fox” and the ”Prince” faded into a distant, rhythmic throb, replaced by the rhythmic jingle of his horse’s bridle and the soft rustle of the wind through the trees.

Finally, the great staircase of the palace loomed ahead. Alpheo reined in his horse at the base of the first step.

High above, at the crest of the stairs stood a small cluster of figures. They were not shouting; they were not throwing flowers. They stood in a stillness that was more powerful than the loudest cheer.

The Fox dismounted, his boots hitting the gravel with a heavy, final thud. He handed the reins to Doran and looked up at the long climb ahead.

For the first time in months, he wasn’t thinking of walls, or logistics, or the shifting borders of empires. He was just a man coming home from the cold.