Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

They stood tall as from the saddles they swung their steel with the desperation of those who had expected a rout and found a wall; while from below, death rose to meet them in the form of a thousand reaching blades.

By every law of war, the Legions should have shattered. The initial shock had been absolute, lances had splintered through the front ranks, and the weight of the destriers had carried the knights deep into the heart of the squares allowing them to seminate confusion all the way to the marrow of the formation.

But the men of Yarzat did not flee. They stood in the red ruin of their formation and began the grim work that was expected of them.

Had the prince not been there perhaps they would have routed, or perhaps not. History was all made up of big ifs. But what use was to talk of road not yet taken, while a mountain await to be climbed?

High and mighty in the charge, the knights now found themselves lonely in the press, like a mob that found his courage in the density of the sea, only to realise how alone they were when the euphoria of the masses swept away.They could not use any strategy nor make any move, there wasn’t even the space to breath. Their only weapon speed was gone.

The legionnaires waiting for them were nothing short of straight battering rams.

’’Kill them all!’’

Someone shouted as limbs and armors slopped to the mud.

Alone with death. Alone with the consequences of their actions they started to fall.

Surrounded by a sea of black and white, they were dragged from their high saddles, their silvered plate proving no defense against daggers and maces that found the gaps in the gore-slicked mud or simply pushed through. If this charge had struck any other line in the South, it would have been the end of the war.

But Alpheo had made his center a thin tempting the knights into the attack toward the only position that could and had held.He had begged for it, and they delivered.

Two worlds were colliding here: the ancient, golden age of the knight was being strangled by the emerging era of the disciplined footman. Chivalry was drowning in a soup of blood and bile, murdered by the ideas of a peasant-made prince.

Madness followed in the wake of the collision.

The maker of all this death stumbled to his feet, his breath coming in ragged. Each breath a statement.

His mouth full of ash.His fear taking hold.

He had been luckier than the men at the apex; no lance had found a home in his chest, but the collision of a charging horse had sent him sprawling into the muck. The black of his obsidian armor was now choked with the grey-brown silt of the field.

He scanned the chaos through the narrow slots of his visor, searching for the white cloaks of his guard, but the storm of battle had swept them away. He was a man alone in a forest of iron.

His hand went slack, empty.

His stomach dropped, the old monsters scouring that little courage he held in him, madness reaching at all sides, screaming and clamoring at him.

He looked around, his heart hammering against his ribs, until he spotted his longsword buried in the flank of the very horse that had bowled him over. The beast lay nearby, its massive chest heaving, legs kicking at the air with the fading, frantic strength of the dying.

Alpheo knelt in the mud and drew his dagger. He had always held a quiet love for animals, creatures of instinct and honesty, and as he looked into the horse’s wide, glassy eye that could not understand why men could be so cruel, he felt a deeper pang of pity than he had for any of the men he had ordered to their deaths today.

With a quick stroke he cut the beast’s throat to end its suffering, then wrenched his sword free from its side.

He wiped the blade on a tuft of blood-soaked grass and stood tall. His guards were gone, his line was a wreck,horses were everywhere and the air was a choir of screams.

Egil would have had a blast here, Alpheo couldn’t help but think.Taking a deep breath and scouring the fear in him, what use was of that?He was already knee-deep in shit.

Men surged from the red mist to claim his life. Some came on foot, stumbling through the silt; others remained atop their frantic mounts, swinging down from the heavens like the hands of angels.

Some he slew ; others he wounded or terrified into the shadows. But for every man who fell, the battlefield birthed two more to take his place.

He wrenched his blade free from the stomach of a man, as two more reached out for him. He reeled back, falling to the right so that one would get in the line of the others.

Manuevering so he would never be two against one.

He did not strike and did his best to make his distance, one would just need to wrench him in the mud and the other to finish him off. They knew that, Alpheo saw it in their eyes.

He deflected a blow there, let another go. His armor ate it whole.Tension screeched at each one of his cell, mimicking the sound of his armor taking all the blows.

He waited for his chance and life delivered it.

He ducked low, air whistling above him like a stone cutting the air. Down he went but up he jumped.

The man never saw it coming until it was too late.

He felt the force of flesh giving way as he gave the first a steel tongue.He felt him spasm beneath him.

He wrenched the blade back and hacked at the other.

He was not lucky as the first.

the man was already at him and the blade skipped off the curved steel of the man’s pauldron with a shower of sparks. The two of them slammed together, their breath mingling in the narrow space between their visors like a lover’s kiss.

Alpheo drove the man down into the muck, pinning him with the weight of his obsidian plate. He jammed the hilt of his sword against the knight’s neck, his knee crushing the man’s thigh to keep him anchored in the mire.

It was a brawler’s game, a style Alpheo had never mastered, and his lack of proficiency nearly cost him his life.

Something whistled above him, and it was long before he felt the jscreech of steel as a blade bit into the side of his neck.

Were he wearing anything less than the masterwork plate of a Prince, he would have been drowning in his own blood within heartbeats. Instead, the sword’s edge groaned and died against the reinforced curve of his gorget.

The knight’s hand scrambled for Alpheo’s visor, trying to wrench the steel open or find the eye-slit for a killing thrust.

Instead the prince freed his hand and hammered his palm into the man’s face again and again, the metal of his gauntlet echoing with a dull hit.

The knight’s grip faltered just enough. Alpheo drew his misericorde dropping the sword and wedged the thin dagger into the soft meat of the man’s neck.

Unlike the Prince, this man had no gorget to save him. He was likely a wandering blade, a knight of low means and high ambition. The result was the same regardless of his lineage; his blood geysered out, mingling with the cooling viscera of the horse Alpheo had killed moments before. Through the open face of his helmet, the man’s glassy eyes stared up in terrified, silent surprise.

Alpheo left him to die alone in the mud.

That was horror.

But there was no time to catch a lungful of air. Through his visor, which he only now realized was half broken, he saw a hulking shape looming over him. He lunged to the side, throwing himself into the slush just as a mounted knight, leaning halfway out of his saddle, swung a heavy axe on him.

The blade bit into Alpheo’s thigh. It shrieked against the plate, chipping away a shard of the black steel before glancing off. The leg remained whole, though the bone beneath felt as if it had been struck by a smith’s hammer.

A dying’s man piss pooled around his armor as the prince rose in a half kneeling position.

He did not even took notice of that and threw a lazy swing with his off-hand, aiming for the destrier’s hocks, but the steel found only air. The knight vanished into the smoke as quickly as he had appeared, his axe already seeking another life to harvest.

A pair of hands hauled Alpheo up from the muck. He couldn’t see the face of the man, nor did they exchange a word; they simply stood together for a second in the red rain before turning back to their duties.

The opportunity to breathe brought with it a silence more terrifying than the noise. As the frantic hammering in his chest subsided and the constant, metallic ringing in his ears faded, the reality of his surroundings crashed down upon him.

Any hope of finding Vrosk or the white-cloaked guard was gone. He was utterly alone, he realised.

The sound of the field was unreal, a cacophony that defied the senses. It was the sound of iron pots being hauled across stone, of men screaming until their throats went hoarse and raw, and the high-pitched, vibrating shrieks of horses that sounded like children crying in the dark.

There were thousands of souls surrounding him, yet he had never felt so small.A lone pebble in a sea of stones. Not even in his days as a slave had he felt this hollow; then, he had a purpose, a chain to break, a horizon to reach.

Here, there was no aim, no grand ambition. There was only the base, animal instinct to survive another heartbeat.

Everywhere he looked, the world was breaking. He saw a massive charger, its spine shattered, kicking out in its death throes and caving in the chest of a legionnaire. He saw riders thrown clean from their saddles, flying through the air like discarded dolls only to be swallowed by the mud or trampled by the next rank of iron.

It was death in its purest, most primordial form.

It was scary. It was chaos and it was meaningless.

To his left, he recognized a halberdier, a veteran who had survived the nightmare of the Bastion against impossible odds. The man moved with the practiced efficiency one would expect of his rank, catching the hock of a passing horse with his hook and plunging the pick-axe end of his weapon deep into the rider’s gorget. It was a perfect kill. But as the veteran turned to find his next mark, a mounted knight tore past him.

There was no theatrical swing, no heroic challenge,just a heavy mace connecting with the soldier’s temple in a blurring instant.

The veteran dropped. He didn’t scream; he didn’t even twitch. Most men died screaming, but he did not.

He simply crumpled like a puppet whose strings had been cut. A man who had survived one hell only to walk into another and leave his soul there without a sound.

A veteran of ten years of war, falling like that.

The rider galloped on, not even deigning to look back at the brave soul he had extinguished. To the knight, the man was nothing, a speed bump in the mire.

A cold, crushing rage ignited in Alpheo’s gut, that was right for them they were nothing, all thier efforts being worth less than the shit from their arse.

’’YOU DOG-BLOODED BASTARD!’’

He swung his sword toward the retreating rider, but the knight was already gone, swallowed by the rising mist of red vapor and grey dust.

His screams the only thing left of that brave memory.

He lunged forward, his boots churning the mud as he sprinted toward a knot of men on foot, his blade raised for a killing stroke. He felt the wind of his own motion, the sudden, desperate need to make someone pay, for all, for his dream , for the deads, for what he was forced to do.

He never reached them.

From the side, a riderless destrier, panicked and blind with pain coming off a bleeding chest, collided with him. It wasn’t a strike of a blade, but the impact of half a ton of runaway muscle. The world spun into a dizzying blur of grey sky and black earth.

He hit the mud or the mud hit him.In both case he was out.

The air driven from his lungs in a single, agonizing gasp. He slid through the slurry, his obsidian armor coated in a fresh layer of filth, as the shadow of the great beast thundered over him and vanished into the gloom as if he had never existed.

He rose, but his mind stayed behind in the dirt, drifting through a world that refused to stop spinning even as he stood rooted in the muck.

The obsidian masterpiece of his armor was gone, buried under a thick, suffocating crust of grey silt and clotted gore. The silver etching the signs of his station, all were vanished, leaving him a nameless shape of mud in a field of slaughter. He realized with a dull, distant horror that he was no longer holding his sword.

Once more he felt the emptiness of his hand.

In its place a minute later he clutched a splintered pilum, its iron head notched and slick. He couldn’t remember picking it up; perhaps the earth had simply offered it as a final, desperate gift.

He blinked, trying to clear the red fog from his vision. The world is swaying, he thought with the detached curiosity of the concussed. The trees are dancing.Wait were there trees here?

A scream of wood and iron snapped him back.

Those were men.

A rider had spotted him. Whether the knight saw the Prince beneath the filth or simply saw a lone target ripe for the harvest, it didn’t matter. The destrier was already in a full, thundering gallop, its hooves churning the slurry into a violent spray. A lance, miraculously unbroken, its ash shaft gleaming with a predatory light, was leveled straight at Alpheo’s chest.

Time became a fractured thing.

He tried to command his limbs, but his muscles felt like water. He had pushed himself too hard, and he was claiming the consequences.

He heaved the javelin forward with a grunt of exertion that tasted of copper, but his aim was a lie. The weapon wobbled through the air, falling short and vanishing into the mud without ever threatening the horse’s path.

Disappointing just as he had expected.

He saw the spear-point then.

It filled his entire vision, a tiny, glinting star of polished steel that grew until it was all there was in the universe. It was centered perfectly on the horizontal slit of his visor.

He didn’t have time to pray. He didn’t have time to scream.He did not make a sound, so eerily close to that same halberdier of before.

The impact was not the strike of a weapon; it was the force of a falling mountain, the weight of an elephant concentrated into a single, needle-thin point of pressure. There was a sound, a deafening, splintering crack of seasoned ash shattering against obsidian plate, and Alpheo was lifted clean off his feet.

The sky vanished. The mud vanished.

The battle vanished. Horse and men vanished.

His head snapped back with a force that felt like his neck had turned to glass. He never felt the blow, nor his head hitting the mud.

The light went out and the world turned to black.

Dead and silent black.