Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

They surged forward stronger than they had ever been, fiercer than they had ever been. Men fell before them, separated into chaff and grain by the rhythmic threshing of their blades.

The geography of the field had become an impossible knot. The left wing had been smashed into the center until they collided at an isometric angle with the reserve cavalry that still tried to ride on; the Legions, who had been pushed to the very brink of the abyss, were now cutting wide, crimson swaths through the enemy as if they hadn’t been drowning in a red slaughter for hours.

Cohesive lines were a memory. The initial order the Prince had fought so hard to maintain was discarded in favor of pure, unadulterated brutality, a chaotic melee that favored the Yarzat and Kakunian hosts. Though they were bloodied and bone-weary, they were animated by a fierce, serrated spirit, propped up by the leadership of men who had crossed the threshold of sanity.

The slaughter could not be stopped. No one even attempted the feat. The resentment bred by hours of retreat and desperation exploded into an agonizing rage, finding its victims in every poor bastard who remained in the field rather than fleeing.There was no honor nor chivalry, as soon as a knight fell into the mud he was hacked down with baton and axes.

Cruelty that would have once made Alpheo turn up his nose was now a commonplace waste of breath. He led these monsters into their depravity because, in the hollow of his chest, he finally understood their fire.

As he looked upon the golden sun of that banner, blazing eye of arrogance in a world of red, an old friend he had long tried to bury in the rocks of oblivion came clawing back.

Rage embraced him. It roared with every kill it was fed, purring at the worship of the men who followed him as they tore through the opposition like sharks through a panicked school of tuna. He became uncaring of wounds, indifferent to the plagues of the body, until there was no distinction between the man and the blade. Every time he staggered from a blow, every time he slipped on the slick entrails of a fresh kill, one look at his prize melted the trouble away.

They had truly believed he would let it all fall.

They thought they could march into his lands, burn his fields, and dismantle the result of his life’s labor, the only trace of himself he would leave to history. They had come for his soil, for Jasmine, for Rosalind, for Basil, for Jarza, for Asag, for Edric, for Rykio, for the memory of Egil.

And they had presumed he would vanish like a thief in the night.That he would run back home and hide under the skirt of his wife.

Nibadur had claimed he would accept Alpheo as a peer only if the Fox lowered himself to a knee. But he knew of his design, for in that world he planned to rule there could be no Fox hiding in the grass.

The Princes of Oizenia, Kakunia, and Ezvania had taken him for a fool and a weakling. They expected that at the first glimpse of their impossible numbers, he would break; that they could indulge in their conquest without a single consequence.

They did not know what they had wrought upon themselves.

As men fell in heaps around him, as legionnaires howled in a murderous joy while bathing in the blood of invaders, as the rebels reclaimed their strength to make their cause the only justice left in the dirt, the South finally beheld Alpheo’s answer.

This was the harvest of their arrogance.

The earlier impulse to retreat, that flickering moment of cowardice, was now revealed for the necrotic rot it truly was. For as Alpheo carved his way forward, he beheld the total fragmentation of the last defense the Oizenian center could muster.

The contrast was absolute in death and life.

Where the Yarzat resistance had only stiffened with every casualty inflicted, forged into something harder by the heat of the slaughter and the pride of an army that never knew defeat, their enemies were melting away like snow cometh summer.

The more the murderous conflagration of black and gold flowed into them, the more the Oizenian spirit evaporated. The ancient wisdom held true: opportunities multiplied as they were seized, but only for those with a soul prepared to pay the butcher’s bill for the endeavor.

Alpheo had found his own soul lacking once today, a great hull revealed to be shallow at the first sign of a gale. But now, at the head of the storm, his great ship rode the blood-crested waves like the undisputed master of a red sea.

The first wave of the enemy was ridden down. His sword connected with a leg, shearing through muscle until the man buckled; then an arm, severed at the joint; then a chest, the point finding the gap between ribs.

He didn’t stop to watch them fall.

Then came another obstacle. Then another. And another.

The world became a kaleidoscope of splintering wood and screaming iron. The chaos was no longer a thing to be managed; it was a thing to be inhabited. He lunged into the teeth of a spear-wall, his blade a rhythmic, silver tongue licking the life from throats. Every obstacle was a ghost-in-waiting.

More. There were more enemies to kill, more lands to conquer, more cities to subjugate.He did not start this war, but he wound end it.

The air was so thick with the mist of shed blood that it turned the world a bruised, monochromatic purple upon the grass. He felt a man’s teeth shatter against his gauntlet; he felt the wet, slide of a axe across his thigh and ignored it as a mere distraction even when it pulsed and throbbed in pain.

He was a dervish of death and hate, moving through the press with an insanity that mirrored Merelao’s.

Around him, his men had ceased to be soldiers; they were a pack of wolves that had forgotten the meaning of hunger, killing now for the sheer, rapturous ecstasy of the strike. They waded through hills of the dead, their black-and-white surcoats stained so deeply they all wore the same uniform of gore.

’’Kill them all!’’ Someone roared from deep in the line, as much as Alpheo could reason it could even have been his own voice.

Where had he hidden all this fire?

A laughing zeal filled him, adrenaline pushing his body to the limit and past, even as every single cell forming his body is consumed of energy.

The line between laughing maniacally and breaking down sobbing was as firm as glass.

He was a murderer at eight, a warlord by sixteen, and now a king at thirty. Who were they that hoped to stop him?That hoped to kill him?Half the South had come clamoring for his head, and where were they now?

Where was the tall towers of Habadia, were was that roaring roasters?He could see a bull to his side and the Sun of Oizen that already fell, that was all that he could see.

He didn’t want the victory anymore; he wanted the extinction. He wanted to see the Golden Sun eclipsed by a mountain of its own dead. He lunged at a knight, caught the man’s mace on his vambrace, biting down at his tongue for the pain and drove his sword downward as they fall on each other in a heap of limbs with such force that it forced his way through the visor of the bastard.

More and more and more. He was running on a fuel that would not be exhausted until the field was silent, and the last of the arrogant had been fed to the mud.

He parried a lance that lunged for his throat, the wood shrieking against his vambrace as he spiraled inside the guard.

With a fluid, upward snap of his wrist, he ran his blade through the man’s elbow joint, the limb sliding down the soon-to-be-dead’s side as he collapsed to his knees, trembling and whimpering in the slurry.

How strange a thing. That a monster so lost in his own carnage would find the respite of his onslaught halted not by a blade, but by a face.

Framed by a dented kettle-helm was a pair of eyes so wide and wet that they mirrored the tears of his own son. The boy was young, too young. Perhaps he was merely fodder scoured from a village during a desperate sweep for meat; perhaps he was a dreamer who had marched south hoping for a purse of silver and a story for his mother.

”Mercy...” the boy choked out, the word bubbling through the grime on his lips, as he realised war for the madness and misery it was. ”M-Mercy, please...I beg you, mercy.”

In those eyes, Alpheo saw the absolute madness of a war the boy had not caused, yet was part of. He saw a mother’s hope and a father’s pride, a cheek that still held the soft, unmarred down of a life too short.

”By the Gods... please, I..I don’t wan-”

Alpheo drove the blade down.

There were no gods on this field, just as there was no mercy. There was only man, no devils, no angels, just sacks of warm flesh holding the fleeting breath of life before the cold vacuum of death.

Men were the makers of both the celestial and the infernal; and when that boy looked up at the shadow towering over him, he saw only devil.

There was once a boy, one so similar to the whimpering and dying form of that child lost in the mud, the fairness he had once dreamed of bringing to the world was a ghost’s promise. If he truly wished to plant the seeds of good, he had to be prepared to harvest with the tools of evil.For nothing good could come from honor.

Greatness could only walk alongside greatness, and the weak, unless mercy was granted by the grace of a whim, were destined to lie forgotten in the mud.

And as he stood there, the roar of an army that had found glory in the very teeth of defeat surged around him, the Oizenian lines breaking, disintegrating, melting away like snow beneath a black sun, victory whispering his sweet song at his hear, then he realised the only truth that stood.

He knew it then. He felt it with every aching inch of his soul. Through the end of others, he had finally arrived at his own beginning.

Amidst the screaming winds of death and the mountains of the slain, through the cheering of monsters and the whimpering of the broken, under the gaze of the singing crows and the pale, shattered sun, a new reality rose in the muck.

There were no more princes in the South. There were no more principalities. There were only subjects, and there was a master.

His heraldry was not the tower of his father, but the Falcon circling the storm.

There was only one King to be beheld from the mountains to the sea, and the name that was whispered by the cold winds of that terrible field of that red day, was only one.

It was Alpheo’s.