Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

One story fades, another begins, another stop, crashing among themselves like bodies juggled by a river’s currents with that sound so similar of thunder. And so just as imperceptible as the reason of life, or love and hate, so those stories ceased to be alone, until they all come together in one great book where the ink fades, spill and dry.

Time ceased to be a river and became a stagnant pool. The past and the future bled into a singular, suffocating present, until the world was reduced to the space between the edge of his blade and the throat of the next man. The mountains of corpses he had left in his wake fluttered away like ash; his fears, his ambitions, even his name, melted into the slurry never to be seen until they would float back once more.

But not now.Too long and too hard it had all been.

He was not a man, they were not men either , just accessory of that hell, deemed to dance until death came down reaching for its accursed.

Men often ponder what they can do in war, but they rarely stop to consider what war makes of them. It is a Great Stripping. It flays away the soul, depriving a man of everything except the steel in his hand and the primal strength required to bathe it red. Titled lineages and mountains of silver mattered less than the pebble beneath his boot. There was only the rhythmic, mingling breath of two animals locked in a dance, until one breath ceased and the other remained to find the next.

The sky, which had spent the day on the verge of weeping, began to tear open. The first light of that wretched afternoon spilled across the valley, a pale gold blessing upon a field of carnage that would have made a masterpiece of any fool with a brush.

Alpheo moved in a dream, the frantic, forced dream of a child closing his eyes to drift through a nightmare. His brain shut down, cauterizing every thought unnecessary for the harvest.

Move and kill. Move and kill.

Stab, breathe, twist.

Swing, breathe, retrieve.

Parry, smash, smash, breathe.

There was no longer a Prince. There was no longer a father, nor a husband, nor a man who had been enslaved once by the scent of dry parchment and old wine. He was iron. He was cold, unyielding steel.

The world was a shimmering blur of kinetic violence. Men ran in opposite directions like shadows fleeing a fire; the air was a choir of death-rattles, the howling of the wind, and the primal braying of the victors. He did all that defined his place in the cosmos, whether that place was a throne above the rivers of humanity or a pit beneath them, he neither knew nor cared.

He was deep in the current, drowning in the trance of the blade, when the world suddenly warped back into focus.

He had his sword raised for a final, cleaving blow, his muscles coiled to deliver another soul to the mud. A sword was thrusted up his way.

But he did not parry. For there wasn’t the need. The point of the blade wasn’t held up against the prince body.

The sword lay flat across open palms, offering the hilt to the conqueror of the field.

Long had the last ember of the fight fluttered away, not only the clean up remained.

The man’s face was a mask of grey terror, his lips quivering as he forced a single, hoarse word through the cacophony of the field.

”Yield...”

The word was a needle pricking the skin of Alpheo’s dream.

”Yield! I yield,oh prince, I yield!Mercy!I beg you, a ransom. My family will ransom me....”

The trance shattered. Alpheo blinked, the heavy and stuffy visor of his helm suddenly feeling heavy and suffocating. He breathed as he never had, as if he just dived away from the cold water of some hellish lake.

He tasted the salt of his own sweat and the iron of the air. He looked down at his hands.

They were shaking, caked in a dark, drying crust of blood and mud.

How had he come here?The only thing he recalled...it was nothing clear, just a blur.

He looked around, truly seeing the field for the first time in an eternity. The roaring had dulled to a low, rhythmic throb. The Oizenians were no longer a line; they were a broken, scattering herd.

He exhaled, a long, shuddering breath that sounded like a death rattle itself. The devil retreated for it was no longer needed, leaving only a hollow man standing in a graveyard of his own making.

He lifted his gaze, then. Across the churned expanse of the valley, the iron rhythm of the battle had fractured into a thousand scenes of surrender.

Dozens, then hundreds, of men were casting their weapons down. There were common footmen, their hands stained with the same clay they had been born to till, and high-born knights who had lost their steeds to the gluttonous muck, offering their swords in one last act of chivalry to mask the cowardice of their surrender. The colorful heraldry of the South, the silks and ribbons that had fluttered like a vibrant rainbow in the morning light, now hung limp and sodden, dragged through the filth.

How could they have hoped to best us with that meager will?

He wondered, anger rising in him.

How many had died in this field?How many people he knew , would he now last see with pale skin and scarred bodies?

They knelt in the mud, a forest of raised hands swaying in supplication, as if Alpheo were not a man, but an altar at which they might buy back their lives with prayers and yet no sacrifice.

Were he a god he would squash all of them like the roaches they were.Shear their limbs, rue their flesh.

But he was prince, and their surrender was needed.So he accepted it.

And yet the field was not yet quiet. Behind the kneeling, the slaughter roared on in a different key. Those who had not found the grace to surrender were being hunted. Alpheo’s men were set upon their backs like hounds released upon a warren of rabbits.

They tackled the fleeing into the slurry, the glint of daggers finishing what the longswords, axes , maces , halberds had begun. Everywhere he turned, he saw the same singular image: the arched, desperate backs of men running, and the relentless, mechanical pursuit of those who had forgotten how to stop and even if they wished could not.

His mind felt dizzy, thick with the heavy, foggy enlightenment that follows a fever dream being lifted away. The air was cold, the light was thin, and the reality of the moment began to settle into his bones like a chill.

”GLORY TO YARZAT! VICTORY! VICTORY IS OURS!”

The shout erupted nearby, a cry that voiced the thought Alpheo was too hollow to speak out.Too hoarse and raw was his throat.

He could only manage a cheering whimper.

The field caught the spark. A wave of cheering rolled across the mud, a cacophony of triumph that sounded more like a collective sob.

Some men broke where they stood, their limbs finally surrendering to the crushing gravity of exhaustion; they collapsed into the mud, weeping openly into their gauntlets, their spirits spent after so long a nightmare.

But the prince made true of his words, for after that long night a morning of hope awaited.

Not all were so peaceful.

Others remained lost in the red trance, charging ahead like unstoppable machines, their blades still seeking meat even as the enemy vanished. Some of them would never truly wake from this moment, Alpheo knew of that. They would wake in their beds decades from now, legs wet with cold sweat, hearts drumming against their ribs, remembering the hell they had drifted through until they were nothing but survivors dressed as heroes.

There were hardly victor on this red field.Even if the others were dead and running, even if the banners of so many proud houses tilted in the dirt like dead flowers.

He surveyed the cheering field, his eyes drifting over the broken and the boisterous alike.

’’Alpheo!Alpheo!Yarzat!Yarzat!Fox!Fox!Fox!’’ Thousands of screamed driftend in on big chorus, not a continous one but a lake formed by a thousands of buckets.

He was the center of their world, the pivot on which their lives had turned, and as the cries of ”Fox! Fox!” rose to a deafening pitch, Alpheo felt the weight of every soul on that field settle onto his tired shoulders.

He looked at his hands, stained so deeply that the blood seemed to have seeped into the very pores of the iron. To the men screaming his name, he was many things.He was a prince. A victor. For some an angel.

To the boy he had just put to the sword, he was a devil. To history, he would be what he would make of himself.

But as he stood there, the wind whistling through his dented helm, the prince knew the truth. He had not won a world; he had simply proven that he could endure the darkness longer than those who had dared to challenge him. He was the only one left standing atop the mound, and the view from the summit was nothing but a beautiful, horrific silence.

And then on that horrible field , it rose.

The light of that weeping, cold sun drifted through the grey cracks of the sky, like a child who had hidden too long under a table admist the shout of parents, peeking out first with trembling fear, and then with the hasty, desperate reassurance of a world gone quiet.

The light of that somber sun burned him. It bathed the features of the reckless gambler who had thrown everything he possessed, everything he was and all he might ever be, into a game where he began with nothing and stood to gain a world.

It was in that frantic throw, in that reasonless choice made amidst the slaughter, that the man in the black armor found himself. Draped in the pale gold of the weeping sun, the stinging warmth on his cheeks, with tears he could not name, salt mixing with the drying copper on his visor.

And as the thousands roared his name, he looked down at his own shaking hands and realized the most terrifying and beautiful truth of all:

Despite the darkness, despite the iron, and despite the cost, in the end, he still lived.

Now he could finally be a father again.