Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

The past can only carry the heavy weight given to it by the living.

For Alpheo, it was a ghost that walked a pace behind his shoulder, never speaking, yet never leaving, always lingering whenever his throughts drifted off.

The winter wind howled across the plain, biting and sharp, matching the sudden cold shivers that rippled through the King’s frame from front to back. It was deep winter, yet the sun hung high in a crisp blue sky, piercing the frost to brighten the cold green grass with its golden rays, bringing a fleeting warmth to the land, at least, where the imposing shadows of the rising walls of Yarzat did not reach.

His long black hair danced wildly, mimicking the grass swaying to the wind’s tune. Arranged before him across the vast green expanse outside his growing capital stood his legions. Only four cohorts of the Primogenia and two of the Aracinea had been called, drawn up in silent rows of polished iron . They were proud, fiercely skilled men, veterans of a dozen bloody campaigns, yet they stood in their flawless formations entirely ignorant of why they had been summoned to this field.

They knew only that down in the southern borderlands, on the very soil where they had recently buried so many of their comrades but more of their enemies, and that their brothers-in-arms were currently clashing with the Vulture Lord.

Many of the legionaries standing here wished desperately to be down there, hunting the rebels through the brush, but wishes do not dictate the march of an army. The King had commanded them here, and so they stood.

Yet, as Alpheo looked out over his formidable host, a dark, gnawing realization settled deep into his chest, bringing with it a profound sense of secret shame: He was not ready.

Nothing he had accomplished could still the sudden, violent rumbling of his heart.

Dum-dum-dum.

It beat against his ribs, loud and vigorous, sounding to his ears like the roaring, unstoppable rush of a river after a storm. He was the victor of dozens of fields. He was the undisputed conqueror of Herculia, the feller of proud Oizen, the warlord who had successfully impregnated the supposedly impregnable bitch of the Fingers . He was the man who had shattered the Prince’s League and ground their grand armies into the dirt. He was the only true king residing in the south, a ruler crowned in the mud and anointed in rivers of his enemies’ blood.

And yet, faced with a handful of travelers on a dirt road, he now felt unsure.

Would their arrival finally bring the answers to the questions he had harbored in the dark for so long? Four years had passed. Almost five. The Emperor of the Eternal City had certainly taken his sweet, time searching for them. But patience was the king of all virtues, and in the end, the past always found a way to come roaring back to claim its due.It was after all more patient than anyone else.

Then, they finally appeared, trickling down the northern highway.

They were a ragged, thunderous confusion of humanity, spilling over both sides of the wide road. As they approached, the long, iron lines of Alpheo’s armored legionaries parted slightly, lowering their spears to give the newcomers the highest military welcome, a solemn, silent reverence usually reserved exclusively for high lords and conquering generals.

Thousands of quiet, murmured voices clashed in the cold air, punctured here and there by the sharp, piercing screams of hunting hawks released by their trainers into the winter sky for their welcome. The travelers came unsurely, their steps timid and halting as they walked the gauntlet between the towering rows of armored soldiers.

There were men in tattered, threadbare clothes with limping, broken gaits; there were hollow-eyed women clutching infants to their chests or dragging small children by the hand. Every single one of them was badly dressed against the winter chill, their faces caked in the dust of the road, and a profound, exhausting fear mirrored in their eyes.

”There are no old men,” Jarza noticed from Alpheo’s flank, his voice coming up as a strained, gravelly whisper, so completely unlike his usual gruff and commanding tone.

None of the officers gave voice to an answer, though they all knew of it well enough.

Only the elderly possessed no worth to a trader. What use was an old, failing man to a master? He could not work the fields, he could not haul the stone, and he could not breed. In the eyes of the overseers, an old man was nothing but a waste of good food. And so, whenever an army was broken, a nation conquered, or a city subdued the old men were always the first to perish when captured.

There were not many of them. Alpheo closed his eyes for a brief fraction of a second, a cold knot tightening in his stomach. He had thought there would be more. He had deeply, desperately hoped for a greater remnant of Egil’s kinsmen.

The king’s friend had been not a man who often spoke of his youth; too much raw pain and dormant rage fluttered to life whenever those memories were summoned. But Egil, before the dirt took him, had told stories of how there had been thousands of their people pressed into imperial slavery when their tribe originally under the War-Emperor.

But that ruin had occurred nearly thirty or forty years ago. Time and hard labor were far more efficient and patient killers than the sword. Alpheo knew it was nothing short of a miracle that any of them were still drawing breath or really that Mesha had managed to even find them.

Of those currently marching down the road, Alpheo could not count more than six hundred souls. From thousands only six hundred.

Was this truly all that remained of Egil’s proud tribe? Was this pitiful, broken crowd the sum of what he could offer to his sweet friend’s memory? To his monumental sacrifice?

The King felt something ancient and long-buried stir violently within his gut. Was it regret? Was it a bitter, stinging disappointment?

No, that could not be it. He had long been familiar with both of those feelings; they were old companions of his, as deeply etched into his soul as the faded white scars left by the overseers’ whips across his back. Instead, he felt the heavy traces of things he had left unsaid, the countless farewells he had never possessed the opportunity to speak aloud, save for in that recurring, maddening dream of his, a dream he still did not know what to make of.

But then, as he watched a young mother trip on a stone and steady herself against a legionary’s shield offered in aid, the true nature of the feeling hit him. The answer came to him suddenly, sharp and precise, like the swift, fatal diving of a hawk toward an unsuspecting rabbit in the brush.

It was the terrifying, agonizing dash of hope.

What were the actual, realistic chances for him to be among this crowd? What were the odds that thousands of slaves, systematically ground down into a few hundred survivors over decades of misery, would still hold him within their ranks?

The chances were infinitesimally small, Alpheo knew. A fool’s gambling odds, more of Egil’s field of work than his.

But as the tattered vanguard of the long-lasting exiles finally reached the foot of his road, he gripped the hilt of his sword, his eyes scanning the sea of exhausted faces, searching for a ghost that might still be clothed in flesh. but he knew not the face of.

It was a small hope, but it was still one.

A lingering, gentle warmth suddenly pressed against the small of his back, tracing a slow circle through the heavy wool of his clothes. The unexpected touch rattled the King, causing his shoulders to drop as he let out a long, ragged breath he hadn’t even realized he was holding.

He turned his head slightly to find that the hand belonged to his young son. The young man right on the crisp of his age, was staring out over the hill, his wide eyes darting first toward the slow, agonizing resolution of a decades-old debt marching down the highway, and then up at the strained, iron lines of his father’s face.

”Who are they?” the boy in him asked, his voice small, unsure, and timid against the howling winter wind.

That was a good question.

Alpheo looked back at the tattered exiles, and he knew they were many things. They were the correction of a mistake. They were lifelong slaves, worn-out whores, and broken servants. They were a shattered remnant without a home left to return to, without much hope remaining in their chests, and with very little left to live for.

To the King, they were his living regret. They were his bitter disappointment, his heavy guilt, and his quiet, unceasing pain. They were each of those dark things and more, they were the forgotten, the beaten, and the cursed of the world.

But as Alpheo watched them shuffle into the shadow of his great stone walls, he looked at the raw scars on his own bare hands, remembering the slave pens he had left behind to build a kingdom. He reached down, his fingers wrapping firmly over his son’s small shoulder, grounding them both.

A different truth, grander than all his sorrow, finally rose to his lips.

”Our people,” the King told his son, his voice thick but steady as it carried across the wind. ”They are now our people.”