Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king-Chapter 959: Throw of a dice(3)

Since the day man first put ink to paper, the House of Kantazoukenes had been compared to a forest fire, a relentless conflagration engulfing everything in its path, knowing no pause and acknowledging no master but the cold kiss of death. 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺

Even before they rose to claim the purple cloak, when they were but a vassal house to the Mazkei, they were a house of marrow and iron, a martial line that bred conquerors. Then, the hound became the master, and Romelia became a leviathan that swallowed half the known world whole.

But Tiberius was no Kantazoukenes. Not truly. Half his blood was "tainted" by a commoner’s womb, and in the eyes of the high-born, a bastard was the shame of the father.

So, what was he doing here?

He sat upon a weathered wooden stump, hunched over a fire that cackled with greedy, orange tongues, rising to challenge the oppressive darkness of the night.

He wondered that same question himself.

His eyes tracked the shifting, orange glow. He took a small stick and poked at the heart of the flame, smashing the burnt wood into glowing cinders. He watched with a grim, hollow awe as a swarm of sparks rose into the air, the fire wheezing as if protesting his intrusion.

The Court had wanted him to be a priest, draped in incense and prayer, deprived of his manhood. He had wanted to be a poet, seeking the dappled shade of olive trees and a long, quiet life at Claudia’s side.

In the end, no one had gotten what they desired. Fate, it seemed, was a cruel editor of men’s ambitions.

How long had it been since he had composed a single verse? How long since Lord Julian had even bothered to maintain the charade of searching for Claudia? Tiberius had long ago discarded the childish rebellions of his youth, the protests, the pouting, the petty defiance. All of that had died under the crushing weight of years.

Julian might have favored him, might even have cultivated him, but he did not treasure him. Tiberius knew that if he ever proved unsatisfactory or became a stone in the gears of Julian’s machinery, he would be discarded as easily as a broken quill. That was his condition, he was just a tool, nothing more.

It had taken ten years of agonizing patience. Even Tiberius was surprised by the old spymaster’s restraint. For a decade, Julian, the architect of the late Imperator’s secrets, had done nothing but bide his time, watching the world burn from the safety of the shadows.

Now, finally, they had taken the first step. Tiberius had been forced onto the board of a game he never wished to play, a game where the only outcomes were the throne or the block. There were no middle roads, no paths for poets, and no mercy for those who hesitated.

Their foundations were shaky, their position precarious. Of all the factions vying for the soul of the Empire, they were the weakest, no sworn lords, no ancestral lands, no army to command. They had only the dark. But now, with the secret maneuvers of the last few days, they finally had the first few steps of a staircase toward a proper power base.

He looked down at the parchment clutched in his hand, the ink still fresh enough to smudge. Julian had handed it to him with a flourish, as if the words upon it were supposed to mend the fractures in his soul.

Tiberius Kantazoukenes.

Had he ever truly desired that name? Did Julian think he did?

He was sure most bastards would kill for such an opportunity, one he had just been handed as easily as breathing.

He delved into the hollow spaces of his own heart and found the answer to be a resounding, bitter no. He had never wanted the name of the fire; he had wanted the peace of the hearth.

He wanted no crown, nor steel in hand, he wanted to compose poetry and let the dull but pleasant hum of life to fill him, until he died of old age with a boring put peaceful like behind.

He was not supposed to be fire.He had never been that.

Yet, he couldn’t help but feel a clinical, cold awe for the man who pulled his strings. Julian had somehow secured an authentic Imperial sigil, a feat of such daring theft that it made the road to counterfeiting a simple stroll.

This document was, in every legal sense, shit smeared on ink.As the last thing the man who bore his seed into his mother’s womb before going for another whore, would do before death, was legitimizing him.

But in the theater of power, a dubious claim was better than a silent one. It provided the thin veil of legitimacy Julian needed while he worked the shadows, just an excuse for the nobles to bend their knee easier to a bastard.

The old man was ecstatic. For ten years, Julian had tended to a garden of secrets, never truly knowing if anything would bloom. Now, the first black rose had opened. The keys to the Empire were, theoretically, in Tiberius’s hands.

I am to be Imperator.

The thought forced a breathless laugh from his throat. There was a dark, venomous joy in imagining the face of Valeria, that red whore who had once ruled the palace . To think that her husband’s bastard spawn, the boy she had tried to erase, would inherit a crown and march against her precious son?

He had walked a long road to reach this stump by the fire. From a damp cell in the palace dungeons, waiting for his stepmother’s mutes to finish him, to the gilded cage of a countryside mansion, and now to the precipice of a throne in a country tearing itself apart. It was an interesting road,one paved with the corpses of his early better intentions.

The snap of a dry twig behind him broke his reverie. Tiberius didn’t reach for a blade;every man in this camp was bought for by Julian, or in service to Landoff or Corbray, which were both in his camp.

She stepped into the circle of firelight, moving with a strange, ghostly grace, taking a seat on a nearby wooden chop. She didn’t look at him. Instead, she leaned her hands toward the flames as if her skin were made of ice and she wanted to see it become water.

The orange glow was merciless. It illuminated the dark, wet stains across her hands, her chest, and her stomach. The blood of her husband, Tiberius’s own half-brother, was already beginning to crust into a dark, rusty brown on her fine garments. She looked as though she had been dipped in a slaughterhouse, yet her eyes were as cold and still as a frozen lake.

She didn’t speak. She simply warmed the hands that had just ended a dynasty, watching the sparks dance with an indifference that chilled Tiberius more than the night air ever could.

It was only as the silence stretched between them that he truly registered her state. The firelight flickered over her exposed skin, highlighting how dangerously thin her garments were against the biting, nocturnal chill.

A dozen phrases bloomed in his mind, short condolences, kind platitudes, or perhaps an innuendo to bridge the distance. But Tiberius was no longer the boy who lived in poems; he was not stupid enough to believe she cared for the warmth of words. Words had never and would never save either of them.

Without a sound, he rose. He unclasped his own heavy travel cloak and draped it over her shoulders, its weight concealing the minimal, blood-stained silk she wore.

Even he felt that was cheeky as fuck. He would probably roll his eyes, if it were not that his new wife was soon be going to die of hypothermia.

He then knelt, feeding more wood to the fire until the orange glow roared back to life, pushing the shadows of the camp further into the trees.

"I am going to get something heavier from the tent," he said, his voice level as the ground. "Do you want to follow?"

Silence was the answer, for a long hollow moment where the only sound was the crackle of pine and the distant, rhythmic call of a night bird. Then, her icy exterior cracked, not with warmth, but like the jagged, violent fracturing of a frozen lake during the first thaw of spring. She pulled the cloak tight around her, burying her face in the fur collar as she leaned closer to the heat.

"He’s still there," she said. Her voice was small, stripped of the mockery and venom she had used on her husband.

She was like a rabbit.

Except that rabbit had killed a wolf.

"He will be there for a bit," Tiberius replied, his tone almost absentminded. He found himself wondering when Julian’s "cleaners" would move in to scrub the history from the floorboards.

He watched her for a second more. Every soul had its own way of enduring the impossible. Some in her position would have feasted on the sight of their vengeance, standing tall as they ascended the ruins of their old life. Others were simply too worn down to feel the victory, the exhaustion of the act leave them hollowed out. She was the latter.

"I’ll be back in a bit," he said, turning toward the pavilion.

He stepped toward the tent, his heart performing a slow, heavy thud in his chest. He intended to lay eyes on the brother he had not seen in fifteen years, the man who had been a god in his youth and a coward in his prime.

The spymaster would likely say his presence there was a complication, a risk to the narrative they were weaving. But Tiberius knew better. After all, the only thing stronger than death was curiosity.

He wanted to see the face of the man who had the world and threw it away, before the earth claimed them both.

He was, after all, still a poet at heart. Was it really too much to feed it one every death of an emperor?