Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king-Chapter 960: Throw of a dice(4)

"Wow, she really took her time with you brother, didn’t she?" Tiberius muttered, his voice a low, melodic rasp in the stillness of the pavilion.

He stepped closer to the heap of meat and silk that had once been his brother, the Golden Prince, the heir to a leviathan. If it weren’t for the fine, stubborn set of the chin, the unmistakable Kantazoukenes bone structure, he would have struggled to recognize the man at all. He had heard rumors of Mavius’s decline, the bloating of his spirit and the sagging of his resolve, but he hadn’t expected the physical reality to be quite so... grotesque.

Apparently, the years of shared misery with Eloir had not fostered familiarity; they had fostered a surgical, intimate knowledge of where it hurt most to be cut.

Tiberius felt his lower cheeks tighten, a reflexive wince as his gaze traveled further down his brother’s body. He took in the final, visceral parting gift of the marriage.

Wasn’t he a lucky man?The owner of that canvas was to be his sweet half...

"They say nothing burns hotter than a woman’s scorn. I figured you would have laughed at such a cliché ,though you were not much for reading I guess...." Tiberius said, leaning over the bed. He reached out and flicked his brother’s cold nose with a finger, "Smile, oh brother! The day of ignominy is over! I shall take your seat now..."

He looked down into the wide, glassy eyes, staring into the abyss of the pupils. He wondered how long Mavius had been conscious through the ordeal. Had he felt the pin enter? Had he seen the face of his wife as she watched the light leave him? He must have died in a frantic, gurgling mix of pain and absolute terror.

The realization sobered him, cooling the fire in his blood. He had hoped revenge would taste like aged wine; instead, it tasted like copper and old dust. He felt suddenly, embarrassingly childish. The high theater of fratricide felt remarkably small when the victim was just a bag of cooling flesh. 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝙚𝙬𝓮𝙗𝒏𝙤𝒗𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝒐𝓶

He did the only decent thing a man could do for an indecent brother: he reached down and swept his palm over the staring eyes, forcing the lids shut.

"Off to the void you go, you old devil of mine,gone to the land of dreams while we trudge on the weary of living" he whispered.

With a grunt of effort, he shoved the body off the blood-soaked fur blanket, hearing the heavy thud as the man who would be Emperor hit the rug. Tiberius turned away toward the exit, his eyes catching the glint of crystal on a side table. He grabbed a cup and a heavy decanter of..... pulling the stopper and taking a deep, searching sniff.

He smiled. A genuine, appreciative curve of the lips.

"The golden ambrosia of Yarzat," he murmured, the scent of summer fruit and scorched earth filling his nostrils. "Even at the end, brother, you truly had refined tastes.A pleasant irony really."

He walked out of the tent, leaving behind a scene that would have made a common butcher blush, and stepped back out into the biting, honest cold of late November.

The fleeting smile Tiberius wore vanished, replaced by a somber, clinical gravity as he took a measure of the woman before him. She looked less like a queen and more like a statue carved from salt and sorrow, still and unmovable against the winds.

He walked toward her, the decanter swinging at his side, and carefully adjusted the heavy fur cloak around her still figure. He tucked the edges in, then, with the steady hand of a man who had poured a thousand libations in his dreams, he tilted the carafe and extended a cup filled to the brim.

She looked at the golden wine, then up at him, her eyes tracking the movement of his throat.

"You look like you could go for a drink," he offered simply.

She didn’t thank him. She took the cup and tilted her head back, taking heavy, greedy gulps. The golden liquid surged down her throat, some of it escaping to cut a pale, clean path through the drying blood on her chin, blood that was a thick, biological twin to his own.

After a few seconds, she finished the draught and held the cup out expectantly. Tiberius felt like a servant in his own shadow as he filled it once more.

"You did quite the work over there," he remarked, gesturing vaguely toward the pavilion.

"Less than he deserved, more than I ever dared hope," she shot back, her tone as sharp as the pin she’d used. She turned her gaze on him, scanning his face as if looking for a familiar rot. "Cursed with appalling company, it seems. The gods have a twisted sense of humor, one brother for the other."

"You barely know me," Tiberius protested, though he lacked the fervor to make it a real argument.

"And yet you remind me too much of myself. I do not need to wonder what Julian promised you; I only wonder if they will bother to kill you or simply cast you aside once your use is finished."

"Probably both," Tiberius said, shrugging his shoulders with a detached nonchalance. "We live in a time without code or custom. Law is a ghost, and our days are dictated by a refined sort of barbarity’’

’’If a bastard is made to believe he can inherit an Empire, perhaps we deserve the chaos that follows."

He took no offense at her barbs; he knew she was merely projecting her own hollowed-out soul onto him. He raised the carafe again, and this time she extended the cup before he even asked.

"Why didn’t you come with me into the tent?" he asked quietly.

The silence lingered.

"I told you," she whispered. "He was there."

"Exactly where you left him. That was the tale of your rise, was it not? Your rebirth. What sort of tale is it if you are ashamed of the ending you wrote?"

"I am not ashamed," she hissed. For a fleeting second, her face mirrored the mask of fury that Mavius must have seen in that bed.

He felt a pang of fear.

"You are. Why else would you tremble at facing the thing you made of him? You should be proud. You faced the sun and put it out. You took what was owed to you with your own two hands. You should hold your head high, yet here you sit, looking like a wet dog left out in the rain."

She didn’t scream. She didn’t weep.She didn’t act as any other woman of refined manner would, instead, she leaned forward and spat directly into his eye.

"I always hated poetic fools. Hypocritical dreamer them all" she said, before taking another calm, measured sip from her cup.

Tiberius didn’t flinch. He reached into a pocket, produced a silk cloth, and slowly wiped the spit from his face. "All men need something to go mad with. Mavius did so by lusting for a life he couldn’t lead, a thrill he couldn’t sustain, and in his final act, a throne made of rotting wood."

"And you?" she asked, her eyes narrowing as she leaned in, the firelight catching the gold of her cup. "What? You don’t crave the purple? You don’t want the world to bow?Don’t want for the little bastard to see those that made him cry weep on their own?You desire it, don’t you?"

"I crave the same thing I did eleven years ago when I was locked in a dungeon that smelled of my own filth. I craved it when I crawled through the sewers of the capital for my freedom. The throne? That isn’t the prize. I believed once it was Lord Julian’s goal. Now, I think even he is too small for what is coming."

That gave her pause. She assumed a thoughtful, predatory look, her head tilting to the side. The wine was clearly beginning to do its work, softening the edges of her shock and sharpening her curiosity.

"Well then" she began this time putting all her attention on him. "If it isn’t the power, and it isn’t the crown... what is it you truly desire?"

"And I should tell you because?I barely know you."

"Because I am asking," she replied, her voice a low, jagged rasp, "and because we are the only two people in this camp who know exactly what color the Emperor’s blood is when it hits the floor. And," she leaned in, the firelight dancing in her dilated pupils, "we both know the one who made it so."

Tiberius looked at her and felt the weight of her unspoken threat.

The image of his brother’s mangled remains flashed through his mind, and he fought back a visceral shiver that had nothing to do with the icy wind.

"I would normally be inclined to give no heed to such a demand," he said, his voice dropping into the cadence of a bard "But I suppose I could make a singular exception for a night as dark as this. Sharpen your ears, then, and uncloud your mind, for I shall say this only once."

He leaned closer, the heat of the fire between them. "I am searching for the sun of my youth."

Eloir blinked, her head swaying slightly from the wine and the exhaustion. She searched his face for a punchline, a bit of political jargon, or a hidden meaning, but found only the earnest, tragic clarity of a poet.

"What does that even mean?" she asked, her voice cracking with a mixture of confusion and burgeoning irritation. " Is that a place? A woman? ’’

Tiberius did not answer. He simply raised two fingers to his mouth and mimicked the act of threading his lips closed.

"Gods, you are dull," she snapped, her head drooping as the adrenaline finally deserted her. She sounded annoyed, but beneath it lay a profound, soul-deep weariness. She pulled his cloak tighter around her, the fur shielding a woman who had just murdered her husband to avenge a son the world had already forgotten.

Tiberius watched her. He watched the way her shoulders finally slumped, the way her eyes lost their predatory gleam and became merely the eyes of a tired, broken mother. He felt a sudden, familiar ache in his fingertips, a phantom itch he had suppressed for a decade.

For the first time in years, the bastard son of the War Emperor didn’t want to close his eyes at the word. He wanted to capture the exact shade of orange the fire cast upon her blood-dusted cheek.