It was a lesson that could not be taught in the sun-drenched libraries of Vinnacovi. All the years of studying scrolls, of making the right connections, of preparing for a seat at the high table of power, it all dissolved into the mud of the Zauern for what they were in front of a storm, nothing but dust.

There is a specific kind of horror in realizing you are not smart enough to stop your own death.

But beneath the terror, there was a cold, clinical surprise at how easy it had been.

This did not feel like a momentary lapse in judgment or a failed charge. It didn’t feel like a mistake at all. It felt inevitable, as if they were merely the final threads in a cloth a Weaver had been looming for months. The trap hadn’t just been set; it had been grown, nurtured by their own arrogance, until the snare was thick enough to hold him.

And somehow....it didn’t feel like it was their fault, as if they were destined to fall there.As if it were written up in the stars.

But he knew , deep down, that was not true. For as surprising and confusing it all was, nothing was written in stone.

With the knights slaughtered, a heavy, suffocating desperation settled over the infantry. On the far bank, the rest of the Kakunian host was shouting, their voices tinny and useless against the roar of the water. They had bowmen, but the mist that favored the Hounds acted as a shroud for the guilty. To fire into the grey veil was as likely to kill a brother as an enemy.

Retreat was a mismatched hope. If they backed into the river, the Hounds would simply put their heads down and push them into the freezing current, having fun killing those that retreated while throwing pebbles at the over-reaching hands breaking the water.

Still...perhaps a watery grave might have been a blessing compared to what was actually happening: the methodical, rhythmic butchery of the Yarzat way.

The Hounds did not close for the kill with steel. They practiced the "Vulture’s Circle."

They rode in close, the thunder of hooves stopping just short of the shield wall, a taunt designed to goad a desperate man into breaking formation to strike back. Every time a young footman gripped his spear with white knuckles, ready to lung, Ser Cleo’s voice would crack like a whip, holding the line together.

But as great and firm he was, still he was powerless to stop the bleeding.

The Hounds moved with a mechanical, haunting grace. They advanced in a blur of fur and iron, released a rain of javelins, and swerved away before a single Kakunian breath could be drawn. Latio had heard that in proper battles, a Hound carried three or four javelins. But here? Unbothered, unchallenged, and acting as hunters rather than soldiers, they had bundles of the black-shafted bolts strapped to their saddles and waists. There would be no reprieve.

Advance. Throw. Retreat.

Advance. Throw. Retreat.

It was a heartbeat of iron. After the fifth volley, the Kakunian soldiers stopped looking up. There was no point in watching the sky when the sky only held death. They huddled beneath their shields, their worlds reduced to the mud beneath their boots and the splintering wood above their heads.

The silence of the mist was broken only by the rhythmic thud-thud of the hooves and the wet shuck of iron finding meat. Every so often, a lone scream would tear through the air. A javelin would find the inch-wide gap between two shields, or the heavy, weighted point would punch straight through the linden wood, pinning a man’s arm to his own protection.

Cleo’s voice, once a booming clarion that could rally a failing line, had begun to fray somewhere during it. His shouts of encouragement grew sparser with every turn of the attack, his throat raw from the damp mist and the futility of his commands. The soldiers didn’t respond anymore. They simply stood, huddled together like cattle in a slaughter-pen, waiting for the iron to find a gap.

The man to Latio’s left was the first he watched die properly. He wasn’t a knight, just a man-at-arms with a pitted breastplate and a shield that had seen better years. A javelin, thrown with a high, looping arc that allowed it to drop deep into the rear of the square, bypassed the front-line defense entirely. It took the man in the soft meat of his belly.

He had died because of Latio. Had he held his shield over his own head, the iron would have bit into linden wood. Instead, he had held it high with three others to create a canopy of safety for the Prince’s son.

The man slumped into the mud, blood tangled around the black shaft of the javelin.

He didn’t die quickly.

He moaned into the dirt for minutes, it was more haunting than the rhythmic howls and laughter coming from the Hounds at the front. Latio could hear every hitch in the man’s breath, every scrape of his fingernails against the sodden earth as he tried to claw his way away from the pain.

Latio found himself trembling. He was cowering, he realised, perhaps he had even pissed himself.

A man of royal blood, a boy who had spent his life being told he was the future of Kakunia, was huddled like a frightened dog beneath a roof of wood and leather while better men died to keep the rain off him.

A white-hot rage began to simmer beneath his fear. This was how it was to end? All the delicate tapestries his father had woven, the alliances, the secret treaties, the decades of careful statecraft, all of it was ready to evaporate into the Oizen mist because his son was dying shitting himself on a foreign field.

He felt the sheer, staggering unfairness of it.

It was a foreign piece of wood, thrown by a foreign hand, in a foreign war he had no business fighting. If he were to die in the thunder of a proper charge, or in the defense of his father’s own walls, he could find the dignity in it. But not like this. Not pinned against a river by a pack of laughing wolves who didn’t even have the decency to look him in the eye while they killed him.

Latio raised his head, the crushing weight of the injustice finally snapping something inside him.

He shoved aside the frantic, grasping hands of the guards assigned to shield him, Waving off their protests with a snarl of royal command that finally sounded like it belonged to a man of his blood.

He made his way toward the front of the collapsing square, holding his own shield high as the javelins continued their rhythmic thud against the wood.

He found Ser Cleo sitting in the dirt, the iron tip of a broken javelin protruding from the heavy plate of his shoulder. The old knight didn’t look like a warrior anymore; he looked like a broken statue.

There was a hollow, defeated vacancy in his eyes as he stared through a gap in the shields. On the right flank, the Hounds had begun their sport. They were looping ropes around the ankles of the fallen Kakunian knights, dragging the armored corpses through the mire to "mop" the ground before their lines. They cheered and howled with a festive, carnivalesque cruelty as the once-noble plumes of the South were dragged through horse dung and gore.

Among those being desecrated, Latio saw the distinctive surcoat of Noros, the body bouncing limply over the stones of the bank.

"Ser," Latio called out, his voice cracking but firm.

With a heavy, rattling sigh, Cleo turned his head. "Young Ser..."

"I think this is to be our end," Latio said, the words surprisingly steady now that the decision had been made. "We both know the mercy we’ll find if we drop our steel. We saw the scalps and the dismembered limbs at the Bastion. We saw what these monsters do to those who surrender."

He looked at the Hounds, the very men who likely had a collection of ears and fingers drying in their saddlebags.

The older knight groaned as he forced himself to his feet, his massive frame towering a full head over Latio. Even wounded, Cleo was a mountain of a man, and the younger Prince had to look up into a face lined with decades of hard-won scars.

"I think it would be more honorable for us to at least die fighting," Latio whispered.

Cleo didn’t argue about honor; at this stage, what was its use? "They would likely spare you," the knight rasped, clutching his wounded shoulder. "A Prince of the blood makes a fine hostage for the Fox to trade.No doubt you would make a fine chip for his dealings with your father"

"They are allied with my cousin, Ser," Latio spat a hint of tremor in his voice "What do you think my end would be in Merelao’s hands? I would sooner have a sword in my grip and steel in my neck than rot in a dungeon or be offered as a burnt sacrifice to the Madman. If I must die, I will die as a Kakunian, not a prisoner."

Cleo looked at him for a long, silent moment. For the first time in years, a sad, genuine smile touched the old soldier’s lips. "You would have made a fine Prince, lad. A fine one indeed."

With that nod of consent Latio drew his sword fomr the scabbard, the ring of the steel sharp against the dull roar of the river.It felt strange in his grip as he realised it was the first time he had unsheated since he had travelled in this forsaken land. "Are we going to charge, then?"

"For death and honor, my Prince," Cleo replied, drawing his own blade that had not a speck of blood.

"For Kakunia, Ser." he corrected.

They both shared a smile as they braced themselves, Latio’s heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs. He gripped his shield, prepared for the sky to turn black once more with iron.

But the sky remained grey.

Suddenly, the relentless raining of javelins stopped. The thud-thud of the projectiles hitting the square ceased entirely. Across the field, the cacophony of the hounds, the taunting laughs, the predatory howls, and the cheers of the desecrators, was cut off as if it were a thread held by a knife.

The only thing remaining on that ground, except of course for the bodies, was the confusion of some dozens of men or so, that suddendly had some reprieve to finally breath.