Their knees were pressed into the damp green grass, the weight of their armored bodies crushing the stems into a fragrant, emerald pulp beneath them. Around Sandon, the air was filled with the sound of noblemen in mourning for their pride.

Voices rose in protest. Sandon had expected as much, nothing new in that.People like to think honor and pride more important than their lives, just as many would spit on them as soon as a blade was pressed on their neck.

This was the first time most of them had been made to taste the black mud of defeat, and it was a bitter, choking pill to swallow. They had held victory in their hands, a certainty of numbers, they had it in the sack and they still managed to let it slip through their fingers like dry sand.

He instead wasn’t as much disappointed; the rebels showed much more grit and courage, they deserved victory as much as anyone.

None, of course, had been more disappointed of that than Lord Ober. His final moments before the dark took him must have been a blur of confusion and haunting terror. To his credit, the man had indeed led the charge; Sandon would grant him that single, solitary honor. But only that, his was the fault if they had lost.

The first to lead, and the first to die. Should have remained home tending to his lemons...

Sandon had been a few ranks behind, but he had seen the end clearly. A rebel lance had found the gap in Ober’s guard, seeking the space he called a head. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

To the surprise to one of the surgeons the rebels lent them, who later found him, it was discovered that the Lemon Lord did indeed possess a brain, though it ended up plastered against the back of his yellow helmet. The lance had punched through the narrow eye-slit of his open-faced helm, shattering the skull and exiting the other side like some bloody needle passing through an apple.

It was fitting, Sandon mused, to call him the first true casualty of the civil war. The fat Prince on the throne in the south had tried to delegitimize the conflict, calling it a mere "rebellion." He was wrong. This war would not end in a whimper or a roar.

It was to last.

Merelao had seen to that. Denying his uncle the only chance he had for a quick end while he was still on the backfoot. Now this was truly a danger for his throne...

"Does the Lord of Epietoli possess no chivalry?" thundered the Lord of Gegiodupi. His chest, now stripped of the breastplate that had failed him, was a mess of bloodied bandages. He was one of the lucky ones. The Lord of LemonTree and his heir had fared much worse; they were currently being prepared for the crows.

It would be the youngest of the lord’s son set to inherit the land.Quite the jump in position for that one.

Sandon looked at the faces of his fellow prisoners. It was still difficult to believe. They had marched with a thousand spears, a wall of iron that should have flattened the rebel in its path, yet they had been broken by a force half their size.

It had taken only a single, focused charge for Merelao to destroy them.

He had pioneered the path to victory with his own blade, cutting through the royal vanguard with the terrifying ease of a hot knife through butter.

Half a dozen knights had fallen to Merelao’s hand alone. Sandon had been spared that "honor," a stroke of luck that saved his father the grief of a funeral, but he had caught a glimpse of the Mad Bull in the thick of the fray. It was magnificent.

It was a dance of slaughter.

Beset on all sides by royal steel, Merelao had fended them off with the effortless grace of a man scolding children. Parrying blow after blow as he wove into the slaughter, leaving behind nothing but a twitching carpet of meat to announce his presence.

Red cape a snapping banner of defiance, showing his men nothing but his back as he led them into the heart of the royal host. He was a whirlwind of damp grey steel and golden horns, a creature that seemed to feed on the chaos he created.

Where other man would have flinched at the unfolding violence , Merelao seemed to find naught but pure enjoyment, as it was clearly dictated by his laughter that rose well above the din of the fighting.

He like a laughing storm.

The remnants of their mounted van were soon swallowed whole by the footmen that had followed behind the Mad Bull; they had surrendered to the "peasants" in a display of mass dishonor.

Any other commander would have been satisfied with the destruction of the enemy’s chivalry and the capture of their high command. Not Merelao. With a bottomless appetite for the fight, he had taken his twenty surviving men, most of them bleeding from a dozen wound, and turned them against the panicked sea of footmen Lord Ober had left behind in his frantic, greedy charge. He had hunted them until the plains ran red.

Sandon leaned back against his bindings, his eyes tracing the silhouette of the castle-city of Ricorum. He had come here to take a head and win a city. Instead, he had found his death

Who knew, he thought with a dark smile tugging at his lips, that such a gem was hiding in the heart of Kakunia?Seems like princes were hiding in the grass here.

Though it appeared the notion was not easily shared by others.

"This is no way to treat prisoners of war!" Some minor lords who had hoped to find easy glory shrieked, his voice echoing off the silent stone of the castle, under the contempt-filled gaze of their captors. "We are men of birth! There are protocols! Ransoms! You cannot make us kneel in the dirt like common field hands!"

His protest acted like a spark in a dry thicket. Suddenly, the air was thick with the brayed outrages of the captured nobility.

"My house has served the principality for two hundred years!" another roared, struggling against the heavy hand of a rebel footman. "To be shackled by a peasant who smells of stable!Deplorable"

"Where is the Lord of Epietoli? Fetch him!" a third demanded, his face the colour of a bruised plum, his voice high like the screetch of a woman. "There is no honor in this! No chivalry!No-" He was shut up when two hands pressed him down and a dagger pressed against his neck.After that he was as meek as a mule and gentle as a pup.

They shifted and heaved, their expensive, mud-caked armor clattering as they tried to regain some semblance of the stature they had held only an hour before. They were angry, yes, but beneath the anger was a desperate, clawing confusion.

They had lived their entire lives believing that their blood was a shield, that a coat of arms was a contract of safety.

And as the cold reality of the mud seeped through their finery, a collective, chilling realization finally clicked behind the lords’ eyes.

They had spent their lives studying the histories of the south, and they knew the bloody math of civil war: there was no swifter way to paralyze a principality than to decapitate its nobility. To massacre the heads of the Great Houses was to invite a thousand smaller fires; it turned lands into graveyards and set brother against brother in a desperate scramble for inheritance.

It would be pure chaos.

And Merelao, as he had just proven was a man who thrived in it.

There is a singular, crystalline cruelty that erupts when a man believes he has been betrayed by his own kind. Some of the captives finally understood this as the first daggers were pressed, with a terrifying lightness, against noble throats.

The entitlement vanished, replaced by a hollow, gut-punching dread.

Sandon watched their faces fall with a weary, detached contempt. He didn’t beg. He didn’t struggle. He simply knelt.

Vae Victis. The Romelians of old had found the marrow of the truth in those words: Woe to the vanquished. To the victor go the spoils, and to the losers, naught but the long, cold sorrow of the defeated.

He shared their confusion regarding the end of this play, would it be the axe, the rope, or a slow rot in the dark?But he knew the answer was approaching. A figure stepped leisurely into the courtyard, his stride devoid of haste, moving with the terrifying calm of a predator in its own den, looking at the bones of his after-meal.

The victor of the field wore no armor now. His bare chest was partially obscured by a simple, loose tunic that did little to hide the fresh bandages swaddling his torso, white linen already blooming with the crimson flowers of his recent exertion. These would be but more scars added to a body already mapped with the history of his violence. Yet, his face remained untouched, an angelic visage that seemed immune to the grime of war.

His long, blonde hair was woven into a lone elegant braid that fell forward over his shoulder, resting against the tunic. His eyes didn’t burn with the manic heat of the charge; instead, they glowed with a quiet, devastating triumph. He was the very epitome of the Warrior’s craft. Sandon could have been told that the God of Wrath himself had descended to guide the rebel’s hand, and he would have believed it.

Wasn’t that, after all, the face of a vengeful angel?

Merelao came to a halt, his gaze sweeping over the kneeling men. He didn’t look at them with the coldness of a judge or the heat of a hater. He looked at them with the strange gaze of a father watching a runaway son crawl back through the mud to beg for a place at the hearth. It was a look of pity so deep it felt like an execution.

Silently, Merelao reached to his side. He held two swords; without a word, he let one slide from his grip.

The steel then clattered against the ground , hitting a small stone and making so sharp a sound that echoed through the sudden silence of the courtyard. Every eye, rebel and royalist alike, fell to the lone, naked blade lying in the dirt between the Prince and his prisoners.

Then, as one, they all looked up.

He stood there, a small smile in face and expectant gaze in his eyes, the sword was at his feet as he waited for someone to understand the rules of the game he sought to bring back.