As the rising sun bled through the tattered grey clouds, the Prince of Yarzat surveyed the field with the hollow, adamant stare of a hound that had tracked its prey to a cliff’s edge only to find the trail gone cold.

He searched for one of that ten thousand.

Where is he? Where is that bastard? His eyes went everywhere, going from the horizon now without banner to the men broken in the mud. Hopefully he was dead and forgotten in all that chaos. If the gods were good.

But people would say they seldom were.

He had payed his own tithe in blood, so where was the Crownless Prince, he had a sword with his name.

His head swam as the answer eluded him, the more he searched , the more dizziness got hold of him. Without the rhythmic percussion of steel on steel to anchor him, the exhaustion of the day finally crashed down. His visor felt like a leaden mask, hot and stuffy with his own recycled breath. The adrenaline, which had acted as a phantom spine for hours, had finally run dry, leaving him brittle like a coconut without its milk.

Completely leeched of all energy he almost passed out.By some miracles he did not.

Perhaps the desire of revenge.

His eyes drifted over the wreckage of his command. The Legions were a ruin of their former discipline; he saw men draped in the rugged wolf pelts mingling with the heavy, full-visored plate-wearers of the Third. The Fourth and the First were stirred together like a messy cake in a blender.

They were all tired, happy but extremely exhausted.

They had won, yes, but the victory had cost them a lot.The prince could see it in their numbers.

The enemy’s jewel, the heavy cavalry that had nearly shattered the Yarzat center, lay crushed in the silt. Those knights were now either cooling meat, deserters vanishing into the horizon, or prisoners huddled in the mud, waiting to see if their names carried enough gold to forestall the axe.

But in the time they fought, they killed just as many.

In some other case Alpheo would have been glad of the victory, perhaps in the day to come he would, but right now?

All Alpheo felt was the frustration of the missed opportunity. His men were on foot, their mounts unavailable , their energy spent. They had broken the enemy’s body, but they lacked the legs to chase down the head.

What a disappointment...though clearly not all shared the opinion.

"That was magnificent!"

Alpheo turned toward the gaunty voice. The movement was too sharp; the world tilted dangerously, and for a terrifying second, he thought he might simply tip over into the muck.

The ranks of the Yarzat line parted like a black sea, and the man who had shared his madness stepped forward.

It was obscene how jolly Merelao appeared. Amidst the flies and the filth, he looked as though he had just stepped out of a spring garden rather than a slaughterhouse. Alpheo felt a spike of envy. He was a man held together by grit and dented iron, yet his ally was the very epithet of vitality.

"How tiresome my life was before this moment! Before you!Before this!Before us!" Merelao cried, his voice crystalline and vibrant. The suspicion he had harbored for Alpheo before the first horn blew had evaporated, replaced by a manic affection, like one might have for a brother thought long lost.

"Many call me a monster, a madman, a creature of the dark, but are those words not born of pure, pedestrian frustration?" Merelao spread his arms, the gold of his breastplate catching the sun. "Never have I felt more alive, more truly kind, than I do now. Think of it! To so many who were drowning in their own fear, I have gifted the ultimate mercy: sleep, and an honorable end. I have been a midwife to their souls!May the gods judge them justly for my sword knew no name, nor face.!"

He threw back his head and laughed, a sound so high and genuinely happy that it made Alpheo’s skin crawl.

Such a sweet voice for such a dark soul, the Prince thought.

"I had such expectations of you when we first met," Merelao continued, stepping closer until the gore on his horns was inches from Alpheo’s visor.The severed head of the lord of Aragustovane still swaying beneath him.

"I have been so often disappointed by the ’great’ men of this world that should be my peers, but you? By the Gods, by the sky, and by the heavy earth beneath us! What a laurel you have seized! Lightbringer himself is shunned by the radiance you have brought into my life this day.

Twenty-two years I have drawn breath, and this last hours has been packed with so much entertainment that I could grow old and wrinkled this very instant, dying with a wink and a smile instead of a hollow sigh."

He leaned in, his eyes shimmering with a zeal that suggested he might never sleep again.

"The two Horned Princes, they shall call us. We didn’t just fight a battle; we composed a symphony. We have written our names in the mud of this valley so deeply that the rain of a thousand years will not wash them away.They’ll sung of us!

Look at them!" He gestured vaguely toward the retreating remnants of the Oizenian host. "They came to shear the Fox, but they found a Bull waiting in the tall grass. Tell me, does it not taste like nectar? Does the air not smell of absolute, unadulterated freedom?"

No, it didn’t taste like nectar. All Alpheo smelled was shit and sweat. The latter was certainly his own; the former, may have been but he was too tired to distinguish from the thousand other scents of the dead.

Still, the Kakunian seemed amused enough, and Alpheo was content to let him play the poet. He was not ready to have a man like Merelao as an enemy , not today, perhaps not ever. If there was one truth nailed into Alpheo’s stubborn head after this carnage, it was that he needed strong friends.

It was clear now that Merelao did not just lead men; he summoned them. He was a magnet for every sell-sword, every mercenary hungry for land, and every wandering knight looking for a cause to die for. The South was littered with such men, and by tomorrow, they would all be looking toward the Bull.

Alpheo wondered, with a cold clinicality, how long it would be before that golden sword was pointed at his own throat instead of his enemies’.

He opened his mouth to offer a weary answer, but the words were stolen by a commotion behind him. The sea of soldiers parted again, pushed aside by a moving mountain of steel.Twice by now they did so.

Under different circumstances, seeing such a juggernaut bearing down on him would have made Alpheo’s heart fail, but he stood his ground as the titan emerged.And why would he not?

It was Jarza.

Though provided, he looked as if he had been chewed up and spat out by a god of iron.

His armor was a map of the day’s brutality, deeply dented, caked in drying mire, and stained a deep, bruised crimson. His cloak was a tattered rag, and his eyes, usually so sharp and full of tactical fire, looked hollowed out by the sheer weight of the hours.Perhaps the prince himself looked the very same.

Still, he felt a surge of genuine warmth, a rare spark of humanity in the grey ash of his spirit. He began to step forward, his arms opening in a weary, instinctive gesture to embrace the man who he did not know until then if he were dead. He wanted to clasp Jarza’s shoulder, to feel the solid reality of a friend who had survived the impossible.

But as their eyes met, Jarza’s expression didn’t soften with relief as Alpheo may have hoped. It shattered. The Legate looked at Alpheo and instead paled.

Before he could close the distance, Jarza spun away. He didn’t reach for the Prince. Instead, he lunged toward a common soldier sitting in the mud nearby, he shook him by the shoulder as if he were a debtor of his.

"MEDIC!" Jarza roared, his voice cracking with a raw, terrifying urgency that made the nearby soldiers jump. "GET A MEDIC OVER HERE! NOW! MOVE, YOU SONS OF BITCHES, MOVE!"

Jarza turned back to Alpheo, his massive hands reaching out to grip the Prince’s shoulders. He held him with a strange, combination of frantic strength and terrified softness, his eyes fixed on a point just above where Alpheo’s brow would be, rather than meeting his gaze through the cracked visor.

"How do you feel? We thought you lost... the men said you fell, Vrosk—"

"I—" Alpheo tried to answer, but the word died in a jagged, dry wheeze. He hadn’t realized how truly ravaged his throat was until he tried to use it. The air felt like ground glass in his lungs.

The sound did nothing to calm Jarza. If anything, the Legate’s face paled further beneath the grime.

"Wh-cough... what is going on?" Alpheo managed to rasp, feebly trying to shove his friend’s heavy arms away. He felt like a child being fussed over by a panicked nurse.

He hated that. He was a prince and he had just won a great victory. He needed no babysitting.

"It would seem to me you are surrounded by midwives and clerics," Merelao’s voice drifted in, silky and unimpressed. He stepped closer, the gore on his horns catching the pale sun. "Can’t you see your Prince is well? I assure you, he has fought at my side for half the slaughter. Were he wounded he would have dropped dead midway.

He is more alive than a quarter of the meat on this field. Your Fox is a lion when the mood takes him."

Jarza glanced at the Kakunian for a fraction of a second, his look suggesting he found the man to be a cockroach in desperate need of a heavy heel. He pointedly ignored him except for a snort that he made sure to let him see, before returning his frantic focus to Alpheo.

"How do you feel?" Jarza repeated.

"I feel... all right. Actually, no. I feel fucked up. But I am alive." Alpheo wheezed between coughs, each syllable a fresh insult to his sour, aching throat.It felt like nails were scraping inside of him "I’ll take the quiet to say... I am happy to see you haven’t found a grave yet.Well met my friend"

"You are not all right!" Jarza barked, his hands tightening. His eyes still refused to meet Alpheo’s; they were locked with a horrific intensity on the Prince’s helmet.

"What are you talk—"

"There is a lance-tip sticking through your head!" Jarza’s voice rose to a panicked roar. He turned back toward the chaotic lines, his face contorted. "Where the fuck is the medic? THE PRINCE IS WOUNDED! GET A DAMN MEDIC OVER HERE. NOW!"

Alpheo froze. Dazzled and disoriented, he slowly raised a heavy, mud-caked gauntlet to his face. His fingers searched the deformed cage of his visor until they hit something hard, splintered, and unmistakably wooden.

Oh.

It seemed that in the end that bastard on horse had truly hit the target.

Did I carry that throughout the battle?That explained many things actually....

Perhaps with the realization of the mind came that of the body, as a sudden, white-hot heat began to bloom across the side of his face.

The numbness of the adrenaline had long retreated, leaving a raging fire in its wake, a fire that had however burnt everything already.

Against Jarza’s frantic admonitions to stay still and the Kakunian’s actual beginnings of worry, Alpheo reached for the buckles of his gorget and wrenched the helmet free.He had to put quite some force for that, perhaps his arms were too tired.

He had suddendly felt stuffed, to stuffed to even breath.

The cool air hit his skin like a slap. He dropped the dented obsidian helm into the mud. and took greedy breaths.

One look from the legate and it appared as if he had aged decades in a single heartbeat. His mouth hung open, his breath hitching in a silent sob of horror. Even Merelao, who was responsible for half of the day’s madness, felt his celebratory smile falter and fade away.

Both of them had their eyes on the same visage.

Alpheo looked at them, his vision beginning to blur at the edges. He saw the way they were staring at the side of his head.

It chilled him more than the wind.

"What?" Alpheo rasped, his voice barely a whisper. "What is it?"

In that very instant, something made a soft and wet sound as if to answer at him.

A heavy plop, against the dirt below.

All three men looked down at the mud.

The kakunian, Arlanian and Romeliand looked at the same thing as there, lying flat and unmistakably pale against the black slurry, was the upper part of what Alpheo immediately recognised as a lone human ear, his ear.

The field went silent, and for Alpheo, the light of the sun finally went out.

The last thing he saw ,as his mind gave way to the demand his body had been making for hours, was nothing but that pale piece of meat straying away from where it should have been.