Chapter 1189: A red day(7)
The Fox and the Bull charged forth, paw to hoof, into the heart of the grinding gears of wars.
There was a profound, terrible clarity in that shared slaughter. It was a communion more intimate than any diplomatic handshake, more honest than any communal plan they had ever conducted against their shared enemy.
And in the red mist of the field, the two men truly understood one another.
No words were needed; no conversation was held except that of the eyes as they partook in a dance that had begun with one, expanded to two, and now consumed ten thousand in its aftermath.
They fought for different reasons, anchored by a mutual mistrust, yet in that frozen pocket of time, the world was laid bare. They felt like gods as they became the harvesters of men.
Alpheo was neither as fast nor as strong as the golden phantom beside him,he was slower , less skiled and weaker, but he forced his broken body to keep pace, the best he could.
’’The only brave thing to do in front of death is laugh’’Egil had once said. And so Alpheo laughed, he laughed when he dodged and laughed when he killed.
He laughed at everything that came his way.
Just as he did now when he cleaved through the head of a poor footman, his blade shearing through jaw and teeth, entering one cheek and exiting the other in a spray of bone. He parried a strike with his sword, caught another on the obsidian plate of his forearm, and claimed a third life with a lunging thrust that sent a man to the hell awaiting him, leaving the flank clear for his new friend to sweep in.
And sweep in he did.
The Mad Bull was a force of nature that stopped for nothing, and the Fox followed in his wake like a tide dressed in sin and death. Men parted before them, some dying, some wounded, many simply fleeing the raw, concentrated rage of the two men. Alpheo knew he was less skilled, less brave, less everything but mind, but mind mattered little in the business of killing.
An armored man-at-arms was the next to fall. The soldier thrusted a shortsword at Alpheo’s face; the Prince knocked the blade aside with a ring clang and buried his own steel in the man’s neck, wrenching it free by the side letting the man’s neck look like the whitered stem of a flower. A flower of blooming crimon.
A flash of gold danced across his vision and he saw the Mad Bull, as if mocking Alpheo’s fatigue, throw himself into a desperate rally of Oizenian infantry, uncaring of numbers or wound sustained.
Horns thundered around them.
’’Drown them in the mud!’’ The prince shouted spirited by some ill-birthed-demon. ’’ We save Yarzat!We save Kakunia!’’ Cheers rang around as the field littered itself with blood.
Maybe they did not even believe it themselves, and would have cheered even if he sang of whores or trees.So loud was the bloodlust that no cry could ever reach them.
He did not know when the shift happened, but the hunters had become the prey. The two figures propping up the entire battle’s effort did not stop to consider the change. A spear lunged crudely at Alpheo’s midsection; he stepped into the vacuum of the strike, letting the wood pass by as the man overstepped, losing his balance in the muck.
The prince minded his step this time, evading a cold cadaver on his way as he commanded longsword down like a headsman’s axe, burying itself in the man’s nape. The soldier collapsed, his limbs going limp as sweet death reached down.
Not for me this time, Alpheo thought with a sick smile that would have been the pride of Egil as he sent another her merry way.
More rushed him. He was not as terrifying as the Kakunian Bastard; where men fled from the Bull, they swarmed the Fox, sensing a more mortal prey, an overcomable wall.
That , noticebly , stung him.
"The Prince!" someone shrieked, cursed the one that did with death by a thousands needle, as Alpheo ducked a mace-blow and tore out another bastard’s throat with a backhand swing. "That’s the fucking prince of Yarzat! He is alone! Kill him!Kill him!"
And they tried.
An axe screeched against his blade, slipping through a failed parry he had attempted and shearing a chunk from his pauldron as it were a block of cheese, before drifting away in the air with that missed opportunity he would forever rue.
"Kill the Prince! He is half-dead already!" Another voice added both in mind and in body.
Half-dead or not, Alpheo watched as the man who shouted was suddenly run through, not by Merelao, nor by one of his madman, but, that could not be...
A ghost?Nay. It was not.
He could have went to the knees in prayer when he saw a streak of black and white appear on that mortal field.
The prodigal sons had returned.
Black and white. Never he felt half as happy as in the moment he grasped at that colours.
The hues permitted only to one force accompanying the prince, and he felt as life was breathed upon him when he behold them once more.
He looked around, finally taking in the results of his unnoticed labor.
He had advanced so much that he had met with his own legions, the pockets of fighters that had been sandwiched between the two armies being broken like burnt reeds upon the ground.
He had not expected to see his Legions again, yet here they were, men who had washed themselves in the flames of a summoned hell and come back begging for more. They were run down, their armor dented and caked in a paste of ash and gore, but at the sight of the silver crown on his helm, their exhausted eyes ignited with a terrifying, red fever that never the prince had beheld in them from so close.
A part of him, the coward that lived in every men came back alive, like a fire fed fuel, whispered that it was time to fall back into the safety of the lines.That he had done enough, that he wounded and tired and deserved more rest than any other.
But that was the voice that always fished for the weakness in his soul. The one if listened would see him rot.
There was only one way to silence it.
Giving himself no other choice.
He turned to face the surging tide of his soldiers. He must have looked a ruin, so caked in filth that many did not recognize him until he found his voice.He could see a certain man perhaps of the first of the Fourth go wide eye when his eyes fell on his monarch.
The first of man.
His eyes became wide as orange at what he did next.
"MEN OF YARZAT!" he clamored, raising a sword bathed in the blood of countless foes.So light in his grasp and yet so heavy in his weight.
A spear cluttered against his neck, stopped by the iron of his gorget. Alpheo whirled, irked by the interruption of his moment, and delivered him death with a single breath.
As he did, the devouring conflagration of black and white across the field took more notice of him.
Whispers and roars mingled, a thousand voices rising into a singular epithet: The Prince. The Prince is alive.
Gods he would never get tired of that title.
Steel clashed with steel, arrows whistled above, and yet thousands as if seduced by some siren’s voice all gazed upon him.The battle forgotten as the prince was found anew.
"I have placed my foot in this place and shed my blood upon it!" Alpheo’s voice cracked like a whip over the din.The winds howling, men dying, and the prince shouting above it all. "I declare this land mine! Kill the unwelcome dogs! Your Prince bids you slaughter! Haul their bodies, shears their limbs! No pity! No remorse! No fear!"
He knocked away a spear with a clashing swing and set the tone for the fighting.It was dangerous to make speech in the midst of a killing field, but as his back turned to his men, he saw the result of that self-claimed-danger.
’’NO PITY!THE PRINCE’S LIVES!’’
’’KILL THE CUNTS"
’’YARZAT!ALL HAIL YARZAT’’
Egil should have been alive to see this. He realised at once.
For as more and more killers realized their Prince, the man they had mourned as a ghost,had returned like a vengeful angel sent by the gods they all fell into a fever of absolute madness.
The Yarzat line, which had held against unimaginable odds through sheer, bloody-minded grit, finally exploded forward. The Prince did not let the moment go to waste; he pointed his blade the only way his body would allow: toward the horizon, into the bleeding heart of a dying sun.
That is where they ought to go.
’’WITH ME!’’ The prince called ’’FIGHT WITH ME! DIE WITH ME! LIVE WITH ME!ALL AND ONE. ONE AND ALL!"
"ONWARD! WITH THE PRINCE!" Cries erupted from a thousand raw throats, a sound that shook the very foundation of the valley. "FOR THE FOX! FOR YARZAT! NO MERCY!"
The exhausted became tireless. The wounded became giants. They followed the black-armored shadow and the laughing golden madman, charging into the final, crimson embrace of the day.
So iron-willed was their advance that a river would have shattered against them. Yet, as Alpheo unleashed their rage, he found he could no longer contain his own. His eyes locked onto a single, shimmering target amidst the smoke, the banner he had cursed with every breath since the first horn blew.
The Golden Sun of that craven bastard.
Like an avalanche of stone thundering down a parched mountain, crashing through the thick forest and splintering everything in its path, Alpheo stormed across the field. He moved with a riotous, crushing confusion, driving all who stood before him down to the worms.
Thrusts!Parries! Swords and maces!Spars rang in the air as black met with gray and then red. Again and Again.
All went aiming for the prince’s head, and all failed in their mission.
He could not direct his force’s madness nor could he do so to his own.
He felt his rage riding wild within him, a dark heat that numbed him to fear, to compassion, and to reason alike. The more he killed, the more he wished to murder.
He let out a shout, mindless roar that lacked both mercy and limit, his gaze fixed solely on that distant banner signaling the presence of the royal party of Oizen.
He was close, he realised as that sun shone in that velvet banner soon to fall under the falcon, I shall not let him live, this time.
So close to his victory, and yet, so distant to his craved satisfaction.
His body, which moments ago had been a breath away from collapse, ignited with a newfound, terrifying industry. He was a machine of war rebuilt in the furnace of hate, nurtured in the bowels of an hard world only to come out like the vengeful natural catastrophe men feared, worshiped and cried upon.
With the only difference that this time, he had been called upon and summoned. Woe to those that did.
And finally, like a bull shown the red, the Prince charged toward the final line of that closing battle.
Numbed to all that may have abated his ire.Woe to the fools that crossed him.
