Chapter 1346: Long lost brothers(4)

Alpheo Avelon-isha, the soldier of fortune who had carved his way to a crown, victor of the Ford, feller of Herculia and Oizen, skulked back in the dry grass, desperately searching for the words to say next.

Beside him, Jarza remained beautifully silent, patiently waiting for his friend to find his composure. The Legate shifted his weight, his heavy iron armor rattling and clinking as he straightened his back against the chill.

Somewhere in the vast, gray distance, a falcon screeched. It was piercing and loud, perhaps a roar of triumph for a fresh kill, or perhaps merely the territorial instinct of a beast declaring its dominion over the valley. It carried all the raw, solitary vigor of the king of the sky. In Yarzat, there were no eagles; the undisputed lords of the air were the falcons.

Now wasn’t that ironic? Alpheo mused bitterly. Almost divinely ordained, some might say. The land of the falcon ruled by a scavenger who had climbed too high.

Strangely, the entire meadow seemed to fall quiet to that screech.

Quiet. That was a rare, almost forgotten word in the capital, where more than thirty thousand souls resided and a ceaseless tide of people moved in a loud, chaotic frolic. And yet, peace had descended. With their bellies full of hot mutton and barley, the Uthahia did something they had not dared to do in a long, long time.

They rested.

Even the children, whom one would normally expect to run wild and play under the intoxicating light of their newfound freedom, simply collapsed in the grass, lazing lazily beneath the winter sun. Alpheo watched them with a quiet envy. They had finally found their peace, while he had just violently spurned his.

His soldier’s instinct screamed at him to simply stand, dust off his breeches, and walk back to the safety of the court. He could pretend he had never spoken. He could bury the dreams, the desperation, the madness of revealing his own mind whose pillars were made of glass.

But Alpheo knew his instincts weren’t worth a runny shit when it came to his soul. With a deep, shuddering breath, the truth finally began to bubble past his lips.

"I have seen him once more," he began. The first words felt like dragging gravel through his throat, but once the dam cracked, the river rushed out. "Egil. I mean. I have seen him again, Jarza."

He saw the immediate change in the Legate’s eyes. Jarza’s jaw tightened, and it clearly took a monumental effort of will for the bull-shouldered soldier not to instantly swarm his King with a barrage of questions. Alpheo had chosen his confidant well; of everyone in the realm, Jarza was the least likely to laugh in his face or whisper of a king losing his mind.

Reining in his curiosity, the Legate simply locked eyes with Alpheo, asking a single, quiet question. "You mean... after the dirt took him?"

The King nodded, a grim, self-deprecating smile brushing his lips. "I know how mad it sounds."

"That is neither what I said, nor what I thought," Jarza replied flatly.

"Well... it is what any sensible man would think. But you’ve always been a bit of an exception."

"Why would I think you’re lying to me?" Jarza grunted, leaning in. "I know you don’t have the stomach to lie about this. Not about him. If you say you saw him, Alpheo, then either his ghost was there, or you truly believe it was. That is enough for me."

The words acted like a soothing balm, settling the frantic rattling in Alpheo’s chest more than he could ever put into words. To not be labeled a madman by his oldest brother-in-arms was a mercy he hadn’t realized he needed.

"So..." Jarza continued, his voice dropping to a low murmur. "Was it in a dream?"

"I’d say so... though my eyes were wide open. I wasn’t sleeping."

"An apparition, then!" Jarza said, his voice rising with a sudden, booming excitement that made Alpheo wince.It was as if he were the one that witnessed the miracle "The holy books of the Father Protector are swarming with them and so it that of the Weaver. How did he come to you? Was there a blinding, heavenly light? Did the clouds part? Was he alone?"

"One at a time, you old fool," Alpheo hissed, raising a hand to cut off the barrage. "It was during the battle at the Ford. In the thick of the blood and the screaming. Hardly a godly, temple-like setting, I’d say."

Jarza paused, a slow, grim smile spreading across his weathered face. "Somehow... that is fitting for Egil."

"It was," Alpheo agreed softly. Battlefield had always been his true home.He closed his eyes, and the memories of the Ford came rushing back, as vivid and terrifying as the day they were forged.

"It was during the second charge of the knights," Alpheo whispered, his breath suddenly turning shallow and erratic, his face growing incredibly serious. "I was in the frontline, as I’m sure you gathered from the state of myself afterward. We had underestimated them, Jarza. We truly had. We didn’t think those heavy bastards would cleave right through their own retreating infantry just to reach our line. That was our mistake, thinking there were rivers they wouldn’t swim across for a principle’s sake."

He swallowed hard, his hand instinctively drifting to the hilt of his sword. "The chaos was absolute and everywhere. Vrosk grabbed me by the collar and dragged me back, trying to shove me into a ring of our own men to keep the cavalry from running me down. But the formation shattered. It was madness made manifest. Before I could even understand my surroundings, before I could tell right from left or up from down, I was on my knees in the red mud."

Alpheo looked up at Jarza "I raised my eyes, and I stood face-to-face with my own death. A lance was coming straight for my throat. And it was in that exact heartbeat... you know the rest I think. But what most don’t know is that it was then in the mud as I lost my senses that I saw him.

Well...a great deal of things, actually," Alpheo said, his voice dropping to a gravelly whisper. "He spoke just like himself, with all his bitter irony and those angry, jerking words of his. I wanted to punch his jaw just as much as I did when he still drew breath." His lips curved up into a faint, fleeting smile. "For a long time, I tried to convince myself it was just a dying man’s fantasy. My mind playing cruel games as the cold took me. But it wasn’t. The longer I stood in that place, the more I felt there was something... further than me. I have no other way to put it, Jarza. It was far beyond the edges of my own thoughts."

"Did something else happen?"

The King searched the empty air for his words, his hands tightening. "I dreamed."

"You dreamed? Inside a dream?"

Alpheo’s cheeks went flush. "I had visions, then! Put it however you must, but I saw things. I saw a sky choked with ash, where the sun was nothing but a bleeding ember. I saw visions of fire and of cold, and then of cold and of fire.

Two opposing terrors, entirely different, yet both dealing in the exact same wares of ruin. I saw a silent, frozen world where the ice did not melt, and a burning waste where the earth itself screamed. I saw a mountain of ash and a sea of bone. Other things, too, whose meanings I do not understand and that I will not even attempt to put them into words."

Alpheo took a slow, deliberate breath, his chest rising beneath his dark breastplate. "But even amidst all that suffocating death, amidst things that should have driven a man mad with their scale, I knew the most important thing was the one standing against them all. Alone he raged. Alone he fought. And he was not particularly good at it, either, as it seemed he was constantly losing. But he did not yield."

A strange, solemn kindness crept into the King’s eyes. "That is what he did. He simply did not lose. I stood there, for I know not how long, watching him. His sword clashed against the encroaching fire and the biting cold, swing after swing. He suffered terrible burns from the heat, and his flesh cracked under the frost, but he did not relent. He stood exactly where he was. There was a desperate, terrifying nobility in that, I suppose."

"Did you see his face?" Jarza asked, his voice barely a breath.

"No," Alpheo whispered. "For the longest time, through all that endless, agonizing struggle, I only saw his back. I watched as the fire retreated only for the cold to advance, and then the cold would break and the terrible heat would take its place. He was the only barrier between them.The only shield to protect what remained, where his light foot stepped, grass and flowers sprouted, by the second they were born they became ashes or where stepped on once more, killing them."

The King’s eyes grew distant, staring through the green grass as if the vision were unfolding once more in the winter dirt.

"But for only one instant, in a conflict that felt as though it spanned lifetimes, the man turned to look at me. He was faceless, his head encased in a simple, dented iron helmet that bore the result of hundreds of clashes.He had horns on him, he was no angel, he had more of a deamon’s bearing.

He was not exceptionally tall, nor did he possess the broad, towering strength of a champion. Yet, there was a quiet....majesty in his bearing, that I , with all my crown and my legions, could never hope to copy."

Alpheo swallowed hard, his hands beginning to tremble slightly before he clenched them.

"And even beneath the shadows of that cold iron helm, I could see his eyes. I could see the absolute rage in them. The bottomless anger, the crushing sadness, and the bitter hate. And somehow... somehow, I felt a terrible certainty. Those emotions... that hatred... they were not directed at the monsters he was fighting with, the one biting at his heels , at his arms, at his shoulders.

It was then that I woke, and I saw Egil for the last time. And it was then that we exchanged our last."

Alpheo had supposed the enigmatic horror of the visions would be the part to freeze Jarza’s blood, yet that was not what the Legate asked about.

"What did you say to each other?" Jarza whispered.

"Not much. Our farewells," Alpheo replied, his gaze dropping back to his calloused palms. "But I did ask him one thing. If nothing else, I wanted to scratch at that lingering, desperate fear that what I was seeing was more than just a trick of my dying mind. Though, who knows... in the end, perhaps it really was just a dream."

"What did you ask him?"

For a long, agonizing moment, the King said nothing, and Jarza did not press him, leaving him the time to prepare himself.

"I asked him about the name he last uttered before the cold took him," Alpheo finally confessed, the weight of the name hanging heavily in the winter air. "I asked him about Enkilae."

Jarza made no move to interrupt. He simply sat in the grass, solid as a boulder, waiting for the rest.

"And he told me..." Alpheo swallowed, his throat dry. "He said that I would soon receive my answers."

With that the King turned his head, looking back over the hundreds of Uthahia resting in the sweeping meadow. Some were sleeping; others were staring up at the grand walls of Yarzat, their bellies full for the first time in decades.

"But perhaps that was a lie," Alpheo muttered, a tired, self-deprecating smile tracing his lips. He looked at his oldest friend. "Can I confide something in you?"

The Legate gave a firm, solemn nod.They were already at this point after all, what was one more secret?

Alpheo’s smile widened just a fraction, though it was laced with a deep, quiet relief. "I am glad it wasn’t true. In a way. I am glad that what Egil told me at the very last was wrong... and that everything I saw in that dream was indeed just a desperate, feverish trick of my mind.I am shamed to be glad of it, but that is the plain truth."

It was a comforting thought. If it was just a dream, then there was no faceless warrior holding back gods know what . There was no grand, suffocating destiny. There was only a King, his people, and a field of dry emerald grass.

But as the words left his mouth, a sudden, sharp gust of wind rolled across the plain, causing the black-and-white banners of Yarzat to snap violently against their poles as if denying the last of the king’s hope.

Through the swaying green blades of the meadow, a figure came scrambling.

It was Asag, running toward them, frantic and breathless, his heavy leather boots tearing up clods of earth as he sprinted down the slope, his black hair held up in a bun, letting his burnt scar open for the whole world to see. Alpheo would have appreaciated the courage and the transformation that his dear friend had long gone through in his life, but the king could not do so, as all he did was focuse one his pale face, his eyes wide with a manic, disbelieving energy, and a wide smile hanging on his lips.

Alpheo’s heart skipped a beat.

He stood up slowly, the iron of his armor clinking, in his chest, the quiet peace he had just claimed instantly shattered into a thousand pieces. There was only one reason a man like Asag would run with such wild abandon.

THe king was wrong.

The dream wasn’t a trick.

He was here.