Five Gods one Grave.

They were all destined for death to reach down at them

Accursed were those who joined this slaughter, for the gods had turned their faces away. They shunned both sides, celebrating neither; on this field, the divine had no purchase. Only men remained, and the war had taken the best of them, leaving only the dregs and the rot.

He had once ridden south with his royal cousin, his head filled with the hollow resonance of epic poems. He had thought this a tale of glory, a saga he would recount to sons and grandsons by a warm hearth. But if he ever lived to see another fire that wasn’t a funeral pyre, there would be no kind words to share. There was no poetry in the sound of a man drowning in his own lungs.

"I think you’d make a fine lord."

The words haunted him now, drifting through his mind like a persistent ghost. He should have been on that stone with him. He should have been fighting at his shoulder, dying in his shadow.

He had known the man for only a brief season, yet he had found a truer friendship in those mud-caked weeks than he had ever felt for the cousins he had spent a lifetime drinking and riding with. Time was a liar; longer did not always mean stronger.

In the guttering light of that awful afternoon, he had ridden the line at the base of the Bastion to search for the remains. He had forced himself to endure the sweet, cloying stench rising from the week-forgotten dead.

He had found him, broken by the fall. His body... it was better not to think of him. Left-hand Mers should not be remembered as a heap of shattered bone and torn wool that he was at last breath. He should be remembered as the rough, iron-willed man he was,a soul that even the malice of four princes could not daunt.

It was a unjust that he was for the dirt and the princes that led this debacles were not.But why was he not with him?

He should have fallen beside him. His blade reddened at his sides. Why was he still moving? At this point, it wasn’t even the promise of a lordship that kept him in the saddle on this grey, miserable day. The title felt like ash in his mouth. So what was the flame that spurred him forward amidst the horrors of the field?

He rode among the accursed, leaning low from his saddle as he swung. His horse screamed in protest, its eyes rolling with terror whenever he forced the beast to charge the unyielding iron of the enemy line.

Why am I fighting? Why am I here?

He cut down an archer. The sword entered at the shoulder and bit deep, stalling just above the armpit. The inertia of the gallop made it easy to wrench the bloodied steel free, leaving another nameless corpse to be swallowed by the mire. The act brought him no joy, no sense of accomplishment. It was merely a chore performed in a slaughterhouse.

He slowed his pace, his horse’s hooves churning the thick, dark slurry of the earth. He looked down at the black, roaring mess beneath him, a churning ocean of mud, blood, and the pulverized remains of hundreds.

In that moment, he felt the crushing weight of his own insignificance. He saw the great armies not as grand machines of state, but as a mound of earthworms writhing in a jar, devouring one another for no reason other than the fact that they were trapped together in the dark with no way out but through the other...

He looked down at the roaring roast upon his breast, probably the only member of the Ezvanian royal house present in this mud.

What was a man in this? A lord, a soldier, a king? They were all just worms, burrowing through the muck, blind and desperate, waiting for a heel they couldn’t see to flatten them into the silt.

They were just passing time.

He realized then that the "flame" that kept him going wasn’t courage or ambition. It was the simple, mindless reflex of the worm, the instinct to keep digging, to keep moving, until the earth finally claimed its own.

The gods were silent, the princes were safe, and the worms were hungry. He tightened his grip on his sword and rode back into the smoke, a small, hollow creature looking for one more thing to kill before the sun went down.

But he was a liar. He was lying to himself as naturally as he breathed, the deceit a shallow shroud over the truth. He was not there to pass the time or to play the part of the dutiful worm. Deep in the bowels of his spirit, a terrible wish,an ember he thought he had smothered under the weight of his grief, reignited with a sudden, scorching roar.

He almost didn’t recognize the figure. He had only seen him once before, a resplendent shadow during the parley when he had made a public fool of Prince Sorza. Back then, the Prince of Yarzat had been draped in obsidian, a silver crown embedded in his helm like a frozen star. Now, the armor was a ruin, caked in the earth and the lifeblood of the South.

The man was dressed in death, walking through the slaughter as if he were its architect.

Marvy felt a jolt of pure astonishment that nearly eclipsed his rage. How is he still standing? How is he even alive? It was a marvel and a bitter insult to those already cooling in the mud. Yet, seeing the Prince in the thick of the gore, doing what the royal cousin Marvy served would never dare to do, earned a sliver of begrudging respect.

He was deep in the fray, his blade a rhythmic engine of death, yet his eyes kept drifting, not toward his own men, but eastward, toward the rising sun. Marvy followed the trajectory of the Prince’s gaze and saw the second target: the Kakunian madman. Merelao was unmistakable, his armor a golden twin to his own eccentricity, a beacon of terrifying beauty amidst the filth.

Both were to die. But the Peasant-Prince would be first.

"PRINCE OF YARZAT!" Marvy screamed, but the voice was a mere pebble dropped into a roaring ocean of steel. The sound failed to rise.

"PEASANT!"

Impossibly, the figure turned. The eyes hidden behind that deformed, mud-streaked visor seemed to ignite, burning with a rage that mirrored Marvy’s own. He looked like a corpse that had simply refused to acknowledge its station, a ghost still haunting the living world.

The Prince of Yarzat shifted his weight, his longsword rising into a weary but lethal guard. "Who are you?" he called, even his voice appeared exhausted

In response, Ser Marvy, cousin to the Royal House of Ezvania, friend to a murdered man, and seeker of vengeance, gave the only introduction that mattered.

"Your death!"

He spurred his horse forward into a frenzy deciding to let steel be his orators.

The beast’s hooves tore at the muck, lunging toward the man on foot. In another life, in a different war, it would have been a stain on his honor to run down a noble of such station while he stood in the dirt. But honor had been drowned in the river hours ago. You would have an easier time finding a needle in a burning haystack than finding a shred of chivalry on this field.

The Prince needed to fall. The debt for Mers, for the Bastion, for the pride of Ezvania, was written in blood, and Marvy intended to collect.

He had no lance, that had shattered against the chest of a Yarzat Black Stripe in the first thunderous charge, but his sword would be more than enough to harvest a soul.

His horse’s hooves hammered into the mire, bursting the unhelmeted head of a fallen man like a ripened melon, sending a spray of red into the grey air that reached all the way to his eyes.

A mere heartbeat later, he was upon his prey.

He swung.

Indeed, he swung true with the full weight of his mount’s momentum. The two blades collided with a jarring, bone-deep ring. He felt the Prince’s sword give way, the Fox twisting his body with a desperate, lithe grace to let the charging stallion thunder past like a cannonball missing a tree.

Marvy hauled on the reins, the horse’s foam-flecked mouth snapping as it wheeled around in the muck.

Today the Fox would die.

The first exchange was merely the prologue. He gifted the Prince another strike, and another.

He charged relentlessly, a tide of iron and muscle. The Prince was a shadow in the mud, always slipping away a fraction of a second before the steel could connect. Marvy finally landed a blow against the pauldron; the blade skittered away with a shriek of protesting metal and sparks, passing dangerously close to the Prince’s neck.

Fools tried to intervene, throwing themselves at the knight with the mindless courage of the doomed. Marvy cut them down without a thought, madness was a poor shield against a properly armed knight in full career.

He could see the Prince’s sword trembling now after the fourth about.

Whether it was exhaustion or the cold hand of fear, it didn’t matter; Marvy knew who held the leash in this dance. He charged once more, then again, his horse a battering ram of meat and plate, the dying prince just the gate waiting to be pounded.

He was growing clumsy, the knight recognised at once. Anxiety and fatigue were the twin executioners of the great.

In his haste to dodge the next pass, the Fox’s heel caught on the stiffened leg of a corpse, a common soldier’s limb acting as the stone that would kill a monarch.

He hit the mud hard.

Alone. Wounded. Weak.

When would the Warrior ever grant him such an opportunity again? To kill a Prince in the dirt and end a war with a single stroke? Marvy spurred his horse forward for the final time, his heart hammering against his ribs.

He would take the head. He would parade it before the Yarzat lines and watch their spirit crumble like dry parchment.

Yes... they will make songs of the Cock of Ezvania.

The knight was so intent on the kill, his eyes so fixed on the fallen Prince, so obsessed in dealing death with his hand that he failed to notice his own rising from the mud.

A madman, nothing more than a farmer given a spear and a reason to fight with the greed of a possible loot, spurred to a courage he would never had by the madness of one, lunged from the smoke. With a unintelligible roar, the man plunged his spear deep into the flank of Marvy’s horse.

It stood there like some conqueror’s banner planted upon the heart.

Then madness was let loose.

The stallion let out a high, harrowing neigh of terror.In front of death the beast instead of falling gave way to wayward madness. Ir reared, its massive hooves lashing out in a blind, agonizing reflex, striking the kill across the neck and chest while his rider was thrown straight down from the saddle.

The horse bolted into the mist, a streak of dying fury, leaving a trail of blood and unraveling entrails flowing down the shaft of the spear that now cluttered uselessly in the mud.

The impact had shattered his world into a thousand flickering shards of light. Desperately, he clawed at the mud, trying to find his feet, his fingers scrabbling against slick and soft decaying bodies. He was a knight; he belonged in the saddle, not in the belly of the earth.

He forced his head up, his neck screaming from the horse’s final, panicked kick. He looked for the glint of Ezvanian steel, for the familiar banners of his kin.

But so eager had he been to hunt the Fox that he had outstripped his own life. He had ridden deep, too deep, into the throat of the enemy.

Alone he indeed not war.

But he did not see friends around.

They were the men the world had forgotten: the farmers, the tanners, the nameless dregs. They rose and came like vengeful spirits, caked in filth and old blood. They didn’t carry the elegant swords of the nobility; they held heavy, notched hammers, rusted daggers, and maces weighted with lead. Their eyes were hollow, devoid of the mercy Marvy had always assumed was his birthright.

"No!" Marvy’s voice broke at last recognising his end. "No, no, no! I yield! I am a cousin to the Crown! I have ransom! I YIELD!"

The word was lost in the cachopony of battle.

Rough, calloused hands slammed down on his pauldrons, pinning him into the silt.One hand grabbed on his visor pushing him down, a knee falling on the clavicle of his back.

He thrashed, of course he did, like a maddened beast he frayed, his legs kicking uselessly in the muck.

"I yield!" he shrieked again, his eyes wide as he saw a man with a broken nose and a heavy mason’s mallet step forward.

No!No! I won’t die. Not now! Not Like this!

He swung a fist in the face of a man, probably breaking his nose and letting a few teeth loose, that earned him boots down his head and knees pinning his temple down, until he could only stare at the boots of his unnamed killers.

There was no honor here. For none was there to be found in the mud. There was only the dull, rhythmic thud of the mallet hitting someone’s steel, and the muffled screams of a knight who had forgotten that a worm, no matter how big, no matter how fat, was still in the end, just a worm.