Chapter 123: A Story Needs Someone to Tell It

He passed near one of the fires and caught fragments of speech.

"...said it threw Rhem clean off his horse."

"That thing had six eyes."

"It had four."

"It had six when I saw it."

"So you were drunk?"

"Like we’re rich enough to have booze."

"You’re right ’bout that."

A snort and a nervous laugh. Someone coughing blood into cloth a moment later.

Fear wrapped itself around camps in particular ways. In palaces it was perfumed, hidden behind manners and measured words. In battlefields it burned hot and obvious. But in camps...

In camps it lingered.

It pooled in the pauses between speech. In the glances cast toward darkness just a touch too often. In the overeager bravado of men trying to convince themselves morning was promised.

Ixion rather liked it.

He continued onward, taking stock of everything.

Where the knights slept.

Where Count Tristans tent had been erected — predictably central, though not too central; close enough to respond to disorder, far enough to preserve his dignity. As expected of kin of the apple stealer, he at least understood appearances.

But a commander hidden behind layers of bodies inspired little but resentment.

Where the horses had been tethered.

A mistake there as well.

Too close together. If one panicked, the others would follow. One shriek in the night and the camp would lose half its mobility before a beast ever crossed the traps. He made a quiet note to watch that area closely, if only for amusement.

Then came the arrays.

Ixion crouched near one etched line in the dirt, gauntleted fingers hovering over the faint shimmer of Aether running through it.

’Crude.’

Functional, but crude.

They might kill a lesser beast or maim an unwary one, but anything truly dangerous would either trigger it from afar or survive it outright.

Still, for regular men, it was better than courage alone.

He rose and continued walking around the camp.

A few soldiers turned at the suggestion of movement, frowned into darkness, then dismissed it. Ixion wasn’t nearly invisible, but the last thing people were weary of nowadays were humans. Unlike Ixion, they were unaware of where the true danger lies.

He passed another cluster of soldiers huddled close to a dwindling fire. One of them sharpened a blade with slow, methodical strokes, the rasp of stone against steel grating through the quiet. Another stared into the flames as if trying to memorize them.

"Think it’ll hit again tonight?" someone muttered.

"Everything hits again," came a quick reply from an man with hollow eyes.

No one argued with a man who’d seen the frontlines.

Ixion did not slow.

At last he reached the edge of camp, where the fires grew sparse and the land opened into a churn of dead grass and jagged stone. Beyond that sat the dark. Vast. Patient. The south.

He stared into it.

Somewhere far beyond these skittering lesser creatures and frightened soldiers lay Fort Luminara. Beyond that, the Convergence Zone. Beyond that... things better left to story and prayer.

His lips curled.

How delightful that he was heading straight toward it.

For a brief moment, he let his senses spread outward. Soul brushing against soul. Faint sparks within sleeping men. Brighter ones within the awakened. The dim, malformed lanterns of beasts prowling just beyond sight. Hunger. Aggression. Panic. Instinct. Such simple things. Such honest things.

Compared to people, beasts were refreshing.

There — something slithered along the edge of perception. Not a true threat, not yet, but curious enough to catch his eye. Ixion tracked it idly, feeling the way its awareness brushed the outermost edge of the camp’s arrays before recoiling. Smart enough to learn. Not smart enough to understand.

It would either grow into something dangerous... or be culled before it had the chance.

Eventually, having satisfied himself that the camp would survive the night barring exceptional stupidity — a possibility he never discounted — Ixion turned back inward.

Settling, it seemed, was the next order of business.

He had no tent, of course.

No bedroll prepared in Veritas’ name. No eager subordinate waiting to ask where he wished his blankets laid out. A tragedy. A true injustice.

After a moment’s thought, he selected a wagon near the outskirts rather than the center. Close enough to hear trouble. Far enough that if trouble came, it would reach others first.

’Prudence is such an underappreciated virtue.’

With soundless ease, he climbed atop it, settling between two covered crates of spears. The wood was hard, the canvas rough, the night air cold against his face.

Perfectly miserable.

Ixion leaned back anyway.

From here he could see much of the camp. The glow of fires. The pacing silhouettes of sentries. The occasional flash of armor. Men pretending wakefulness. Men pretending sleep.

A horse stamped somewhere nearby, tugging at its tether. Another answered with a restless snort. For a moment the line tightened, bodies shifting, unease rippling through them like a shared pulse — then it settled.

Above them all stretched the night sky, wide and indifferent.

For a while, he simply watched.

A medic changing bandages.

A soldier quietly vomiting behind a wheel.

Another kneeling with clasped hands, lips moving in prayer to a god that, if present, had clearly elected not to interfere.

A pair of young knights whispering to one another, voices low, speaking not of battle but of home — of a sister’s wedding missed, of the fortunes of old, of things that would continue or collapse regardless of whether they survived the march south.

Then, finally, Ixion exhaled and let Veritas’ eyes drift half-shut.

Tomorrow they would continue south.

Tomorrow more beasts would come.

Tomorrow more men would die, adapt, or prove themselves too brittle to be worth remembering.

But for tonight, the camp remained standing. The panic had faded into muttering. The sentries had stopped imagining Wraiths behind every shadow. And Ixion, perched like a patient vulture above them all, allowed himself the smallest measure of rest.

As for why he’d spent his time walking through the camp observing the soldiers...

He’d be the only one left to tell their story after the day of reckoning.

After all...

True tragedy wasn’t death itself. It was dying in obscurity.