It was the cold that found him first, a biting, crystalline numbness that made his skin feel as if it had been flayed and laid upon ice. Yet, beneath that chill, his blood was a slow-moving river of fire, his nerves screaming with a heat that didn’t belong to the cold air.

Then came the dark.

Seeing nothing when knowing there was a lot to see , was the scariest part.

And at last he tried to draw a breath, but the air was solid.

He fought next to clench his fingers. It was a slow, agonizing labor even that, like trying to move limbs made of lead. His mind commanded his hand to close, but the muscles stuttered and failed like a dog to stubborn to turn back during a walk, twitching uselessly against the sludge. Every inch of his body felt foreign, a broken machine he was trying to jump-start with a dying spark of will.

While that may be, there was still work to do, so no matter how much his body groaned and cried, he staffed it with fuel.

He pulled at the air again, but instead of the cold wind of the Lampianis, he felt a thick, viscous weight sliding down his gullet.

His throat was being stuffed.

He realised at last.

For a heartbeat, he was confused, the dregs of the dream still clouding his mind. Then the burning began.

He was swallowing the mud.

The gag reflex exploded in his chest, panic doing for his broken body what willpower could not, make it move.

He heaved himself upward, his spine screaming as he bucked against the weight of the earth. He threw himself sideways, his gauntlets splashing into the shallow, bloody mire.

He began to cough, violent, racking spasms that felt as though they would tear his ribs from his chest. He retched, spitting out mouthfuls of black and brown dew and stagnant river water, gasping and shivering like a man who had just been dragged from the bottom of a lake.

The world began to tilt. The dizziness came in a sickening wave, turning the grey sky into a spinning vortex of ash. His head felt light, hollow, and terribly numb. The strength he had used to escape the mud vanished as quickly as it had come.

His vision blurred, the silhouette of a dead horse nearby flickering and fading. With a soft, wet thud, Alpheo’s strength failed him. He fell back, his armor disappearing once more into the freezing embrace of the mud, his lungs still whistling with the desperate, tired music of a man who refused to stay dead.

He at least could move his hands now, and he used them to get the mud off his visors, allowing at last for the light to see though.

The hearing returned last.

The rhythmic, bone-deep clack-shriek of steel on steel echoed within the hollow cavern of his helmet. To any sane man, it was the sound of a slaughterhouse; to Alpheo, it was the most beautiful melody in the South.

The battle was alive. The Legions were still breathing.He still had a chance....

He clawed at the earth, trying to rise, but his equilibrium was as fucked up as the rest of his body. Every time he gained an inch, the world tilted ninety degrees, and he slid back into the freezing slurry. His senses were utterly ruined, his inner ear drowned in the trauma of the charge. He was a beetle flipped on its back, legs thrashing in the grease of his own failure.

The urge to puke was a hot, acidic ball in his throat, but he fought it. He dragged himself to his knees, his muscles shaking with the effort of a man lifting a castle. He stayed there for a moment, his visor pointed toward the grey, indifferent sky, breathing in air that was freezing to the touch but felt like liquid fire in his lungs.

How long? Minutes? Hours? The sun had moved, but the chaos was absolute. The horizon was a blurred smudge of smoke and iron.

He bit his tongue to stay focused and forced himself up. He was almost there, standing, swaying, ready to pat himself on the back for surviving tgravity, when the world reminded him that he was not a spectator.

A massive weight slammed into his side. He didn’t see the man, only felt the sudden, violent theft of his balance. For a moment he was in the air, hoisted up like a sack pf grain after an harvest and then hurled back down with enough force to make his teeth rattle against his jaw.

Thud.

The air wheezed out of his lungs in a pathetic puff. His gorget snapped back, bruising his collarbone and pinching the skin of his neck with a cruel, metallic bite.He felt his teeth go white, whiter than they already were.

He lay there, his head swimming in a fresh soup of dizziness, when the first sound of his new reality reached him.

Screech.

The sound of a fork cracking through a plate made his ear bleed.But there was no fork here.

He realised only when a hand pinned his head down, that it was a dagger trying to slither past his steel , searching for a purchase on his helm.

Screech.

The dizziness, which had just started to recede, roared back like a tidal wave. Through the narrow slot of his visor, he could see the silhouette of a man hovering over him, he didn’t saw the face, only a few inches of his breastplate, his misty breath mingling against his visors.

The blade dragged across the metal just above his brow, the sound vibrating through Alpheo’s skull like a saw through bone.

It was getting closer.

What will alone could not achieve, panic and adrenaline fueled. Like a cornered mouse in a cat’s jaws, Alpheo struggled. He punched, he kicked, he thrashed, every cell in his body screaming a singular command: Move. Survive. Kill.

Knowing nothing more than the sniff of metal meant danger and death.

He wanted to live. He had to live.

Dread filled his lungs, thick as the smell of the blood-soaked earth pressing into his back. His breathing came in ragged, staccato bursts.

I’m hyperventilating, he realised

He fought with a ferocity he hadn’t known since he was a boy in the sands, a slave pinned down with a blade seeking his throat.

He glanced toward the edge of his visor. There was no Asag to swoop in with a rescue. No legionaries to form a wall. The man atop him didn’t even know he was killing a Prince; to this soldier, Alpheo was just a mud-caked corpse that had dared to twitch.

HIT HIM! HIT HIM, YOU BASTARD!YOU DOG!KILL HIM!

He threw a desperate punch, but the man countered by slamming the heavy pommel of his dagger into Alpheo’s visor. Crack. The world flared white.

He felt small. He felt weak. All the years of training, the tactical brilliance, the command of thousands, it was all a lie. In the dirt, he was still just that helpless boy, a manipulator who used others’ strength because he had none of his own. Here, there were no titles, no coffers, no laws. There was only the cold, hard physics of muscle.

I’m going to die in this shithole. I’m going to die like this, alone.

But then, the miracle of friction and sweat occurred. The man’s slick, gauntleted hand slipped from the crown of Alpheo’s helm, his momentum carrying his chest forward, his face coming dangerously close to Alpheo’s breastplate.

The window opened.

Alpheo didn’t hesitate. He reached up, his fingers clawing into the man’s helm, and began to hammer the open palm of his hand against the side of the attacker’s head.He used all he had , elbow , palms fists.

Strike. Strike. STRIKE! The man went wild, swinging his dagger blindly, the blade screeching uselessly against the obsidian plates of Alpheo’s gorget. Each metallic ring only fanned the flames of Alpheo’s rage and fear.

But he pushed it down, rage would serve nothing but waste away this miracle and fear was poison.

Logic returned,he forced it to come back, fitting him like a cold glove that awaited its master. The panic subsided into a lethal, focused intent. He stopped trying to push the man away, instead...he wanted him closer. He wanted the man’s weight against him.

Alpheo bucked his chest forward , lashing his left arm behind the man’s neck in a vice-like grip. His training came rushing back like a vengeful angel. He didn’t use his muscles; and instead did what he could with his whole body. He pivoted his hips, hooking his leg and pulling the man’s head down with every gram of his weight.

The attacker shrieked, a muffled sound behind steel, and began to fist Alpheo’s ribs with the dagger. Thud. Scrape. Thud. It was like fisting a rock. The obsidian armor, the masterpiece of the Yarzat smiths, stood defiant.It ate it all.

In that moment, the steel was a better friend than his entire army had ever been.

Alpheo leaned into the hold, his teeth bared in a snarl behind his visor. He felt the man’s balance snap. He felt the gravity of the Lampianis finally take its side.

The man went down hard, the weight of his own momentum and Alpheo’s leverage slamming him into the slurry.

The prince lunged atop him, his knees pinning the man’s shoulders into the filth. He reached for his hip, his fingers dancing over his belt until they closed around the hilt of his misericorde. The thin, needle-like blade cleared the sheath with a soft hiss that was lost in the roar of the battle.

My turn, you son of a bitch.

The man thrashed, his hands reaching up to claw at Alpheo’s visor, but the Prince was a statue of iron. He wasn’t looking for a heroic strike; he was looking for the meat. He reached down, his fingers searching beneath the heavy plate of the man’s hip, finding that one vulnerable strip of unprotected skin behind the thigh, the soft, pulsing junction where the armor ended and the man began.

He punished him for that distinction, plunging the dagger in.He felt the rings of chain give way, breaking like a gate with its battering ram.

It went in. He smiled as he wrenched it out.

Out it was. Then in again.

Out and in.

Out and In.

He drove the steel home half a dozen times each time easier and more satisfying than the last.

The man screamed like a sheep to the slaughter , the same sound the prince would have made if the positions were reversed, his body flailing like a maddened beast caught in a trap.

The blade moved white and grey like the claw of a predator.

How dare he do that?How dare he even think he was entitlted to my life after everything.

He bucked and twisted, his iron-clad limbs splashing red soup into the air, but where the attacker was a whirlwind of blind agony, Alpheo was the eye of the storm. He was cold. He was precise. He was a man finishing a chore.

"Be still," he hissed, the words lost behind his breath-fogged visor.

He acquiesced to the man’s struggling, suddenly loosening his grip and letting the soldier roll onto his side. It was a hunter’s mercy. As the man tried to gasp, Alpheo threw his weight onto the man’s back, his left hand reaching around to grab the front of the enemy’s helm.

He wrenched it back.

The man’s neck arched, the throat exposed and taut like a sacrificial lamb’s.

He had no gorget. This would be easier than he would have thought.

He didn’t hesitate. He raised the dagger one last time and drove it upward, sliding the narrow blade deep into the soft hollow beneath the jaw.

The flailing finally stopped.

The sound of a life leaked out into the mud.

The man’s hands made one final, feeble grab for Alpheo’s wrists, his fingers trembling before losing their strength and falling into the mire.

Alpheo remained there for a heartbeat, watching the light leave whatever he could see of the man’s posture, he felt pleased of that.

And alive, he felt alive, livelier than he had ever been.

He didn’t feel like a Prince. He didn’t feel like a hero. He felt like a survivor. He wiped the misericorde on the man’s dying cloak and looked back toward the sea of iron that awaited him once more.

No sooner had he regained his footing than he felt the weight of a gaze with the most eagerness that a man could arouse in himself staring straight down at him.