Merelao watched, breathless, as the impossible occurred.

He had not expected the figure to rise. Not ever again. So battered was that iron form, so thoroughly claimed by the crushing weight of his sins that his sight felt less like a man regaining his feet and more like the conjuring of a ghost.

He had not expected many things from this day, but above all, he had not expected to have this much fun.

He felt a hum of shivering pleasure beneath his skin. He had been right to defy the cautious advice of Varo and ride into the Fox’s lands; he would not have missed the savor of this slaughter even if the price was a permanent seat in the Ring of Pride. This was a morsel so sweet, that he would have sold his soul a dozen times over just to taste it once. Perhaps he already had.

The man who had bartered his non-eternity for the exquisite flavor of his own impending death, a thought so profoundly wrong that it felt like the only truth that could empass him.Perhaps mankind was just cursed in its own foolishness, why else born mortal would they make war?

His hands felt sticky. Even through the ebbing of his mail and the polished protection of his plate, he could feel the cloying, rhythmic warmth of the red blood he had harvested. To his ears the melodic prayer to the gods of violence, rose in a crescendo.

The priests preached that men only truly understand the horror of mankind in the crucible of war. Merelao wondered why they never spoke of its beauty. Why was it that he could gaze upon this carnage for days on end and find only peace?

And nothing on this scorched earth was more beautiful than the man standing before him now.

The Prince of Yarzat was a ruin of blood and mud, and that was as it should be.

That was good.

In the worst of a thousand men, he had finally found the best of himself, the one Merelao had never thought he would see.

But the Prince had also been kneeling and that simply would not do. After today, after this baptism of iron, that man should never have to kneel to anyone ever again.

With a heart fluttering like a caged bird he began to move.

He moved with a dancer’s poise across a stage of corpses, weaving between men of iron locked in the terminal embrace of their bloody dance.

He stepped over the steaming guts of a fallen destrier with the daintiness of a courtier avoiding a puddle. A lowly footman lunged from the periphery, a desperate snarl on his lips, but Merelao cut him down without breaking his stride, he left him still breathing until he wasn’t from a spear of the many following him.

Finally, he came to a halt. He stood amidst the swirling red mist and the choir of the dying, and he beheld him.

There he was. The Fox. A fallen angel caked in the earth of his own making, standing tall against the smallness of others

The Gods had made it for him no doubt. Why else would they have decided to bless the world so? If not to see just what baudiness of theather they would make together?

----------------------

The world spun in sickening arcs as Alpheo shoved the cooling weight of the corpse away. Everything was wrong.

The air tasted of copper and wet wool, and the sensory clarity he had regained only served to highlight the nightmare. Where were the white cloaks of his guard? Where were the disciplined blocks of his black-and-white men? He saw iron clashing with iron, a frantic, churning meat-grinder of a melee, but the heraldry was lost to him.It was madness found flesh.

Then, a sound cut through the din, a laugh that was entirely too light for such a heavy place.

Alpheo turned, his neck creaking within his gorget, to see the figure striding toward him. It was a man who looked like he had walked out of a fever dream and onto the silt. He reached out, his touch surprisingly tender, helping the Prince to his feet with a grace mocked Alpheo’s own battered state.

The laugh grew. At a distance, it had sounded like a sob, but as the man closed the gap, it grew sharper, more pleased and more joyful.

Blood was smeared across the man’s porcelain skin, seeping from a shallow cut on his cheek and staining his full lips. When he smiled, his teeth showed themselves pink, and his expression was a dizzying cocktail of pride, excitement, and a malice so pure it was almost beautiful.

"What wrath! What a spectacle we have made!" Merelao’s voice sang above the screams of the dying. The rest of his troops closing in. "The Bull and the Fox on this forsaken field, two legends in the making!We shall broke them and make another river of red! The field shall have blood, ours or theirs!Only you I have to thank for that!"

His eyes were wide, as blue and shimmering as a mountain lake, dancing with a zeal that made Alpheo’s skin crawl. Unlike Alpheo, who was a ruin of mud and gore, Merelao’s golden armor was slashed all ower with bright splashes of red. It looked less like the grime of war and more like a decoration, a crimson pattern he had chosen for himself this morning.

A white and red ribbon hung on his left horn, the red part flapping in the sky as some bolt of cloth he had knot to make himself more visible, as if the trumpet blaring behind were not enough.

Alpheo stared at him through his cracked visor, his breath hitching, his vision going blank a bit at paces.The traces of his earlier fight and dream still in his body.

While Alpheo felt the crushing weight of every life he had spent to hold this line, to survive in the hell of his own calling, Merelao looked as though he were standing in the middle of a ballroom, waiting for the next dance to begin.

The surprises were far from over.

As if they were long-lost brothers reunited on the brink of death rather than fragile allies born of a common enemy, Merelao embraced him. The golden plate pressed against Alpheo’s mud-slicked chest with a intimate eagerness that left the Prince stunned.

The man should not have been here. That made no sense.

Alpheo had been at the very apex of the center when he fell; now, the world looked sideways. Around them, the men were not the disciplined, black-and-white blocks of the Yarzat Legions. These were a ragtag swarm of zealots, their armor a mismatched patchwork of armor and equipmet he didn’t recognize. Though he had to relent that they fought with a wild, terrifying spirit that seemed to radiate directly from the man now clinging to Alpheo’s shoulders.

He looked around trying to make sense of that little order that could be made from that chaos.

The allied lines were pushing from the wrong direction entirely. And then, the most impossible thought of all took root: Merelao had been commanding the left wing.

What in the hell was he doing here in the center?

"What a battle! What a dance!" Merelao cried, his voice a melodic fever.Oblivious to the very confusion his mere presence had on the wounded man.

"The two horned princes we shall be of this field! Let us call our demons forth and make paste of our enemies! The field shrieks for us; let us deign to answer with our slaughter! In victory lies immortality, let us clasp it and suckle upon its nectar!"

Merelao let out a soft, low moan, his eyes rolling back as if he were receiving the finest comforts of a bathhouse rather than standing in a river of blood. Alpheo might have been disgusted with the whole affair if it were not for the cold stone of dread sinking into his gut.

He realised what happened.

How had he done it? He was outnumbered two to one.

To be here, he must have shattered the Oizenian flank and carved a path through the ribs of the entire enemy army.

Twack. Twack. Twack.

The sound was dull and rhythmic, like wet leather hitting wood. Alpheo’s tirade of questions died in his throat as his eyes drifted down to the thing swaying beneath Merelao’s neck.His eyes moved lower now, a bit of sense drifting back in him.

Alpheo had seen the limits of human cruelty. He had ordered limbs sheared from corpses, and saw scalps hanging from his warriors; he had seen men hung by their own entrails and heads used as grisly milestones on the road to power. He thought he was immune to shock.

He was wrong.

He realized then that he had never truly known the man standing before him. Hanging from Merelao’s gorget like a string of smoked sausages , was a human head. Its long, dark hair had been knotted into a rope, the weight of it thumping against the Kakunian’s golden breastplate with every step he took, every breath he take and probably every swing he made.

But the horror had a crown.

As Merelao leaned in closer, his breath smelling of copper and expensive wine of earlier morning, Alpheo noticed the decoration atop the man’s helmet. What he had initially taken for a ribbon of white and red, a favor from that lady he brought from Kakunia, was nothing of the sort. 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮

Speared upon the tip of the golden horn was not a ribbon but a human eye. It stared out at the battlefield with a milky, unblinking void.

Alpheo regarded the man, seeing him for what he was.

And worse he couldn’t decide if that had been a good or a bad thing.

Some monsters, after all, were not be discovered much less be given a crown.