He let his cloak fall to the rushes, his squires scurrying like mice to detach the heavy plates of his armor. Each piece clattered against the stone floor , each ring a dead sentence for any hope he may have had.

It did very little to ease the tightness in his lungs. Ever since he had collapsed into the mud of that gods-forsaken field, he felt as though a spectral hand was perpetually crushing his chest at each moment.

May the Father curse that bastard Nibadur for his treachery, they could have still won if only the Habadian was not made of brittle resolve.

He had thought his heart would stop entirely when he saw the banner of the bull thundering toward the remnants of their line. He had sent wave after wave of men into the meat-grinder in hope of stopping that madman until there was nothing left but blood and air. He might as well have thrown scraps of paper at the enemy for all the good his soldiers had done.

A shiver raced from the nape of his neck to the base of his spine. He tried to purge the memory of the slaughter, yet it clung to him like the stench of charred meat. It was supposed to be easy. A glorious march south. Instead, even here in the relative calm of Oizen, he could not wrap his mind around the catastrophe.

The enemy had been a ghost, a phantom that was everywhere at once, always striking with exactly enough strength to shatter their spirit.

He had left a thousand men to guard his rear and secure the supply lines when the Kakunian way was cut off. He could still taste the bitter iron of confusion on his tongue when the messenger arrived with the news of their fate.

Even now he could not understand how that had happen.

"Ash," Nibadur had hissed then in a detachment that made his blood boil still. "Ash is all they are now and all they will be!" Nibadur had turned livid when Sorza tried to wring more details from the trembling messenger.At least he was doing something useful instead of brooding like a philosopher with a finger up his arse.

Perhaps it was then that the "architect of the league" had first toyed with the idea of fleeing with his tail between his legs. Damn him for that.

The torches of his keep flickered, casting long, wavering shadows across the hall. It had been nearly half a year since he departed Oizen for the principalities of the south. He still recalled the day he left the capital, the air thick with the scent of flowers as citizens lined the roads, throwing petals at the Southron army and waving rags around.

They were all happy then.Or at least they seemed to be.

His mother’s letters which Sorza kept receiving during the siege had hinted at the decay, but he only understood the true depth of the rot when he returned in defeat with only barely a few hundred from the thousands he had left with. Vagabonds had made a nest of his beautiful city; one could not walk a dozen paces without being swamped by a swarm of beggars crying for alms. The garrison had tried to drive them off, but the wretches simply retreated to the countryside to become bandits, worsening an already impossibly-bad situation by preying on the roads.

It was all the fault of the Peasant’s Prince. That cursed man had harried the land with fire, his dog-kin leaving nothing but blackened earth in their wake. It was not enough that they had murdered his father; now they had murdered his fields and invited famine to sit at his table.

Just like they had done with Herculia.

He turned toward the window, looking out over the darkened rooftops of his city. The silence of the night was broken only by the distant, rhythmic weeping of women that knew their husbands would not return.

Very little of the army he had set out with had returned. The whole city would be in mourning for days.

Those that had not been killed or captured, had either deserted or followed their lord back in their keep. He had tried to force the army to stand united, but even he knew it was a lost cause. Already morale was fraying when the Bastion was still besieged, the only thing that could have rivitalised the man was a victory against that monster, instead it was the other way around.

"Wine," he croaked, his voice sounding thin even to his own ears.

’’Your Grace?’’ The squire asked him.

"Bring me wine’’ Sorza repeated.

At last he was left alone.

Alone with the weight of his failures and its consequences.Alone with his thought.

He brought his hand to his hairs, he had noticed how in the morning he was finding more and more hair on his pillow, both white and black. At that point it was the least of his worry.

His principality was a ship taking on water, and famine was the rising tide. Each of his lords would soon ignore his summons, treating his commands as little more than the desperate braying of a man who had promised them the world and delivered only a graveyard. He couldn’t even lean on his vassals for support; their larders were as hollow as his own, their lands suffering under the same shadow.

If he had been unpopular after signing that humiliating peace, he was now a pariah in his own halls. It was Herculia all over again.

At this point, his only hope was for Nibadur to weave some miracle out of the air. Sorza already knew the mountain of troubles that awaited him, and he hadn’t even worked up the courage to look at the tally of the capital’s food stores. He had personally overseen the emptying of those warehouses to feed the siege, only for that precious grain to be reduced to ash along with his rear guard.

The door groaned open with the force of a thunderclap. Sorza spun around, his mouth already open to unleash a tavern-worthy string of insults at his squire, but the words died in his throat.

"I had feared the worst, my boy," a voice cried.

His mother filled the doorway, sweeping toward him like a great, velvet-clad wave. As she wrapped him in an embrace, Sorza felt a sliver of strength return to his bones.

He squeezed her back, burying his face against her wide shoulders. She had let herself go since his father’s death, but in this court of vipers, no one dared mention the weight she had gained to numb the pain.

Each of them had their own poison for grief. Edmure had retreated into a shell of silence, their mother had turned to the comforts of the table and the bottle, and Sorza had fueled himself with pure, unadulterated hate. A fine lot of good that had done him; he was in a far worse state now than when he had started.

She had the sense not to ask about the field. The sight of the battered men limping into the courtyard was enough to tell the story, and no doubt the whispers of defeat had outrun the army itself.

"What will you do now?" she asked softly.

He looked at her, truly hoping she held the answer. She had always been the voice of reason; he should have listened to her instead of his cousin Malis. She had been the only one to speak against the war with Yarzat.Perhaps knowing herself what the men did not.

But who could blame him? The odds had looked secure, and his vassals had been screaming for blood. They would have lynched him had he chosen peace. Now, they would likely lynch him for the way he had waged this war.

"I do not know," Sorza admitted, his voice cracking. "I don’t have the slightest idea of what happened. One moment we were a united fist, and the next, everything went up in smoke with no understanding of it except the name of the one who caused it."

"This war..." a thin voice wavered from the shadows at the back of the room.

Was a mistake.

Sorza realized only then that his younger brother was standing there, hesitating by the door as he always did.

"We should not have waged it," the boy trembled, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he struggled to find the words. "It was a mistake. We should never have done it....now the Prince of Yarzat is marching against us. We should not have done that.We should have kept the peace"

No longer had the words come out from Edmure’s mouth that their mother’s hand shot up and made red of the boy cheek.

The sound was even more chilling than the prince’s own mood.

The blow was strong enough that he fell down on his butt looking up with the confused more than pained expression of a child that did not understand the punishment.