The transformation in the crowd was almost laughable in its predictability. Where monts ago the air had been alive with raucous cheers and good-natured jeering, now a heavy silence pressed down upon the arena like a burial shroud.
The sa nobles who had been howling with laughter as runners face-planted in the sand now sat in stiff-backed solemnity, their faces carefully arranged into expressions of grave stoicism.
Alpheo watched them from the royal pavilion, his fingers steepled before his lips to hide the curl of his mouth.
How quickly they shifted masks - from revelers to pious spectators, as if they weren’t all secretly salivating at the prospect of violence.
He could see it in the white-knuckled grips on the railings, in the way eyes darted hungrily toward the closed gates where the combatants waited, in the barely suppressed tremors of excitent running through the crowd like a current at the notion that high noble’s blood would be spilt.
Animals, he thought, the lot of them. Dressing up their bloodlust in the finery of justice and calling it holy.
The hypocrisy was almost impressive.
All in the na of divine judgnt, as if the gods had nothing better to do than preside over their petty squabbles. As if victory ever went to the righteous rather than simply the stronger.
A muscle twitched in Alpheo’s jaw. He knew better than most how hollow such notions were. They called him "Yarzat’s Reckoner," the "Little Fox" - titles born from his battle prowess and cunning, when one did not want to insult his low blood with titles like the Mud Prince or the Peasant Prince.
To him, conflict was simply a tool - like a blacksmith’s hamr or a scribe’s quill. Sothing to be used with precision when needed, then set aside without nostalgia when its purpose was served.
In an ideal world, he would never have drawn his sword at all, of course, but that was if he was given a kingdom at birth, as, after all, the only thing bigger than the man’s curiosity was his ambition for power, riches, and victories.
He could have spent his days wandering the palace gardens with a book in hand, feeding songbirds from his palm, which was sothing that he often did when he had no task to attend.
Few knew that version of him - the man who could lose hours discussing trivialities , they only knew him as the one who could break armies and who could apparently shit silver from nothing, given how much of it he threw around.
Asag was one of the rare exceptions. He never mocked his intellectual wanderings, as Egil and sotis Jarza would do.
He could of course not be a companion for those talks, given the man’s unfortunate upbringing, yet just his company was reassuring for Alpheo.
But such luxuries were fleeting. The world he was in - the world he was shaping for his son - demanded a different sort of man. One who could wield fear as precisely as a surgeon’s blade. One who understood that sotis, peace had to be carved from the flesh of enemies.
A sudden fanfare shattered his thoughts.
Around him, the crowd’s feigned solemnity cracked - a collective intake of breath, the rustle of fine silks as spectators shifted forward, the barely suppressed whispers racing through the stands.
Alpheo schooled his features into regal indifference, though his stomach turned a bit at the thought of Robert’s son’s death.
Alpheo despised those who broke their words.
In a world steeped in lies, betrayals, and half-truths whispered behind brocade curtains, a man’s word—when given freely—ought to an sothing.
And so, for all his political maneuvering, he aid to keep his promise to the one man who had died to deliver him victory.
Which ant, of course, he now had to tilt the scales in favor of the boy Robert had left behind.
Fortunately, Alpheo was no stranger to playing puppeteer.
Even more fortunate: Lord Gregor, his opponent, was a man with more aches than sense. A grizzled wall of at with knees that creaked like old siege gates and joints locked in a silent war against ti. Years of campaign wounds had turned the man into a shrine of pain—and like any priest of suffering, he relied on his sacrants. Chief among them: opium.
Not the pipe, of course—it was still not a thing .
No, Lord Gregor took his relief in the form of crushed poppy paste dissolved into hot herbal concoctions, handed to him in silver-gilded goblets by trembling servants who knew better than to comnt on how much was too much.
Funny thing about opium: it didn’t just dull pain—it dulled everything. Give a man just enough and he could swing a sword with a bit less wincing. Give him a little more, and he’d be slow on the draw, dazed between breath and blade. Just enough more than that, and the only thing he’d be cutting was the tension in the air before toppling like a felled ox.
Funnier still was that Lord Gregor—despite his noble bearing and fire-breathing threats—was a miser.
He kept his coffers close and his trust even closer. Which ant his private physician, a man with years of unpaid loyalty and a growing contempt for his employer, was all too eager to entertain a prince’s discreet offer—especially when that offer jingled with enough coin to buy not only a new house but the land beneath it.
Alpheo didn’t even have to threaten him . A single veiled courier. A sealed scroll. A pouch heavy with coin. That was all it took for the good doctor to understand what was being asked of him.
Of course, none of it was certain. The dose had to be subtle, lest anyone in the crowd suspect sothing was amiss. If Gregor stumbled too soon, the nobles would cry foul. If he fought too well, Talek might still die. It was a careful dance between chance and chemistry.
So, while Alpheo pulled strings as subtly as any spider laying her web, he knew one truth remained: Talek would still have to fight. He would still have to bleed. And maybe, if fortune leaned in his favor, he would survive long enough to earn his father’s vengeance.
And if not?
Well... Alpheo had done his part. Kept his promise and as those foolish people down to him said , ’Let the gods judge the rest.’
----------------
Silence reigned in the royal arena—a deep, unnatural hush that settled over the crowd like fog before a storm. The air itself seed to hold its breath as the two combatants stepped into the sacred grounds, their boots crunching softly against the carefully laid sand.
Gregor stood like a mountain, all steel and nace. His armor was a masterpiece of brutality, forged in the forges of older wars and crusted with the echoes of n he had crushed. Plates of steel wrapped nearly every inch of him, save for the unarmored gaps at his joints and beneath his armpits—as the mutellargy techonology had still not reached that point in armor making. He looked less like a man and more like a walking battering ram, his breath hissing softly behind the slits of his helt.
Opposite him stood Talek.
His armor was leaner, the kind worn by captains of the White Army—not full plate, but a hybrid of hardened steel over mail, its polished surface catching sunlight in gleams like trembling courage.
His warhamr hung heavy in his grip, a cruel head of steel balanced on a thick shaft of oiled ashwood. It was not a graceful weapon, nor forgiving. It would not dance or parry—it would end things. If it struck true even once, the fight could turn. But Talek would only get so many chances. Maybe one.
Yet before either man could draw blood, before a single weapon was raised to feed the arena’s hunger, tradition demanded its due.
A priest stepped forward—old, bent, and moving like the very idea of movent offended him. His robes of gold and ivory hung off his withered fra like banners on a collapsing fortress. Every step he took across the sand seed a miracle in slow motion.
This was no accident.
Alpheo had personally selected the man—Father Barun. Not just for his seniority, which brought ceremonial gravitas, but because the man was famously, gloriously slow.
Every blessing he gave was a sermon. Every gesture a gentle crawl toward conclusion. And Alpheo needed ti—ti for the concoction laced into Gregor’s morning brew to take root, creep through his bloodstream, and dim his sense
Alpheo needed ti; it was just that simple.
The crowd, though reverent, began to shift restlessly as Father Barun began the rites. First ca the invocation of the gods, each na drawn out like a dirge. Then ca the symbolic anointing—holy oils daubed carefully on the brow, chest, and hands of each man. Gregor’s eyes twitched beneath his helm. Talek stood utterly still, jaw clenched.
Finally, the old priest raised his voice, quavering but still powerful, to speak the sacred words: "May the gods grant victory to the just and judgnt to the guilty."
And so the sacred trial could finally start.
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