He had been a goddamn child.
So sure of himself. So certain that he was ant for greatness, that the world would part for him like the Red Sea with Moses and crown him for his brilliance. He had believed so deeply in his own myth,that great lie, the orphan who rose from the gutters, the slave who turned his chains into laurels.
He’d looked in the mirror and seen not a man, but a story. A legend.
And legends, he thought, didn’t bleed.
He had believed that power was a thing of wit and will, that as long as he kept moving forward, as long as he refused to kneel, the world would eventually yield.
But as it turned out , it didn’t.
Power had a price. It always did. It demanded its toll in blood and pain and sleepless nights. And when it couldn’t find an enemy to take it from, it reached for your friends instead.
He had escaped slavery, yes. Crawled from the mud, stolen the keys to the princedom, and worn a crown that had been ant for n born better than him.
He’d thought himself the tear in the rule , the glorious exception that proved destiny wrong.
Now he saw the truth.
He wasn’t the tear. He was the stain.
And that was the second harsh lesson life had taught him, and just like the first, Alpheo found it unbearable.
He didn’t want to be there.He didn’t want to see his friend’s body wrapped in white, or the fire pit prepared in the middle of camp.He didn’t want to stand among n pretending to honor the dead when every breath he took was a reminder of what he had done, and with the guilt that he was forced to bear.
But he could not bear it.
He didn’t want to sleep tonight.He didn’t want to wake tomorrow.
He didn’t want to live in a world where Egil was ash.
How greedy...
The voice ca unbidden, slithering from the back of his mind, curling like smoke in the hollow of his skull.
You wanted to eat and yet not pay. You wanted to take and not give. You wanted crowns without diggin your own graves. How did that go for you, boy?
He clenched his teeth. He knew that voice. It wasn’t another’s , it was his own.
There was no demon, no whispering ghost of conscience perched on his shoulder. It was him. All of it was him. His best and his worst.
His guilt had a tongue because he’d given it one.
He was greedy. He’d always been.
He’d wanted power. He’d wanted safety. He’d wanted more.
He’d told himself he wanted it for his friend. What a great lie that was.
He wanted it because he liked the way it felt. The way n looked at him when they said your grace. The way victory filled the lungs, like a drug.
And now here he was ,standing beside the pyre of his close friend, trembling like a sinner before the gallows.
No longer soaring, but falling into the mud.
He made the mistake of glancing toward the pyre. Just a glimpse. Just one last look.
He saw Egil’s face, calm, distant, as though the world had finally released its grip on him. The light from the flas thatwould soon be licking across the pale of his skin, and for a heartbeat, he looked alive again.
Alpheo tore his gaze away, his chest convulsing. The tears ca hot and sudden, unbidden, cruel. He swallowed them back, only for them to return harder, his throat aching as if trying to strangle the grief itself.
That’s just the first, he thought. How many more before I’m done paying?
How many more of them would he have to lose before his dream finally took shape?
Asag? Jarza? Basil? Clio? Jasmine?
Would he bury them too ? One by one, all for a crown?A piece of gold?
At the end it would there be anything that wouldn’t rot?
He hated himself for even asking.
But that was the price, wasn’t it? That was the toll.
You couldn’t keep a crown clean. You couldn’t climb without blood under your nails. You couldn’t build an empire without first tearing your soul apart.
And he had only just begun to pay.
He looked around and saw the gathering for what it truly was , not a funeral, but a theatre of obligation. Even death was a political statent.
What had he forced upon his friend?He was made to ride not to to play in a world of snake.
There were those who had co because they had to: the Yarzat lords with their fine cloaks and colder heart. He could see it in their eyes , that faint, disgusting glimr of satisfaction. The Butcher of Aracina, the man who made even nobles quake, was finally still. A monster slain without the need for a blade in the dark.
Many disdained his friends for having killed nobles in the dark of the night at Aracina.Its na always reminding the other nobles of who held the reins of powers now, the key position in the state no longer theirs but of foreigners.
They hated him, and now they did everything they could not to smile.
And opposite them stood the Rolian delegation, somber and stiff, the Imperator himself wrapped in mourning black. His father in law had apparently fallen to the beasts of the Second Prince, and yet here he was, staring into the pyre of the man who had saved them all.
Alpheo’s grief curdled.
The pain in his chest twisted, blackened. He felt it rise through his ribs like bile ,hate.
Hate for the Imperator he had co to aid. Hate for the nobles pretending sympathy when they could barely hide their relief. Hate for the order of things , that those who bled the least were always the ones to speak the loudest of sacrifice. He above all , he hated the false Imperator.
He wanted that head.By God, by gods, by whatever cruel thing ruled this pitiful world, he wanted it.
But rage burns fast and grief, he found, burns longer.
As his gaze drifted past the perfud and the proud, his eyes fell upon them , Egil’s n.
Two hundred and fifty had charged that day. n who had stared down the clibanarii, whose armor cracked under their spear.
Now, one hundred and seventy stood before him.
Fewer than half were unscathed. So leaned on their comrades; others limped, arms bound in rough linen, blood still dark on their bandages. One man, legless from the knee down, walked forward on a carved stick, the weight of his loss steadied by the shoulder of a brother-in-arms.
And still, despite everything, they stood tall, as if they had conquered the whole world.
Their chests were puffed out, braids thick and long against their backs , their pride unbroken, their faces set in that strange, hard quiet of n who had looked death in the eye and refused to kneel.
Heroes , not because they had lived, but because they had endured.
Alpheo felt sothing twist inside him at the sight. Sha, maybe. Envy, perhaps. They carried their grief with dignity, while he drowned in his own.
There was no priest to speak, no holy man to mouth platitudes. The absence startled the Rolians, and even so of the Yarzat lords exchanged puzzled glances.
They did not understand.
Egil had never prayed to the Five of the Star. He had spat at the idea of them.
He would not insult him by pretending otherwise, jus to play politics with his death.
And so, the silence deepened. Thick, heavy, absolute.
Then, movent and for the first ti, sound.
The Crown’s Hounds stepped forward, forming a line from the crowd to the casket. No one gave the order. None was needed.
Each man approached with sothing small and utterly his own. So laid helts ,battered, once-bright crests of the Rolian elite , upon the coffin, as if the iron could speak where they would not. Alpheo watched the dull tal catch the light and thought of the n who had once worn those helts and how their faces had gone still in the mud.
Those who had nothing of such value to leave knelt until their foreheads brushed the wood. With hands that shook from fatigue, from grief, from the mory of where those braids were made, they drew steel and cut the long plaits that had hung like banners down their backs and then they let the braid fall, inside.
The one-legged man moved more slowly, clutching three helts against his chest as if the weight steadied him. He set them down with a pained, careful grace, then tried to bow. His knees buckled; he would have collapsed had not two broad arms caught him and hauled him upright. He steadied himself, muttered sothing into the wood ,a prayer a lie, Alpheo could not tell ,and then straightened, eyes red but fixed.
By the fortieth man, the coffin was a small monunt of helts and braids. tal kept arriving, dull and dented, until the lid could no longer be seen for the offerings. So of the younger soldiers hesitated, awkward and ashad, then simply laid their gifts on the nearest heap.
One after another they put that excess down among the straw, given how the coffin was filled with those tals and hairs, as if making a second grave for their gifts
Alpheo felt an odd detachnt: part of him catalogued who had left what, , while another part simply wanted to vomit or to scream.
When the last of the n had given what they could and stepped back, the coffin was borne down into the shallow pit lined with hay. n moved around them in a loose silence; there were no trumpets, no priests, only the rasp of leather and the soft, accidental sobs of those who could no longer hold themselves upright.
They laid the casket gently upon the straw.
Here, at this hole in the earth, everything that had been wild and loud and alive in that man was reduced to aning and then to ash.
He could not fashion a prayer before nor after the fla took up; he could not promise revenge that would bring his man back. So he simply watched as they pulled the hay up around the coffin, as one of the n silently struck a flint and the fla took, licking first at the dry straw, then at the wood. The smoke rose slow and black into the afternoon.
Alpheo did not look away as he stepped forward, his friends closing in to their prince fearing...what?That he would throw himself in those flas?
He simply let the heat touch his face, let the smoke fill his nostrils, and felt, with a cruel clarity, that all of that was true.
He remained, immobile, watching the casket disappear into fla and ash, until the final curl of smoke thinned and the world felt colder for what it had lost.
And then he knew, his friend was truly gone.
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