Page 35 of Of Empires and Dust

Dinekes surged forwards, hurling his valyna through the chest of the first rider, then hefting his shield across his body as several Andurii swarmed around him, spears levied. The horses were cumbersome in the dense mud, their hooves sticking and sucking, then sliding as they tried desperately to find traction. Dayne grimaced as the beautiful creatures slammed into the wall of Andurii spears, steel punching through flesh. The horses and their riders fell, blood flowing into the puddles.

The battle, if it could truly be called that, didn’t last much longer. The Thebalans who tried to flee were caught by the spears at both ends of the passage or shredded by Mera’s Wyndarii, who wrought death from above.

Those who fought to the bitter end were given that end.

“The battle is won, Andurios. They never stood a chance. Stories will be told of this night.” Barak was covered from head to toe in mud, a number of gashes along his left shoulder. Dayne felt guilt at whatever Thebalans had stared down the beast of a man in this voidpit. “I’ve sent detachments to round up the surviving horses and recover any gear that can be salvaged.”

Dayne nodded to Barak before yanking a valyna free of a Thebalan corpse, blood pumping from the open wound. He turned and drove the spear down through a twitching body. The woman cried out, reaching for her sword as she lay dying in the mud. Dayne twisted the spear and pushed it deeper. She went limp. He turned to Barak and the other captains who stood about him, calling out. “Make sure the dead stay dead. We will burn the bodies and let them enter Achyron’s halls, but they will not walk from this place.”

Dayne turned and picked his way through the blood-sodden battlefield, driving his spear through anything that moved.

“Dayne.” Sweat and mud slicked Belina’s face. She grasped his shoulder, moving her head to meet his gaze. She didn’t need to speak. He knew the question her eyes asked.

“It must be this way,” he said, pulling his spear free from the body at his feet. “The lines have been drawn, Belina.”

“When I said ‘who are we killing now’ and you said ‘all of them’, I didn’t know you actually meantallof them.”

“This is it. This is where the future of Valtara is decided. I want Loren and every soul under his command to see me in their nightmares. I want them to fear us like they feared the night as children. I am ready to be their demon.”

Chapter 10

For Those We Have Lost, We Mourn

6thDay of the Blood Moon

Aravell – Winter, Year 3081 After Doom

Dann fidgetedwith the top button of his tunic as he walked. It was too tight, and it rubbed against his neck. But Therin had gifted it to him for the ceremony, and Lyrei had nearly taken his hand off when he’d tried to undo the top button. Apparently, it was against tradition and would have done Therin a great dishonour. Even then, as they made their way through the city, thousands walking around them, Lyrei glared at him, her eyes sharp as his mother’s words.

He stared back at her, moving his hand closer to the button, then pulling it further away, trying his best to make her laugh.

A flicker of a smile touched her lips but vanished as quickly as it had appeared, and she stared off into the distance.

Dann let out a subdued sigh, reaching back and pressing his fingers into the muscles along the nape of his neck. Lyrei hadbarely spoken since the battle – since Alea’s death – and Dann had no idea what to say without making everything worse.

He wished he had Calen’s knack of always seeming to know how to say the right thing at the right time. Calen had been born with it. He would never admit it, but he had been. Those speeches Therin would tell tales of, the ones given by ancient heroes on the eve of legendary battles, Calen had been born to give them.

Dann, on the other hand, had not. Words came easy to him, true enough, but rarely the right ones and never at the right time. All he wanted was to take Lyrei’s pain away. He hated seeing others in pain. There was nothing worse. Well, except maybe the cockrot - as it had been so beautifully named.

Ahead, elves marched in the red and gold that Dann had come to associate with the kingdom of Lunithír. They loved their gold.

The elves marched in step, as though all their minds were connected by an invisible string. The single-minded discipline was otherworldly. Each of them was garbed in the finest of clothes. Thick crimson trousers embroidered with gold. Polished black boots that came up past their shins. Stiff, high-collared white tunics – not dissimilar to Dann’s – with golden cloaks draped over their shoulders and swords strapped to their hips.

He looked over his shoulder at the column that marched behind him. It stretched off into the distance, winding through the streets of Aravell. Three thousand three hundred, a blend of elves and humans. Each of them had pledged to fight at Calen’s side in the war to come.

The elves among them all wore the same stiff tunics and thick trousers, but none displayed the colours of any kingdom. In fact, when Dann looked closer, he saw that a number wore ribbons of white and purple tacked to their trousers. Colours that had fast become tied to Calen.

In contrast to the elves, the men and women who had come from across Epheria could not have looked more disorganised and incoherent. They were a confused assortment of random colours and garments; some in fine linen shirts, others in battered cottons, and others still in all varieties of garb from sleeveless tunics to roughspun woollen jerkins. Many of them had come to Aravell with nothing but the clothes on their backs. But still they walked with their heads held high, moving with a rhythm that Haem and the other knights had drilled into them.

Despite the disparity between the elves and humans, between the armies of Aravell and those who stood behind Calen, there was something common between them, something shared: pain.

Dann had felt it from the moment they’d stepped out into the streets. It clung to the air, made its home in the stone, and pierced the heart of every soul that walked towards the ceremony.

Three thousand three hundred. That number had been near five thousand three days before. Almost the entire population of the villages around The Glade – dead. Thousands more had died from the three elven kingdoms that called Aravell home, and the number of dead went up every day as the Healers struggled to keep the injured alive.

Friends, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters. The scale of the death had been so vast that no soul had gone untouched. It was a horrible thing to share – loss. But in a way, there was nothing else in the world that bound people together more closely.

Dann’s throat tightened as he walked, and his thoughts wandered. Alea and Baldon’s faces floated in the back of his mind, the realisation settling in that he would never hear the sound of their voices again. He would never see the gold of Alea’s eyes or Baldon’s toothy amused grin. They were gone, and hewas less for it. Before he’d left The Glade, Dann had barely seen death. Now it seemed to follow him like a wicked shadow.

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