Private To Fill the Father's Cup

Blood, piss, and shit marred the air, stained the nose with every breath.

Noniruth drew towards a frenetic end, bringing with it a chill that permeated the bone even so far south as the head of the Ilican peninsula. Sparse pine woodlands gave ground to the encroaching winter, dry branches cracking under foot and hoof.

Not three miles from the walls of Sadrias, formerly under the Praetorship of one Vespin Quinn, regiments of the Kharmic Legion marched in the pitch of skirmish. Several of the VII Legion were scattered about the area, the bulk of the force making straight for the gates of Sadrias under the guise of inquisition; little more than bloodsport, in truth. Reports from the Imerisan Front that landed the garrison commander of Castellis Sutr, the renowned Black Fort, the displeasure of her betters spoke of detachments of Selvari horse raiding in the adjacent hinterlands.

The embarrassment of allowing rebels mock the venerable Legion hastened this march. Deploying a force near 500 strong split into isolated regiments across the villages and farmsteads leading to the city-state of Sadrias, the imperials expected little in the way of resistance. Counter to this, one regiment faced off against a particular band of sellswords. Morning had bled to terse afternoon, heated by the ensuing melee while the Legion forces dug in their position amongst the pine.

One redheaded officer, either elf of half-elf by sight of his ears, clicked his tongue, gaze colored by frustration. He was scratching at his helmet, jaw clenched white, and surveying the chaos that surrounded him. A hollow gesture, perhaps, from the relative safety of his command pavilion.

"Fucking sellswords holding up better than these Stater rebels," he said. "Might hire some myself if any live the day." Hints of admiration alighted his tone, if grudgingly.

He poked his head out from the pavilion. Pockets of pike were pressed at the fore, a constant thrum of sword and cudgel and axe on shield made music of the screams that accompanied them. Wagons had been turned, used as mock barricades at the edges of this impromptu encampment to maintain a semblance of order. Several of these were arrow-strewn, at least one smoldering with the embers of a freshly put out fire. The occasional body made fast mortar for the gaps, at least.

The flank held some comfort to it, situated atop a slope that led to one of the tributaries feeding the township beyond. A token force was stationed there, mostly to guard the injured pulled back from the front.

He raised his voice, shouting to a group of youths that manned the wagon-garrison, "Cadet Cadre! Eyes sharp for that detachment of Selvari horse! Open ground is your funeral, be fucked if I'm paying for any more caskets."

This inaction galled him. The promise of reinforcement kept the fighting from reaching a stalemate, though the time incremented as through a sieve. It ticked away, grain after grain, bruising both the egos and bodies of the Legion.

"Cleric, get your ass to the rear, see to the wounded." This he addressed to a man still seated in the pavilion, untouched by the dirt of the day.

The man, robed in the black accoutrements of Ko's faithful, was Santiago, a cleric serving in tandem with the garrison commander of Castellis Sutr. The bark of command tugged at his eyebrows; it was unusual at the best of times for him to be given requests, let alone a direct order from a mere regimental officer. He shrugged it off, rising with a particular care to keep the mud from his silks.

"Ko's blessing on this battle," Santiago said in parting, leaving the pavilion to cross the hundred or so paces to the rear. This he did alone, bereft of his usual escort, careless to the mayhem about him.

“Kill, kill, and kill again!”

Etain felt the weight of her black armor bite into her shoulders as she lunged into the chaos. The smell of blood was thick, almost sweet under the pine smoke, but the stench of piss was sharper still. A horse reared nearby, its rider crushed beneath it. The body of the man split like rotten wood, and the creature whinnied, chest heaving, before skidding away. A volley of arrows hissed overhead, one thunking into a tree mere inches from her head.

“Red!” someone hollered from the rear, a wiry merc with a scar slicing across his cheek shouted. “Bet I’ll reach the palisades first!” Etain grinned beneath her helmet. "Fine! Better start running then, Jarrick!" she called back at him.

Her sword sang through the air, a silver blur beneath the sun. She drove her blade through the neck of a legionnaire who came screaming at her, the head rolling into the mud. Etain wiped the gore from her visor and pressed on. From the side, a shield smashed against her shoulder, knocking her down onto her knees. Rising, she caught the legionnaire’s spear with her hand and snapped the shaft with a chop from her sword. The man’s eyes went wide with disbelief before Etain drove the pommel into his face, the cartilage bursting under the blow. He fell backward with his broken nose. Blade embedded in his chest.

Looked up to see Jarrick run past her. “Come on, then!” he shouted, dodging an overhead swing and chopping a man’s wrist off mid-swing. Etain set off thundering through the mud.

Chaos christened the makeshift battlements.

Shouting could be heard from within the encampment: "Ko's hairless balls! Where the fuck are my scouts? Report, legionnaire! Report!"

The redheaded officer leapt from the command pavilion, strapping firm his helmet and drawing his blade. What composure he boasted had drained from him in the attrition of the skirmish.

Features gaunt, hunted about the eyes, the redheaded officer scanned the field, drinking in the chaos and making frenetic order of it. At the fore, their pockets of pike held fast, forcing the Sadrias defenders behind a line of ditch dug in the early hours of the morning. The men wearied of the task, but holding that line required little in the way of ingenuity. Press back the Stater forces without pursuit, use the sparse pines to prevent the Selvari horse from approaching. Simple enough.

The flank, comprised all of paired wagons turned over and mortared by bags of dirt, collapsed. The token legionnaires manning the station were dead. He had no time to mourn them, nor cause to do so. The failure of the rear guard to provide warning of this new force damned what defensive efforts they managed to this point.

The regiment, a mere fifth of the forces deployed by the VII Legion, had sustained losses earlier in the day in heated engagements with the Sadrias defenders. Exhaustion manifested in the shaky arms of pikemen. Morning reports from the scouts described this array of troops as little more than local militia bolstered by sellswords with warnings of a detachment of Selvari horse dancing between the fronts. No word had been uttered of this second force, one mad enough to take the long side of the hill and put the stream at their flank.

"Hit the flare, signal for reinforcements!" No sooner had the words left his mouth that an orb of light tinged blood and orange fired into the sky. It flickered out, briefly, and exploded with force that echoed over the melee.

He loosed a breath. Despite signaling failure, a mar upon the reputation of the Kharmic Legion, that flare alighted measured hope in him. It promised inevitability. Within the hour, maybe three with worst luck, reserves from the forces laying siege to the city proper would hasten to their aid. He needed only hold on until then. That task, he admitted, wore the cloak of a revenant.

"Form up," he shouted, "semi-circle, backs to the palisades! Cadet Cadre, you're up! Prove yourselves worthy of graduating the Crucible!"

They hit the camp like a thrown axe and stuck just as deep. Tents collapsed under panicked horses, hogs barreled through men like living battering rams. The hogs smashed into the line of pikes from behind, and the formation folded like wet parchment. Men screamed. Some tried to surrender. Around them, the camp tore itself apart.

Etain didn’t bother looking for targets, they kept throwing themselves at her.

One legionnaire tried to run past her, smart enough to know she’d kill him, dumb enough to think she couldn’t reach him. She hooked his ankle with her boot, sent him sprawling, and pinned him through the spine. He twitched once, twice, then not at all..

Rebels pushed through, shields locked, boots trampling the dying. Etain moved with them, carving open any gap she saw. She preferred close quarters, faces close enough to see the fear, to smell the moment a man realized he was already dead and just hadn’t hit the ground yet.

The cadet, barely old enough to shave, who met her, only got half a word out. “Hal-...” before her sword buried itself in his face, splitting helm and skull alike with a crunch that vibrated up her arms. She yanked the blade free with a grunt, bits of teeth and tongue coming with it.

“Lovely welcome,” she muttered. “Hope the rest of you are friendlier...”

Then the second flare went up. Red and orange. Then a third.
Flickering like small dying suns over the nearby camps.

The redheaded officer smiled a bloody smile as he caught sight of the flares.

Two other regiments, reserve outposts for the siege, faired as poorly as his own troops, victim to dissemination at the beck of bad intel. He could imagine their lines, cordoned off by carts and pike, collapsing beneath a charge where all reports promised no activity.

Bitter relief filtered in. No longer did he need to hold out another hour.

The siegebreakers, wyvern riders touting sacs of wyrmfire filled to bursting, cast long horrors over the impending horizon in their flight down from Kalmatrin. Too late for his regiment, of course, but there was grim satisfaction in dreaming of the walls of Sadrias crumbling underclaw of their breakers.

Three arrows protruded from his cuirass, accentuated by a wicked gash that clove his shoulder loose from neck. His cogence remained some small miracle. Propped against the bodies of his command, gurgling from throat and nose, he kept to his macabre desires. Most of what sustained him amounted to shock, he knew, no point dwelling on it.

In his last breaths before the shieldwall faltered and the sellswords gored his forces about their tusks, he managed to order what remnants escaped initial contact to parlay with the other four regiments. Maybe twenty of his own heeded those orders, leaving a bulk of bodies strewn across the encampment. His pavilion laid in tatters, smoke curling from the timbers that once held it aloft, fabric openly burning to join in the medley of stenches that saturated the field.

He was lost.

This sector was lost. But not the day. Sadrias, oh sweet Sadrias would yet burn. If he any hope yet smoldered within him, it was a fervent wish that the remainder of the VII Legion forewent any pretenses of conversion. More the pity he could not bear witness it himself.

---

Thoughts swirled in the adrenaline laced soup of Santiago's head.

Having seen firsthand the guards perish at the camp's flank, he fled from his post administering aid to the wounded. Unarmed, clothed in robes and sandals that spit mud along his bared calves, he survived that initial contact.

His flight took him over the hill's crest that had once made for the encampment's rear fortification. Slipping under a wagon, he hid there in a panicked daze for some time listening to the press of boots and hoof and the frenetic shouting that cascaded overhead. When it seemed clear that the sellswords overtook the camp, when their attention felt distinctly geared towards the defending remnants of this regiment of the VII Legion, Santiago rolled out from his hiding place and tumbled down the hill.

Each turn, ankle over head over elbow that scrabbled for purchase on the slick rootwalls of the bank, brought a new ache, a fresh, sharp pang that tore consciousness from him well before he reached the bottom.

There, bits of gravel braiding his hair, he laid in a puddle as the stream trickled by. Dazed, arm twisted awkwardly beneath the small of his back.

Etain spotted the body by the stream the way a wolf spots a sheep limping. Half by movement, half by instinct. A scrap of robe in all this soot and ruin. She skidded the last few steps down the embankment, boots splashing in the shallows.

“You picked a piss-poor place for a nap.” A man, a priest, judging by the cut of his robes. "Up you come." Her gauntlet clamped around the back of his neck, thumb digging into the tendon, yanked him to sit up. “There,” she said, leaning down so he could smell the iron on her. “Try standing before I decide to drag you by the hair instead.”

She flicked the edge of the sword toward him. The blade was slick and red to the hilt. Bits of scalp clung stubbornly near the guard. A shred of someone’s ear, she hadn’t bothered to flick it off yet, was plastered to the flat of the blade. Blood had dried in jagged flakes along the fuller, but fresh ribbons still dripped from the edge.

Santiago was not bequeathed with the time to think—rather, his faculties were quite lacking in that regard, rendering himself incapable of stringing together much in the way of reply beyond a gurgle of muck, spit, and flecks of blood that congealed in his mouth.

The pain in his arm was sharp, that in his head dull. His temples pounded, his nose flared, his lips bubbled with slick breath. Standing from that angle tore out a groan that mewled from a yelp, but stand he did, after a staggering fashion. A sandal came loose in his tumble, the straps tripping at his attempt to rise, forcing him into a half-slump at the sellsword's hand. Dangerously close to that blade, vile thing that it proved.

Glazed eyes looked to the sky. An empty thing but for the smoke filtering over the pine. Even the clouds meandered off in the distance, too far to offer any measure of comfort.

Santiago could only nod in defeated acknowledgment, fully at the woman's whim.

The smoke of the burning pavilions swirled around them, thick and bitter. Behind them, someone screamed. Ahead, someone else shouted orders. Blackshields picked through bodies and loot piles with the bored focus of men and women doing a familiar chore.. Silvani riders laughed as they stripped armor from the dead. Etain marched the priest through it without slowing.

As they moved between bodies cooling in the dirt, she muttered. "Liten, priest," nudging him forward if he slowed. “Bit of advice,” she said. “Heroes die stupid. Brave men die loud. You... might live, if you’re useful.” Brave men bleed more slowly because someone decided to make an example of them. Etain didn't like that, she was still a knight at heart and would rather not engage in torture.

“So if the Captain asks you something? Answer it. Don’t sermon, don’t lie. You’re not a hero.” forced him toward the looming shape of the Captain’s hog and the ring of Blackshields waiting.

'"He a new friend of yours, Etain? Bit ragged."

Etain snorted at the Captain’s question. “Ragged? Aye, that’s how I like ’em.” she drawled, popping the buckles of her helmet. She pulled the helmet off. Out fell her red hair, sweat-soaked, copper bright, streaked with grit and mud. A few strands stuck to her cheek.

The sword in her hand was still wet and ugly, rivulets of dark red sliding toward the tip. Etain glanced at it, then at the priest’s robe. It was cleaner than anything else in sight by a mile. She grabbed a fistful of his robe, not waiting for permission, and
dragged the blade across it, slow and thorough.

“Found him by the river, Hiding like a wet rat.” she said, tossing the soiled flap of robe back against the priest’s legs. She sheathed her sword. “Figured he’s either lucky or useful. Maybe both. Hard to tell with the holy ones.” She nudged him with her fingers toward the Captain's hog.

Blood dribbled off his lips as he entertained this facsimile of polite conversation. It served him better to spit it out weakly over himself, letting it coat the underside of his chin and collar of his robes.

Few details coalesced before the Cleric, his vision occluded by flurry and pain. The drum of hoofbeat, of shouting yet rung in his ear, all the more raucous for the thrum of heart that beat him ragged. One cogent thought suggested that he was concussed, but with little to abet that circumstance he relinquished care of it from his mind. Other matters proved more pressing, such as his imminent survival where so many of the LV Legion had failed. No easy task.

His makeup ran wet, betraying patches of dual colored flesh along the chin and brow. Even with the many-handed idol of Ko absent his breast this band had identified him a priest. Unlucky. He couldn't lie away his allegiances.

He gritted out a red smile. A charming sight coupled with splotches of muck-braided hair.

"Malik," he said, draw thick of his mother's accent, "or Santiago, if you'd prefer my baptism name." This he managed between gasps, teeth nattering against the pain that sung from his arm.

“Aye, Captain,” she said, tone flat as hammered iron.

She turned on her heel, blood-stiff braids swinging, and strode away from the Captain and the priest. Her boots crunched over splintered shields, discarded spears, and the odd hand that hadn’t been attached firmly enough to its owner.

Her mare, Josephine, snorted when she approached, stamping at the ground. The warhorse, big, white, perpetually irritated, tossed her head from where she’d been tied along the remnant of a wagon frame. Etain grabbed the reins and loosened the knot. She patted the mare’s neck, gently.

“Come on, girl. Captain’s got us riding.”

Etain shoved the helmet back onto her head and swung up into the saddle with a grunt, settling into it with familiar habit. A quick tug brought the mare around, hooves kicking up mud as she steered her back toward the Captain’s position.

“Right then,” she muttered under her breath, rolling her neck. “Back to bloody Sadrias.”