4.4 KiB
Below the tower, in the wide, frostbitten courtyard of House Talpis, a handful of riders formed the king’s last honor guard. Their mounts were restless, steaming with breath, stamping into the snow. Some bore the great helms and thick cloaks of the noble houses. Others wore little more than scavenged plate and cracked leathers. They lined up in ritual silence beneath the pale flame of the standard—silver-antlered stag against black wool, rippling weakly in the wind.
The great gates creaked open. Chains groaned. Wood protested. What had once been a triumphal arch—the Gate of Sorrow, carved with images of the city’s founding—now looked more like a maw torn into the side of the palace. Ash and snow coated the reliefs. The faces of saints had been chipped away by siege fire.
King Aran emerged last, astride a white destrier draped in funeral gray. He wore no armor. Only the black mantle of the mountain kings, trimmed in white fox and bound at the throat with a single clasp of antler bone. His sword—Calvenra, broken in half a generation ago and never reforged—hung sheathed at his back, not to be drawn. He bore no shield. His crown sat heavy and crooked atop silver-threaded hair, the points of iron antlers dulled from age.
To Telaryn, watching from the high tower, he looked not like a warrior, nor a ruler, but like a memory walking into its grave.
“Does he truly believe he can change the outcome?” Alisha asked quietly. “He can’t break the lines. Not with so few.”
“No,” Telaryn said. “That’s not why he rides.”
Alisha glanced at her, uncertain. Telaryn didn’t explain.
In the square below, the king raised one hand. The motion was smooth, practiced—the signal of a man who had trained his whole life for this gesture, though he had hoped never to use it. The riders followed. Swords were drawn. A single horn blew—low, steady, mournful.
The last ride of Talpis began.
The hooves struck the stone like a heartbeat. Then again. Then faster.
Down the long road through the outer keep, the king led them. Past the shattered statues of forebears. Past the burned-out guardposts and the crumbling wall banners. They rode not as men marching to war, but as ghosts returning to the site of their death.
No one shouted. No war cry split the wind. No drums rose to meet them.
Even the Third Legion, gathered in disciplined ranks across the field, seemed to watch in reverent quiet.
They met at the edge of the frost-scabbed causeway, where the rubble of the outer defenses had created a kind of gauntlet—narrow, broken, flanked by debris. A killing ground.
And still they rode.
King Aran did not slow.
His horse reared, teeth bared to the sky, and then the charge struck.
It was a good charge. One that would have been studied in other wars, remembered in scrolls. The first line of legionaries broke—too slow to brace against the fury of dying men. Two went down beneath the hooves. Another impaled on a lance. For a moment—a blink, no more—it looked like they might break through.
But the Third Legion did not falter.
They rotated formations with brutal grace, shields locking, spears rising in a wave. The second rank surged forward.
A red-fletched javelin struck the king’s mount in the neck.
The white horse screamed—then collapsed, dragging the king down beneath it.
Aran vanished in a cloud of snow and blood.
The rest of the riders tried to wheel around, to reach him, to hold the line. But the tide closed. Metal clanged. Hooves slipped. Men fell screaming. The standard-bearer was the last to fall, curling over the banner as if to protect it from the snow. A legionnaire drove a blade through both cloth and spine.
It was over in under a minute.
From the tower, Telaryn stood unmoving, her gloved hands clenched white on the stone.
No horns sounded for the king’s fall.
No name was called.
Only silence. And snow.
The white flakes landed on blood-soaked ground, melted, and vanished.
She turned away.
“He died for them,” Alisha whispered, not quite meeting her eyes. “For us.”
Telaryn’s voice was very quiet. “He died for the memory of something already dead.”
Alisha flinched.
Telaryn didn’t.
She crossed the balcony, her boots crunching in the snow. Behind her, the city burned. Beneath her, the king lay somewhere in the ash.
And ahead of her, a different kind of legacy waited.
One she hadn’t chosen. One she could no longer escape.