A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1593 - 1593: The Dragon's Wrath - Part 5

They wished not to survive every battle. They feared death, no doubt, but in swearing service to him, they had, in a strange way, given over that prospect of death, and come to terms with it in a way that Oliver himself had not. In holding them back, and not using them to their fullest capacity, he realized that he betrayed them.

Like he, they were tiny streams, wearing away at rocks. They all sought to overcome something. That was the nature of the existence that they had chosen. They had sworn to serve an ideal that named itself progress. They had fallen to that ideal, in the same way that Oliver had, and they gave it all the meaning that life was to offer.

He robbed them of their burdens. He failed to utilise them properly. He closed their eyes to the grandness of existence, and declared, in their place, as the mighty river, he would push aside all boulders in their path. It was not compassion, it was tyranny.

The madness that he supposed to have seen in the First King was the detached love of nature. To draw away, to feel the will of the masses, to have hardly a will of one's own, to merely function as to that which they desired – that was the purpose of a General. A General of Claudia's sort, anyway, for the First King was that in its entirety. Ingolsol saw strength in a different sort of General, one that overwhelmed.

Yorick's horse almost collapsed beneath him, and Oliver's heart wavered, his eyes flickered with gold, tempted to fall back into old ways, to give in to wrath, and to seek to crush the wall in front of him. But he saw the man's eyes, and his smile, and he felt his warmth, enough to bring tears to Oliver's eyes as he acknowledged it.

There was a man who had found his moment of grandness, his stone to break, and he had cast himself in it. He claimed his own beauty of existence, and courageously, brighter than any hero, had shone.

Yorick lamented not his death. He took pride in it.

"I AM A COMMANDER OF THE PATRICK ARMIES!" He shouted, retaining his footing, for one moment longer, just enough time to slash another man down. "SEE IT, AND REMEMBER IT!"

The greatness of that pride, from a man like Yorick. A normal man, swept up in the stream of something that he saw to be grander, and allowed to rise all the more highly for it. Oliver could practically hear his gratitude. Ingolsol threatened to dance in pleasure from it, but Oliver took it with Claudia's magnanimous sadness and pride. Tears streamed down his face, as he acknowledged the greatness of his comrade, and the life that he gave for the sake of a victory that even Oliver could not see.

"Oh comrade, how delighted I was to fight beside you," Oliver said, seeing Yorick disappear into the tide of rampaging men.

A tiny ripple, in the ocean that was their enemy, one that soon enough, the wave of men saw lean flushed away. They trampled over the fallen corpse, and that of his horse, and they pierced straight through, flattening the last of their comrades, and beginning their convergence towards Verdant's central army, still embroiled with the last dregs of the soldiers that they had been tackling.

If there was one silver lining in it all, it was the freedom that continued to be offered to the Patrick bowmen, as they loosed volley after volley, on charging infantry, and bowmen, who were currently unable to respond back ,for all the men that rushed in front of them, and through them, blocking any attempts they might have made of rebuilding their formation and firing.

For all those volleys that landed, they seemed the barest of little scratches upon a mighty stone wall. It didn't at all seem to weaken the enemy. All the damage that it did was purely aesthetic, and even then, that aesthetic was not enough to give rise to any sort of hope.

A great tidal wave converged on them, like the tsunamis that were said to batter the western shore, and there were none, aside from the archers, who were free enough to meet them. It was checkmate in its truest form.

Volguard ground his teeth. All he could do was give an order that demanded valiance rather than strategy. "Tell Lord Idris to reform his ranks, and to meet the enemy!" He said to his messenger, though he was well aware of the fact that to say that was much easier than seeing it actually done. It was difficult to rush even the last small few troops that they faced.

In the centre, Verdant was giving orders to much the same effect. He and Jorah shouted with an urgency that was only partly iced by the calm that the two of them managed to retain. The soldiers operated with a recklessness, sensing an impending sense of doom, though few of them had the opportunity to look round and see the scale of the problem that was to come their way. Perhaps that too was a silver-lining in it all, for if they had, they might have broken already. There could be few more crushing attacks on morale than to see such a number descending upon an army that was not prepared to meet them.

Throughout the ranks, Blackthorn dashed, as did Karesh, and Kaya, and all their mightiest warriors, targeting the last few pockets of resistance, doing all that they could to flatten the different rocks that stood in their way. But they were far from being quick enough.

There was no hope to be had, there were no bridges to cling to. Oliver found himself in much the same position. An equal battle he and his men were fighting, one that gently began to shift in their favour, now that the cavalry were down to their last few hundred – though Oliver only had a hundred remaining men of his own – but speed didn't exist. They didn't have any cards to pull out, or any resources to build a wall against the mighty threat that was set upon him.