A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1600 - 1600: To Flow or to Fly - Part 7

His words struck like thunder, though they had been given so lightly, without a gathering of energy in Oliver. He had simply spoken what was easiest to him, along the lines in which they were easiest. To the point that even the dragon could not have seen it coming.

And stir they did.

Some great witch sprung to life, and made the battlefield into her cauldron. She plunged in this great wooden spoon, and she stirred, bit by bit, those black waters.

She pointed to something that otherwise was not there. The dragon had cast all forward, in a single great charge, it had committed the large portion of all its pieces – all the soldiers that had been stationed outside Solgrim's walls had been sent engaging. All their momentum from their charging had been used up, and spent in a single manoeuvre. There was no more charging for them to be done, and that great crashing wave that they had once been was no more. Now they were just a black lake, endlessly churning, the God's Eye that sought to drown all that swam in it by sheer overwhelm.

The surface of such waters were still aside from the slightest of ripples. Hauntingly so. It made them seem all the more overwhelming for it. And so when a ripple of grandness was put along its black glass, and something was beginning to be stirred, it sprang up a tide that there ought not have been. It pulled the floating debris from the depths of the lake, and showed them once more to the light of the world, and all the stars that shone above.

There was a sudden flash of fear from Prince Hendrick. He looked in alarm at the two Generals next to him, and wondered why he could not see the whiteness of face that he felt in himself. They looked more curious than they did concerned, as if they had seen something with a particular degree of curiosity.

Hendrick could not adopt such detachment. He felt as if, all of a sudden, there had sprung to life a being of grandness. Something that grappled with him personally and loved him not.

Oliver said no more, but he could feel the freedom of the lines that had suddenly been created. They shot out, all these different currents of air, offering their way for a little leaf that might fly along them. A grand creature like a dragon might have overlooked them, in sheer arrogance, supposing them to be far too light to be of concern to the likes of him – but a little leaf, like Oliver Patrick, did so gladly float along them.

There came the sense of magic, the sense of something horrifying, the presence of a creature beyond a man, something that hardly seemed to match the state of the land and armies before them. Something that transcended physicality.

Did the witch match the dragon? Was the witch even on the side of the Patrick army? It was hard to tell, but Oliver could never have dared assume so. That which stirred, and invited in fresh chaos and opportunity, could just as easily turn on him as it did the enemy.

"MY LORD PATRICK! I HEAR YOUR CRY!" Came a reply, spoken a full minute after Oliver had given rise to his. From the sweeping blackness of many men, there was plunged into the sky a short spear, and then a rapier quickly followed it.

Beneath that tide of men, there arose, once more, a thoroughly exhausted Verdant Idris and Lady Blackthorn, both of them covered in a mixture of their own blood, and that of the enemy. Their efforts had long since shrunk to the point that they could no longer be seen from the walls of Solgrim, but animated freshly by Command as they were, they found their strength once more.

From their cry, there came others. Mighty warriors who had been defeated more by their exhaustion than by their wounds shouted their whereabouts, and united with their comrades.

"KAYA! WHERE ARE YOU?" Jorah shouted.

"Behind you," Kaya replied wearily. "Karesh is there too."

"Gods be damned, how are both of you still alive?" Karesh said. It sounded joking, but the man did not have the energy to joke. The look in his eyes was not one full of light. They were distant, and looking off elsewhere. His body was carried on, without a will of its own. It was the will of another man, or another thing. They all found themselves in such a state.

"I don't feel particularly alive," Kaya said. "And it doesn't look like we've got much hope of clinging to life for much longer…"

Still, they found themselves surrounded, without prospect. All they had been offered was the barest licking of energy so that they might rise again, and once more attempt what they had failed to do before. It was the mere prolonging of their struggle.

"We will do what we can," Jorah said stoically. "We'll see the men gathered, and attempt to reunite with Lord Idris."

"What men?" Kaya said.

"…Those men," Jorah said, pointing.

Like ghouls, soldiers rose up from the ground. One by one. It was hardly just Oliver's cry that had seen them raised. It had merely been the initial spark of Command. But the true reason for their standing lay elsewhere. It was a force beyond Oaliver Patrick, one that he could not attempt to control. He had known from the start that he could never match the dragon – and still, he knew that he couldn't. He could sense the change in the air, but he knew it was not him that lay in control of it. It was a natural phenomena, of a different sort than the physicality offered by the problem of a dragon.

He was pulled along by it, so separate to him, its wind gathered, and the most mindless thing for Oliver to do was lend it his voice, without intention, without even the anger that he felt before for the gravity pulling him in. He was just a piece of something else, another whole. When he gave his speech, and lent to the wind the fire that the witch so longed for in her cauldron, he did not do so by his will, but by hers.