A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1602 - 1602: The Witch - Part 1

In his battered armour, bloodied, yet somehow ever so proud, there was a picture more perfect than the one that had come before it. That beautiful piece of artistry that Harmon had poured his heart and soul into. The engravings of beasts, and tigers, torn up, and bloodied, and even more terrifying, and that torn up surcoat of the Patrick House that he wore, everything dripped with the significance of something beyond them – and beyond Oliver himself.

He lifted his sword, Dominus Patrick's blade, his hand guided to do so, still the leaf in the wind that he was before, his eyes wide, and solid purple, with only the slightest bits of gold. He remembered the speech that he had been making, before he had seen the horse to mount, and he did so continue it.

"MEN OF THE PATRICK ARMY!" He said again, Command swirling, in more directions than one, a feeling of buoyancy that he hadn't experienced before. The Command flowed through him, rather than just away from him. It made him feel stronger, revitalized.

He could feel his men too. Those hundred that were standing, and then, hundreds more beyond them. They were all carried, ever so gently, by this wind of some great creature – or monster, if it was indeed that. It allowed Oliver to reach, without relying on the force of Ingolsol to do so, to a thousand men, all at once.

A good portion of those thousand barely seemed to exist. The lives that remained on them was no more than the smallest of sports, only visible in the complete void. But the complete void was exactly where they dwelled. All the pieces – every single one of them buoyed him.

Men were rising from the ground, before Oliver even needed to say any more, and when they did stand up, to look in the direction of their voice, they saw something divine, a General that ought to have been defeated, on the back of a white horse that looked as if it might take flight at any more moment.

"STAND!" Oliver said. He searched for the right words, and that was the only one that came to him, without an ounce of force. They needed nothing more than that. They could hope for nothing more. It was not about victory, for this was no longer their fight – it hadn't been from the start. They were mere mortal men, and this was the battlefield of the Gods. They could only move meekly, and pray that there was built a wind that would blow war in their favour, to even the slightest degree.

That was enough. It was more than enough. For the wind, and the witch, agreed. It was along their lines that the Command travelled, and it was buoyed by it. Dominus would have called it the might of the flow, but Oliver found in it a sensation beyond that. There had ever been inconsistencies in the flow, single moments in which all that they understood about it would be overturned. The wind helped to correct some of those, but even the wind was incomparable to the true thing. The true thing only the Gods could conceive of, and even they could not command it.

From a defeated army, there arose men terrifying enough that they might have been called undead, for the state of some of them. Some of them seemed as if they could hardly stand for a few minutes, even without a battle to fight. Their breathing was heavy, and their shoulders were stooped, as if they were being held up by the strings of something else.

"Tell me! Both of you! Where do we stand?" Hendrick said, in his alarm. "Where do we stand?" He grabbed Fitzer by his shoulders, to shake an answer out of him, before the battle could grow all the more dangerous.

"Undefeated," Fitzer replied. "As of yet, undefeated. No matter what tricks they pull, it will be the last of them."

Tussle nodded, feeling the same degree of calm. "We had expected something, and at last, does the man called Oliver Patrick show himself. So this is the creature that has set the realm into such a degree of upset."

"It would seem, then, that the stories were likely not exaggerated," Fitzer said. "A worthy opponent, do you not think, Tussle?"

"Worthier than the meek and quiet man that had stood with nothing to say up until now," Tussle said, playing with his moustache. "He has played all his cards, and his job is well enough done. Now, we can be sure, it is our own time to join in, would you not say, Fitzer?"

"Indeed it is," Fitzer said, donning the helmet that he had kept held under his arm. "Their army has found a second wind, Prince Hendrick. Requesting permission to depart with two thousand men, and to see them crushed, once and for all."

"…Permission granted," Hendrick said, wondering why it was he felt quite so alarmed in giving that order. "Both of you?"

"Both of us," Tussle agreed. "His capacity as a Sword we shall not underestimate. I will require your assistance, Fitzer."

"And I shall require yours, Tussle."

When the gates of Solgrim opened, it had to be acknowledged that there was a change in the air. Their heavy wood dug through the built up snow, adding deeper lines the ones that had already been there, and out strode two men of significant, and opposing character.

They came at the head of two thousand men – a lacking number for a duo that radiated their level of might. For once, they weren't bickering. For as often as they thought, they knew each other well. When they nodded to each other, from aback their horses, it came as a signal that portrayed more than words could.

Prince Hendrick watched them go, his nervousness not fading. "Why isn't he dead?" He murmured to himself. Amongst all the infantry that he had sent advancing, Oliver Patrick's resurrected thousand prevailed. They were scattered, and tiny in their number, when compared to the wave of his own army, and somehow it seemed to work to their benefit. They refused to fall. "Is this simply the effect that a General is meant to have on his men?"