A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1634 - 1634: Echoes in the Void - Part 4 & The Hidden Mighty Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

There was Karstly too, but it was not joy in particular that Skullic felt in fighting alongside him. It was a degree of resentment. It was a man he looked out at from the corner of his eye, ever so warily, with the vague sense that Karstly was set to compete against him in all things. It was an unspoken competition, and still Skullic declared that he would not lose.

"SECOND AND FIRST RANK, FIRE AS ONE!" Skullic said, switching their tactics all of sudden, from the wave-firing that they'd been operating on until then, with the first rank firing as the second rank saw a fresh arrow notched to their bows.

It was the slightest little blur of black in the distance that set him to that order, breaking the rhythm of the combat they'd held until now. Quickly, all sight of it was lost, beyond the cloud of black that arose in its place. The cloud travelled in a sweeping parabola, just missing the incoming crow, as it came into view.

A loud bellow from the enemy command centre, where their General sat on a stool, told Skullic that they'd acknowledged the bird as well, but there was little they could do about it, when their men were still set to weathering the arrows that were coming their way.

The storm passed far too quickly for Skullic's liking, and the bird travelled far too slowly. "Hurry up, damn you… Hurry up!" Skullic growled. It was as much a war of information that he was fighting as it was a war of men. To secure a single crow was to snatch a victory worth a good few hundred, or even a thousand soldiers.

Now the enemy were sending their ranks of archers forward, with the intention of seeing the bird chased, and struck out from the sky.

They managed a hasty volley, done without the orderliness of an ordinary volley, with the men all but firing at will. A mismatched cloud sprung up after the bird, and one would have thought the creature to be blind, for it continued to flap at the same pace, even as that giant cloud thundered after it.

Just barely, by the smallest of margins, did those arrows miss, and the crow barely flinched. They came within a hand of striking it, and the bird did not even regard them with a twist of its neck. It was almost contemptuous in its duty.

Though watching the quiet battle with a sheen of sweat on his forehead, Skullic had to smile his respect, if only for the fact of the crow's escape.

He held off the want to celebrate their minor victory, just barely. With all the days that they'd spent battling, something as small as this really was the only victory that they could foresee. The role of the defender, as they played it, wasn't an entirely rewarding one, when the enemy scrambled in the same way they always had in the days before, and it became quite clear that this would simply be a battle of endurance – one that the besieged would always be destined to eventually lose.

His messenger gave the crow a perch to land on, and with swift and nervous hands – after distracting the bird with an offering of a handful of corn – saw the little message unclipped from the side of the crow's leg, and saw it handed to Skullic.

"The seal of… House Patrick? I do believe, my Lord," the messenger said, sounding doubtful as it gave the seal a hasty appreciation.

"Mmm," Skullic said, agreeing with the evaluation. "I would have preferred word from Lord Blackwell to get through… We must know the state of the entire campaign. But I suppose it shall suffice to see what our young Ser Patrick has to say… His front was the most…"

His muttering to himself cut off, as his eyes flashed over the letter, scanning the scribbled characters, drinking in their meaning at a rapid pace. It irritated him that he'd become so accustomed to reading Oliver's handwriting at this point, that the barely decipherable letters hardly made him flinch. They were a code in and of themselves. Even if an enemy were to intercept the crow, their scouts would have an irritating time deciphering its meaning.

"News, General?" The messenger asked uneasily, seeing how quiet Skullic had grown. Skullic shot the man a quick look, becoming distinctly aware that most of the attention on the wall was now pointed his way. His men waited, restless in their unease. All their efforts could be for naught, depending on the contents of one letter. It was a terrifying position to be in.

It was made even more terrifying still for the stakes behind the defence of the Skreen. Unlike Ernest, they had not had the time they needed to evacuate the civilians. It was not a purely military castle that was being left in operation. It was a little town now, in its own right, with no roads allowed to the outside world to see it refilled. And those civilians remained hungry, chewing through their supply of grain, with no prospect at relief.

The Skullic soldiers fought with the weight of that responsibility, and without the freedom that would have otherwise been granted to them, if they knew that they could afford to take certain liberties in their defence, and make certain structural sacrifices. They had to fight and strategize to perfection, lest their slightest mistake cause the deaths of hundreds of innocents.

And in all that, there was the ever niggling doubt that, perhaps, elsewhere, the campaign was going poorly. Perhaps it was already over, and the stress was for nothing. It was a quiet voice, but it was a dreadful thing. It wormed its way into a man's head like a poison, and dulled the certainty that he would otherwise have had.

Like starving men, they had waited for the crow to bring them news, as if it was its flesh that they craved to see their stomachs settled from hunger. Now that it had arrived, they hardly wanted to hear the answer. The trepidation hit them more nervously than any of the enemy charges had. There had begun to be a routine to that – but this was an executioner's blow that would be delivered without fighting. It was mere words, and words alone, that would send the guillotine falling down onto all their heads.

Skullic crushed the letter up in his fist, in a sudden display of emotion, shattering it in the same way that he had seen so many desks shattered after they were piled high with seemingly unnecessary paperwork. A great many shoulders sagged at the motion, interpreting it to be a bad sign. Skullic's jaw was tight, and the intensity about him, something that seemed indistinguishable from rage, only added to that.

Then he spoke.

"MEN OF MINE, FEAR NOT!" Skullic shouted. "FOR WE FIGHT ALONGSIDE TITANS! FOR ALL THE EFFORTS WE PUT IN HERE, THEY MULTIPLY THEM IN THE WORLD AROUND, TEN FOLD! THIS CROW CARRIES NEWS OF GREAT VICTORIES. A MAN THAT YOU YOURSELVES HAVE FOUGHT ALONGSIDE MORE THAN ONCE. OLIVER PATRICK CASTS THE FIRST HAND IN THIS WAR, AND SEIZES THE FIRST GREAT VICTORY FOR HIMSELF. HE HAS DEFEATED THE EMERSON ARMY OF TWENTY THOUSAND, BY THE GRACE OF THE GODS, WITH A MERE TWO THOUSAND OF HIS OWN."

"HE CLAIMS THE HEAD OF GENERAL TUSSLE, AND HOLDS HOSTAGE GENERAL FITZER AND PRINCE HENDRICK. LOOK, MEN OF MINE, HOW THE VALIANT OF OUR ALLIANCE FIGHT, AND ASK NOT WHETHER YOU CAN DO MORE, FOR NOW IT IS EVIDENT! WE ARE BEHIND! WE LACK THE PASSION OF OUR ALLIES! WE HAVE SHOWN INSUFFICIENT HEART! IF THEY ARE TO SNATCH GREAT VICTORIES, THEN YOU MEN OF THIS SKULLIC ARMY SHALL NOT FALL BEHIND. GLORY, MY COMRADES! GLORY! WE WILL TAKE, AND WE SHALL TAKE SOME MORE! WE HAVE OPPORTUNITY, AND WE SHALL SNATCH IT, TO PAINT AS GLORIOUS A PICTURE FOR OTHERS AS THEY HAVE PAINTED FOR US! LOOSE THOSE ARROWS!"

"""URAHHHH!""" The men responded. With each sentence that their General had spoken, their mood had turned, faster, and faster, until from nowhere, there had sprung this mighty fire, with embers that seemed as if they'd spent decades in their establishment. From nowhere, there was magic, and the wall of the Skreen seemed to extend just the slightest bit higher.

That seated General, bearing the royal flag of the High King, appointed directly to his majesty himself, had to grimace.

"…General Sartorius," a Colonel said warily.

"I am well aware. Withdraw the men," the General said, in his high reed-like voice. "We will not be getting anything out of them today. If they are so passionate, then we will give them no fuel for their fire to burn. Time is our greatest ally, indeed."

If one were to divide the Stormfront, the most popular claim would have been that it consisted of five realms, each of it governed by different Kings. There were the four realms of the Silver Kings, and then there was the Central District, governed directly by the High King himself.

Such a mapping was drawn up by the scholarly. They delighted in the even number, and the even division, and they pointed to the perfect parallels that had been mapped out with it in the Academy. With the yellow castle, the red castle, the green castle, the blue castle, and the central castle. And they would say "look, the perfect piece of symbolism! Look how wise those that came before us were, when they saw such things constructed!".

That was a view of an academic. It was likely the view even of most Generals, and most strategists. Only those with a hand that had dared to rise up all the districts of the Stormfront at once would have realized that, despite all that they had come to believe, the Stormfront was not nearly as uniformly civilized as once supposed.

There was, however, a void. Something that even the mighty merchants that saw their wares traded on the national level would come to realize. A place where trade routes ran dry, where roads seemed to stop going, where messages rarely seemed to reach, and where adventurers rarely seemed to return from.

In the wild of such lands, few outsiders had the opportunity to have their gazes pierce. None were invited in to observe the strangeness of such a people, and no High King ever dared to push for the opportunity.

For all the Silver Kings, there had been one that all the High Kings had remained exclusively wary of, for their culture, and the way they carried themselves was so entirely different as to be almost foreign.

A single Treeant Silver King had ruled, and only shortly, in a decade-long reign that had been tolerated nervously, in light of the old rituals. They were strange enough that the other Silver Kings might have unified, to ensure that they'd never see such an odd House in power. But the naturalness of a disease-ridden death had seen them free of the monarch sooner than they could have hoped, and no such rebellion had sprung up, and the old ways were kept.

The Treeants themselves were aware of their strangeness. When they attended the Academy, they did so in the guise of normal noblemen. They wore the usual Stormfront noble culture as if as a costume, but somehow, it never seemed to suit them. In such dresses, with shirts of thrills, and robes of the finest fabrics, they had seemed unusually stern and serious, like boulders that had stood grimly for millions of years, merely tolerating the weather, and waiting for the opportunity for them to rise again.

The ancient family of the Treeants neglected to marry outside of the realm that they governed. Their rituals, even for the scholarly that made their life work the pursuit of them, remained shrouded in mystery. So tight was the secrecy, that none in any position of government even truly knew how many residents those dense forests of the Treeant Silver Kings housed, or just what the level of strength of their soldiery was.

It was an eternal nervousness, an eternal pressure, for there was the sense that, behind that curtain of green, and behind the different Goddess that they worshipped, the Treeants were slowly amassing their strength, and waiting for the day, and the perfect opportunity, in which they might arise again, and restore the ancient ways to the Stormfront – ways more ancient than even the country itself.

In the depths of an old forest, with trees thicker than three men put together, piercing higher into the sky than any could dare to believe, there stood a man of such gigantism, that he seemed to have stepped out from the trees himself.

Over his head, there was thrown the skin of a bear, and even that was not large enough to reach down the fullest length of his body. It left his chest exposed, leaving the work of keeping warmth to the thick growth of hair on his chest, and the long bristling beard that ran through it.

More of the man's skin was bare than what wasn't. A kilt of checkered green and brown draped from his waist to the upper portion of his knee, and every patch that his bear fur and his kilt did not cover, was littered with the most complicated and spiralling of tattoos. They ran from his lower shins, all the way up his stomach and chest, and then out onto the cheeks of a face that might have been cut from marble for how sharply it was angled.

He bellowed, as he wielded his giant warhammer against the empty air, a piece of equipment as large as he was, and yet he wielded it with the effortlessness that others might wield a broom pole.

"Germanicus," came the call of an old crone, wearing a coat of raven feathers, as she leaned heavily against her cane. The impatience in her voice spoke of just how long she had stood there, forced to watch as Germanicus did his thinking with his weapon, declaring that he was still as of yet undecided. "We must send the message out today, Germanicus, we have waited too long. Any longer, and we will be met with as traitors."

"Let them think that," Germanicus snarled. "We will crush all who dare to stand against us."

"If that were your line of thinking, you would have decided long before now," the crone said.

"What of the King?" Germanicus asks. "What says he?"

"You are the King," the crone corrected him. "He has stepped back from all worldly affairs since appointing you office. He declares he will not voice an opinion on it, and he will leave the matter entirely in your hands."

"That bastard…" Germanicus said, finally pausing his swinging, only to slam his hammer headfirst into the ground, sending green most and dirt flying.

"Don't take it out on the forest," the old woman said, angrily enough. "You would turn against Gaia, simply out of confusion? Do you always need to know the perfect path forward? Do you suppose that we all enter this world with a map of our lives, knowing exactly which step to take?"

"…I apologise, oh mistress Gaia," Germanicus said reverently. "But that geezer has forced me to wait for years, and only now that there's trouble does he throw the mantle my way."

"You know that not to be true," the crone said. "It was you that refused to fight him. You have declared for years that you did not want the throne. You could have seized it two decades ago, with your strength. The men respect you, you would have found no opposition."

"I still don't want it," Germanicus said.

"Yet Gaia has chosen you," the crone said. "You might not seek the throne, but you have sought strength, and the throne naturally follows you. It is our way. You have defeated every other challenger that has risen up to point their swords at the King and plant their stake, and you have done all that without ever having challenged him yourself. There are some that are angry with you both for that – they claim you have spat on our traditions, and kept a man in power past his time."

"They would have lost to him anyway," Germanicus snarled, showing his teeth. "They don't know the strength of the old bastard."

"You have forced him to step down, without the challenge," the crone said, pointing at him with a stick. "You walk perilously close to sacrilege, King Germanicus. You have forsaken your duties for too long. You have dwelled here, seeking the pleasure of minor combat. It is time you faced up to what you were. Make your decision, Germanicus. There will be war regardless. Decide which side you shall fight upon."

"None of them," Germanicus said. "They stink of modernity. They know not strength. None of them… None of them should rightly be the answer. But we made our promise, centuries ago, to the First King, and we should not be the ones to break it."

The crone pounded her stick once, seemingly in approval. "That is why Gaia has chosen you, Germanicus. One does not achieve your level of strength without maintaining a sense of purity. You seek not power. You are as natural a phenomenon as the ruling bear of the forest. Very well, you have given us your answer, and I will see it spoken. Sixty thousand warriors await your command, my King. It will take a week to ready them. In that time, I trust that you will make yourself more presentable. Do not shame the old King by fleeing from your duties."

…

…

A silver crown sat perched upon a head of carefully combed, shining black hair. A face of immaculate and slender beauty. King Wyndon had always been such a man – and he'd been fortunate to inherit the throne still in relative youth, barely past his thirtieth year, when his beauty still remained intact.

He had to fight to keep the furrow out of his brow, knowing the wrinkles that it would bring. He walked calmly, despite the nervous tension raging in his heart, with his dark navy and pure black robes trailing along the floor behind him. Serving girls bowed to him as he went. There were an increasing number of them here, each one as beautiful as the last – a beauty that rivalled his own. One rarely saw a man in this part of the Wyndon lands.

He trailed his way down a walkway of well-cleaned white stones, a bridge over a broad pond, full of little delights, in the rarest of fish and the most beautiful of lotus flowers. If one had to describe the grounds, they could not have done so easily without using the word 'palace'. Ten minutes of walking, through an outer wall, and differing, increasingly beautiful scenes, had taken King Wyndon to where he was, and still there was more to go.

It was a palace separate from his own. A great distance from where he usually dwelled, but not so great that a skilled rider could not reach it in half a day. It was the perfect description of House Wyndon's relationship with the man held within. He was an individual to be kept far, and kept happy, but close enough that they could still deal with him, should they ever need to.

King Wyndon's hand had been forced. The man that dwelt within such noble grounds was not a man that he would have ever met with casually. He was a leftover from the reign of his father – a mistake that ought to have been cleaned up long before. King Wyndon had certainly never anticipated the day in which he would be forced to go marching up towards the man's walls, and give up his guards, as a King in his own country, and walk alone, as if he were a mere servant.

The defeat of Prince Hendrick's army had been the impetus behind that. "No more half measures," the Wyndon war counsel had declared. Talk of what would be done against the Emersons as a result of their failings had already reached as far as them, and it was not pretty. If ever there was a reason to act, and to act well, it was now. Increasingly, King Wyndon felt a level of respect for the enemy that they were to face that approached fear. Naturally, he still thought his chances to be better if he fought alongside the High King, but he still feared that his troops would return home defeated.

"…King Wyndon," came the cold remark of an outrageously beautiful woman as she stopped the King before a sealed gate. "What business do you have with Emperor Tiberius?"

King Wyndon bristled. It took all the strength he had not to allow the rage to contort his face. The woman in front of him would feel nothing from it but disdain, that much was easy to tell. The light seemed entirely gone from her eyes. She looked at him with an expression that was void. For how pretty a woman she was, and how fine all her garments were, and how rich even the small matter of her hair pin was, she could not have seemed less alive.

"…The matter of war," King Wyndon said calmly.

"Ah, yes," the woman said. "Emperor Tiberius had expected that you would come grovelling for his assistance. He asked me to relieve you of your crown before you entered. If you would."

She gestured with her hand, motioning to him as if he were nothing more than a dog. That too, Wyndon supposed to be the wants of Tiberius.

"General Tiberius—" He began.

"Emperor Tiberius," the woman corrected. "Your crown, King Wyndon. If you wish to enter, the matter is simple. Your crown."

King Wyndon bit his lip. He looked around him, hoping that there was no one to see. Never before did he think a King could have suffered such humiliation. The deadly poison available to the Wyndon House – the cast aside seed of General Tiberius. His father had seen the young man nourished, for all his talents, only to cast him aside, and see him imprisoned in lavishness when it became quite clear that there were other such corruptions in the heart of the man.

With trembling fingers, King Wyndon pulled the crown from his head. It had sat there for a good few years now, and he enjoyed its weight, and the respect it commanded. He fancied that it suited him, that he made a good king, that he was made for such a degree of power. But the woman before him, by the command of Tiberius, saw that snatched from him in an instant.

She plucked the crown from his hand calluously, and dangled it by her side without the slightest trace of respect. Then she glanced at an hour glass, still slowly sifting sand through its opening. "Well, you shall have to wait. The Emperor is busy. He should not like to be disturbed."

"What—" King Wyndon tried to protest, but the woman swiftly saw him cut off again.

"You may take a seat there," the woman said. "For your own good, I would advise you to be quiet. The Emperor does not enjoy his pleasure being interrupted."

The King was forced to wait, in a simple unfurnished wooden chair. It seemed like a stage performance set up entirely for his benefit. He wondered just how far ahead Tiberius had planned it all – and he was left to wondering at it for a good hour, before those doors finally opened, and a good dozen flustered women, their clothes dishevelled, came spilling out.

That was something that King Wyndon knew well of the man, even without truly having met him. The General Tiberius had a fondness for pleasures that went beyond even that of the High King. His hands sifted all the way into the darkest of realms. From what his father had told him, there did not seem to be a single line that General Tiberius would not cross to feel the certain rush of jubilation. That level of hedonism frightened King Wyndon, even as a man that pursued pleasure himself.

"You may enter," the woman said, when the last of the women had spilled out. She motioned briskly with her hand for King Wyndon to move, impatience in her gesture, as if it were she that had been forced to wait for the entirety of an hour, rather than he.

He slid forward, on nervous legs. The power of the crown that sat in the woman's hand seemed a long forgotten thing. He felt like a student once more, about to visit the quarters of General Tavar to be chided for his less than adequate results.