A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1837 - 1837: The Quietest Battlefield - Part 2

So it was shocking to see a King's head on the floor, bleeding out, with a grim look on his bearded face. It was a fundamental wrongness, a questioning of something that those soldiers, and all those men that stood there, including Oliver, and even including Tavar, seemed to believe, at least to some implicit degree. A King was not a creature that could be struck down so casually.

"A Time of Tigers," Hod murmured to himself, as the only one with the capacity to offer up a degree of understanding. It was exactly as the prophecy had written. All that they knew would be turned upon its head. The very power structures that they considered to be immutable and mighty would be carved apart, as easily as an origami tower by a sharp blade.

It would be done as if it was the most natural thing in the world, as if that was what ought to have happened.

Boundaries and structures of certainty and timelessness lay in all things. That was the nature of the progress that Claudia governed over, and the Stormfront men had come to worship. They saw that truth in themselves, as much as in the world around them. So it was that, in striking down a King, the Stormfront had crossed a line and broken through a Boundary that they did not even imagine to exist.

The civil war had transformed beyond itself. There was the idea of overthrowing the High King, but they had yet to be confronted with the overwhelming reality of the actual slaying of royalty. Even Queen Asabel's transfer of power had been relatively peaceful – no fool would dare to wrong the Gods by actually spilling the blood of a King.

But it had been done, and being done, it could not be undone. They had crossed a line, and they had thrown out the old structures of stability that the High King had seen introduced. They went to war with their very ancestry. Now, there was no going back. Now they had to see it all the way through. If their cause was a righteous one, then they had to hope that all the way up to the throne of the High King, it would continue to be righteous. And if their cause was not righteous, then now they had already stained their hands bright red, and they bore the black colour in their hearts of criminals.

To see it done, there was a man that ought to have been far too young to shoulder that burden. It was a man who ought not to even have had the strength to slay him. Again and again, when they crossed blades, Oliver had managed to best King Germanicus, but no physical laws as to the Stormfront understanding of military prowess or Boundaries could point to why it was he was able to do so. Nor why, especially, he had enough might to see the man bested to such a degree that he could so cleanly see his head severed.

All of it together, it was dismantled. Two things that should not be in one. The realm of the physical, that they'd relied on for so long was being dismantled. With the actions of sword, like the brush of an artist, together, both enemy and ally alike, they painted a new realm, they derived a new Stormfront, just as the First King had done in his fighting all that time ago.

When Germanicus' head fell, and it gave that dull resounding off frozen stone, it echoed out with a note that all could hear, if not with their ears, then with their souls. It changed the very colour of the realm. For with the death of the King, there spilled out one thing, known by different names. Those with the eyes of the First King would have called it potential. Those that feared it would have called it chaos, and they would have said it was the seed of Claudia.

It brought vagueness to all that they did. There was room to move in even the smallest of things. If a man as young as Oliver Patrick could become General, then what say of the potential for normal men? If a General weaker than a King could still lop off the head of that same King, then what say you for normal men?

Hod recited the verse, as he looked upon them all, and he understood the very moment that they were inclined towards, the very instant that they had entered into the moment that the prophecy had spoken of. They had danced around it, and perhaps they had already been there, but now there was no ignoring it.

"Ye with claws, see it and want," Hod said. "Ye with desire, let it loose, and see it tremble. Ye with hands to seize, dare thee grasp that fire? Water the land with the tears of the Gods, and pluck the fruit, you with the strength to climb. Lay tremble to the sea, set aflame to the sky – all within reach, belongs to thee with the might to seize."

A soldier without rank. A sergeant, with many decades stuck in his position. A peasant. A Serving Class man. Already these titles, given of their civilization, had begun to mean less. There had instead begun to be one defining characteristic that mattered, and that was strength.

"And even that be cast aside!" Hod exclaimed. For the very next verse of that ancient prophecy did contradict itself. It spoke of simple strength being cast aside for quietness, for something mightier, and meeker. The Time of Tigers was a time of contradiction, nothing could be stable, not even the right way to fight in it. The only certainty of it was the very uncertainty.

So when the two armies did face off against each other, their numbers, as they had been from the start, in a state of disparity, there was not the sense that they were terribly unequal. For, from the start, something had been acting that mere numbers could not quench. And now Tavar had lost a man of significance too, all to achieve his goal of getting inside the gates of Ernest, where ten thousand Emerson men awaited their freedom, along with an angry and restless General, and the Emerson Prince himself.