Story:Kings of Strife/Part 45

Part Forty-Five
There was an instant of utter stillness when memory returned to the Crimson Death. He looked up from his seated vigil as a gentle gust of cold wind blew past his cheek, as if teasingly pawing at him. As soon as he realized that he had regained a long-lost instant of time in his memory, Taoris mentally grasped at it – and it disappeared, as ephemeral as the wind that brought it to him. He lowered his head again and sighed, his breath misting and fading in front of him in the air.

The memory was of a face, he knew. Soft yet angular; looking up at him with twinkling eyes and undisguised admiration. Love, perhaps. The face had brought about an instant feeling of warmth, but for what?

He did not remember. The face’s owner, the origin of the face, what the warmth meant, he did not remember any of it. He had not remembered for more than seventeen years.

‘I do not dream anymore,’ Gin Taoris thought, more as a reminder than an observation. His body needed much less sleep than a normal person’s, but when he did rest, he met only darkness. This was as much a part of his curse as any other part of him. ‘I have become my curse and nothing more.’

Another eastbound wind blew past Taoris, and he stood slowly. The winds were starting to blow his tattered, battle-damaged red cloak around his shoulders. He stood in place for a moment before looking behind him, to the west, to the country of Shorica. ‘That’s odd.’ For almost fifty days, the wind had been pushing to the west, constantly blowing snow and cold into his face. The winter chill had always been working to edge him backwards and rob him of his coverings.

Now the winter came from his back.

A sign, he would have thought, if Taoris was a suspicious man. He wasn’t. The Crimson Death sighed and started to walk to the west, towards the ruined town behind him and its crumbling stone towers. Although the unease in his breast was purely fantastic and foolish superstition, it would not hurt for him to reach high ground and look around.

All around him were corpses.

Taoris had not been farther than two miles from the border between Shorica and Inusia, and almost all of those two miles were filled with dead men and women covered in blood and blue mantles. In fifty days, he had only been pushed back from the border by two miles, and in the course of those fifty days of defense, the village of Troia had fallen to complete ruin.

He had not been ordered to defend the Shorican borders, nor had Vainia ever mentioned such a thing to him, but Taoris knew it was his job to complete. ‘She needed the space. I could not help her there in the city.’ Warfare was the only thing the Crimson Death was good at, and it was the best way he could help his queen. At least until she decided to become a queen again.

‘All she needs is time.’ He had sworn to hold the border for as long as was needed, and he planned to make good on his promise. His blades had shattered over the near-constant fighting, but every enemy dropped a new blade to use without fail. He had been wounded, shot, cut apart, and blasted by explosions, but his body had healed from greater wounds before and easily would again. The Crimson Death would not yield, and neither would Vainia’s nation of Shorica.

The bodies were scattered apart recklessly, all killed by one savage form of mutilation or the other. In passing, Taoris pulled free two longswords that had fatally impaled a soldier. Swinging them lightly for a moment, he slid their handles into his belt, allowing them both to stay upright by their guards.

He walked in silence, and arrived at one of the tallest surviving towers with silence. Snow had lightly covered the ground in time since Taoris arrived at the eastern Shorican lands, and most of the trees in the large Wilds to the north had long ago lost their leaves. From the vantage point of the various crumbling towers found in the countryside, one could see for miles in the usually dense forest. Where there were once entire swathes of land aggressively colored in shades of dark green, there were now only dry skeletons of life, reaching towards an azure sky paler than it ever was.

He looked to the west, and saw only further ruin.

For a short period of time, the Inusians assaulted him with artillery. Most of the shells had missed him, though a few nicked him or damaged his clothes. Though he came through the shelling relatively unharmed, the land around did not, and melancholy craters dominated much of the countryside he took defense of. Not only that, the village of Troia was destroyed almost instantly.

Months ago, Taoris set fire to a large portion of the town as a way to spite Silverius, during their very first battle. Once again, because of his direct actions, destruction had returned to the city and its people.

‘Only death can pay for life,’ he thought. He pushed a piece of hair from his face and blinked away a stray snowflake as it drifted into his eye. There was nothing to see from the west, so he turned back to the east with his head held high and his hands curled into fists. On the horizon, just barely visible amongst the dense clouds of the storm, an airship approached. More bluecoats were aboard, for sure.

Taoris smiled and started walking towards the edge of the tower. His new swords were in his hands and spinning with anticipation before even a second had passed. ‘Good,’ the Crimson Death thought to himself, ‘I needed something to distract me from my thoughts. This will do just fine.’

*****

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