"Battlefield funerals tend to be whatever's practical at the time, but usually, the winners either bury their dead, or light a proper ceremonious pyre for them. Maybe the corpses of important people get preserved and brought back home for a proper funeral.

For the losers, their dead were typically either dumped into mass graves or burned together without ceremony. Some even left them for scavengers to devour, a common sight in less civilized areas.

The corpses always got taken care of one way or another though. After the first time a plague nearly wiped out the winners of a battle, nobody ever just dumped corpses willy-nilly anymore." - Mauricio Verne, Chronicler for Callen's Cutthroats, a mercenary company active in Ur-Teros, circa 318 VA.

Ruins of Fort Ascher

Holy Kingdom of Theodinaz, southern region

Western Alcidea

5th day, 3rd week, 7th month of the year 2 FP.

It took all the mustered workforce of the mercenaries - the Free Lances and the Brewers combined - three whole days to sort out the tens of thousands of corpses in the vicinity. They had even gone out to the distant camps and sorted out the corpses there too, before they set everything that remained on fire and allowed the fire to devour whatever was left.

Outside the fort itself, the massive pyre of burning bodies had never ceased to burn all that time, as newly sorted corpses would be tossed in as more fuel from time to time. The light the fire had given off was so bright that some followers and dependents chose to work at night, and kept the pyre burning until the next morning, when another shift took over for them.

The stench of burnt human flesh - Reinhardt always thought it smelled a lot like roasted pork - inundated the air around the ruins, though none of the hardened inhabitants seemed all that bothered by it. At most some of the children sneezed when the stench got overpowering.

It was in the afternoon of the fourth day after the battle that the last of the zealot corpses - which had started to decay for a while and gave off an unpleasant stench - was finally deprived of everything valuable and unceremoniously chucked into the burning pyre, where the flames greedily enveloped the dead flesh.

By then Reinhardt had mostly recovered from his injuries. As a therian his natural recovery had always been better than humans to begin with, and the lack of truly serious injuries also helped expedite the process in his case.

The same could not be said for many others. Elfriede was still incapable of too much strenuous activity, the wound to her lung still hobbling her down. Mischka's arm hadn't recovered yet, neither had Grünhildr - who had many more injuries than him - recovered, though Salicia was mostly better off by then.

Out of Mischka's eighty two, only forty seven survived the battle. The matron herself lost her younger son Ivan, and three of her grandchildren during the battle. Her elder son, Niko, and youngest daughter Varilya had yet to regain consciousness either since then, the same with another six of her grandchildren.

Reinhardt saw Yuri, the massive elephant-therian man he had fought alongside caring for his unconscious husband when he went to visit the infirmary. The burly man seemed deflated, the way one of his mighty tusks was broken in half and how his long trunk was severed halfway betrayed the serious state of his own injuries.

On his end, Reinhardt had been there to check on his still unconscious adoptive father. Hogarth had not regained consciousness so far, the mace blow he took caved in part of his skull, and the healers even said it was a miracle that he survived the blow.

They said that he might never be able to even walk on his own again should he ever regain consciousness, barring a truly skilled healer coming to his aid.

It was the same case for many of the still comatose injured, and a good portion of the other severely injured people. A good portion of them lost a limb, sometimes two. More than three dozen had injuries to their spine and were rendered paraplegic.

From the dwarven cavalrymen who had come to their rescue, Reinhardt had learned that the main force of the second expedition was roughly a week behind them. That meant he had three, maybe four more days to come to a decision.

Given the abundant loot - while each zealot might not have much, there were many of them, that the salvage earned the mercenaries a very decent amount even after they split it in halves - he wondered whether he should cut his losses then and there.

If they were to return, they would still have some money leftover in the company coffers even after the families of the dead were properly compensated, maybe enough to get the injured a proper retirement fee and to restart anew as a tiny outfit, maybe just twenty of them or so.

On the other hand, Elfriede's knowledge of Zefirous and the potential that she might be able to ease the expedition's conquest of the city would have counted for a massive contribution, one likely to earn them a sizable sum.

Elfriede herself had stated that she would have preferred to keep going if at all possible, although she too was all too aware of the dire state of the Company. Many of the others echoed the sentiment, but with a dejected tone.

They wanted to keep going, yet were all too aware that there was no way to do so in the Company's current state.

Reinhardt tossed and turned in his sleep that night, his mind occupied with all the worries for both his own family and the Company. Elfriede was fast asleep next to him with Erycea cuddling against her side. How his wife always managed to sleep so quickly, and would be awake at the slightest disturbance, yet thoroughly ignored his tossing and turning was always a mystery to him.

In the end, it was moot as both of them jolted awake when they heard what sounded like a commotion from outside. Elfriede rose carefully so as not to disturb their sleeping child, but the two of them were out from their bedroom with weapons in hand moments later.

What they saw when they came outside, was the sight of many of the people on watch gasping at the approach of a figure that looked rather ghostly from a distance, given her all-white outfit in the dark of the night.

Some had knelt and offered a prayer of thanks to the deities, while others wept in joy, in particular those whose relatives were amongst the crippled and the comatose.

Reinhardt watched with slack jaws as the stranger in white walked into their camp, as the woman laid a gentle hand on Mischka, whose tents happened to be close to where she entered from. A moment later the therian matriarch removed her right arm, no longer mangled, from the sling and looked at it with some bafflement.

"Take me to the injured," he heard the Silver Maiden say.

Hope sprouted in his heart at that moment, amidst the surprise and disbelief that crowded his mind. Hope that he might have a better way forward, for himself, for his family, for his Company.