The bear-maiden stared hard at the half-headed corpse of a boy no older than young Alden Halstead. Tears fell from her eyes like water leaking from an old dam. Her hands were tightly clenched into fists. The rebels had isolated his body nearly an hour after the battle, tossing it away.

Judging by the expression frozen on what remained of ruined his face, he was terrified when he died. Was he alone or surrounded by his compatriots? Did they know that he was so young? Did they care that he was so young? His hair was brown and short, his skin fair yet bearing traces of acne. His remaining eye was hazel-green, gazing off into the bright blue sky above. He held an arming sword and shield, both unbloodied. They were stained only by the muck of the field's upturning. He had fought for his King. And he had died without doing anything in the one battle that mattered up to this point.

Lieutenant Gervais Tamas, who appeared some ten paces behind the bear-maiden, said something muffled by the battle aftershocks. She did not respond, as expected, and ran through old stories of tragic deaths from eons past. The demise of Prince Proclus Diogenus at the hands of his grandfather came to mind, his untimely passing at thirteen bringing an entire kingdom to heel with despair. King Diogenus Alpyius, his father, was said to have wallowed in his chambers for six days before he emerged stone-hearted to enact vengeance on his wayward elder. The war was said to have been terrible, costly, and one of the most brutal showcases of humanity's degenerate violence in the past eight thousand years. Only the feud between Acominatus and Stauricius surpassed it. No one would ever wage such a war for the death of this young boy. Never.

"Drayheller," Tamas said again, his voice now audible to the Drayheller. "Your friend is safe."

She turned to him with a startled look in her eye, unsure who he was speaking of. "What?" she asked in a far-away mutter.

"Goscelin Tharfield," he clarified after seeing her expression. "He asked me to tell you that he lives. Wounded, but alive. He's being taken back to Barkhamsted to heal."

"Oh," Gíla whispered while turning back to the corpse. It was good that he had survived the conflict, but he was one of two she had connected on some base level before the battle. "Have you heard of Alden Halstead? A young boy. No older than sixteen."

Tamas spat something chunky onto the grass. "No."

"Do you think..."

He approached her, stopped, and sighed as if annoyed with her questions. "Most likely."

Gíla shook her head at the man's uncaring tone and stepped closer to the corpse. She knelt beside it and breathed sharply as more tears fell from her eyes. It stunk of everything she was sure would be seen more than glory and honor. "What do you think he was before this?" she asked in a whisper. "An apprentice? A simple son? A thief?"

"Does it matter?" Tamas asked in turn.

The bear-maiden nodded and rubbed her hands together, ignoring the grainy feeling of the blood and matter on her palms. "To me. It's why I'm here. To study your kind and find out why you do all of this. I thought I was prepared to see the death that comes from that doing. That I was prepared to kill. Yet, I never thought about the chance of..."

"Children being in the fighting," Tamas concluded. "I have killed many in my time. Stupid, brave, cowardly kids."

"Did you know any of them personally?" she asked.

"No. It's all the same: they are the enemy, and you are not. If you don't kill them, they'll kill you. No time to care for their life stories."

"How are you so accustomed to it?" Gíla questioned as she wiped the tears from her eyes with the backside of her hand. The dried blood crinkled against her fur.

"War makes cold-hearted killers of us all," he answered. "Fight enough, and you will become one too."

Gíla climbed to her feet and, like so many before, examined the man standing close by. He was bloodied far more than anyone else she had seen after the battle. Some of it was undoubtedly his, but most of it, she assumed, was the enemies. Still, he was not without injury. His left hand was missing two fingers and was wrapped in a cloth that had grown a dark red spot that dripped intermittently. His right cheek had been cut open to the bone by a deep slash, and his chin was split. The longsword, planted in the dirt beside him, was visibly dulled through the caked layers of gore. He would need to sharpen it after getting medical attention before infection set in.

"You should see to your wounds," she said. "You're going to get sick if you don't."

"Worry about yourself, Drayheller." His tone was stoic, and his steel eyes were narrowed to scrutinizing thinness. Gíla still welled with tears in her golden eyes. "God above, you must get over it now. This war isn't over, not after one battle. You should accept that. That boy there...young Alden...they won't be the last."

"They should be the last," she retorted, her face darkening.

Tamas did not flinch. "You wanted to fight with us. You wanted to fight against us. This is how we fight. It's appalling, inhumane, and ruthless. And far more souls will be untimely sent to God Almighty than they are timely. Get used to it, or go back to your people as a craven and pray to whatever heathen God you worship for forgiveness if that's what you need to get over it."

She said nothing to that and watched him walk away toward the waving banners of their army. He stopped, looked back, and said: "Oh, right. Captain Reynfred was looking for you. Wants to know if you live."

Thousands of bodies littered the area in chopped, mangled, crippled fashion. Thousands more were piled in great stacks or carts to be trotted off for the nearest road to civilization. They all had names that Gíla would never know. They all had faces she would always remember. But they were not what took the length of her senses. The field and all semblance of green and life had been washed away. Each inch of it within the mile span of the battleground was drenched in horrible fluids and would forever remain stained.

A shiver ran up Gíla's spine as the memory of the young man Rannulf replayed in her mind. Her fist collided with his head and caved in his skull's structure. His body was on the ground with pools of blood and matter forming under him as he twitched the last vestiges of his life. She grimaced, spat out a horrible taste on her tongue, and shuddered a breath as she eyed the growing crowds around her and Tamas.

Five thousand had marched to fight the King. Twenty-five guilds. Now, all that remained was enough manpower to fill the ranks of five guilds. Banners bearing the sigils of the Eye, the green dragon, a crowned wolf, a bloodied raven, and a spiked turtle flapped in the wind in tatters and shreds. They were the only ones that stood. The King's commanders had sounded a retreat at the last possible juncture for their survival, taking what remained of their numbers into the distance, vanishing beyond the horizon. Mille the Wolf was the only reason the Duke's forces did not charge after them in a blind frenzy, finally quelling whatever madness had overtaken them.

It was a pyrrhic victory, if ever there was one for the modern age. To be sure, a shallow repeat of Acominatus, but a repeat nonetheless. And if Goscelin was correct, both Duke Oudet and King Aslofidor had more willing or ordered to fight for them. More fields of Vucan to be sullied. More chances to replicate the old ways.

The regal voice of the captain could be heard as suddenly as a windstorm, and the bear-maiden's attention was taken from the losses of life - both present and future. The man in question stood not twenty paces from her and Tamas, the latter of whom bid her a curt farewell and ambled off to what she hoped was a healer. From the deluge, Galeran Reynfred had emerged quite well injury-wise, if also quite grotesque with what coated him. Bone, blood, liquids she dared not guess, and chunks of organs. He was facing away from her and giving a speech by which the soldiers in his presence were enraptured. The words were lost to the Drayheller, who held her breath as she stepped closer to him, not wishing to interrupt him or catch the stench of what covered his body.

He stopped regardless upon seeing the faces of his slight congregation scowl at her presence. He faced her with a quick spin of his heels. He was fancily armored compared to the more spartan figures such as Gervais Tamas, or the man Alden had assumed was Zane the Colossus. Though grossly caked, his armor was embellished with engravings, and the guild's complete sigil epoxied to his chest. The captain's badge. Each engraving detailed the legends of his house across his chest plate, back plate, pauldrons, and gauntlets, either through words or pictures. An inspirational and prideful man in comparison to Tamas' fire-and-brimstone dourness.

"Bear-maiden!" he exclaimed with a hint of genuine surprise. "I see you survived after all."

"Yes, sir," she said in a voice far meeker than she intended.

He nodded with a surprisingly pleasant expression on his chiseled face, further outlined by his loose blonde hair and goatee. "Good. Our losses were immense, as you know."

"They were."

"Yes. The war is not over. The King's ramshackle army survived the day, and with news of his loss, Aslofidor will be apoplectic."

She looked over into the direction of where the King's army had retreated and visualized the fury in the eyes of a man she had never seen. What did he look like? Was he short and rotund to match the stories of his choler? Or was he tall and powerful like a king of legend to counteract the tragedy of his dwindling power? "I can only imagine," she agreed.

"Let me help you visualize it then. He will call upon every single man and woman willing or unwilling to fight for him," Reynfred continued. "He will seek to surround the Duchy, pinning us inside like cattle waiting to be slaughtered for their meat. He will demand that those who refused to fight today will fight the next. He will send out his advisors now, his best commanders. He will see that we are not to be defeated in a single day or subjugated in the courts of politics and subterfuge. Today was only a taste of what horrors of war await us. What brutality stalks us. And I know what it will be like at the worst. I fought for the man and saw his devolution into what he is now. Firsthand. He will not stop now. Not until he is wiped out, or we are. We must recuperate and prepare to slay the corrupt King and his mongrel sheep. In God Almighty's name, by year's end, this must be accomplished. In God Almighty's name, it will be accomplished. We have proven that we can beat his army. And we can dethrone him."

The bear-maiden stuttered for a moment, wrong-footed, and found herself incapable of forming any words to combat the captain's own. It had taken two years for the King and the Duke to get here. For Reynfred to believe that the next point could be reached so soon was nearly as maddening as the battle they had just survived.

No such argument would ever work on his soldiers. His words inspired the congregation, which has grown by no less than twenty other men and women. They voiced their agreement. Some gave cheers, some small blessings, and others wide-toothed grins.

"And what of those who serve him? Those advisors of his, the council?" asked a pretty burly woman. Her features told of her being from the southern reaches of Aslofidor's kingdom, and her build implied something with craft, possibly smithing.

"I imagine the Duke will want us to kill them as well," said another, far more mousey in every detail. A northerner, perhaps. "Kill them all and send them to God Almighty for their judgment."

"Let the Devil take them outright," spat a third, hidden in the crowd. "God should not have to deal with such vermin."

More joined the cluster, and the cheers grew until it almost became a roar. Gíla smothered resentful curling of her lips. Am I the only one?

"Still your tempers, friends!" calmed Reynfred, holding his hand up with his palm facing outward. "I know it is cruel to ask when I speak such enlightening words. Hell below, I know I am feeling the urge to rear my head back and yell as loud as I can to God Almighty along with you. The promises of our victory sing to us now, I know. But save such zealous energy for the battles to come. Save it for when the King is at our mercy, and our swords are at his neck." The congregation fell into hushed boasts, promises, and proclamations. Gíla shivered inwardly at the fierceness she caught in her captain's eyes and the thousand years of power they could inspire alone.

She shifted her gaze onto the scenery around them. The banners of the Duke and surviving guilds fluttered with as much intensity as those that served under them. So many had been tattered or torn or stained. Yet, they remained standing proud and defiant. The bear-maiden could not say the same for the King's banners, which now lay in heaps and ruins on the field. Many of them would serve as kindling and toiletries for the night.

"As for you, Drayheller," the captain suddenly shifted, returning his attention to the bear-maiden who stiffened her back. "I need you to tell me how you fared. Did you live up to the stories of your people? Did you fight with unmatched strength?"

She remained silent for a long moment before nodding, "Yes, sir."

He smiled and looked down at the dirt for a moment. He kicked something maroon and pale away from his feet. "Find your words, Drayheller. Did you get the information you were looking for?" he asked. "Tales to tell your kin if you return to them of how we humans fight? Of how we rebels fight?"

Another long moment of silence before she nodded again, "Yes, sir. I...fought as one of you. I spared few in the fires of the battle. Many fell beneath my feet, doubly so when armed with a weapon to befit a creature such as myself."

"Good. I moved you to the bulwark for that very reason. I did not want such an important army member to risk her life needlessly." There was a touch of something disingenuous to his voice. She let it pass over her uncontested. "Well, at least until whatever happened happened. You lived regardless and killed many."

"Is there anything else you need of me, captain?" she asked quickly, wishing that this conversation would end and that she could go find a quiet place to sit.

"No," he answered, his expression dropping slightly. "No, you may leave. Rest, too. The Duke has heard much of the Drayhellers' spirit for storytelling. So be ready if he wishes to hear you spin your narratives when he meets us next."