It was a clear and sunny summer morning in Forelia, and the alfalfa that had been sown just before the siege began was by now fully grown and gleaming with good health. Rain had come in overnight, and the boon of extra water had caused the summer’s first bloom to begin. A countless amount of violet flowers waved gently against a backdrop of dark green as a light breeze blew, bringing down cool and dry air ahead of what already promised to be a very hot and humid day.

A dirt road ran through the field of alfalfa, stretching from the northern horizon to the south, where the road and the field met a dense forest of ancient white oaks. The trees reached high into the sky, and they were close enough to one another that their heavy boughs intertwined like lovers locking arms. The embracing boughs cast deep shadows onto the forest floor, and the road was shrouded in darkness just a few feet after crossing the forest’s threshold. It was on the road and from the darkness that the Losoan mercenary Gideon emerged, carrying his dying father on his back.

He took a few steps out into the sunlight and stopped, quietly looking around at the vast field of alfalfa as it swayed in the wind. The field’s pungent earthy aroma filled his nose, but it could not completely suppress the sickly-sweet scent of his father’s blood.

Life as a mercenary had taken Gideon all across the western world. From Kenan in the deep desert far to the south, to the shores of the Sorrow Sea which divided the world west from east, and sometimes back to his birthplace of Loso in the snowy north-east. He’d seen many beautiful sights in his travels, but the vast panorama of colorful flowers on display before him was by far the most beautiful thing he’d ever witnessed.

Forelia was a country that felt old. Ancient life filled its forests and rivers. Its earth was rich, and had produced a great bounty of food every year for the Forelians, but this year the vast fields of corn, sorghum, and alfalfa that surrounded Forelia City had grown untended. The men and women who had farmed the land for generations had hidden behind the city’s walls when the Kenanites invaded, and after four months of siege they had finally all been killed or enslaved.

“It wasn’t my fault. Do you know that? You do know that it wasn’t my fault?”

Gideon recognized the familiar death-terror present in Dance’s voice. It was the growing realization that he was about to die, along with the stubborn refusal to accept it. Most people were like that when it was their time, but it felt surreal to hear it from his father.

Slowly, carefully, so as to not hurt Dance with the movement, Gideon turned around to get a look behind him. Somewhere in that dark forest, the Lake Men were looting and burning the corpses of the other Singing Blades who’d failed to escape. The band had been routed so quickly and so completely that Dance simply had no opportunity to rally them. The engagement had devolved into a series of foot chases, where the Blades all tried to be faster than the men running next to them as the Lake Men pursued and cut them down.

“Fuck, they wouldn’t listen! Why wouldn’t they listen to me?!”

Gideon turned back to the road and carried on. He saw no need to rush. Dance was about to die, and no one had the power to change that for him.

Dance was a large, barrel-chested man, and between his size and all of his gear he was very heavy and difficult to carry. Gideon was just as large and strong as his father, but he’d been exhausted by the exertion of the battle, and from carrying a man who easily weighed two hundred pounds for miles. Sweat dropped rapidly from his chin as he doggedly trudged ahead, deeper into the alfalfa.

He could not explain to himself why he was going to such an effort. Dance had never been a father worthy of the kind of help Gideon was giving him. Even so, he pressed on, listening quietly as his father’s feverish denials became weaker and more incoherent with each step.

In time Gideon reached a young tree on the side of the road that was barely taller than the alfalfa, and finally decided he'd done enough. He took care as he laid Dance down against the tree, but a weak cry of pain escaped from him nonetheless.

Dance's skin was gray and clammy, and Gideon realized he might die at any moment. He stood over Dance and watched impassively as the dying man weakly tried to settle himself into a more comfortable position, his eyes squeezed shut against the pain. The feeling of the tree against his back seemed to return some clarity to his eroding mind.

“Where are we?”

Gideon looked around and shrugged. “I don’t know. North, maybe.”

“ ‘m dying?”

He gave a casual nod, but there was gentleness in his voice. “Yeah. You’re dying.”

Dance’s eyes flew open, and he searched Gideon’s face with a look of pure fright. He tried to sit up, but only managed a slight incline, speaking with passionate bitterness.

“...You little bastard! I saw what you did as they ran away with their tails between their legs! Nothing! You did absolutely nothing to help me! You have always been Kali’s curse on me, and now you’ve killed me! I hoped and prayed every single day you would just leave and grant me peace! But now I get it, oh yes, I understand...Kali herself placed you here just to harm me! To betray me! To mock me and torment me with my failures!”

He spat at Gideon, whose expression froze as he took the outburst. Dance settled back against the tree once again and groaned loudly with pain, curling his hands into fists where they rested against the earth.

“Fuck…just tell me. Did they break because of me? Was it my fault?”

Some of Dance’s intestines were now poking out of the gash in his belly. A thin rivulet of blood was flowing from the wound and staining the dirt dark red beside him.

Gideon shook his head slowly. “No. It wasn’t your fault.”

Dance’s relief was palpable. “...Alright. Take this bullshit off of me.”

Gideon obeyed wordlessly and knelt to begin the work. He carefully removed Dance’s armor a piece at a time, and laid it all in a neat pile, placing the sheathed claymore on top after finishing with the armor.

As Gideon laid the sword on the pile, Dance looked down at his wound with a grimace. His right hand shook as he moved it to conceal the wound, and his voice came out as a rasp.

“You take a good look at me, bastard. I promise this’ll be you someday.”

Gideon blinked hard and looked away. As his eyes roamed the alfalfa, he heard Dance breathe his last breath. It took Gideon a long while, but he eventually mustered the courage to look at the corpse.

He’d seen many people die over the course of his life, far too many to keep track of. In death, all people were united in form. Most times, death took them with their eyes still open; their faces and bodies frozen in anguish and pain like a winter storm had passed over them. Occasionally they closed their eyes and allowed death to pass over them peacefully, as if in the moments before life escaped them they’d finally accepted the unacceptable. Gideon felt mildly surprised that Dance had ended up being the latter.

No matter how it happened, though, death itself was always very simple, and always very easy. Maybe they panicked in the seconds before, maybe they screamed and suffered and thrashed around in agony, maybe they quietly waited for the inevitable. But when it was time, life disappeared just as easily as a lantern’s light being blown out. One moment the light was there, the next it wasn’t.

Gideon’s eyes searched his father's corpse as he wondered: Why don’t I feel anything?

It was troublesome somehow to have no strong reaction to his father’s death. He wanted a feeling that was easier to accept, or to at least understand, and he tried to force a different one out of himself. Anger, sadness, guilt, fear, hatred, anything other than indifference. Numbness.

Abruptly, Gideon began to search through Dance’s pockets. It felt strange and wrong to loot his father’s corpse, but it was the only action that made any kind of sense.

Dance had only a few denars on him when he died. It was not nothing, but it didn’t seem like adequate compensation. Even so, Gideon pocketed the coins straight away.

After finishing, he got to his feet and gazed down at the corpse, wiping his bloodied fingers on his shirt. He'd had so much to say to Dance for so many years, but the right words and the right moment had never arrived. Dance's final words buzzed in Gideon's ears, vexing him in the exact same manner as a flying insect buzzing around his ear.

Gideon stepped around his father’s corpse and left it behind. Soon after, summer cicadas clinging to the alfalfa began to cry in unison, filling the air with an ear splitting chorus of shrilling.

The sudden noise brought Gideon out of his reverie and back to the immediate demands of the present. He was endangering himself by walking along the road in broad daylight, but crossing country would likely be even more dangerous. The Singing Blades had left camp early in the morning and marched at least five miles along unfamiliar roads before they’d met the Lake Men. He’d also been turned around in the chaos of the rout, and thus had no idea where the Kenanite army camp was.

Roads always lead somewhere. He reasoned. Following this one away from the battle is good enough for now. Besides, what does it matter, anyway? I’ve got no more reasons not to welcome death.

The road seemed like it stretched on in the same direction forever, and as he walked through the sweltering summer heat he began to wonder if he hadn’t died along with his father and everyone else back in the forest. He couldn’t remember much about what he’d heard about the afterlife, but a land of endless alfalfa seemed like something out of the Forelian Scriptures. If it were true, a long walk through a field of flowers didn’t seem like a good enough celestial punishment.

At around midday he reached a crossroads. There was still nothing but alfalfa and heat in every direction, but after looking around for a while Gideon spotted movement far off in the distance on the road to his left. Two horsemen, carrying raised lances, trotted along the road. They seemed to spot Gideon around the same time he spotted them, and he watched as they began to gallop towards him.

He stood in place as they approached. When they were close enough for conversation they brought their horses to a stop and raised their lances at him. They wore chainmail gambesons, and their pale faces were heavily tanned. The brown hair underneath their arming caps was cut short. They were both clean shaven, as Kenanite soldiers always were, and it would have been somewhat difficult to tell them apart if one of them hadn’t been old enough to have a few wrinkles around his eyes.

Gideon casually raised his hands in the air, palms out towards them. “Relax. I’m a Singing Blade.”

The horsemen shared a brief look before the older one responded. “That so? Where’s the rest of you?”

He shrugged and lowered his hands. “We met a group of Lake Men about an hour or so ago. They routed and killed most of us. I barely escaped alive.”

“Where? Back down that road?”

“Yeah.”

The horsemen lowered their lances and trotted up to Gideon, peering down the road he’d just been on. “Faraways down that road?”

“That’s right.”

The older one nodded to Gideon and addressed his companion. “Alright. Kent, you head back. Tell ‘em the mercs were whipped by some Lakies to the east. I’m going to go see for myself.”

The younger lancer gave his superior a curt salute, the Kenanite hand sign of universal knowledge, and turned his horse about, racing back down the road they’d just been on.

“It’s very brave of you to go alone,” Gideon said dryly, “but the Lake Men aren’t going to leave anything valuable for you.”

The horseman scowled at Gideon before he set off at a gallop, leaving him in a cloud of dust. Waving the dust from his face, Gideon crossed the crossroads to follow the other horseman.

Many lonely hours of walking underneath the summer sun lay ahead of him. Angry ghosts of the very recently departed would be his only companions along the way.