Fallen Eagle

3rd Week of April, 1460

Lustinianos was truly as fat as a wine cask, only twice as greasy.

“The Lord is not ignoring your request for an audience, truly, my Principe.”

He spoke to Alexios with a syrupy gentleness, as if the softness of his voice could coax lies into truth. The sound of it turned Alexios’s stomach. He wanted to retch onto the man’s smug little mouth, to watch that sweet tone choke on bile.

To wrap his hands around Lustinianos’s throat and squeeze until the last wheeze crawled out. To tear down the little plots of him and his treacherous lord. They conspired with devilish infidel mercenaries, letting corruption seep through the Principality like rot through a wound, poisoning sanctuary and soil alike.

Rip them apart, the dark voice urged. Lest heaven itself tremble beneath the cannon’s roar.

Alexios tried to smother it. To shove the voice back into whatever pit it had slithered from. But. It. Would. Not. Leave.

His fist came down on the hardwood table in his tent with a crack that made the lantern jump. Lustinianos jolted, and the sight pleased Alexios far more than it should have, there was nothing pleasurable about his situation.

“Do not lie to me,” Alexios rasped. The words scraped out of him, nearly inhuman - half a man gasping for air, half a beast holding its jaws shut.

“The master is tired.” Lustinianos swallowed hard. “Riding horseback is more than his constitution allows.” He shifted, uneasy, which Alexios took to mean that he wasn’t adequately controlling his face, holding back his dark urges.

“That is what he said yesterday,” Alexios growled, “and the day before that.”

“And the answer will remain the same until he is ale.” The fat man’s tone tightened, fraying at the edges. “He would be happy to receive you another time.”

“I will not be treated as a son begging an audience from his father.” Alexios snapped, the outburst ripping free before he could leash it. “He will see me, as I am his suzerain.”

He held Lustinianos with his glare. The man withered under it, shrinking in place like tallow near flame.

“Master Lustinianos,” came a voice from outside the tent.

“Yes?” Lustinianos nearly squeaked.

“A messenger has come for you.”

“I’ll be right there.” He fled as if the canvas itself were on fire, barely pausing to bow to Alexios before slipping out.

Silence settled, thick and hateful.

Alexios stood alone in his tent and burned in it. They had been gradually fading him into irrelevance, patting his shoulder, soothing him, moving him aside like one would a child who didn’t know any better. Like his father had done. He had known he was being used, but to be discarded so easily… even the illusion of command had been stripped from him. Now he was not even a nominal leader of the rebellion, only a convenient name, spoken when men needed an excuse to keep feeding the war.

His jaw clenched until pain sparked behind his molars, so fierce he thought a tooth might have cracked.

His visions had been sharpening in sleep. Brightening. Drawing closer. He had believed this rebellion was the answer - that it would become the holy war needed to save the flock. But it was slipping out of his hands, bent to other men’s ambitions instead of God’s will.

No. He would not be guided like a servant by these false messiahs. He followed only God.

And he would take what was his.

Alexios rose. Slowly, as if the decision had weight. He crossed to the trunk where most of his belongings lay, and shoved aside bundles of clothing to draw out something thin and sharp.

“He is fair,” Alexios breathed, each inhale unsteady. “He is just. And He will see all I do in His name.”

He lifted the dagger to his mouth and dragged the edge across his tongue. Flesh parted easily and a hot, metallic tang flooded his taste. The blade held a keen edge.

A smile pulled at him, small and dreadful.

Yes.

This would do.

This was how he would wrench control of his fate back into his own hands, how he would force the world, and treacherous men, and even heaven itself, to look upon him again.

And in doing so, he would bring about His peace onto this land.

Adanis stood cloaked amidst the northern peasantry, one more bent back in a sea of unwashed, filthy bodies. The stink of sweat, boiled grain and cheap spirits pressed in on all sides. Beyond the shifting mass of men he watched the boy at the centre of it all barking orders as he tried to keep the sprawling chaos of the camp from tearing itself apart at the seams.

He felt no pity for any of them.

Not for the men who writhed on the hard-packed earth, blowing on their blistered feet or clutching at bellies sick with bad rations. And not for his son, who shouted himself hoarse to be heard over the din of complaints and demands hurled at him by surly sergeants.

The world was not kind, and the sooner Apostolos learned that, the better.

Adanis had learned it twice, and both lessons had left scars. Once when his father had torn down his treasured loggia by the roots the very week his mother died, not out of grief, but out of spite, to remind his son that nothing in this world was truly safe. And again when his own love had left him for greener woods than those of this world, abandoning him on the grand hunt of life.

There was no gentle way to swallow such truths. No kind tutor for them, no careful, patient explanation. Either one learned them or one was broken upon them. And there was no way to protect a family without becoming intimate with them.

Branches of a tree might grow in the sun and never know the feel of shade. They did not have to. When a man meant to fell a tree he did not aim for the branches - he struck at the trunk. So it had to be sturdy, thick with rings of hardship and weather, strong enough to stand when steel bit deep. If the trunk splintered, all its parts withered and died soon after.

Adanis would not let his tree fall.

His son was destined for great things. He was meticulous, diligent, and honourable.

But he was still too soft.

Too trusting, too willing to feel the pain of others as if it were his own. He lacked backbone. Adanis would see him tempered into the strongest version of himself, even if the boy had to hate him for it. Just as his own father had done to him. Just as Apostolos would one day do to his own son. So would the Nomikos endure.

These dark realities of war, disease and despair were simply another face of that same truth Apostolos had yet to fully grasp and close off from himself. Too much of his mother clung to him still. The softness in his eyes when he spoke to the wounded, the way his hands lingered on a shoulder in comfort instead of dismissing it. Adanis would temper that too.

It was already taking shape. He could see it in the straightness of the boy’s posture as he moved through the camp, in the dangerous gleam that flashed in his eyes when he dared talk back to his father now, in the growing distance in his gaze when he looked upon the sick and the dying. That passing hollowness was a small, necessary death.

He was finally becoming a man.

“Let’s go.” Adanis gestured to his small retinue. He had seen enough.

They slipped away through the camp with the ease of men accustomed to moving unseen, and soon the noise of groans and shouted orders dulled behind them. Back in the quiet of his tent, his inner sanctum, Adanis shrugged off the rough cloak and the plain clothes.

Iadeus was already waiting within, ginger head bowed over a small stack of parchment.

“Everything is well, Uncle?” the boy asked, looking up. His voice was mild, but his eyes were sharp. He had a natural talent for the quieter, dirtier arts of noble life - espionage, forgery, secrets whispered in the dark. His branch of the family had always excelled at that work, performing their own part in keeping the great tree alive.

“Yes. It is more than fine, Iadeus,” Adanis answered with a smile.

The boy’s work on the forgery had been inspired. Months of careful labour, of studying hands and seals and titles, now distilled into neat lines of ink. In that harmless-looking writ lay the weapon Adanis needed to slip a knife between Philemon’s ribs without ever drawing a sword.

There was no world in which he would meekly accept a Principality co-ruled with that viper. The north was his bastion, his family’s bark and roots, and he would see it shatter before he let another man claim it. The Principe was meant to rule only in name, but with Adanis’s backing even a puppet could wield influence enough.

All the boy in Mangup would have to do was cede away the north, grant it as a hereditary charge beyond the easy reach of court whims and Adanis would sponsor him if only to stay Philemon’s more daring machinations.

House Nomikos would finally rule the north for generations to come.

It would be the legacy Adanis left behind. The purpose to all his hardness, the meaning in every cruel sacrifice he’d had to undertake. It would grant meaning to his struggles.

“A letter has come in for you.”

Iadeus stepped closer and handed Adanis a small envelope, the parchment edged with little flourishes. One look at the inscription on the cover and Adanis knew exactly whose hand had written it.

His heart seized.

He had not left on good terms with his daughter. Of all his failures, that one clung the tightest. He had taken up the burden of Patriarch to shield precious souls like hers from the dark. She was one of the high branches, soaking in the light.

Iadeus, quick as ever to read a room, inclined his head and slipped out of the tent without another word, leaving Adanis alone with the fragile weight in his palm.

Adanis did not waste a heartbeat. He broke the seal with his thumb, careful not to tear the paper, even though he had no idea whether the words inside would soothe or flay him.

Dear Father,

I am sorry, you were right about the Captain. In the days since your departure I have cursed your name aplenty and dreamed only of the death and destruction of this war you have started. But I have also dreamed of the Captain, and I have realized a truth. On the day of his departure he fooled me. I believe he poisoned the wine we consumed and drugged me. I do not know if he accessed your study or what his reasoning would be, but he did come inside the Nomikos Common Room, as you well know.

Adanis’s eyes sharpened on the lines, the world around him tightening to the cramped strokes of her hand. His fingers trembled despite himself.

What?

That bastard had dared to poison his daughter. His little fawn.

Heat flooded him, white and blinding. For a moment he saw nothing but Captain Theodorus’s face pinned to a stake. He forced himself to breathe. Anger could howl later.

What could the captain have wanted?

The message from Philemon? The one directing them to Kalamita? Adanis had noticed no forgery, no clumsy hand where there should have been a practiced one. And how would the captain even have accomplished it? He was a spy for the Crown, yes, but a calculating one, this was a daring, reckless plot to access his correspondence. But then again, there would have been no other method for him.

To think he would use Adanis’s daughter to access his correspondence… it seemed almost too vile, even for him. Had he wooed her for months just to seize that one perfect chance? It would certainly explain the Crown’s strategy so far, if they’d known that they were headed to Kalamita all along.

He read on.

I see that now. I should have trusted your judgement when it came to him. I was blinded by my heart. My foolish, naïve heart. I am sorry, Papa.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

It hurt Adanis to read such lines. He could picture her hunched over the desk, see the ink blotches where her hand must have shaken. He could feel the hurt pulsing behind eachstroke. That bastard had played with her heart and then turned her into a tool besides. There were some sins a man could not allow to pass unanswered.

And this was one of them.

I cannot forgive you for starting this war, nor for ordering Apostolos to murder Kyriakos. But I will pray for you both to come back safely. Please, do not leave me alone.

Adanis let out a slow breath and set the letter down as if it were a relic. He did not curse his son for telling her the truth, nor his daughter for writing it.

Whatever evil he did, he did for them. For his blood.

And he would do more. Far more. The path he had chosen did not reach its end with niceties. If the world demanded terror in exchange for his family’s safety, then terror it would receive.

But Captain Theodorus’s name was now carved into a different ledger. Adanis would not delegate that task. He would be the one to find him, to look him in the eyes, and to drive steel through the man who had dared lay hands on his daughter.

The stakes were set, the pieces laid. All that remained was to play out the final round.

The candlelight shimmered, making the shadows in Philemon’s tent coil along silk and canvas. A soft note of incense swam through the air, pushing back the grit and sour reek of the camp outside as if the world beyond the tent-flap were some unpleasant rumour he could choose to ignore.

War was such nasty business, he thought. Necessary, of course, but there was no rule that said one had to wallow in it. He preferred to keep as many paces as possible between himself and mud, steel and unwashed flesh. Even now, with incense and expensive rugs between him and the army, his sensibilities were strained by the mere knowledge of so many sweating bodies pressed together beyond his little sanctuary.

Still, the siege of Kalamita would be quick. He had planned for it, and was certainly counting on it. The very idea of a months-long slog made his skin crawl. He had no intention of sitting in filth while some provincial garrison slowly starved itself into reason, not when he had taken pains to ensure things would conclude with a certain elegance.

Brute-forcing one’s problems head-on was such a crude way of doing business.

Yes, he had mustered a sizeable mercenary host, enough steel to greatly outnumber his foe. But that was simply prudence. Insurance so that, when the time came, nothing unforeseen would spoil his work. A smart player always hedged his bets when he was ahead.

The true attack had been launched months ago, not with the coarse trudge of boots but with the discreet scratch of a quill. Intrigue, to Philemon, was a gentleman’s weapon. Only fools like the Doux despised its utility, mistaking subtlety for weakness. The man was, as ever, one step behind, swinging at shadows while bleeding from a fatal strike in the dark.

These manoeuvres and games, the ambushes and sieges, were all just theatre. Playthings and distractions for soldiers and nobles who needed something obvious to point at and call victory.

The Principality was already his.

Kalamita and the Doux were merely two last pieces to be brushed from the board.

“My lord.” A whispered voice sounded from beyond the tent, barely rising over the muffled din of the camp.

“Lustinianos, enter,” Philemon called.

The bald man slipped inside with a servant’s bow, dressed in simple, unremarkable robes – the guise he used whenever news arrived that did not concern the rest of the army.

That fool Adanis thought himself clever, playing at his own little games. It amused Philemon to watch the northern man’s bids for leverage at each council, those slight transgressions and careful probes for advantage. As if they would amount to anything. No doubt Adanis had some scheme simmering to improve his lot in that barren stretch of north he called a domain. Like the rest of them, he thought too small, reached for too little, content with co-ruling a Principality and preserving his house. Philemon did not share.

He took.

“Urgent news, my lord.” Lustinianos’s usual joviality was stripped away. That, at least, was something Philemon could appreciate about the man: when the moment demanded gravity he rose to meet it. Half the time he was an obnoxious sycophant Philemon tolerated only for his familial connections and coin, but he could be serious when it mattered.

“What is it?” Philemon asked, opening his eyes. He sat cross-legged on his lavish futon, lungs filling with incense as he centred himself.

“A message from the Gryphon.”

The words struck a familiar chord. For an instant Philemon was back at his palace in Funa, hearing Arsinoe’s harmonic voice reading the letter that had set all of this in motion.

His eyes snapped fully open, his posture sharpening. He inclined his head, bidding Lustinianos continue.

“It’s done. Do not forget our deal when this is all over.”

A slow, fierce ecstasy unfurled through Philemon. This, more than any drug or carnal vice, was what completed him: the knowledge of a plot well executed, of a quiet knife finding its mark, of power flowing towards him as naturally as water down a carved channel.

A chuckle escaped him, low at first, a satisfied growl that built and broke into full, unrestrained laughter. Lustinianos seemed to shrink in on himself at the sound, eyes flicking away from the expression Philemon allowed to surface. His control slipped, for once, under the weight of this moment of triumph.

The time was nigh. The Principality was his now in all but name. He had carved the path, pushed through every punishing leap. Now there remained only this last step.

The Doux, Adanis, the Prince, this whole Principality would find themselves beneath his heel, trampled and forgotten, while he stood alone at the summit.

Cassandra stood by the great oak and sank carefully to her knees at its roots. Her lips trembled, her hands shook as she reached out to the rough bark. It had been her mother’s favourite tree, her father’s pride. Now it was all she had left to lean on.

She wondered, not for the first time, why she had come. Perhaps it was only to pour her despair into something that had weathered more winters than she could count. Perhaps it was to wrestle a promise from whatever powers she wanted to believe listened through leaf and branch.

Hilda’s fingers found hers and squeezed, steady and warm. She nodded once when Cassandra hesitated, a simple gesture that said more than any words.

Cassandra drew in a breath and managed a faint, wavering smile. She took strength from that touch, from the familiar presence at her side. Together they placed their hands against the oak’s trunk, palms flat on the cool, living wood.

No, she had not come here to speak to bark and memory. She had come here for the only thing left to her.

To pray.

“I am sorry, Mother, for bothering you on your birthday,” she began, her voice barely there, cracking halfway through. Suddenly, she felt small again, a child begging her mother. “But I do not know where else to turn.”

She bowed her head.

“I ask you to pray with me. For my brother to come home safe. For my father not to lose his life. For our house not to fall apart.”

Her fingers laced together and she squeezed until her knuckles ached, as if she could hold her whole world together by sheer force of will. Hilda mirrored her beside the tree, hands clasped, lips moving in her own pleas.

“Make them come home,” Cassandra whispered. “Watch over them. Please.”

She poured everything into that word.

A single tear slipped free, warm against the chill air. It caught the light as it fell, glinting with a faint, impossible golden hue before sinking into the dark grooves of the bark.

All was quiet on the northern road, but the sharp April breeze told Gerasimos it wouldn’t stay that way for long. He had made his almost sole purpose in life to learn how to read the forest. The forest had, in turn, taught him that it alone chose the outcome of hunts before they ever happened.

A hunt succeeded or failed on her whims. Not the sharpness of the spear or the strength of the arm, but whether the woods accepted your presence. If the forest was not on your side, you were already doomed. Tame it, coax it into cooperation, and the hardest part of the work was done.

This stretch of forest, at least, they had already made their own.

Sentries and scouts were tucked along the natural animal trails that crisscrossed the few paths they had left open, the others choked with carefully placed tangles of thorn and bramble. Gerasimos’s expertise had been called on more than once to determine which tracks to block, which to leave, where the traps would feel like chance rather than design.

It wasn’t so different, he thought, from planning any other hunt. You mapped how the prey would move, which paths they’d favour, where they’d slow, where they’d think themselves safe. Then you chose the places to intercept them, tight gaps where escape narrowed to nothing.

“When will they arrive? It’s past midday, they are beyond slow,” one of the young pups they’d saddled him with muttered, he was covered in mud and foliage, like all the rest, a crude disguise that mirrored the forest floor, and only worked if they stood still - and kept quiet.

“Shut your damn mouth,” Gerasimos hissed back. The boy’s eyes went wide, all wounded pride and surprise.

Gerasimos fought the urge to snort. Everyone here seemed astonished that an old man who looked one bad winter away from the grave had been given such an important task. They saw the bent back, the grey in his beard, never the years spent learning how not to die in places like this.

“Young ones these days don’t have any patience,” he muttered under his breath.

Hunting was patience. Waiting until your quarry was exactly where you needed it to be. You couldn’t shove them into position by force. Push too hard and they bolted, and then all your careful work scattered with them. You had to guide them, gently, with absence more than presence. Let them think each step was their choice.

He remembered once waiting over two days in the same cramped hollow, joints screaming, to bring down the fattest boar he had ever seen. He had shot it right in the arse as it waddled past, smug as a lord. There had been nothing noble about the smell or the mess afterwards.

That was another truth the songs never told. Hunting wasn’t glamorous. It was mud and blood and cold, and anyone who prosed poetic about it being some noble pursuit was either lying or had never left the safety of a pavilion. Grand hunts and golden stags were for high nobles who had beasts driven into their laps so they could feel brave over their wine.

True hunting was darker. It was patience and cruelty and knowing exactly when to let the forest do your killing for you.

And it was true hunting they needed now.

The soft crunch of boots over old foliage was the only warning they got.

Gerasimos pursed his lips and let out a low, casual whistle, the call of a common forest bird. At once the men around him stiffened, every bowstring and crossbow winch drawn that little bit tighter as they slid into readiness.

How he had been the first to notice the intruders, he couldn’t have said. His ears weren’t sharper than any other man his age, his eyes no longer reached as far as they once had. He simply knew what the forest sounded like when it was alone, and what it looked like when something didn’t belong in it.

Sure enough, a few breaths later, a pair of fair-weathered men with hard, mean faces crunched straight into their little snare. The information about their scouting patterns had been invaluable. Gerasimos had never hunted such predictable prey. That they liked to spread out in pairs, numbered close to fifty in all, and moved in neat, crisscrossing lines at a fixed distance from one another. These were the details that mattered.

A smart hunter studied his beast beforehand. Learned its habits and little tics. The boy who’d dragged him out of his village and into this rebellion understood that rule better than most seasoned trackers. Gerasimos still wasn’t sure how someone so young had come by that kind of sense. It had taken him a fair few close calls, too much blood and too many empty bellies, to learn the same lesson.

I suppose that’s what you call a genius.

He shook his head once to clear it. No room for wandering thoughts now. He drew a slow breath in through his nose, feeling the weight of the bow in his hand, letting the tension bleed out of his shoulders. You needed your mind clean as a whetstone and your body in that narrow place between taut enough to hold the string and loose enough not to shake.

As soon as the pair of scouts crossed the invisible threshold they’d marked on the ground, ten different projectiles hissed through the undergrowth. Gerasimos loosed with them, his arrow humming away and burying itself cleanly in one man’s skull. A decent shot – the least he could expect on a stationary half-aware target, but still mildly impressive given the winter he’d starved through.

His body, at least, had never truly abandoned him. Decades spent with a bow in hand had left a wiry strength that clung to his bones even as the rest of him withered.

It was his mind that had strayed from the forest, not his muscles.

The ambush was over in less than ten heartbeats. Not so much as an eep escaped any of the scouts. Best case, really. Gerasimos had ordered the men to aim for the lungs; if the bastards didn’t drop at once, it wouldn’t do for them to have the breath to scream. And hitting centre mass was simple enough even for the fools they’d saddled him with, provided they kept their hands from shaking.

He flashed a few brisk hand signals, and the bodies were dragged off the trail before the blood could pool too widely to hide. They couldn’t risk the second ring of scouts stumbling upon a butchered pair lying in plain sight. By his reckoning, it would be about fifteen minutes before the next two came padding along, given the spacing they followed.

Truly, he thought, he’d never had a hunt come this easy. Almost a shame. If he were honest with himself, he preferred a bit of a chase.

Gerasimos settled back into the green, crouching low amid the ferns and brush, the damp earth cool beneath his boots.

“Back to waiting again,” someone behind him muttered under his breath.

Gerasimos turned just enough to give the boy a look and that was all it took for him to snap his mouth shut, eyes dropping.

These pups and their yapping. Young ones had no patience now.

Back in his day…

“Fifteen successful ambushes. That makes nearly three out of every five of their scouts dead.” Theodorus’s voice was crisp in the close air of the command tent.

“And no one was discovered,” the Doux rumbled from his heavy command chair. “A best-case scenario.”

“That would have been if we’d slaughtered them all,” Poseidippus added from his own seat, the cadence of his voice so uncannily like the Doux’s that it was as if the same man spoke twice. “The ones who slipped through could double back and find us.”

“We’ll have sentries posted to cut off their escape paths. We stand between them and the main host,” the Doux replied. Theodorus had come to realise that, remarkably, he was the less demanding of the brothers. Now that was something he’d never thought he’d say. “Their eyes are blind, for the moment, and we are in their blind spot. That will have to be enough.”

He let his gaze sweep over every face in the filled command tent: captains, banner-knights, grizzled sergeants, all bathed in lamplight and worry, tense as a bowstring.

“It will be more than enough.”

Sir Silvanus lounged back with the easy poise of a man born in fine armour, the picture of calm confidence as he eased into his seat. “Get them into the kill box, and I’ll deliver the killing blow.”

“You truly mean to lead the charge?” Theodorus asked, he couldn’t help the worried frown that came about him.

“Someone has to. The leadership can’t all be hiding at the back,” Silvanus answered, tone light, as if he were volunteering for a pleasant ride and not the most dangerous task in the entire plan. “And I need to win some small measure of favour, or you’ll take all the credit, my dear Theodorus.”

That drew a round of chuckles from the men nearby. Silvanus was easily the most charismatic of their officers, a knight the soldiers actually loved rather than merely obeyed.

Theodorus’s laughter came out thin and weak. He had grown fond of the man. Just as he had grown fond of Kyriakos. The thought settled in his gut like a stone dropped into deep water.

Silvanus seemed to sense it.

“Do not worry, friend.” The edges of his grin softened, arrogance ebbing into something quieter, almost sad. “I know I might not come back. But this is bigger than all of us. And have a little faith in me. I’ve won my fair share of prizes in my time.”

Theodorus knew his reputation well enough. Silvanus and Hypatius had been prime contenders and bitter rivals on the jousting field for years. It didn’t ease the feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach. Not after how Kyriakos had ended up.

“They don’t call me the Copper Sword for nothing,” Silvanus added with a flash of teeth.

Another wave of laughter passed through the tent. Everyone knew he loathed the nickname, and almost no one knew its true origin. He insisted most of the rumours were wrong, which only made the men cling to them harder.

“Tomorrow I’ll show you why,” he finished, and this time his grin turned properly feral.

The Doux chose that lull to rise from his chair. The movement alone was enough to drag every wandering gaze back to him.

“It is no exaggeration to say that tomorrow will decide not only our fates, but those of our families,” he said. His face was not carved from stone but from metal, hard and cold and utterly devoid of softness. “Everyone you cherish will perish with the new regime. All our lines will be culled if we lose this rebellion. Make no mistake about it.”

Weary, dark looks greeted the words as the men let them sink in.

“Even if we survive the field, if we lose the battle the Italians will sweep away all that’s left,” he went on. “Tomorrow, fight as if your entire existence is on the line. Because it is.”

He raised one thick hand into the air and slowly closed it into a fist.

“Scour any thought of defeat from your minds. Lay down your life if you have to. For the Principality.”

It was not an inspiring speech so much as a sentence pronounced - a stern, dour order none of them were permitted to refuse.

Men pushed back their chairs and rose as one, hands slapping to breasts or hilts in salute. Theodorus felt his own arm move almost of its own accord, compelled by the weight of their shared doom.

“For the Prince!” someone cried.

“For the Principality!” came the answering roar.

“For Theodoro!” It was despair, hope, and purpose all jumbled into one singular shout.