Chapter 671: Booty
Alpheo could hardly believe what his eyes beheld.
For a brief, flickering moment, he wondered if he were still asleep, dreaming some fevered vision of triumph too fantastical for reality. But no dream had ever smelled so richly of sweat, iron, and oiled wood.
Cart after cart rolled down the patchy green road, their wheels creaking beneath the weight of wealth pulled from the bones of Herculia.
The entire spoils of a broken city were being hauled, piece by piece, across the grass and laid bare before the quartermasters of the White Army. Their ink-stained hands moved quickly, cataloguing the loot with all the cold precision of scribes counting the spoils of gods. Everything was being sorted and tallied: from the tiniest bronze trinkets pried from hearths, to the grandest tapestries torn from palace walls.
Coins by the thousands. Iron tools. Casks of wine. Locks of silk. The humble and the lavish, heaped together like bones in a grave. But the true prize, the most profitable hoard by far, came not from the homes of commoners but from within the halls of the Herculeian court itself.
Though the royal family had fled before the city fell, they had not taken much with them—there simply hadn’t been room for everything. And so they had left behind their legacy in silver and marble.
There were carpets,silverware engraved with ancestral crests. Gilded statues, paintings by dead artists , ceremonial helms never worn in war but polished bright for display. The debris of dynasties. The dusted proof of once-unshakable lineage.
And now, all of it was his.
Alpheo stood amid it all, stunned into silence. His armor caught the glint of the midday sun, its edges reflecting off a set of golden goblets balanced carelessly in a wooden tray. He watched as soldiers dumped entire velvet-lined chests holding who knew what onto blankets, laughing like children with their hands in the honey jar.
Much of the ornamental wealth would be shipped back to Yarzat to line the walls of Alpheo’s own court, a new order built upon old opulence. The rest, especially the goods that couldn’t be repurposed for prestige, would be sold off to eager merchants .
"How much do you reckon is in there?" Egil asked, stepping beside him. His voice, too, was touched with disbelief, eyes scanning the mountains of wealth with the same wide wonder as a boy peering into a dragon’s hoard.
Alpheo exhaled slowly, his gaze fixed on a trove of scepters half-buried under bolts of brocade.