Chapter 1916: Tears of the Gods - Part 5
The pain of that loss, it would not allow him to vanish. Even if he tried to dismiss it, the pain was there, heavy and impossible. He could not allow it free of himself. That suffering, it dug in between his ribs as the coldest of daggers.
"My Lord," Verdant said, from at his side. A face cold with expectation. There hardly seemed any love there. Oliver found himself shying away from the man, and the harshness of him. Even the slightest little cold glance now wounded him immensely.
"...Apologies," Oliver said, looking elsewhere, trying to steady his breathing, as once more, the situation ran away from him, along with his own mishealth.
"We’ve lost a good few men..." Blackthorn said as well. There might not have been accusation in her voice, but Oliver still thought that he could hear some. The weight of that responsibility. Two thousand men they had charged in with, at the back of their General, for the weighty sacrifice he had made of himself, and what had they brought to bear for it? Nothing but the slaughter of their men, and the remaining thousand good Patrick soldiers that they had.
Oliver grit his teeth. It took everything that he had to simply climb back into the saddle, but that still was far from being good enough. He swayed uneasily, fighting his breath, unable to establish a rhythm. He almost fell. The wound to his arm only added to his dizziness.
A breakthrough from Tiberius’ men, as they gathered themselves from a distance, and began lurching forward. Disorganized they might have been, but it hardly seemed to matter. The speed of the chase now, that was to their advantage.
The need again – the need to make a painful decision. Oliver didn’t have it in him. He grasped for the reins of some strategy that might serve to pull it all together, but his heart was an unsteadily beating, chaotic sort of thing.
Endure, that was the only thing he could summon up the want to do. Endure, but for what? For what future? For which memories that flashed through his mind?
That summer day, when he’d been determined not to bring his little sister along. When the waters of the creek were perfectly clear, the sunlight illuminating the bottom, and he had sprang through them with such ease, and she had stumbled and had to half-swim her way through, calling out to him with tears in her eyes all the while.