Arc 7: Chapter 13: An Angel’s Grave
Despite the cold, despite the late hour, Tol still seemed alive. Where they hadn’t found room in taverns and inns, the disparate bands of soldiers sheltering in the town’s walls made rudimentary little camps on the streets. They huddled around bonfires, chatting, individuals and groups crossing from fire to fire here and there to speak with their fellows.
It wasn’t like any army of regulars I’d seen before. The handsomely equipped retinues of knights rubbed elbows with dusty mercenaries and mismatched militia who’d scavenged or forged their own arms in sleepy villages. I saw many bearing the symbol of the Auremark proudly, emblazoning it on armor or stitching it into clothing, It dangled from the necks of preosters, who walked among the soldiers and blessed them.
Even with the cold of a winter night, I felt a shiver of warmth in the air. All living things have aura, and the souls of humans grow more potent when focused to a singular will. I felt that will burning from the smithies that clanged even as dusk melted into night, felt it as keenly as the warmth of bonfires where soldiers gathered and listened to holy men give them impromptu sermons. I felt it like a warm summer wind curling through the streets, settling into the stones of recently erected shrines and the metalwork of arms being crafted for this same purpose.
The faith of the gathering army provided the power, the prayers of the priests wove its narrative and provided life to the idea, and the toiling smiths shaped it into its deadly culmination. There would be magicked blades in the hands of these would-be warriors of God when they marched eastward.
It had little in common with the armies I’d previously witnessed in action. During the war in the Karledale we’d fought for nebulous loyalties to individuals and families, each hewing to the House of their choice and shifting as the winds did. There’d been a sense of righteous defiance against the pretenders for some, but I wasn’t a Karledaler by birth. I’d fought for Rosanna and for Lias, was loyal to them personally.
Later, during the Fall, everything had come undone. There were half a hundred sides before Markham and his allies managed to form the Ardent Bough, and that war had been tinged with a desperate nihilism, a sense that all in the world had unraveled and only by losing oneself to the blood fever could any meaning be found in it.
Not here in this sleepy, small country tucked away in the heartlands. Here I felt a sense of unified purpose. People from a score of lands, who spoke in different dialects — some so insular I could barely understand them — and from various origins in wealth and social standing all broke bread and heeded the clerics like one congregation.
It invigorated something in me, even as a more cynical part of my soul warned against it. Who would these devout warriors turn their blessed steel against? Against an Abyssal Lord? Against a Faerie Queen? Would they see twisted forms in the cracks of civilization like Parn and his people, who lived within the great drains of Garihelm, and call them demon.
There were monsters in the world. I’d seen them, fought them, but there were also plenty who looked like monsters and were in fact very human in their core. I felt a scar on my chest itch, itself a contradiction and a reminder.
For the first time I almost felt glad that Catrin had left when she could. This thought came in a moment of intense whiplash, as I paused to listen to a young soldier with a beautiful voice strum a lute for a small crowd, and also wished she was there at my side so we could listen arm in arm.
The young man laid back against a huge chimera with a long, furry neck like some mix of bovine and dragon. It laid behind him with its eyes closed and listened as contentedly as the gathered throng. I stood at the back of the crowd and listened a while before moving on.