Born a Monster

“Close and bar the gates!” Rakkal shouted.

“Tortoise formation!” Uma joined him.

For my part, plucking arrows from various spots of my flesh, I was glad to not have a heavy shield. This is when the arrow in my face left its arrowhead inside. Not because it was flimsy, or damaged in striking me. This one had been designed with a Hunter’s malice, deliberately to come off inside the target. If I ever used a bow and arrow, it was a technique I intended to pick up.

Please understand that back then it was a moral issue for me, almost a matter of religion. One should not eat any animal capable of asking you not to eat it. Back at a time when I hadn’t yet distinguished myself from any other aware beast... well, you probably don’t care.

What was important was that it mattered to me, and it was literally impossible to kill a beast at range by surprise and also ask it if it was Aware.

Students of Achean history will know the tortoise, where a group of large shields forms a dome of interlocked shields; this is not the formation we took. What we assembled was a core of archers, protected by a layer of light infantry, surrounded at the front by a wedge of heavy infantry. Again, a practiced move.

And we advanced, away from the protection of our fortress walls, toward the commotion of the burning tents.

Normally, a death sentence. But Rakkal had suffered too many ambushes, too many supply convoys lost. The enemy troops were cavalry. Fast, maneuverable. But their supplies were not.

.....

We lost perhaps twenty percent of our number just getting there. But we did, and then the enemy had to face us, spear to spear.

Well, only if they wanted to maintain their ability to fight. And there, much diminished in numbers, were our allies.

It was an inversion of how the tactic was supposed to work. The anvil had moved to the hammer, and those of our enemies trapped between... they were crushed. When the rest of the enemy withdrew before dusk, there were over a hundred twenty enemy fallen, two thirds of whom would survive to become prisoners.

Our infantry... was decimated multiple times over. A lesser army might very well have been finished by such casualties. Ours cheered, raising weapons and voices. Comrades carried wounded comrades back toward the fortress; seriously injured people had to be lined up in the field, sometimes two per enemy cot.

I was too exhausted to focus my healing powers. An attempt to tap disease instead tapped only Death. Duty. Courage. Rage.

I knelt on one knee, coughing up blood.

[You have 8/80 health, 12/40 sanity, and 28/40 serenity remaining.]

Compared to the sheer number of battles where I’d ended up unconscious? No, this still felt worse, because I was awake to feel it.

My ribs; still fractured. [Anemia], [Exhaustion: 4], [Dizzyness], along with the mental ones [Sudden Stress Decompression] in the lead.

It was a moment of history, about which many songs would be sung. There was blood in my remaining eye, and I didn’t care that I didn’t have place in them. I was a survivor, but there were many who had bedecked themselves in glory, which I had not.

You know their names, perhaps better than I do, who was there.

By the numbers, this second part of the day also looked like a wash. It wasn’t. Combined with our earlier losses, the enemy now by far outnumbered us. What we had shown was that we could fight, and it had cost us a good deal of blood.

Bards would call this the turning point of the war; a first victory pulled from a history mostly of defeats. Limping in a line back to walls that could now hold us all (even if everyone didn’t have a bunk), I had to wonder if it was worth it.

We need only so much of your ground as to cross it, and only for the time needed to cross. It was a simple bargain, and one common to both human and Uruk. I had never thought to question whether the centaur also practiced; three years prior, I had taken it as a given that they did. Now, I wasn’t so certain.

Could an entire culture be so stubborn? Yes, I realized it could. The Daurians had been; I just had trouble reconciling their nature with what I knew of the centaur.

Oh, I could believe Rakkal was capable of his own stubborn streak. If all of this up until now had been for the sake of his family, I didn’t see him breaking off now.

It played to his understanding of the world; it had nothing to do with tactics or strategy. Only when he was there did he win. The Empire had been all but ruined, but now that he was here, he would believe that time was nearly over.

Why should he want peace, when all he could see was victory?

Likewise, Theoni had no reason to seek peace. This was just a single upset in an otherwise glorious and I presumed unbroken string of victories.

I had too much experience with loss, too many protections against fear in particular. But there could be no mistake, this was not the end of anything. This might have been a new beginning, but that only meant...

Gods, two such strong wills, two people sworn to their cause...

What HAD become of the blood cultists from the wars of human annexation? I could not imagine they had been idle all this time. They would not have missed this slaughter, not willingly.

But there was no sign of them. Those who went among the bodies of the dead and dying did so for mundane purposes, salvaging that which could be salvaged, and gathering the fallen to be burned later. Plains scrubs being what they were, that would end up taking eight days or so.

I had envisioned Rakkal, or at least Uma, would return to the fortress; I was wrong on both counts. When Rakkal’s staff was summoned to the “outer camp”, I walked behind and off to one side.

“You must be crazy.” one of the guards told me. “Keep being near him, and he will eventually kill you.”

“Perhaps.” I said, “But he’ll end others who are more fragile, first.”

That guard, though, was not far from wrong.

“Ah.” said Rakkal. “Little brother, the runt. The coward.”

“Cowards don’t get arrow wounds to the face.” Uma said. “Forgive me, little one, but the bones don’t seem...”

“There is an arrowhead lodged inside.” I said.

She snorted. “We have a surgeon.”

The surgery to remove such a deeply embedded arrowhead is not a thing to endure or undertake lightly. It involves the application of a series of wedges, gently applied. Not solid, but hollow, so that when the final wedge is in place, you can reach in with thin forceps, grab hold of the arrowhead, and pull it out. Or, in my case, where the arrow was broader than the wedge, worried out little by little.

Obviously, I survived. I was in no shape to do anything other than pass out, but I endured enough to know it must have gone. She told me later that when she removed the last of the wedges, the bones of my skull snapped shut as though they knew their proper places.

I awakened on my back, of course, my armor stripped of padding (much of which had been ruined by blood) and stacked neatly.

It was one of the few times I had been unconscious in the company of soldiers and woken with my inventory in the same state as before.

It was night when I originally woke, and a quick tour of the camp revealed guards walking about in teams of six, most teams accompanied by one or two centaurs.

From the tent adjacent to mine came the sound of snoring, long and loud, and from no less than two throats. Different parts of that large tent, before you get any false impression that I am implying otherwise.

I looked up, with my old eye and the bulb that would become my new eye. I could almost focus enough to tap them. Almost.

It should come as no surprise that I still felt exhaustion, even when the sun woke me again in the morning. I wasn’t the only soldier so affected, just the only one near Rakkal.

“You look smaller without your armor on, little brother.” he said.

“Larger brother, please, we need no such games. Say what you mean to say.”

“Do you still believe in this miserable notion of peace?” he asked.

“It does not seem likely, after a conflict like this one. Both sides have allies to avenge.”

“Both. Sides.” he said.

“Theoni of the Cloudrunners has a strong will.” I said. “I do not foresee this coming to an end that has both of you still alive.”

“In that much, brother, surely you can agree?” Uma asked.

Rakkal flexed his fists. “This world, and thus these plains, are too small for both of us to continue living. Let me get close enough, where she cannot scamper away, and this will be over.”

“If it were just you and her, I agree.” I said. “But it won’t be, will it?”

He nodded. “Many will die.”