By the time he reached the crest, there was nothing left of his shield but a leather strap hanging from his wrist. His sword arm trembled from exhaustion, the blade slick and dripping from elbow to tip. His lungs burned. His ears rang with screams. His vision swam red.
He braced himself against a shattered post, sucking ragged breaths. And in that moment, with the hilltop around him nothing but corpses and smoke, he thought of only one thing.
Aerion.
With his free hand, he carved the name into the post. Clumsy, crude letters gouged into the wood with the bloody point of his dagger. Not “lord.” Not “Archduke.”
JustAerion.
Just his.
Then he screamed.
Not in pain. Not in fear.
In defiance.
It ripped from his chest like fire through dry timber, carrying over the clash of steel, over the thunder of hooves, over the last groans of the dying. For one heartbeat, it was louder than war itself.
And the men around him—what few still lived—took up the cry.
They surged. They bled. They killed.
The world ended at Hollow Ridge.
When the noise finally broke, when the screams thinned and steel stilled, it left only silence, heavy as stone. The hill that had been a prize was nothing now but a cairn of corpses, the ground soaked so deep with blood it looked black. Smoke rolled low through the valley, acrid, clinging, choking.
Clyde lay among the dead.
At first, he wasn’t sure if he was one of them. The sky swam above him in blurs of grey and ash. He tried to breathe, coughed, and blood filled his mouth. His ribs screamed. His thigh wasfire. The hand still clutching his sword refused to let go, cramped tight around the hilt even as his strength bled out of him.
Somewhere close, a crow cawed. Pecked. Flapped away.
He pushed himself onto an elbow, gasped, and collapsed into the mud again. His chest convulsed, the taste of iron flooding his tongue. But he didn’t stop. He couldn’t.
Not here. Not yet.
Aerion’s name was still carved into the wood of the broken post, a few paces above him. He saw it through the blur, smeared with gore, and it pulled him forward like a hand at his collar.
Clyde clawed his way through bodies. Slid in entrails. His fingers dug into mud, his knees buckled, but he dragged himself inch by inch until his back found the post. He leaned against it, head tipped back, breath shuddering.
Alive. Barely. But alive.
He forced his fingers open at last, dropping the sword into the muck beside him. His other hand touched his chestplate, where Aerion’s ribbon still lay tucked inside. Stiff with sweat and blood now, worn thin as silk spun to threads—but still there. Still over his heart.
He pressed it hard, hissed against the pain, and laughed—a broken, ragged sound.
“Still here,” he whispered to no one. To Aerion. To the gods. To himself.
His vision swam. His body begged for sleep. He let his head fall back against the post and shut his eyes.
If he woke again, it would be a miracle.
But for now, for this moment, he had survived.
Dawn crept back over Hollow Ridge like a thief ashamed of the night before.
The mist hung low, veiling the dead. Frost silvered armour where men would never rise again. The wind carried no songs of triumph—only the stink of blood and smoke, a silence too vast to be anything but defeat.
