The Crown of Treason

Chapter 1. Fire (Part 1.)

'They have nowhere left to go!' Barack shouted in Jovin's ear.

He was right. The flames had started their hellish devouring of the roof. It couldn't be long before the fire would chase the inhabitants outside. His men formed a wall of pikes in front of the gate. Die by fire or die by impalement. That choice he had left to the defenders.
'A horrible dilemma,' he thought.
Jovin had imagined his first command different than this. Colourful banners, golden spurs, loud blaring heralds, nothing of the sort. Nothing but cries of terror above the howling of the developing inferno. The wailing, weeping and screeching of desperate victims dying in the air being sucked out by the fire. He had become an ordinary killer at the head of a death squad.

Jovin felt his facial muscles tighten. His eyes wanted to shield themselves to the cruelty of the night. Three mansions his men had burned at his command. Three palaces, three households, three executions.

'Imperative,' argued the voice in his head. 'Death of the few, to forgo death of the many. A lot of years of fighting could be avoided. This wasn't a slaughter this was war, an efficient war. With the king in chains and his most powerful supporters extinguished, resistance against the Golden Circle was, for all intents and purposes decapitated. Proceed and persist... Chaos and years of bloodshed were the alternative.'

A faint cold fear ran across his spine as if thirty pairs of eyes pierced the skin of his back. Even before he had fully turned around he recognized the clop of hooves. Before he realized what it was he saw the reflection of flame in polished armour. In a gush of spirit in the dept of his clinging he raised his halberd, an instinctive response to a coarse unintelligible shouting.

'Calvalry!'

Maybe he shrieked something else. Maybe, he cried nothing at all. The sound exploded inside his head when the side of a horse smacked him against the gate.

His head was spinning and a force, stronger than a hundred men wrenched his halberd from his benumbed fingers. A pike scratched his helmet, glancing within a hair of his eye. It cut a thin line of blood on his cheek where the metal of his half-bascinet left the corner of his face exposed. It would be a scar to show his progeny. That was if he survived this fight.

Punch-drunk he tried to climb back on his feet, but the pull of Pathos, god of war, forced him back to the ground. As if he had to be there. The iron claws of Mortigena, goddess of war lay in wait on the cobblestones, eager to carry him to the Gloomy Halls. Still, he managed to erect himself, only to be smashed again face-down in the mud by a slash of a sword between his shoulder pauldrons. Horsemen, black fades, trot between his men. Their swords slashing about them, barely missing his head this time. Blood squirt from arteries around him. He was defenceless. His men were defenceless. Not a single sword was raised in parry to hide behind. Instead, he saw faces marred with expression of pain and death; eyes frantically searching for help, hands looking for something to take cover behind and mouths shaking before the lights in their panicked eyes faded and Mortigena claimed her prize. His men were cut down one by one. Hooves hammer them against the muddy cobblestones, into a bloody entanglement of barely fighting men. A breastplate in his own colours crushed Jovins wrist, knocking his blade, he somehow managed to draw, out of his hand. It got lost in the heap of kicking men.

'Pathos be with me, I'm going to die,' he thought. 'Ergodix, no. I refuse to go out like this.'

In the corner of his eye he saw a sword, about an arm-length away from him balancing on the shoulder of one of his entangled comrades. His fingers closed around the hilt as he managed to find the ground beneath his footing.

'A sword, thank the Shifting God, a sword. I have to...'

Jovin kicked his comrade off of him. The paralyzing weight left his chest.