the Twelve-faced Moon: A Loona fanfiction

Chapter XXVI

Heejin II

When the battle was done, Heejin rode her silver mare through the fields of the dead. Her handmaids and the men of her auxiliary forces came after, smiling and jesting among themselves.

Nuzheni hooves had torn the earth and trampled the rye and lentils into the ground, while swords and arrows had sown a terrible new crop and watered it with blood.

Dying horses lifted their heads and screamed at her as she rode past. Wounded men moaned and prayed. Soyeon moved with her on foot, the maiden armed with her longsword,half the size of her body, taking a harvest of lives from the dead and dying alike,a mercy.

Despite her father's treacherous deed,Soyeon proven herself to be an able retainer for Heejin,doing all the bloody work without ever sounding a complain...Heejin saw Soyeon's slanted eyes,eerily calm despite all the gruesome work she done.

Those wounded and still can be saved are tended to their wounds by Gwok Yubin and her pack of physicians,on a cart pulled by ox. her dimples in her cheek run slick with her sweat and blood of the wounded.

After them would scurry a flock of small girls,orphans from nearby village and towns, pulling arrows from the corpses to fill their baskets,as being told by Eum Gyesong,who's in charge of Heejin's army supplies,stingy middle aged rotund of a man,with lips shaped like silkworm. He's tailor made for the role,Heejin thought when she composed her army disposition with Black Hare back in Hare Hole.

In return for their work,Gyesong offered them safety and he did fulfilled his promise,as the column now getting closer to a walled city,where they can be safe from Nuzheni outriders and their arrows.

Last of all the dogs would come sniffing, lean and hungry, the feral pack that was never far behind the Northern Chungcheongan army.

The sheep had been dead longest. There seemed to be thousands of them, black with flies, arrow shafts bristling from each carcass. Nuzheni riders had done that, Heejin knew; no man would be such a fool as to waste their arrows on sheep when there were shepherds yet to kill.

The town was afire, black plumes of smoke roiling and tumbling as they rose into a hard blue sky.

Beneath broken walls of dried mud, riders galloped back and forth, as they herded the survivors from the smoking rubble. The women and children,Goryoan and Vastlander walked with a sullen expression...of those caught in a crossfire between Heejin's army and the Nuzheni horde.

It was different with the townsfolk. Heejin pitied them; she remembered what terror felt like. Mothers stumbled along with blank, dead faces, pulling sobbing children by the hand.

Soyeon said that this city is called Anshan,just south of Shenyang,capital of Liaoning province,the intended target of Ung Jeom's forces. We're halfway there...to end this war

Heejin saw one boy bolt and run for the river,copper skinned,a Nuzheni,no older than Jiwoo's twin younger brother,wearing ill-suited equipment of a Nuzheni horseman.

A rider cut him off and turned him, and the others boxed him in, running him this way and that. One galloped behind him, lashing him with horse whip across the buttocks until his thighs ran red with blood. Another snared his ankle with a lash and sent him sprawling. Finally, when the boy could only crawl, they grew bored of the sport and put an arrow through his back. Heejin recognized the banner they sporting,black with purple lightning bolt. The Laughing Shield's men. No wonder they were so cruel.

The Laughing Shield himself awaits her at the shattered gate,his grey hair streaked with black prominent when hit by wind. He wore a dark green surcoat over his mail,obscured by mud and all sorts of dirty mess. His gauntlets, and greaves were dark grey steel But his sly and uneasy smile stood more. Heejin find him odd standing there without his namesake shield.