*COMPLETE* Allayria promised to do what it takes to stop the Jarles, to make the ugly decision. She thinks, at last, she understands what the dynast meant. The lesson earned from the top of that lonely cliff and given the dark murky water below.
It...
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There's rain falling down on the tents of this invading army. It pings, ping, ping on the quavering canvas like knuckles rapping on a door, asking to be let inside. Outside, the mud squelches and sucks, trapping boots and wheels, and anything else that dares set down in it. The land, much like the people who occupy it, has a hard grip that tangles, ensnares, and never relents. In the golden, wheat-grass plains of the Jarles, mud conquers all.
General Jin's command cut down another attacking squadron today as they crossed into the plains—though squadron is too big of a word in Hiran's estimation. What had been sent to meet them was not much more than a rag-tag group of spoiled meat and bones.
Faceless phantoms, he thinks, remembering the way the starved soldiers had wavered on their feet, like the blowing grass around them. Sent only to delay, never to defeat.
They were prisoners of war and otherwise captured people who had not been of Jarles before, though what they are now is less clear. What they should be considered, as they swing their swords of ice and throw their stone hammers in the honor of the great and terrible Imperator.
Allayria had peeled open one of the first ones just after they crossed the border, pinned it down and pried the cold, sharp metal off its bloodied crown. There was a flicker of perverse hope of what might be changed, reversed, as she dug and Lei held, but the freed being beneath them only laid there—for minutes, hours, days—and in the end, Allayria returned with a silver sword.
They know now the Jarles never send anyone who can be salvaged.
Most of the ones who come, one of Beinsho's soldiers confided earlier this evening to Hiran over the course of several pints, were Halften.
"Dfidnnt know theyfth taken so many," he had slurred, all red-rimmed eyes and haggard face. "Bon saw his cousin thish last time."
This, Hiran thought, is the point.
"The Jarles are evil little cretins," he told the man, clapping a hand on his back and holding it there because it seemed as if the man's face might crumple. "That's why we're here, to show Abadi Chaudri exactly what the people of Halften, Roften, and Solveig are made of."
There were cheers to that then, hands swinging, heads wobbling, but voices stronger, angrier, feet stumbling in an impotent frenzy.
Yes, Hiran had thought, more drunken rabble-rousing and less stewing. Because, though the swinging may be wild and erratic, at least they were swinging and not wilting into the ground.
That was several hours past; now Hiran trudges through the muck and dark, wandering back to his small, (relatively) dry hovel of a tent. Most of the ones he passes are dark, though he spots the flicker of candlelight in a larger one in the distance.
Allayria, most likely pacing in her tent. The Paragon has not been sleeping well, if the dark circles underneath her eyes can tell any tales.
