Ronin Of Dreams
Still Watching...
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As massacres go, the Alliance had so far fared well and lightly from the brunt of what Could have happened, in favor of how Luck decided to break. The stench of copper and bile that had hung in the air from the battlefield like a rank perfume had settled upon young Constantine. It clung to his nostrils, his clothing, his very soul and made him sick even in the high saddle of his mount. The sharp burning tang of vomit cleansed his head but briefly, and the youth never did manage to gain the attention of any of the mage contingent. Not that they would have been able to spare the time, with the Urn and its aftershocks resonating across the entire field of the battlelines.
This was the harsh reality that the greenhorn had to face. In the shame of his failure to adjust to the truth of battle, he stayed away from his fellow Warsmiths in order to work through the heaviness that had settled on his heart and mind. The cold, rocky ground of the Pass left sleep well by the wayside, and his mind raced the stars across the sky in thought.
Dawn came, the sun crested the sky, and young Constantine took what action he could...and headed directly into Sayden’s encampment. Come Hell or high water, he would get their attention and give Jakaero’s contingencies a chance.
“Yer a fine hand with yer horse, I’ll grant ya that,” said Harsen much earlier in that day to Cory, “but don’t be overlookin’ a farrier and his tricks. Work with horses long enough and ye learn, or you wind up with a hoof through the ribs!” Both Harsen and Danny-Boy had guffawed in laughter, making sure to keep a bit clear of the horse so as not to unintentionally spook it. “Ah, but ye see enough o’that out on the field, ‘m sure. We’ll just be takin’ a quick looksee and then off be ye on your ways. Should tell us what we need to know just fine.”
Orric was a man of many talents, most of which involved in some regard the spilling of blood or the enabling thereof, but that was not to say that Orric was a bad man overall. He was a man of passionate pursuits, who felt at home on the hunt or at the forefront of a battlefield holding his own. A man of action and intent. A man...tasked with the grunt work of ferrying messages and plans back to his own peers, laying a groundwork for future shedding of blood.
Frankly? It rankled his nerves something fierce.
The rest of the warsmiths could practically see the frustration as shimmers working off of Orric’s shoulders long before the nominal second-in-command could bark orders and thrust banners of each breed around. It didn’t really bother them much, though it was a risk with which Harsen eventually came over to take the Thanisguard’s banner from Orric’s hands. The verbal abuse was a waterfall tirade that washed over the pragmatic and indefatigable warsmiths, which soon caused Orric to tire of it and stomp off up the path. Not before he grabbed a full set of the smiths to join him, but all the same Orric became a source of amusement as he left. “Naught like trying to juggle a hot coal, that one. Right boys?”
The laughter that echoed in his wake did none to calm him down. Any other time and he might join in, tossing in some self-deprecating mockery of his own and enjoying the time spent with a group of folks he rarely if ever saw in person. It was just that the battlefield was so close and the sounds of mayhem and death echoed up Grimclaw Pass like an orchestral cacophony of a performance. His blood thundered in his ears, heart hammering in his chest, as the call for battle grew within him. Only one thing stood superior in his mind, and that was the rhythm of the forge and its crackling flames.
The procession made their way back up Grimclaw Pass mostly in silence, the other five smiths preferred not to set off the growing powderkeg of Orric. When they came to the other cart of supplies, the quickly parted Orric’s company to congregate and discuss what few tidbits the angry leader had shared to them of Jakaero’s insights. No, it was poorly Naysmith’s luck to have to deal with Orric’s anger, and the shout of Orric’s greeting to the financier of the warsmith’s expedition to the pass. “By the brazen balls of brass itself, where in the nine hells is any signs of progress, Carver!?”
“Oh fethin...Orric, get off your bloody high horse, you know it’ll take time to get anything worth fixin’ with back up here in the Pass!” Of course, Naysmith looked like he hadn’t hopped off his own mount in hours, let alone helped with the workload himself. Unsurprising, given his acclimation to riches and the comfort of his own well-stocked smithy.
“This is WAR, you right fool. You have to get things DONE.” Orric slid out of his saddle and crossed past Naysmith towards a group of the labor crew working in tandem with a shovel. “Means actually putting word to work!”
“What would you know about work, you ornery jackdaw! You’re just here to feast on the army’s leavings!”
“Feth that!” Anger and frustration bled slightly into the calmness of certainty, as Orric brought to mind the messages he needed to pass along. “Besides, Nay, it’s not looking all that good.”
“Whaddya mean not good?”
“I mean Jakaero and I took a look at the mayhem that is going on, and its looking like we’ll be needing a whole lot more than this in short order.”
Given that Naysmith was the sole actual smith among the contingent not to have been in war before, and unlike Constantine still hadn’t really experienced it, the full impact of a ‘lost cause fight’ went over his head like a breeze through the pass. “Hah! He’s just being a worrywort. The Alliance has more forces than either of you are giving credit for.”
“No, Nay. And if you think Ol’ Jak has gone blind or dumb not to have a very quick grasp of how things are, I’ll thump ya all the way back to the three duchies m’self. He and I both were trained and served to do just that, reconnoiter and understand the distributions that lay before us.” Orric’s low growl was full of menace, and his riotous temper made him throw the set of sketches at Nay rather than hand them over gently. “Study those. We need to make efforts fast to get as much of that created up here at the centerline as possible. Well, YOU do, I”ll be down in the thick of it.” Naysmith railed at the treatment, and after looking over the sketches began to scream and wail at the impossibility of it all. It didn’t much faze Orric, who gave the richer smith not a single iota of attention. Instead, the furious man bent his back to the work of the labor teams, parting earth and sawing wood until the wee hours of the morning.
But that was all yesterday. A day of simmering anger and frustration. Whereas today would be a day of blood and glory. Orric smiled as he trotted towards the command pavilion, taking him closer to where the combat would break, and blood would be spilled.
The spectacle of death a mile or so down the pass neither stoked flames in Jakaero’s heart nor did it send him into a spiral of despair or abhorrence. Death was simply death, and this veteran of the battlefields took in the stench of blood and offal as much as a hunter would listen to the call of birds when tracking a prize buck. It was there to be noticed only at an idle moment, a detail otherwise brushed aside as inconsequential as his eyes roved over the formations and the orchestration they engaged in. His mind churned out evaluations of the tactics displayed, updated and revised his inclinations of the needs and lacks among the Alliance’s number, and the utter finality of how this task would break washed over him.
They would lose. That had never really been in doubt to Jakaero, the nature of this lost effort that the others simply were either ignorant of or too foolhardy to admit was the case. No, what he came to realize as Alquen’s forces artfully defanged the formation of magi that had become the center effort of the Alliance lines, was that the force from the Three Duchies at best would see another pair of sunrises before being overrun. Even as the lack of cohesion led to a momentary burst of tactical idiocy that would only ever be mentioned in histories as a stroke of brilliance if the allied forces could defeat Alquen’s armies for all time - this evaluation did not change in his mind.
It wouldn’t take the delicacies of spy games, nor the obvious skill of the tactician playing puppeteer among the opposing side. Just the fractious nature of this so-called Alliance continuing to fail to get along would condemn them. Such thoughts weighed heavily upon Jakaero through the evening and well into the night, leaving him to linger and delay reporting to the command tent the next day.
His arrival was...remarkable, at least to himself. Not only had the Alliance somehow gained a modicum of seemingly competent reinforcements, but prior to their departure one of the other contingents appeared to have quit the command tent. For good, judging by the expressions on the representatives from Je, and soon that entire force would wend their way through the encampments to the false safety of the lands beyond. Both Je and this new force likely would find the preparations further up the mountainous pass, but neither would be able to influence it much now. “So be it,” Jakaero whispered to himself as he pushed past the flaps of the command tent and regarded his ‘peers’.
Once inside he wasted little time, crossing what little space there was within the confines of cloth to the sand tables which outlined the forces and formations perceivable for both sides. With a heavy hand he pulled his forge hammer from its beltloop holster and laid it down upon that same table. Would they even grasp the symbolism in that, the tool meant to create not destroy? He doubted it, and yet all the same, he spoke softly to the remaining assembled. “You all are fools. Why does this Alliance lack cohesion? Because each looks to their own rather than working as one cohesive unit, and the crows shall feast upon that even more readily than any hostile force opposing us.
“You all are fools, coming to this Pass to play at war rather than with the steeled resolve of a gambit hope. Not a single one of you brought a support group to cater to your warriors when off the field of battle, to mend your gear and offer succor to the exhausted. It baffles me how you all chose to bring only arms of war. Did you think this to last naught but a single day of hectic battle? Do you believe Alquen will turn aside given our displays thus far, or have you realized we have not yet been crushed because even we serve a purpose? Or have the overtures already begun, whilst I have been absent catering to a forlorn hope to buy our homelands every single hour our lives can afford?”
Jakaero turned, taking a slow glance around to each of the remaining assembled commanders, lingering briefly upon Enric with a nod. Only that commander seemed to also grasp the depth of the task, though that commander likely would not have to bite back a guilty twinge at the concept of the overtures. The others present...at least they had a force in their homelands to resist with. Not so for his own, but it was pointless to bring that up. No, all he radiated was a grim calmness that underpinned the state of affairs present to each member of the Alliance. “It matters little, I suppose. The smiths will be busy throughout the day bending metal and weaving the chain to restore your armaments to you, even as you each busy yourselves at the task of bleeding through more men than necessary.”
“It is not my place to tell you how to go about your tasks, just as it is not your place to instruct a smith how to use their hammer. And yet? I dare. Buy another day with your resolve. Stiffen your spines, draft a conclusive plan, and follow the leadership you install into command without this childish bickering and mudslinging. Or the crows will feast on your misbegotten hides.” The warsmith sighed softly, reaching back to grasp his hammer from the table, his mold cast. It would take the events of the day to prove whether the metal remaining within the masses to be resilient - or to shatter, too brittle to bear its own weight of ego. He moved aside, taking a place near the Oramis Collective’s representatives, and nodded softly to them. Lacking news from Constantine, he might have to cast that die on his own as well...
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