The vast field of alfalfa that had been sown by the Forelians just before the siege began was by now fully grown and gleaming with good health. Rain had come in overnight, and with the arrival of the morning sun the summer's first alfalfa bloom had begun in vibrant earnest. A seemingly endless carpet of small violet flowers stretched towards the unhindered horizon, waving in the gentle breeze. The wind blowing over the field was pleasant and welcoming, like a promise from the sky given to the earth. Soon it would bring down more cool and dry air, correcting to some extent what was already a very hot and humid day.

A dirt road ran through the alfalfa, stretching from the northern horizon to the south, where the road and the field met a dense forest of ancient white oaks. The trees reached high into the sky, and were close enough that their heavy boughs often intertwined with one another, like lovers locking arms. Beneath them, shadows carpeted the forest floor, causing the road to be shrouded in darkness only a few feet after crossing into the forest’s threshold. It was from the darkness of the road that the Losoan mercenary Gideon emerged, carrying his dying father on his back.

He took a few steps out into the sunlight and stopped, quietly looking around at the vast field of alfalfa as it swayed mildly in the breeze. The field’s pungent earthy aroma filled his nose, but it could not completely suppress the sickly-sweet scent of his father’s blood.

Life as a mercenary had taken Gideon all across the western world. From Kenan in the desert far to the south to the shores of the Sorrow Sea which divided the world west from east, and occasionally back to his birthplace of Loso in the snowy north-east. He’d seen many beautiful sights in his travels, but the expansive panorama of Forelian summer colors on display before him seemed at that moment to be the most beautiful thing he’d ever witnessed.

Forelia was a country that felt old. Ancient life-energy filled its forests and rivers. Its dark brown earth was rich, and had produced a great bounty of food year after year for the Forelians. But this year the vast fields of corn, sorghum, and alfalfa that surrounded their city had grown untended. The men and women who had farmed the land for untold generations had hidden behind the city’s walls when the Kenanites arrived, and after four long months of siege Forelia City had finally been broken by hunger.

“It wasn’t my fault. Do you know that? You do know that it wasn’t my fault?”

Gideon recognized the familiar death-terror present in Dance’s voice. The growing realization that he was about to die, along with the stubborn refusal to acknowledge it. Most people were like that when it was their time.

Slowly, carefully, so as to not hurt Dance with the movement, Gideon turned around to take a look behind him. Somewhere in that dark forest of hugging trees, the Lake Men were looting and probably burning the corpses of the other Singing Blades who’d failed to escape. The ambush that routed the band had happened so quickly that there'd simply been no opportunity to rally everyone. The engagement had devolved into a series of foot chases, where each Blade tried to be faster than the man running next to him.

“They wouldn’t fucking listen! Why wouldn’t they listen to me?!”

With a quiet sigh, Gideon turned back to the field and continued on at a normal pace. He saw no need to rush. Dance was about to die—no one had the power to change that for him.

Dance was a bulky, barrel-chested man, and between his size and all of his gear he was very heavy and difficult to carry. Gideon was just as large and strong as his father, but he’d been exhausted by the exertion of the battle, and from carrying a man who easily weighed two hundred pounds for several miles. Sweat dripped rapidly off Gideon's chin as he doggedly trudged ahead, deeper into the thigh-high alfalfa.

He couldn't rationalize to himself why he was going to such effort. Dance had never been a father worthy of any kind of help, let alone the type Gideon was currently giving him. In truth, he could have abandoned Dance under the tree where he'd found him, soaking in his own blood, and been perfectly justified in doing so. Who would even have seen it happen, to judge him for it? And yet, Gideon pressed on, listening quietly as his father’s feverish denials and pained breathing became weaker with each passing step.

In time Gideon reached a young tree by the side of the road which was only somewhat taller than the alfalfa, and abruptly decided he'd done enough. He took care not to hurt Dance as he laid him down against the tree, but a thin cry of pain escaped from him nonetheless.

Dance's skin was gray and clammy, and from it Gideon understood that death might arrive for him at any moment. He stood back up and watched impassively as the dying man weakly tried to settle himself into a more comfortable position, his eyes squeezed shut against the pain. Something about sitting down—perhaps the feeling of the rough bark against his back—seemed to return some clarity to Dance's fading mind.

“Where are we?”

Gideon took a look around, then shrugged.

“I don’t know. North, I think.”

“I'm dying?”

He responded with a casual nod.

“...Yeah. You’re dying.”

Dance’s eyes suddenly flew open, and he searched Gideon’s face with a look of pure fright. He tried to sit up, but only managed a slight incline, and spoke with passionate bitterness.

“...You little bastard! I saw what you did as they ran away with their tails between their legs! Nothing! You did absolutely nothing to help me! You've always been a curse on me, and now you’ve killed me! I swear before Kali that I hoped and prayed every single day you would just leave and grant me peace! But now I see, oh yes, I understand...Kali herself placed you here just to harm me! To betray me! To belittle and torment me as I lay dying!”

He spat at Gideon, whose expression had frozen when the outburst began. Dance settled back against the tree once again and groaned loudly with pain, his hands curling into tight fists where they rested against the earth, coughing. Droplets of blood were present in the spittle that landed on his chest.

“Fuck…just tell me. Did they break because of me? Was it my fault?”

Some of Dance’s intestines were now protruding from the gash in his belly. A thin rivulet of blood was flowing from the wound and staining the dirt red beside him.

“No," Gideon said. "It wasn’t your fault.”

Dance’s relief was palpable.

“...Alright. Then take this bullshit off of me.”

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Wordlessly, Gideon obeyed, kneeling down beside Dance to begin the work. He carefully removed his armor one piece at a time, laying it all in a neat pile beside him. With all his armor finally off, Gideon placed Dance's sheathed claymore on top of the pile.

Freed from his armor and sword, Dance looked down at his wound, grimacing. His right hand shook as he moved it to conceal the wound, and his voice came out as a rasp.

“...You take a good look at me, bastard. I promise this’ll be you someday.”

Gideon blinked hard and looked away. As his eyes roamed the alfalfa, he heard several ragged breaths leave Dance, then silence. It took Gideon a long while, but he eventually mustered the courage to look.

He’d seen many corpses over the course of his life, far too many to keep track of. In death, all people were united in form, if nothing else. Oftentimes it took them with their eyes still open—their faces and bodies frozen in anguish and pain like a freak winter storm had passed over them. Occasionally they closed their eyes and allowed death to pass over them peacefully, as if in the moments before life escaped them they’d finally been able to accept what had been fundamentally unacceptable. Gideon felt a mild amount of surprise to see that Dance had ended up being the latter.

No matter how it happened, though, death itself was always very simple, and always very easy. Maybe they panicked in the seconds before, maybe they screamed and suffered and thrashed about in agony, maybe they quietly waited for the inevitable. But when it was their time, life disappeared from them just as easily as a lantern’s light being blown out. One moment the light was there, the next it simply wasn’t.

Gideon's cast his gaze across his father's corpse, wondering: Why don’t I feel anything?

It was troublesome somehow to have no strong reaction to Dance's death. He wanted a feeling that was easier to accept, or to at least understand, and he began to try and force a different one out of himself. Anger, sadness, guilt, fear, hatred, anything other than indifference. Numbness.

Abruptly, he kneeled down again and began to search through Dance’s pockets. It felt strange and wrong to loot his father’s corpse, but it was the only action that made some sort of sense. It was something familiar, something he'd done to corpses many times before, on a dozen different battlefields Dance had led him onto.

The search resulted in only a handful of denars. It wasn't nothing, but as compensation for a life full of distance and cruelty it didn't seem nearly adequate. Even so, Gideon pocketed the coins straight away.

After finishing, he returned to his feet and gazed down at the corpse, wiping blood from his fingers onto his shirt. There'd been much he wanted to say to Dance for many years, but the right words and the right moment never seemed to arrive.

I promise this'll be you someday.

Dance's final words buzzed in Gideon's ears, vexing him in the exact same manner as a flying insect. He stepped around his father’s corpse and left it behind. Soon after, summer cicadas clinging to the alfalfa began to cry out in unison, filling the air with an ear splitting chorus of shrilling.

The sudden cacophony brought Gideon's attention back to the immediate demands of the present. He knew he was endangering himself by walking along the road in broad daylight, but crossing country would likely be just as risky. The Singing Blades had left camp early in the morning and marched at least five miles along unfamiliar roads before they’d met the Lake Men. He’d also been turned around in the chaos of the rout, and thus was perfectly lost.

Roads always lead somewhere, he reasoned. Following this one away from the battle is good enough for now. Besides, what does it matter, anyway? What reason do I now have not to welcome death?

The road seemed to stretch on in the same direction forever, and as he walked beneath the sweltering summer heat he began to wonder if he hadn’t died along with his father and everyone else back in the forest. He couldn’t remember much about what he’d heard of the afterlife, but a land of endless alfalfa seemed like something out of the Forelian Scriptures. If it were true, then a long walk through a field of purple flowers didn’t seem like a very good celestial punishment.

Sometime around midday he reached a crossroads. There was still nothing but alfalfa and heat in all directions, but after taking a long moment to look around he spotted far off movement in the distance on the road to his left. Two horsemen, carrying raised lances, trotted lazily beside each other along the road. They both seemed to spot Gideon at the same time, and he watched as they began to gallop towards him.

He stood in place while they approached. When they were finally close enough for conversation they brought their horses to a sudden stop, pointing their lances at him. They both wore chainmail gambesons, and the pale skin of their faces and ungloved hands were heavily tanned. The brown hair underneath their arming caps was cut short, and they were both clean shaven, as Kenanite soldiers always were. It might have been somewhat difficult to tell them apart if one of them hadn’t been old enough to have a few wrinkles around his eyes.

Gideon casually raised his hands in the air, palms out.

“Relax. I’m a Singing Blade.”

The horsemen shared a brief look before the older one responded.

“That so? Where’s the rest of you?”

“We met a group of Lake Men about an hour or so ago. They routed and killed most of us. I barely escaped alive.”

“That so. And where was this? Back down that road?”

“Yeah.”

The horsemen lowered their lances and trotted up to Gideon, peering down the road he’d just been on.

“Faraways down that road?”

“That’s right.”

The older one nodded to Gideon, then addressed his companion.

“Alright. Kent, you head back. Tell ‘em the mercs were whipped by some Lakies to the east. I’m going to go see for myself.”

The younger lancer gave his superior a curt salute, the Kenanite hand sign of universal knowledge, then turned his horse about, racing back down the road.

“It’s very brave of you to go alone,” Gideon told the remaining Kenanite dryly, “but the Lake Men aren’t going to leave anything valuable for you.”

The horseman scowled at Gideon before he set off at a harsh gallop, leaving him behind in a thick cloud of dust. Waving it from his face, Gideon walked across the crossroads to follow the younger horseman.

Many lonely hours of walking beneath the summer sun lay ahead of him. Angry ghosts of the very recently departed would be his only companions along the way. The sky, it seemed, had broken its promise.