I drove my blade through the heart of the raider queen. I disregarded my fear and charged past my old mentor, Captain Coran as he took the raider’s blade in his shoulder. I felt my blade catch on the woman’s gauntleted hand and kept on sprinting. Kept on screaming. Kept on lunging until my momentum carried us both into the cavern wall and my blade through her gauntlet, her hand, her chest, and the soft wall beyond. I heard her hissing at me to finish the job while we still grappled with the blade in her chest.

“Kill me child!” She hissed. No fear, no sadness, just disdain. “Sow the blood of Hysa on your irradiated soil! See what happens!” She smiled then through her own blood and sweat. I was still too bloodcrazed to feel anything, but my memory did not abandon me for an instant. I did not realize the paranoia instilled by Pa Greyson ran so deep.

I killed another man as well. Younger than myself. Even less experienced than myself. The grooves in his face spelled winters in the open cold. Not so cold were those grooves as they ran with his own blood. His face and the woman’s now intermingle in my mind. I can feel their blood between my fingers. Slickening the handle of my most prized possession. I can feel blood running down my own face. I can feel cold steel as it skewers my body to a wall. See my own grimacing face watching me as I die. I cannot help but project myself into those I have just killed. I wish I understood glory. The world-rending force which Aduren described to me only three hours past must exist. I know it does. Aduren would know. He emits it as a torch does light. He could not be lying….

An unknown force assails my shoulder. My back is pressed against a wall, so it must come from ahead. I reach for the blade at my side, but I feel none. My eyes are closed. Cramped like a neglected muscle. I cannot open them. A fear greater than any I have experienced before descends on the darkness of my small world. Am I dead? No. I do not remember dying. And I remember everything. I feel the warmth of blood running down my cheeks again. Beading at my chin. Coalescing and dripping to the ground. The soft, earthy, ground. I can feel it. I am not dead. I have lifted barrels of stone loaded simply to spite me with a task I could not possibly complete. I have pulled carriages like a workhorse when the master thought it fit to ridicule me. But I have never experienced something so difficult as opening my eyes to the aftermath of my first real battle.

The liquid streaming from my face is not blood at all, but tears I did not know I could still cry. Crying is the utmost display of weakness, but I cannot help it now. Coran stands closer to me than any man should, midway between congratulation and embrace. He is the man to whom I should have looked for guidance. The one I should have followed when I had the chance to become a legionnaire. The man I stole from to adorn myself with a token other men would respect. He peers into my eyes to assess my mental and physical condition, but I cannot return his gaze. How could I look into his eyes? A childish part of me believed that once I fought beside him, cowardice and slights of the past would fade in his eyes. I did not realize that they already had. But not in my eyes. To me, they have not lost a pound of their crushing weight. I mutter what might be an apology, a thanks, or a congratulation and push past him. The only way to ameliorate the shame is with action, and there is still action to be carried out.

Only two figures still cast their shadows in the flickering torchlight. Both men of Kitford, both rummaging through the dead. A third man kneels, almost as tall as the rest even on his knees. He rocks back and forth over the body of yet another dead man, overturning a two-headed axe in his weathered fingers. Round and round the axe heads go, the blood plastered upon them slowly washed away by the large man’s tears.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

My attention is wrenched from the axe’s hypnotic motion by the sharp cracking of wood. Farther from the entrance of the cave, Gillan has cut his own bowstring to fashion a compress for the boy Marshall. The boy bleeds from multiple chest wounds, but not yet from the mouth. He may yet survive.

In all of this darkness I have forgotten the light. Where is the hero who led the charge? Surely he did not run. He is not among the standing or kneeling. He is not among the dead…now I see him. His mace holstered upon his back. His tawny chain mail glistening in the torchlight as he pulls his shuddering body over the wet earth towards the cave’s mouth by his fingernails. I vault the dead and dying as I used to sacks of flour in my father’s cellar.

Lodging one hand beneath his displaced left shoulder, I roll him onto his back to get a better look at his face. He is bleeding from the mouth and nose, face contorted into a grimace and head locked to one shoulder to stem the flow of blood from a noxious neck injury.

He screams into my face, but the only sound I hear is the gurgling of the water in his throat. Even as I lift his head from the ground he claws over his shoulder at the ground. What could he want so desperately at the mouth of the cave? Perhaps he wants to see the sky again before he dies. Then I remember.

What a fool I am not to remember what we discussed earlier today. And a villain to let my fear block out the information I need to save his life. I slide my arms beneath his legs and back and lift with all my strength. Armor and bodyweight combined, he must weigh two hundred and forty pounds, my own equipment weighs another twenty. I straighten my legs and flex my back, but I cannot heft him above my waist. I call for help, but each living man is preoccupied with more than one of his dying friends. I look to the giant, where he still kneels, but his name is yet unspoken. I don’t know if he would rise even if I did speak it. Aduren is trying to speak again, but his voice is past the help of mortals. I must deliver him to the divine. So I do.

Back creaking and tendons tearing, I stumble out of the torchlight, into the dark passage that follows, and finally out into the moonlight. I cannot help but drop him then to clutch my own ruined ligaments. Stars swim before my eyes, but they are not real stars. I do not know why this thought sits so prominently in my mind, but imagining real stars - pinpoints of light and heat - saves me momentarily from the pain in my body.

I am wrenched from the celestia within my mind by Aduren’s touch. Now he is the one turning my prone body over. He no longer wears pain on his face, and he no longer bleeds. Just as he did in the streets of Kitford, he has shrugged mortality from his shoulders as a sportsman does a riding coat. He holds his lustrous crescent moon pendant delicately in two fingers as he runs it over my body. As the metal touches my skin, I begin to see the moonrays that heal my flesh. They glow a pure white and vibrate like spidersilk draglines, passing from Aduren’s body into the ground and then upwards towards the moon. They flow through the pendant of Selune into my torso and arms, where they mend body and mind. The ecstasy of health and safety in the wake of terror and death are overwhelming, and I begin to chuckle as the last of my wounds fade to memory. And now I understand. This is what glory feels like.