They called him Meat.

His real name was Matthias, though, born the son of a successful butcher from the lower part of Stonestrike. No one seemed to call him that, though, not since the Army had got a hold of him. They all liked to call him Meat, not that he really knew why. He could venture a guess or two; whether it was for his father's job, the way he seemed to sweat with the stench of pork or the fact that he was a rather portly lad even at eighteen summers, but he could never be sure which of them it was.

Not a single one of the soldiers he trained with ever seemed eager to clarify either.

Much like his chosen name, Meat had never felt much choice when it came to his life. He had grown up the son of a butcher, much like his father, and his father before him and so on. Truly, aside from being stronger than most boys his age, he had seen nothing that would make him stand apart much. As such, he had expected to become a butcher's boy much like his father and his father before him.

That had changed four summers past when the Royal Army's wheelhouses entered his village.

It was that day that he, along with six other boys in their town of several thousand, was singled out as special. He had a good amount of magic; they told his papa. He would rise high in the Army, given some summers of training, was what they had told the man before handing him a small bag of coins and unceremoniously shipping him off to the Crownlands like a bag of potatoes.

His papa had essentially sold him to the Crown, he would later find out, for boys were not supposed to be shipped off so quickly and so early. The Army had wanted to shape him; shape his magic, shape his personality, shape his ability, shape his body; simply remake him into something the Crown could be proud of. Unfortunately for them, as much as Meat's body and face resembled a lump of clay, his flesh wasn’t the sort to be so easily molded.

Three summers of rigorous training and schooling had left him with magic that he could barely control; more suited to making his body stronger and faster than it was remaking the landscape or calling elements to his will, a body that was still quite unimpressive to look at despite the power he held within it. Truth be told, he always was a hungry lad and he made sure to get food even when his trainers refused him, and a mind that was just a few hard knocks to the head from being completely useless; no one ever said he was a smart lad, anyway.

In short, he was still a lump after three summers of training; a slightly more focused lump, but a lump, nonetheless.

It made sense, then, that the Crown decided to cut their losses and throw him into the frontlines, off to fight some border skirmish that the Crownlands had no belief they would lose. A summer of war had come and gone and yet, despite all expectations and fears, he was somehow still alive.

They had meant to kill him; Meat knew that much, and if he had time to think, he believed he would hate them for it.

If he had time to think, at least.

Yet time was never in much supply in the face of battle.

His blade flashed again on the battlefield time and again, cheap steel meeting swords of a more curved make repeatedly as he rushed through the fields. Magic was more than just fire, ice and lightning, every soldier and noble knew that much. It was more than just light and sound, thunder and smoke. Magic was the body, as well; speed and strength, force and power, muscle and blood and stamina and…

Well, many other things, Meat could only guess. He was no scholar, after all.

It wasn't enough, though.

Despite all their fire and ice or force and muscle, they were still being routed, chased back by sheer numbers of the Occident savages. It was all Mead could do but swing his sword and run as he did his best to ignore the pained screams of his fellow soldiers and the demanding voices of the nobles for them to stand and fight.

Let them fight, Meat thought to himself, leaping over an attempted pincer by two fur-wearing raiders. He turned in mid-air and carved the both of them in twain, sword flicking out faster than a normal swordsman would believe humanly possible, especially for someone of Meat’s size and frame. It almost sung as it slid through meat and flesh, butchering beasts of men with an ease his father would have given anything to have obtained. Considering he had given his son, it could even be said that he had obtained it, in a way.

Barely able to throw magic for even a half hour before weakening and they claim to be better th- Meat's thoughts halted in his mind as he saw fires burning through the breach, boulder-sized jets of flame soaring above his head and exploding near the fringe of the Occident horde.

Reinforcements!

His heart jumped in his chest and his disdain of the noble class faded for a moment as the jets of flame continued, similarly-sized blasts of lightning, water and ice rocketing towards enemy lines alongside them. He could see them even from here, the nobles standing atop ramparts casting their long spells and thrusting their palms out like they had tried to teach him.

All at once, they released fire again and a haze of orange light was suddenly burning over the horizon. Meat's eyes widened as he could suddenly feel the rumbles in the ground. unsure of what was going on. The fat soldier glanced up again and saw one noble, a grey-haired lad dressed in finery surpassing any he had seen even in the Royal Guard suddenly leap from the ramparts and take to the sky.

Flight? He can fly? How can he fl-

The portly young man could only stare as the noble stretched out his arms and a bright white light hissed over the battlefield with no warning, a sound like thousands of windows shattering at once filling the air and sending the hearts of men racing.

Across the borderlands, entire legions of marauders from the Occident were being scorched into ice on a scale no one had imagined possible. Not even the strongest of their magic-bodied warriors could survive this onslaught, their blood freezing in their bodies before the rest of them.

Meat gazed at the approaching sight in what could only be described as utter fear and rapture, an army of soldiers in white and gold doing the same around him, as a mountain of ice formed from the ether and crashed into the rocky ground with a force like that of a god's fist.

The world went deaf with the impact and those struck with it were either smashed to paste or sent flying only to meet the same fate later.

Leagues away, the fields remained buried by snow and ice and crystalline spires that defined the categorization of either as they stretched their way up to the clouds like the spires atop the castles of the Crownlands. In literal seconds, the bloody fields of green had vanished under nothing but white as far as the eye could see.

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For the first time in years, the true visage of winter had marked the borderlands, a harsh, icy wasteland on the ground, even as the skies above remained clear as summer.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

A week had passed since he lay here.

Over seven days and Meat's body was still frail and weak.

Frail, weak and useless.

His lungs struggled with each inhale, the once-soldier had noted when a healer had asked if he had any trouble breathing. If that wasn't enough, the pain in his chest was nothing short of agony.

His hands - what was left of them - felt numb, and he felt like he had lost some of the movement in his remaining fingers. The only thing that he had to live for – his own body – was now useless to him, nothing but scarring and weakness where there was once hearty and stout strength. He hadn’t cried, though, when he first woke up.

He hadn't cried when he found that his left leg was rendered a complete stump, rendered useless by the sheer unimaginable cold and apparently amputated while he was unconscious from pain. He hadn't cried when the low-rank healers of the Royal Army had refused him anymore help. He had pleaded, almost begged them for something, anything, that they could do to fix him and he was met with nothing at all. Weak spells did nothing but ease his pain and minimize some of his lesser wounds but that was nothing, really. The weak potions and similarly classed healers that the Royal Army spared for soldiers of his rank and breeding often struggled with simple stab wounds from a lance, let alone something of this caliber.

To recover an entire limb was so ridiculous a request that Meat knew he would be better off praying to the gods for a miracle.

His right leg, while not lost, was almost nearly as bad.

Stiff and weak, so much so that Meat struggled to move it below the knee, he doubted he would even recover full feeling in the limb even if he lived for a score of decades. Ugly gouges on his leg greeted his eyes, letting the soldier know where the razor-like hail had stripped the muscles from his upper thigh.

He hadn't cried those first few hours he spent lying on his filthy cot in the recovery tent, staring at every wound he could see, his mutilated hand especially. His eyes tracked the ice burns on pale flesh, the scars from where he had tried to tear away the painful leech-like snow digging into his skin. With only three fingers, he could scarcely recognize his own limb any more.

Meat had also lost three toes; two on his left foot, and one on the right. The frostbite had bit them clean off and thankfully, he felt no pain from them. Just a raw emptiness whenever his eyes landed upon his scarred feet.

He remembered that when he'd first left Stonestrike so long ago, he had scarcely any scars at all, a round-faced boy who had barely known any hardship and never went without the fullest of bellies.

And now…

Meat choked back a sob, the sound coming off as a pained groan.

He hadn't cried that first day, yes, but every day since was an entirely different story altogether.

What woman would have him as he currently was, an ugly cripple?

Marriage, a faint hope for the sweaty butcher boy turned soldier, was now an unthinkable dream.

What money could he make as a warrior, with his body like this?

The army wouldn’t keep him on as he was, not even if he begged and pleaded. He wasn't a renowned soldier or a noble bastard worthy of a high-ranked healer of priest to bless his wounds and recover his body. Any unaffiliated healers were expensive, often working strictly for nobles, the royal family, or off traveling with adventurers and even if he were to try and find one, the small pension the Army would unceremoniously hand him for just a single year of service wouldn’t be enough to return him to anywhere approaching full health. Even if he drained every last silver that they gave him, he would be lucky to recover his missing limb in its entirety.

Meat choked back another sob as he stared up at the roof of his tent, the cold of the outside barely even an afterthought in the face of the aches he already felt. A lame soldier was dangerous to himself and the men he fought with, an embarrassment in the eyes of the appearance-obsessed nobles even if he maintained any dregs of skill and power.

He was done for, he knew this deep in his heart.

Even to his family, if he deigned to return to them, he would be a burden to them all, a load barely worth the coin his father had sold him for.

Meat once again felt his face with the same hand, unsteady hands almost dragging themselves over his cheeks. He had no mirror, but his features felt pale and gaunt, like his skin was stretched tight over the bones of his face leaving him a skeleton, a far cry from the jolly girth he had once been proud of.

Everywhere, his skin felt rougher, like it had been burned by the unrelenting cold that mage had sent forth with frightening ease. He had lost both weight and muscle, his body now something closer to what the Royal Army’s trainers had tried to force upon him with exercise and starvation. He had seen men who had been exposed to the winter before in Stonestrike, poor men with no respite from the cold; they always had carried with them that haunted look in their eyes.

The cold would always leave its mark, is what they said back home.

Now, Meat knew what that mark felt like. Between his gauntness and his wounds, the boy doubted if he was even recognizable anymore.

It was over a week after he first awoke that his eyes fell upon the one who had done this to him, the noble with such immense magical power arriving to the healing tent Meat had been stuck in since the day the battle had come to such a quick and horrible conclusion. He was exactly as the once-portly mage soldier had expected, a handsome-looking long-haired figure adorned in all the trappings of nobility, from the silver circlet that matched his hair and eyes to the embroidered fur cloak with the letter 'F' on it in similarly-colored stitching, and the many, many rings that lined his fingers; more than one for each finger, it seemed.

Meat knew him, he realized, as he caught sight of the boy.

Knew of him, at least.

It had been popular gossip for years now that a new noble had arrived out of nowhere, some idiots claiming that he was even a peasant that the Emperor had risen up as a reward for striking down an unjust noble with powerful magic. Those were clearly lies, most people rightly assuming that he wasn’t even a lowborn, the general thought among the Empire being that he was a male bastard the Emperor had born on a maid or courtesan, likely due to the fact that his Empress had born him nothing but a line of daughters.

Beautiful daughters that enraptured the senses and minds of any man that laid eyes upon them and immensely powerful in magic, but daughters nonetheless. More likely rumors said he was next in line to be the Emperor and Meat almost found himself believing it; just looking at the boy a few summers his junior told him all he needed to know; handsome, composed, the type that was born to be a noble.

Rumors being what they were, he wished he could dismiss the claim of royalty as nothing but the jests of attention-seeking fools, but Meat knew it was likely as true as anything else, watching the noble stride into the tent the way he did. Nothing bad ever happened to people like that, his voice whispered in his head with cloying hate.

He watched the Emperor-to-be speak to the other men in the tent, the rigid and haughty face barely even sparing them a look as he paused at each of their cots to accept their praise for his actions on the battlefield.

And praise him, they did.

Each one of them, without the slightest shame or dignity, clutched at the man's cloak as if they were nothing more than the most pathetic of beggars. Each one thanked him with tear-streaked faces for his actions even as they lay injured and wounded, likely from the boy's actions as much as that of any enemy.

To make matters worse, the noble even had the gall to play with the idea of humility, speaking softly and attempting to lower himself to their level, but Meat could see through it, his one good eye still useful for something. He made motions as if to touch the injured soldiers but never actually did so, hand trembling in disgust as he neared them, and as they clutched at his cloak, praising him like he was one of the gods descended upon the Empire, he felt the need to pull his garments away and escape from their dirty touch.

Most of all, the boy noble could not hide the look on his face; one of fear and disgust at seeing the lowborn in front of him. It made sense that he wore such an expression, what else for a people that could barely stomach them when they were clean and whole? Meat's eyes were vicious and heated as the noble finally neared him, hand inching toward his sword as the other boy approached.

"Well met, soldier," began the noble, silver eyes looking down at Meat still with that same haughty expression, "you fought bravely on the battlefield. I only wish I had arrived sooner to prevent you from being injured as you are."

You injured me. IT WAS YOU! His own voice screamed bloody murder in his mind as Meat stared up at the noble of his own age with hate in his eyes, muscles tense as his fingers finally met the hilt of his now-chipped blade resting by his cot. "Aye, wouldn't that be a blessing, m'lord?"

The noble nodded, not even willing to pay the conversation enough mind to notice the heat in Meat's words as the man responded back to him with such false humility that it made Meat grit his teeth. "You speak true. May I have the name of one who fought so well?"

A savage grin burst across the wounded man's face as his fingers tightened around his sword; an expression he wasn't used to but one that felt natural all the same. "They call me Meat."

With that sentence, he swung the sword.