Basil could feel the rhythmic thrum of the drums deep in his marrow, the same pulsing heartbeat that seemed to keep the entire army alive. All around him, the air was a chaotic web of sound: the thunder of hooves as messengers tore through the mud, their faces masks of sweat and grit, each carrying a frantic report or a cold command that would see soldiers die.

And at the center of this hurricane of iron stood his father.

He appeared a statue of dark steel, a man commanding a world he could not truly see from the low ground of the riverbank. Basil looked at the sea of armored backs surrounding them and felt a suffocating sense of blindness. The sounds of the slaughter echoed from the front, a distant, metallic grinding of men killing one another, but from his vantage, it was only a roar of disconnected noise.

He wondered how his father did it. How could a man juggle ten thousand moving pieces, most of them obscured by the rising mist and the spray of blood, while carrying the crushing knowledge that a single heartbeat of hesitation would be paid for in the lives of his friends? Every messenger was a gamble; every horn blast was a roll of the dice. between a charge or a route.

His eyes drifted to the long, miserable line of men in white tabards marked with the red cross of the healers. They moved like ghosts along the fringes of the battle, dragging broken bodies away from the mud and toward the medical tents huddled just behind the reserve line.

Those tents were the closest thing to the river. If the center snapped, the wounded would be the first to die, trampled into the silt by Oizenian hooves , blades falling down on men that could not fight back....

He looked at his father’s rigid back and wondered if it was a deliberate choice, perhaps to remind every soldier that there was no retreat, only the shield of the man standing next to him?

Basil’s hands were shaking. He felt shame for that.People were dying and he was getting scared while sorrounded by the safety of his father’s men.

He gripped the hilt of his small short-sword that was mostly for decoration until his knuckles turned as white as the healers’ cloth, trying to swallow the lump of bile rising in his throat. He felt so small when faced with the magnitude of war.

"Father," he whispered, the word lost in the braying of a war-horn that went like a howl. He wanted to ask if they were winning. But Alpheo didn’t turn; he was listening to the wind, waiting for the next scream of the earth to tell him where to strike.

His eyes closed for a heartbeat as if listening to the very vibrations of the earth. When they snapped open, he moved with the cold, multi-limbed precision of an octopus commanding its tentacles.

"The Hounds are overextending," Alpheo’s voice cut through the din, sharp and resonant.Speaking to everyone and no-one at the same time. "They’re getting greedy for the kill. If they detach from the line now, the Oizenian reserves will swallow them whole. Pull them back. Now."

A messenger took the command and vanished into the grey mist. Basil watched him go, his throat dry. He looked at the chaos, a roiling sea of mud, steel, and screaming men, and wondered how his father could distinguish one banner from another in the murk. He followed his father’s gaze and saw it: the wolf-pelt standard of the Hounds was indeed a fraction too far forward, a lone tooth sticking out from a shattered jaw.

Was that perhaps why banners were hoisted up even during battle?It was clever...still to understand that from the banner alone?

Later, a rider caked in black slurry skidded to a halt. "The first wave is routed, Your Grace! The mud is a graveyard of horses!"

"Is there a pursuit?" Alpheo asked. His hazel eyes didn’t even flicker toward the messenger; they were already scanning the far horizon, deciding on the next move before the current one had even finished.

"None, Your Grace!"

"Good. None has there to be. Let them choke on their own dead, but do not break the line."

The messenger departed, the sound of hooves squelching in the muck a constant, rhythmic reminder of the fragility of their position. Reports flooded in like a rising tide, requests for reinforcements, tallies of the fallen, frantic warnings of shifting banners sometimes too ahead or too back.

Basil was awed by the sheer weight of it. To sit at the center of such madness and remain the only still point in the world... it seemed less like leadership and more like a form of divine, terrible patience.

And waiting. Basil knew waiting.

His life had been a long, quiet corridor of waiting for tother to take notice him and let him enter in a world he wanted to join so badly.

’’Look out for me and light a candle will you?’’ His father would always say before riding off to battle.

He waited for his father all the time , always lighting that solitary candle in the window as he’d been told, even if he suspected the gesture was for his own comfort rather than his father’s safety.

’’Have you looked for me?’’ he would always ask as he embraced him when he came back with some glorious victory at his back.

He also waited for his mother to emerge from the exhausting theatre of the court, ready with wine and a steady hand for her, listening to the bitter politics of Yarzat until her voice grew soft with sleep from him massaging her weary shoulders.

It was from hers that he got most of information about the state of their political field.She would always eagerly speak if given some wine and attention.

He waited for Uncle Jarza to put down his day’s ledgers so they could shoot arrows into the twilight, learning the secrets of his father’s past between the thrum of bowstrings.

Sometimes he would even go and let him watch how his troops drilled in a mock battle.

Patience was a virtue, they told him. But as he watched the wounded being carried past, Basil wondered if patience was merely a skill they taught to the helplessness of the young. To wait was to acknowledge that you had no hand on the tiller;that you could do nothing but witness something you had no control over, you were merely a passenger on a ship steered by giants while all you could do was hold to the mast and hope for the best.

He hated that sense of powerlessness. Even though he was well awake, he made him feel as if he had been in that dream, swallowed by something he had no control over.

Was that the fate of his future?To be swallowed by his father’s crown?And all he could was wait?Wait for the time to come?

Is time truly a river? he mused, looking back at the Lampis.Always flowing ahead, each second making so that a cup of water different than the one before now stood where others before laid?Each second a new river sprouting from the one that stood before.

Or is it a cage we built for ourselves while we wait for the door to open, to measure just for how long we have been powerless to hear of what we had no control over?

The reports grew grimmer as they came.

Uncle Asag had always sneered that noblemen preferred the safety of the rear, yet today the "proper" blood was flowing as freely as the peasants’. Word came that Lord Lysandros, a man who had once dared to rebel against his father, had been slain alongside his eldest son. A honorable death for dishonorable men, he had thought with a coldness that surprised him.

Then came Lord Masio of the Bloody Fist, a man who had never given his father a moment’s trouble. He was carried past screaming, three arrows buried in his breast and thigh. Basil felt a pang of genuine sorrow; Masio was a steady man, the kind of stone upon which a state is built. He hoped the man survived, if only because the world felt emptier every time a loyal heart stopped beating.

Eventually, Alpheo grew weary of the casualty lists. "No more," he snapped, his intonation making it clear that the names of the dead were beneath the necessities of the living. He turned his full attention to the "board", a mental map only he could see, where men were pieces and blood was the price of a move.

Basil watched his father’s face, searching for a sign. A clench of the jaw. A flicker of a smile. Anything to reward Basil for his long vigil at his side. He wanted a signal that the waiting was almost over, that the sun might yet break through the grey.

But when the next messenger arrived, a boy no older than Basil, his horse heaving and blowing foam, the reaction he finally got from his father was not the one he had prayed for.

It was a bad one.

Apparently the Oizen were ordering a new attack, one that this time, was giving his father some pause. 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

He did not know of the reason, so all he could thing of was : Why? What made that attack so different from the one before?

And yet a reason was there, else why would his father be looking so unsettled?