1 Chapter 1

The blood saturating the field had splashed all the way up his boots, practically to his knees. Solna, shoulders bowed under exhaustion and the weight of his large oval shield, looked out over the battlefield from his place in the middle of it. So much death spread from horizon to horizon, blood painting the whole of the field into a crimson sea. All of it over a pointless, ancient feud, the cause of which was barely a memory to his people.

With a sigh, Solna continued his search for wounded. This was his third battle against Osairan forces since his kingship began, his fifth since he learned the martial arts, and he knew his duty to his warriors. He stopped at the next body he came across, a common foot soldier with her head bashed in and missing her weapon. Another corpse was a couple of feet away, in the hard green and black leather of the Osairan army.

Solna continued his trek in silence; the few soldiers within calling distance sweeping the ground for their comrades gave him a wide berth, but found no one alive. The next tangle of bodies yielded nothing either, and his hope of finding any wounded in this section diminished further. It was both a testament to his warriors’ skills and something that he roundly cursed that his army was so good at killing, a weapon more keen and lethal than his broadsword.

He spared a quick glance for a small group of bodies. Six soldiers total and just as he was turning away, the barest creak of leather reached his ears. Solna hesitated a moment and when the sound came again, he was striding toward the fallen group before he even registered he moved. The sound ceased just as he came to the closest body on the outer edge of the pile.

“Hello?” Hopefully someone was alive in the mess. Maybe hearing a voice would give them the strength to hold on. Nothing moved again, and Solna’s eyes burned with the futility of it all. Now that he was close however, there was no harm in a careful check of these six.

The first couple of bodies were very obviously dead, jagged holes blasted through their chests. The third’s armor looked like it had been peeled away and then decapitated with Serena’s great glaive. Buried under that one was another half sprawled on his back. An Osairan.

He wore no armor at all, three stab wounds evident through tears in a thick green tunic, but the heavy leather bracers laced damn near up to the elbow were a surprise. Solna crouched down at his side and brushed back the man’s obscenely long black hair, as fine as spider’s silk that clung coyly to his own callused fingertips, exposing a milky smooth throat and elegantly pointed ears. It took a moment to remember that he needed to look for a pulse a hairsbreadth farther back than he would on a human or dwarf, but he sighed thickly when he found the heavy, too slow beat. Thank the Powers.

A whisper of breath escaped past the wounded elf’s lips, stray locks of hair still covering his face fluttered with it, and Solna jumped into action. The last two bodies were checked at a glance, just as irrefutably dead as the first three. He brought his attention back to the elf and considered his options.

It was about an hour’s march to his palace in Helano, but much less on his horse. Without that infernal beast close by, and no healers either, Solna was left with only one reasonable course of action. But damn it all, he was not up for this. Judging by the gray pallor of the wounded elf, neither was he.

Solna grimaced, and then carefully brushed the rest of the black hair away from the elf’s aquiline, bloody face. A smudge of vibrant green under the blood drew his eyes to the elf’s brow. Gently, Solna thumbed away some of the mess from the skin and found green stars tattooed like a circlet that disappeared into the hairline at either side of the temples. Thirteen of them, no less. Archmage

He scrambled for the straps of his shield and yanked, relieving himself of the extra weight, then slid his arms beneath the elf’s shoulders and knees. Enemy or not, he was going to save at least one being from this bloodbath. Groaning, Solna stood with his charge, his muscles starting a fierce protest at the added burden after such a long battle. It was a treacherous moment to maneuver around the dead, but he made it out of the group without losing his hold on the elf.

Once free, he looked again at the surrounding carnage and his silent soldiers minding their own searches. There was nothing for it. Solna started to walk, a jagged path past the dead, cradling one of the few flickering flames that made it through.