It was a dark night, deep, heavy, and still.
And it was on that one, beneath a sky cloaked in silence, that the old dynasty of Herculia came to its end, not with the clash of steel or the roar of loyal men making a final stand, not with the splendor of sacrifice or the desperate dignity of doomed ruleship.
No songs would be sung about bravery. No last speeches would be carved into marble and stone.
Instead, the last true patriarch of the Herculeian royal house stood bound to a weathered pole, wrists chafed raw by ropes, neck cinched with a collar of iron, a length of chain tethering him like a mutt beside a tent he no longer had the right to enter.
A dog beside the fire of his conqueror.
Once, he had been a man of immense presence. Broad of shoulder and commanding in voice, his bearing had filled courts with gravity. His beard, now matted and grey with dust and spit, had once been trimmed in ceremonial oil and woven with golden thread during state parades.
