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It happened all at once. A ringing sound made me awake. I was standing upright.
I could barely see because of some kind of visor. The world in front of me had been reduced to a thin, horizontal slit of dull light and shadow. Even breathing was hard. Each inhale dragged hot, used-up air into my lungs. The inside of the helmet smelled of iron, sweat, and something sour, like fear that had been trapped there for years. The metal pressed against my skull, the padding rough and damp against my temples.
I was wearing some sort of helmet, the air inside hot and stale. Every exhale fogged the lower rim, condensing into moisture that ran down the inner curve of the steel. My breath echoed back at me, loud and shallow, as if the helmet itself was a bell and my lungs were striking it.
I started to hear marching. At first, it was distant—like rainfall on a roof. Then it grew into a rhythmic, metallic thud, a synchronized impact of hundreds of boots—or feet—striking hard earth in unison. The sound vibrated up through my legs, through the plates on my shins and thighs, rattling softly with each step. A hand pushed me from behind, a firm shove between the shoulder blades that jolted me forward.
Fog surrounded me. Thick. Oppressive. It hung low and heavy, a pale, milky wall that swallowed sound and color, leaving only shapes and echoes. The world ended a few steps ahead, beyond the reach of my limited vision. The fog tasted faintly of ash and salt on my tongue, coating my teeth with a thin, dry film. It clung to the edges of my armor and beaded like sweat on the polished metal.
My steps left bloody marks on the ground, as if I was bleeding. Dark red prints bloomed on the pale, packed earth with every footfall, stark and wet in the colorless haze. The soil seemed to drink the blood greedily, absorbing it, leaving only a dull stain that stretched out behind me in a broken line.
I was wearing plate armor, yet my feet were bare. My soles brushed over pebbles and rough ground, the grit grinding into my skin. And yet I couldn't feel them injured. No pain, no sting. Just the awareness of texture: cold dampness in some patches, dry cracks in others. The blood that smeared under my toes was warm, almost comforting, as if it belonged there.
I was holding a short sword. The grip was worn, familiar. The leather wrap was darkened where countless fingers had pressed it, smoothed where palms had tightened in fear and fury. It sat perfectly in my hand, as if my bones had grown around its shape. The weight of it pulled gently at my wrist, neither heavy nor light, but known—like an old scar.
Several armored men surrounded me, their forms looming as silhouettes that drifted in and out of the fog with each step. They wore distinct blue marine plate armor, the hue a deep, muted cobalt that caught what little light there was and turned it cold. Their pauldrons were broad and angular, their breastplates slightly curved, the metal etched with thin lines and sigils that glinted faintly whenever the fog shifted.
They wore crow beak helmets, the visors narrowing into sharp, hooked protrusions that jutted forward like the beaks of carrion birds. Their eye slits were small and dark, giving them an expressionless, predatory look. Every movement caused their plates to whisper and clink, a private, constant storm of metal on metal.
Ventian letters were etched onto their chestplates and pauldrons. The engravings cut deep into the steel, filled with a darker blue enamel. Some letters were large, set alone like symbols of rank; others trailed in short lines and curves along the edge of the armor, partly obscured by straps and belts. The letters seemed to shimmer as they passed through the fog, vanishing and reappearing like thoughts half-remembered.
I squinted through the narrow slit of my visor. The edges of the slit dug into my brow when I tried to focus, the metal biting into skin already slick with sweat. The world fragmented into slices: a shoulder plate here, a back of a helmet there, the curve of a spearhead, the faint sway of a banner far ahead.
The seemingly random assortment of letters actually formed words. Once my gaze fixed on them, they stopped being meaningless shapes. I could read "Sacrifice." "Justice." "Honor." "Sorrow." The words were scattered, sometimes broken by straps or dents in the armor, forcing my mind to stitch them together. But most were seemingly random, truncated syllables and isolated signs. Perhaps even the words had happened by chance, the pattern only in my mind.
My armor, on the other hand, was silver. Shining. Polished to a mirror finish. Even in the muted fog, the plates caught every hint of light, throwing it back in soft, diffuse reflections. When I glanced down, the curve of my cuirass showed a distorted, ghostly reflection of my surroundings—blue figures, white mist, and the faint, red smear of blood at my feet. There were no words carved into my armor. No mottos. Just clean, flawless metal.
I tried to lift my helmet. My hands wouldn't obey. My fingers tightened around the sword hilt when I willed them to rise, but they refused to release it. The muscles in my forearms trembled with useless effort, veins pressing against the inside of the vambraces. It felt like invisible cords tied my wrists in place, tethering them to the stance of a soldier.
All of us had our feet bare. I could see pale, calloused skin below the greaves of the men to my sides and in front of me, their toes blackened with dust and dried mud. Yet only my footsteps were bloody. Their tracks were just dim impressions in the dirt, soon blurred by the passing of more feet. Mine stood out—bright, fresh, the red almost luminous against the ground.
We marched. The column moved as one organism, inhaling and exhaling in sync, the line of soldiers stretching forward and backward into the fog. The beat of our steps set the rhythm of the world, steady and unyielding. Each step tugged at my joints where the plates met—knees, hips, shoulders. The leather straps creaked, buckles clicked quietly with every shift of weight.
I felt like a woman was holding me from behind, her presence as clear as if her body pressed against my back. Her arms were wrapped in a gentle embrace around my neck, forearms crossing my collarbone, hands resting lightly on my shoulders over the metal. Her fingers felt warm, the phantom of skin against steel somehow unmistakable. Yet I knew—knew—that there was far more supposed to be between us. More than this disembodied closeness. A history, a promise, a name. Something I couldn't remember. Something I had lost and was still losing with every step.
There was no weight, no resistance when I tried to look back. Only the sense of her—scentless yet familiar, like a memory of sunlight on a specific afternoon that refused to form, hanging on the edge of my mind and slipping away the moment I reached for it.
Ahead of me, by a few rows, stood an aquilifer. I recognized the tall, rigid silhouette above the mass of helmets. He held the Aquila high—a golden eagle mounted on a dark wooden pole, its wings spread wide as if in frozen flight. The metal caught what little light filtered through the fog, making the eagle glow faintly, like an ember in the mist. Its eyes were small, hard gems that seemed to stare straight ahead into whatever waited beyond the white curtain.
So we really were Ventians? The word curled up from somewhere deep inside my thoughts like smoke from an old fire. Ventian. It tasted familiar, bitter at the edges. It brought with it a hint of sea wind, of marble walls and high banners, of disciplined voices shouting orders in a language that felt both mine and foreign.
But I didn't remember this armor. I didn't remember this war. The silver plates on my body, the blood at my feet, the woman at my back, the Aquila ahead—none of it aligned with the fragments in my mind. Faces without names, maps without borders, oaths without context. Everything felt like a story someone had told me once, long ago, that I had half-listened to and then forgotten.
Then I heard a horn. Sharp. Cutting through the fog like a blade. The note rose from somewhere ahead and to the side, a single, piercing sound that vibrated inside my chest, resonating against the cavity of my armor. It silenced the low murmur of marching for a heartbeat, every man's attention snapping toward the invisible source.
The men around me quickened their pace. Their boots—or bare feet—hit the ground faster, the thud-thud-thud beating like a giant, unified heart. The loose pieces of their equipment rattled more violently; scabbards brushed against greaves, buckles slapped against leather.
I followed suit. My legs moved automatically, muscle memory overriding confusion. The length of my stride adjusted on its own, my weight shifting forward. My body remembered what my mind did not. Knees bent just enough, shoulders hunched at the correct angle, sword arm held close but ready.
Besides the men in front of me, even a squinted eye through the formations couldn't let me see anything because of the fog. The front line dissolved into white as soon as it left the immediate perimeter of my vision. The world ahead was a blank page written on only by sound. Somewhere in that blankness, something waited for us, patient and unseen.
We stopped for a moment. The horn fell silent. The column compressed slightly as those in the rear took an extra step before realizing. The sudden stillness felt wrong, like inhaling and never exhaling. The air grew heavier, thicker. Armor creaked as men shifted their weight from one foot to the other. Someone coughed behind me, a harsh rasp quickly stifled.
Then I heard chants. At first, low, almost uncertain. Then they gathered strength, rose, layered over one another until they became a wall of sound.
War cries. The men near me were shouting slogans, their voices muffled by helmets but fierce all the same. Spittle flew from the lips of those whose visors were up, disappearing into the fog.
"For the Princess!" someone roared to my left, the word Princess striking something deep in my chest, like a bell half-buried in ash. The image that came was blurred—an outline of a figure on a balcony, hair caught in the wind, a hand raised in farewell.
"For the Legion!" others picked up, the word Legion booming like a drumbeat that shook the air itself. It wrapped around us, bound us. I could feel the history in it, a thousand battles piled on top of each other, a weight of expectation pressing down on every helmeted head.
"For the Silver General!" This last cry rolled forward and back through the ranks like a wave, echoing in the narrow space between my ears. Silver. My armor. My title? Someone else's? The phrase scratched at a locked door in my mind. There was a face behind that door, hard and tired, eyes outlined by years of lost sleep. Mine. Maybe.
The Princess? What Princess? The question surfaced before the chant even faded. It did not feel like ignorance; it felt like theft, as if the answer had once been mine and had been taken. The more I tried to remember, the more my thoughts slid away like wet stones.
The horn sounded again. Louder this time, and closer. The note cracked at the top, strained not from weakness but from force, as if whoever blew it had emptied every last breath into the signal.
And we charged.
The entire formation surged forward as one. The ground jolted under my feet as hundreds of bodies hurled themselves ahead. My bare soles slapped the blood-slick earth, smearing red behind me. The fog rushed at us, swallowed us. The rhythm of the march shattered into the chaotic thunder of a charge. Armor clashed, men grunted, breath tore in and out of lungs. My sword arm rose of its own accord, the blade tilting forward, catching a faint, ghostly glimmer of light just before it plunged into the whiteness.
I saw lights in the distance. Torches. Hundreds of them, flickering like angry fireflies in the fog. They swayed and bobbed with motion, forming a ragged, glowing line that stretched wider than our formation. The flames were orange and red, sputtering with black smoke that curled upward before being swallowed by the mist. Each torch was a pinprick of heat in the cold, damp air, and together they formed a constellation of violence waiting to collide with us.
Then we charged forward at full speed. The entire column broke into a sprint, the disciplined march dissolving into controlled chaos. Plates rattled violently against one another, leather straps groaned under sudden strain, and the air filled with the harsh rasp of breath torn from hundreds of lungs at once.
It was very hard to do that in such heavy armor. Every step should have been a battle against gravity. The cuirass alone had to weigh as much as a sack of grain, and the greaves, pauldrons, vambraces—all of it pressed down on joints and muscles that weren't designed to carry this much dead weight at a dead run. The weight should have been crushing, dragging me down into the earth with each footfall.
Yet my feet didn't hurt at all. No blisters forming on bare skin. No scrape of stone or bite of thorns. No burn in the arches or heels from the impact of running on uneven ground.
I actually couldn't feel my feet. They were numb. Completely detached from sensation. It was as if someone had severed the connection between my legs and my mind below the ankle. I knew they were moving—I could see the ground rushing past, could feel the jolt of impact travel up through my shins and knees—but the feet themselves were phantom limbs. Present but absent. There and not there.
The blood still pooled beneath them with every step, warm and slick, painting the dirt in streaks that trailed behind me like a comet's tail.
I heard the lines clash in the distance. Metal on metal. Wood on bone. The sound hit me like a physical force, a wall of noise that rolled back through the fog. It was sharp and dull at the same time—high-pitched rings of blade meeting blade layered over the deep, wet thud of clubs smashing into flesh and armor. Somewhere in that cacophony, shields splintered. Somewhere, bones cracked.
Cries followed. Of pain. Of anguish. Of anger. Men screamed with voices that didn't sound human anymore, guttural and ragged, stripped of everything except raw emotion. Some were cut short mid-breath. Others stretched on and on, fading into moans that were worse than the screams themselves.
The sound of blades colliding filled the air like a discordant symphony. Each strike was a note—some sharp and clean, others warped and grinding. There was no rhythm to it, no pattern. Just overlapping chaos, a thousand instruments playing different songs at once, each one a story of survival or death written in steel.
The fog thinned slightly as we closed the distance. Shapes emerged—hulking figures backlit by torchlight, silhouettes of raised weapons, the press of bodies slamming into one another.
It seemed like we were losing. Even from my position several rows back, I could see it. The Aquila had tilted forward at a sharp angle, no longer held high but dipping toward the earth as if the aquilifer was struggling to keep it upright. Our front line buckled inward in places, the neat rows fragmenting into knots of struggling men.
The enemies started cutting through our ranks like scissors through cloth. Blue-armored soldiers staggered backward, helmets knocked askew, shields split down the middle. Some fell and didn't rise. Others tried to hold their ground and were simply trampled or pushed aside by the sheer momentum of the barbarian charge.
Well, "cut" was an exaggeration. Our enemies were wearing animal hide armor—crude leather and fur stitched together with sinew and thick cord. The hides were mottled brown and gray, matted with dirt and old blood. Some had patches of coarse hair still clinging to them. The leather was uneven, poorly cured, cracking at the joints. It hung loosely on their frames, offering little protection but plenty of mobility.
They held maces and clubs. Primitive weapons. Thick chunks of wood, some reinforced with iron bands or studded with nails and bone fragments. A few carried stone-headed hammers lashed to wooden handles with leather thongs. No swords. No spears. Just blunt instruments designed to crush and break rather than cut.
We were losing to those? The thought stabbed through my confusion like a shard of ice. These weren't trained soldiers. They weren't a disciplined army. They were raiders, tribals, barbarians who probably didn't even have a word for "formation." And yet they were tearing through Ventian legionaries—men clad in polished plate, armed with forged steel—as if we were made of paper.
The soldier before me got sent backward by a heavy strike. A barbarian—bare-chested except for a crude leather vest, face painted with streaks of white ash—swung a spiked club in a wide, overhead arc. The impact caught the soldier's helmet dead center with a sound like a hammer striking an anvil. His helmet caved inward, the metal buckling and folding around the blow. The crow-beak visor twisted to one side, the eye slits no longer aligned. He collapsed without a sound, legs folding beneath him, arms going slack. His sword clattered to the ground beside him.
I dodged to the left, slipping through the gap his falling body had created. My armor scraped against the soldier beside me as I squeezed past, plates grinding together. The barbarian who'd struck him was still recovering from the swing, his club raised high, weight shifted forward onto his front foot.
I closed the distance in two steps and thrust my short sword into his neck before creating distance by stepping backward. The blade punched through the side of his throat just below the jaw, sliding between muscle and cartilage with almost no resistance. Hot blood sprayed across my silver gauntlet, steaming in the cold air.
He fell to the ground, clutching his throat. His fingers scrabbled uselessly at the wound, trying to hold the torn flesh together, but the blood poured out between them in thick pulses. His legs kicked, heels drumming against the dirt. Blood pooled beneath him, spreading in a dark, glistening circle that seeped into the earth.
I looked left and right. The realization hit me all at once. No wonder we were getting beaten. The armored soldiers around me were holding great swords—long, two-handed blades with grips wrapped in leather and pommels the size of apples. The blades themselves were as tall as a man's torso, designed for wide, sweeping cuts that could cleave through multiple enemies in open combat.
But we were packed into a tight formation. Shoulder to shoulder, sometimes closer. The soldiers couldn't raise their swords above waist height without striking their own comrades. They couldn't utilize their reach or power. Every swing was cramped, abbreviated, robbed of momentum. The great swords became liabilities, heavy and awkward in close quarters.
Idiots. The word surfaced in my mind with cold clarity. Whoever had armed them—whoever had trained them—had prepared them for a different kind of battle. A field engagement. Open ground. Not this press, this grinding melee where every inch mattered and reach meant nothing.
I dodged the strike of another barbarian—a heavy mace whistling past my helmet with enough force that I felt the air displacement, a rush of wind that stirred the fog. The spiked head missed my visor by a finger's width. If it had connected, my skull would have caved in just like the soldier before me.
I didn't think. My body moved. I stepped inside his guard and stabbed him in the chest. The blade sank deep between his ribs, angled upward toward the heart. I felt the resistance as the point scraped bone, then the give as it punched through into the soft tissue beneath.
But he ignored the pain. His eyes—wide and bloodshot, pupils dilated—didn't even register the wound. He kicked me backward with a roar that came from somewhere deep in his belly, animalistic and raw. His boot caught me square in the chest, the impact reverberating through my cuirass. The force of it lifted me off my feet for a split second.
I stumbled, arms windmilling for balance. My heels caught on uneven ground, and I tipped backward.
A soldier behind me caught me before I fell. His gauntleted hands gripped my pauldrons, steadying me. Then he shoved me forward without a word, hard enough that I nearly collided with the barbarian I'd just stabbed.
I used the momentum to swing my blade across the barbarian's face. The short sword arced horizontally, edge leading. It connected with the frontal part of his skull just above the brow with a sickening crunch. Bone splintered. The blade didn't cleave through—skull was too thick for that—but it cracked the frontal bone inward, fracturing it in a spiderweb pattern. Blood and something pale—fragments of bone, maybe brain matter—sprayed from the wound.
He clutched his face, screaming. The sound was high-pitched, almost childlike, completely at odds with his bulk. He dropped his mace and staggered backward, both hands pressed to the ruined front of his skull. Blood poured between his fingers, running down his wrists and forearms in thick rivulets.
Another barbarian moved into his place immediately. This one was younger, leaner, with a braided beard and a necklace of teeth hanging around his neck. He carried a wooden club reinforced with iron bands, the head stained dark with old blood. He didn't hesitate. Didn't check on his fallen comrade. Just stepped over the body and swung at me in one fluid motion.
The soldiers on my left and right were holding the line—barely. To my left, a Ventian legionary blocked a mace strike with his great sword held horizontally, the impact sending a visible shudder through his arms. To my right, another soldier thrust awkwardly at a barbarian, the tip of his blade scraping harmlessly off a hide vest because he couldn't extend his arm fully.
I didn't need to fight two people at once, which was good. The formation, as clumsy and inefficient as it was, at least ensured that. Each of us faced one enemy at a time, with our flanks theoretically protected by the soldiers beside us.
But they really limited my movement. I couldn't pivot, couldn't shift my stance to the side to create angles. Couldn't retreat more than a single step before bumping into the man behind me. I was boxed in, trapped in a narrow corridor of space barely wider than my shoulders. Every dodge had to be minimal—a tilt of the head, a lean of the torso. Every attack had to be a straight thrust or a short, vertical cut. Anything horizontal risked hitting an ally.
It didn't help that they started to get bashed in. The blue-armored soldiers—my supposed comrades—began to collapse under the relentless barrage of clubs and maces. Their plate armor, designed to deflect slashing blades and glancing strikes, was useless against the blunt trauma. Each impact dented the metal inward, driving it against the flesh beneath. Pauldrons crumpled. Breastplates buckled. Helmets folded like tin cups under a hammer.
And they fell. Not backward, but forward and down, collapsing onto their knees before pitching face-first into the mud. The barbarians didn't stop to finish them. They simply stepped over the bodies and kept advancing, their bare feet and crude boots finding purchase on the writhing, groaning heaps of armored men.
The most horrific part was that the rows of soldiers in armor that the barbarians were walking on were probably still alive—bleeding inside their dented suits, unable to move, suffocating under the weight of their own protection. I could hear them. Beneath the clash of weapons and the roar of battle, there were other sounds. Wet, labored breathing. Muffled screams that echoed inside sealed helmets. The scrape of gauntleted fingers clawing uselessly at the ground, trying to drag broken bodies forward or backward, anywhere but here.
Their armor had become their tomb. The dented plates pressed against ribs, restricting lungs that were already struggling for air. Visors had been knocked askew or crushed inward, blocking vision and breathing both. Some probably had broken bones—ribs puncturing organs, fractured skulls leaking fluid into the brain. And all of them were pinned, immobilized by the very protection that was supposed to save them, slowly drowning in their own blood or simply running out of air while the battle raged on above them.
What kind of battle even was this? The question clawed at my mind as I fought. This wasn't warfare. This was slaughter. Badly equipped, poorly commanded soldiers being fed into a meat grinder against an enemy that shouldn't have stood a chance. Where were the officers? Where was the strategy? Why were we packed so tightly that we couldn't even swing our weapons properly?
That Silver general certainly was a dumbass. Wait… Was I supposed to be him?
A barbarian came screaming toward me, a short axe raised high. His face was a mask of rage, teeth bared, eyes wild. Foam flecked the corners of his mouth. He wasn't just attacking—he was frenzied, consumed by bloodlust or something worse.
He swung the axe across my chest before I could react. The blade struck my cuirass dead center with a sound like a church bell being struck by a battering ram. The armor reverberated with a deep clang that resonated through my entire torso, vibrating against my ribs and sternum. The force of the blow knocked the air from my lungs. But the metal held tight. The axe blade skittered across the polished surface, leaving a bright scratch but no penetration.
What an idiot. Swinging an axe at plate armor like it was a tree trunk. The edge might have worked on leather or chainmail, but against solid steel? He might as well have been hitting me with a stick.
I calculated my trajectory in the split second it took him to recover from the recoil of his own strike. His weight was forward, committed to the swing. His guard was open—chest exposed, arms extended. I didn't need to think about it. My body already knew.
I stabbed him through the heart. The gladius punched into his chest just left of center, slipping between ribs with practiced precision. The blade sank in to the hilt. I felt the moment it pierced the heart—a slight give, then resistance as the muscle contracted around the steel.
Blood splashed across the soldiers beside me as I pulled the blade free. Hot and dark, it sprayed in an arc that painted their blue armor in streaks of crimson. The barbarian's eyes went wide, his mouth opening and closing like a fish pulled from water. Then he collapsed, knees buckling, and fell face-first into the mud.
This was when I realized I was holding a gladius. The legendary Ventian short sword designed for exactly this kind of close-quarters fighting. Straight double-edged blade, about 60 centimeters long. Perfect for thrusting in tight formations where there was no room to swing. The grip fit my hand like it had been molded to my palm. The weight distribution was flawless, the balance point just forward of the hilt.
Why couldn't I remember that earlier? The question nagged at me even as I fought. I had been holding this weapon the entire time. I had been using it, thrusting and slashing with muscle memory that clearly knew exactly what it was. But my conscious mind had only just caught up, only just attached the word to the object.
What else had I forgotten? What else was my body doing that my mind couldn't explain?
The soldiers on my sides were killed—bludgeoned into the mud. To my left, a legionary took a club strike to the side of his helmet that caved in the temple guard. He dropped without a sound, sword still clutched in his hand. To my right, another soldier's knee gave out as a mace crushed his greave inward, shattering the bone beneath. He fell sideways, and a barbarian brought a hammer down on his back, flattening him into the ground.
I tried to move backward, but the line didn't open for me. The soldiers behind me had closed ranks instinctively, shoulder to shoulder, filling any gap that might have formed. When I took a step back, I simply collided with an unyielding wall of plate armor. Someone shoved me forward again, back into position. The formation was rigid. Unforgiving. It didn't matter that the men beside me were dead or dying. It didn't matter that I was now exposed on both flanks. The line held because that's what it was trained to do.
Two barbarians focused on me. I could see the shift in their attention, the way their eyes locked onto the silver armor that stood out like a beacon among the blue. One had a heavy metal mace, the head studded with short spikes that were blackened with dried blood. The other was holding a crudely made sword—jagged, unbalanced, the blade notched and pitted as if it had been forged from scrap metal and sharpened on river stones. But it was sharp enough to kill.
They came at me from different angles, not coordinated but instinctively flanking. The swordsman swung first, a diagonal slash aimed at my neck.
I clashed blades with the sword wielder. Steel met steel with a sharp crack. Sparks flew from the point of contact, bright orange pinpricks that died instantly in the fog. The impact rattled my wrist, sending a shock up through my forearm. His blade was heavier than it looked, or he was stronger than he appeared. The force nearly knocked the gladius from my grip.
The guy with the mace raised both hands, gripping the long handle, preparing to bring it down on my skull. I could see the muscles in his shoulders bunch, the slight bend of his knees as he gathered power for the overhead strike. If that mace connected, my helmet would cave in just like the others. The silver would offer no more protection than the blue.
I dodged to the right just before he committed to the swing. My armor scraped against the now-empty space where the soldier beside me had stood moments ago. I shifted my weight and ran into the barbarian in front of me—the swordsman—using the momentum of the heavy armor to push him into the other.
The collision was brutal. The swordsman stumbled backward, arms flailing as he tried to keep his balance. He crashed into the mace wielder just as the mace was coming down. The strike went wide, the spiked head slamming into the ground with a dull thud.
They stumbled. Collided. Fell into each other in a tangle of limbs and weapons. For a split second, they were vulnerable—off-balance, weapons out of position, attention divided.
While he was still stunned, I slashed the swordsman across the throat. The gladius cut deep, opening the front of his neck from ear to ear. Blood fountained in a high arc, spraying across my visor and obscuring my vision even further. The swordsman's hands flew to his throat, sword clattering to the ground as he tried uselessly to hold the wound closed.
I kicked his body into the mace wielder, making them both fall to the ground. The dying swordsman's weight carried the other barbarian down with him. They hit the mud hard, the mace wielder's back slamming into the ground with enough force to knock the wind from his lungs.
I moved quickly, trampling onto the mace-wielding hand of the other barbarian. I lifted my leg and brought my heel down with all the weight of my armor behind it. Bones crunched under my heel—small bones in the hand, fingers, knuckles—grinding and snapping like dry twigs. The sound was sharp and wet at the same time. He screamed, a high, piercing wail that cut through the din of battle.
I thrust my gladius into his face. The blade punched through his eye socket with almost no resistance, the soft tissue giving way instantly. The point scraped against the back of the skull for a split second before breaking through into the brain. His scream cut off mid-breath. His body went rigid, then slack. Twitching. Then still.
But I had overextended. I was too far forward, out of line with the formation—what little remained of it. My weight was on my front foot, my arm fully extended, gladius still buried in the dead barbarian's skull. I was exposed. Vulnerable.
Something hard hit me across the head. The world exploded in white light and a ringing that drowned out everything else. My helmet absorbed most of the impact, but the force still snapped my head to the side. My vision blurred. My balance failed.
I fell to the ground. My knees hit first, then my hands, the gladius slipping from my grip and disappearing into the mud. I tried to push myself up, but my arms wouldn't obey.
A lot more hits followed. Maces. Clubs. Hammers. They rained down on me like hail, striking from all directions at once. My back. My shoulders. My helmet. Each impact was a new explosion of force that drove me further into the ground. The metal bent with every strike, the plates crumpling and folding inward. My pauldrons collapsed against my shoulders, restricting my movement. The joints locked—elbow, knee, hip—as the armor warped around them. My armor became a cage, a prison of twisted steel that held me immobile.
I felt nauseous. My stomach lurched, bile rising in my throat. The inside of my helmet spun, or maybe it was the world outside. I couldn't tell anymore. My vision blurred, the narrow slit of my visor filled with nothing but shifting shadows and the occasional flash of a weapon descending toward me.
I tried to curl up, to protect my head, but I couldn't move. The armor wouldn't let me. Every piece had been driven inward, pinning me in place like an insect mounted on a board.
The hits kept coming. I stopped counting. Stopped feeling them individually. They blurred together into one continuous wave of pain and pressure.
I couldn't move. My fingers wouldn't close. My legs wouldn't bend. I was trapped inside my own body.
I heard barbarians continuing to advance. Their footsteps were heavy, irregular, the sound of men drunk on victory and bloodlust. Clashing. The sound of weapons striking armor, of shields being torn from dying hands. Screaming. Voices breaking apart into raw noise, wordless and animal. Cries of triumph and agony—sometimes it was impossible to tell which was which. A barbarian's roar of victory could sound just like a soldier's death scream if you weren't close enough to see who was standing and who was falling.
It went on for a pretty long time. Minutes, maybe. Or hours. Time had lost all meaning. The sounds merged into a continuous wall of chaos that pressed against my ears even through the ringing in my skull. Metal scraped against metal. Bodies hit the ground with wet thuds. Somewhere, someone was begging for mercy in a language I didn't recognize—maybe Ventian, maybe something else. The begging stopped abruptly.
But then I started to hear a large number of steps being taken. Organized. Different from the barbarians' chaotic advance. These were synchronized, rhythmic despite their speed. Retreating. The unmistakable sound of a formation breaking and running—not a panicked rout yet, but a disciplined withdrawal that was dangerously close to becoming one.
The soldiers were running. The Ventian legion, or what was left of it, had broken. I could hear officers shouting orders, their voices hoarse and desperate, trying to maintain some semblance of order. "Fall back! Fall back to the second line!" But the second line was probably already gone. Already running. The fog swallowed their retreat, turning it into nothing but the fading thunder of boots and the clatter of abandoned equipment.
The barbarians followed, howling in pursuit. Their cries were triumphant now, undiluted by fear or doubt. They smelled blood. Smelled victory. The sound of their pursuit grew louder for a moment as they passed through the killing ground, then began to fade as they chased the fleeing soldiers deeper into the fog.
I was left there. In a field of corpses and of soldiers screaming in their metal coffins. The silence that followed the departure of the battle was somehow worse than the noise had been. It was punctuated by sounds that made my skin crawl—wet, labored breathing from inside dented helmets. The scrape of gauntlets against mud as someone tried to drag themselves forward on a broken spine. Moaning that rose and fell like a tide, sometimes forming words, sometimes just sounds. "Help." "Mother." "Please." "Kill me."
And beneath it all, the quieter deaths. The ones where men simply stopped breathing because their lungs couldn't expand anymore. The ones where crushed windpipes rattled one last time and then went still. The sounds of life draining away into the blood-soaked earth.
I couldn't just stay here. The thought came from somewhere deep, primal. Not logic, but survival instinct screaming at me to move. To get up. To escape before the barbarians came back to loot the bodies and finish off the wounded.
I had to find Emily, right? The name surfaced like a drowning man breaking the surface of water. Emily. Who was Emily? This was so vivid that I had almost forgotten.
She must have been in this dream somewhere. Dream. Yes. This was a dream. It had to be.
The Princess... yes! The pieces clicked together with sudden clarity. Emily was the Princess. The one the soldiers had been shouting about. "For the Princess!"
I tried to raise myself, but my arms didn't want to cooperate. My right arm responded sluggishly when I commanded it to move, lifting a few inches before stopping as if it had hit an invisible wall. My left arm barely twitched. The joints in the armor were bent inward, pinning my limbs. The elbow guards had been driven into the soft joint, locking the angle. The vambraces had crumpled around my forearms, creating rigid points that wouldn't bend.
I couldn't even see anything. The gorget—the neck armor—had been hammered upward and forward, the metal folding over itself until it pressed against my jaw and lower face. It blocked most of my field of view even without the helmet, leaving only a narrow gap at the top where I could see a sliver of gray fog and darker shapes that might have been bodies.
The metal around my neck was supposed to be so bent that I couldn't breathe—the gorget should have crushed my windpipe, cutting off air completely. I should have been choking, gasping, dying. But the hands of that woman were keeping it away. I couldn't see the hands, yet I knew they were there. I felt the pressure. The warmth. Fingers pressed against the inside of the bent metal, creating just enough space for air to flow. Her palms rested against my collarbones, holding the crushing weight at bay through sheer, impossible presence.
Who are you? I asked the question into the void, not expecting an answer. The hands didn't respond. They simply remained, steady and warm, a lifeline in the darkness.
I slowly raised both arms up to my head. Every movement was agony. My shoulders screamed in protest as I forced them to lift despite the warped pauldrons digging into the joints. My elbows ground and clicked, bone scraping against bone where the armor had damaged the joint. The gauntlets felt like they weighed a hundred pounds each. Eventually, after what felt like hours but was probably only seconds, I got my hands to my head.
I fumbled with the straps and buckles of the helmet, my fingers clumsy in the thick gauntlets. The buckles were small, designed to be fastened by bare fingers or with help from a squire. The leather straps were slick with blood—mine or someone else's—making them slippery and hard to grip. I couldn't feel the buckles properly through the metal fingers. I had to rely on sight, but my vision was blurred and doubled. Finally, after several failed attempts, I found the main buckle under my chin and managed to pry it open.
Eventually, I popped it off. The helmet came free with a wet sucking sound, peeling away from my head where blood had glued it to my scalp. I dropped it beside me. It landed in the mud with a dull clang.
Air flooded into my lungs. Cold. Damp. It tasted of blood and smoke and something sour that might have been decay or just the fog itself. But it was air. Real, breathable air that didn't stink of my own sweat and fear. I gasped, inhaling deeply, filling my lungs to capacity. The cold burned my throat. My chest expanded against the bent cuirass, the metal creaking in protest.
With a wave-like motion, I forced myself onto my ass. I rocked back and forth, using momentum to overcome the weight of the armor and the weakness in my muscles. Forward, back, forward again with more force, and finally I tilted past the balance point and fell backward onto my tailbone. The impact sent a jolt of pain up my spine, but I was sitting up. No longer lying prone like a corpse waiting to be looted.
My vision was red. Blood was in my eyes. Everything had a crimson tint, shapes blurred and swimming. I could see the outlines of bodies around me—some blue, some in hides, all still—but I couldn't make out details. Couldn't tell if any of them were moving.
I tried to force it out by putting pressure on my eyelids with the tips of my glove. I pressed, hard. The metal fingertips dug into the soft flesh of my eyelids, pushing against the eyeballs beneath. It hurt—a sharp, focused pain that cut through the fog in my head. I held the pressure, counting slowly. One. Two. Three. Then I released and blinked rapidly.
It... worked. The blood cleared, pushed out through the corners of my eyes and down my cheeks in pink-tinged tears. My vision sharpened. The red tint faded to a more normal gray-and-brown palette. I could see clearly now—as clearly as anyone could in this fog.
How did it work? How did I know it would work? The questions nagged at me. That wasn't a common technique. That wasn't something you just guessed at. I had known, with absolute certainty, that applying pressure to my eyelids would force the blood out. Which meant I had done it before. Or been taught it. By whom? When?
I was nauseous. The world was slightly spinning, not in a constant rotation but in a slow, sickening wobble. Shapes doubled and blurred at the edges of my vision, then snapped back into focus, then doubled again. My sense of balance was off—I felt like I was sitting on a ship in rough seas, the ground tilting beneath me even though I knew it was perfectly flat.
Brain damage? The thought came with cold detachment. Concussion at minimum. Possibly worse. Skull fracture. Intracranial bleeding. Traumatic brain injury. The symptoms fit. The nausea, the vision problems, the disorientation. How did I know the symptoms? Why did those medical terms come so easily?
I slid my right hand across my head, feeling the wet warmth of blood matting my hair. My fingers traced across my scalp, searching. There—just above and behind my right ear. A depression in the bone. Not deep, but definitely there. The skull gave slightly under my fingertips where it should have been solid. The skin was split, a ragged gash that oozed fresh blood when I touched it. I brought my hand up to my eyes.
Blood. And a lot of it. My gauntlet was covered in it, thick and dark, dripping from the metal fingers in slow, viscous drops. The blood was too dark. Venous, not arterial. That was good—meant no major vessels were cut. But the sheer volume was alarming.
My skull was cracked. The realization settled over me with eerie calm. A depressed skull fracture, probably. One of those mace strikes had hit just right—or just wrong—to break through the helmet and crack the bone beneath. I should be dead. Or dying. I suppose this wasn't the first time this happened.
Fuck. Now what to do?
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