A Revelation on Euler's Steppe

[Xarkly 17299]

THE REVELATION ON EULER’S STEPPE

Spoiler

 

 

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Bishop Villorik’s vision swam as he half-collapsed against a tree.

 

The clamour of battle sounded far behind the warpriest, but he could not tell if his hearing failed in his disoriented state, or whether he truly was far from the epicentre. The leather of his gloves creaked as he gripped the bark for support, and sucked in quick breaths through his teeth. He could only dimly feel the stinging pain in his right thigh where an Adrian axe had bit deep, but a glance down at the blood seeping darkly through his greaves told him the wound was grave.

 

Grave, the warpriest thought as he grit his teeth, if not mortal.

 

For a moment, he simply stared at the wound as the blood oozed and dripped down his leg. Is this … how I die? The thought did not instil fear in him as much as it did confusion. This can’t be my purpose. God … is this truly all you need me for? Even with his mind still rocking from when he had been struck, he knew that thought was childish; did he truly expect that the Holy Light would have some special purpose, some divine mission, for him to accomplish during his time on the mortal world?

 

He knew it was foolish, but bitterness still welled in him at the thought that his journey was to end here and now, on the fringe of one of the many battlefields between the Covenant and Veletz. In that foolish, bitter moment, he lay his sweat-slicked head against the trunk and squeezed his eyes shut on warm tears.

 

He did not know how long he wallowed, but eventually he realised that the sound of battle seemed to have drifted further north, and he became gradually aware of his other wounds, from the dull pain in his shoulder from when he had fallen from his horse, to the scrapes on his left forearm from when the splinters of his lance had ricocheted after skewering an Adrian rider.

 

But his senses did not fade, and his consciousness did not leave him yet.

 

Keep moving until you can’t, he urged himself as scrubbed the tears from his eyes. Though no living soul was there to witness his self-pity, that did not mean he was alone. The Skies still watch. Gripping his broken lance - the splintered top of which was still caked in the blood of the Adrian rider he had struck - he began to limp through the trees again. If he could just get out of the forest … if he could just staunch the bleeding …

 

His vision continued to swirl as he limped through the trees. Several times, he thought he heard boots stomping through the foliage - or even a charging horse - but when he whirled around, his blade brandished, he saw no one. On he limped, hissing through his teeth as each movement sent pain jolting through his body. Despite that pain, the spot where the axe cleaved his leg felt numb -- that was what truly worried him.

 

Finally, the trees thinned, and the morning - was it still morning? - sunlight lit the slopes of Euler’s Steppe beyond. Although there were no canopies of leaves to blot out that sun, the view before Villorik felt … darker. The autumn sun lit the field of fallen horses and slain riders from where the Covenant and Adria had first clashed, before the battle had pushed deep into the woods, and the grass was dappled with a glistening crimson glaze.

 

For a moment, Villorik could only watch.

 

He had fought many battles in this war already, from Breakwater to Westmark, where men had died screaming beneath collapsing towers and the hooves of thousands of horses, and so the carnage before Villorik now paled in comparison to the war’s maiden clashes. Yet, as he watched a burgundy standard stream from the end of a lance jutting from the earth, he knew it was not the bodies before him right now that made his skin crawl.

 

It was the repetition.

 

Breakwater. Brasca. Westmark. Hippo’s Gorge. Stassion. Drusco. Over the din of battle - distant in the trees, now - he could hear a few wounded groans, coughs, and even hoarse pleas from where some of the fallen lay.  … and now Euler’s Steppe. Villorik swallowed the lump in his throat, and forced himself to forward once more through the red-stained field. He had to keep going; he had to staunch the bleeding in his leg.

 

The repetition - this cycle - went beyond the war between the Covenant and Adria, Villorik knew. Before he had been ordained, he had studied more than the Holy Scrolls; he knew the Tapestry of Man, and the last one-hundred and fifty years of weaves. The Covenant war was not a new war, but a new name. The Covenant was but the child of the Eastern Almaris Treaty, just as that had been the child of the Tripartite Accord, fought between a new generation of the same foe, time and time again.

 

Villorik came to an abrupt pause as he felt something grasp his uninjured leg. Slowly, the Bishop lowered his gaze, and found a mailed gripping his ankle. It was no surprise that Villorik had not seen the woman to whom the hand belonged to before now; she was pinned to the ground by a horse that had been skewered by a lance, and the horse’s blood was drenched the woman beneath it so thoroughly that she almost blended into the battlefield. The horse’s caparison, the woman’s tabard -- it was all so red that Villorik could not make out for which army she had fought.

 

“C … can …” came a wheeze from beneath the woman’s helm, so quiet that Villorik could barely hear her only word.

 

At first, Villorik gave no answer. He looked down at her, and the patches of pale skin that had not been drenched in her horse’s blood, before he slid his gaze to the horse itself, and the lance buried in it. Based on the depth of the lance’s strike, and the angle of the woman lying beneath it, it was clear that the lance had impaled her midsection, too.

 

The sun glimmered on the edge of Villorik’s sabre as he raised it. Through her misty eyes, the woman’s expression shifted to a brief reprieve of gratitude. “Light, revere this woman,” he began. His own voice was shaky, and meek. “Revere this woman, whose body is now broken, and whose thread on the Tapestry is dutifully woven.” She closed her eyes, and Villorik thrust his blade down. “ … and cradle her closely in the Skies.”

 

As her corpse fell lifeless and what little blood she had left pooled with her horse’s, Villorik just watched her. “What purpose did this one fill, Holy Light?” he asked her body. “Mortally wounded, in the first strike of the battle. Left to bleed and die beneath her mount, so soaked in blood that no one could tell for which side she even fought.” The fear that Villorik had not felt earlier surged in him now.

 

The Light gave him no answer as Villorik shakily set off across the battlefield once more. His entire right leg was slick with the blood seeping from his axe-wound, and his vision felt edged with the sickly cold sensation of blood-loss. His lance-turned-walking-stick creaked as he continued.

 

“KRESA!” echoed a panicked peel across the field, and Villorik squinted to make out a man, his helmet shed, limp between fallen horses and riders. He roughly turned them over by the shoulders until he could see their faces, at which point he unceremoniously dropped them as he moved to the next corpse. “KRESA! WHERE ARE YOU?! CAN YOU HEAR ME!? KRESA!”

 

For him, Villorik only muttered another prayer.

 

Two minutes or two hours, Villorik could not say how much longer he limped through the field of sunlit corpses. He could not say how many dead or dying soldiers he passed, nor how many useless prayers he muttered. The only thing he did know was that his chances of limping all the way back to the Covenant war camp were slim. And so, he finally lowered himself down beside a horse peppered with arrows, and whose rider was nowhere to be seen. Clumsily, he set his sabre to sawing off a length of its Adrian caparison, and then cut away the bloodsoaked fabric of his own greaves until the wound on his thigh was laid bare.

 

The sight of the bloody gorge in his flesh almost made his vision swim again, but he forced his shaking hands on. He poured what water remained in his canteen on the wound, and then bound the torn caparison around it as tightly as he could. When it was down, he simply leaned back and rested his head on the horse’s torso, between the shafts of arrows jutting from its body.

 

All he could do now was wait for the battle to end.

 

End? No, he corrected himself as he stared up in the cloud-streaked sky. Simply lull, until the next battle. Until the next war. Until the cycle repeats.

 

The battle being fought on Euler’s Steppe was small compared to the clashes at Hippo’s Gorge or Brasca, which themselves were mere blips in the eternal war.

 

“The Cycle,” he whispered to himself as he watched a bird glide overhead. “The Cycle.”

 

From the Sinners’ War, to the Successors’ War, to this fight - throughout it all, humanity had refused to change. After each victory and defeat, the rulers of mankind returned to their scattered holds, squabbling over divisions and ruling over petty realms that required the aid of half a dozen other armies to quell any threat.

 

It will come again. The women trapped under the horse; the man searching for ‘Kresa’; all the dead on the field around him. Villorik had seen that scene tenfold at each of the other battles, but it was knowing that it had happened through those wars time and time again that threatened to make him sick-up.

 

It will come again. The war and the warriors - reincarnated … so long as man does not change.

 

He did not realise he had gripped his fist around the hilt of his sabre until he heard his gloves creak. So long as man does not change … Blinking away his fatigue, he looked at the sun flash against the sabre’s length, except for where the woman’s blood coated the tip.

 

He was not sure where his sudden energy had come from as he pressed the blade into the mud, and used it to climb to his feet again. He regarded the battlefield not with pity anymore, but with rage.

 

If man will not change, then they need to be made to change.

 

He ignored the white-hot pain in his bound wound as he began to limp across the battlefield again.

 

As the sun shone on the field of death, Villorik thought that perhaps the Light might yet have a purpose for him.

 

The Cycle will be broken.