Rewan looked upon the battlefield with a solemn expression, guided only the meager light that crystals and lanterns had to offer. As a boy, he gazed upon the remnants of battle, afterimages of warriors and footmen lying still upon the ground. This sight though, was a story made frightening real. Here, now, where the deeproads converged to a plateau of slate in front of iron gates, warriors of every house, clan, and creed held valor and brutality in equal measure. He saw a dwarven merchant upon the parapets haggle not with silvered tongue, but debts of steel and coppered bolt. Nameless footmen holding back defender's sally, holding sword and repeated prayers. In this cavern, where dwarves once cleaved gems from stone and reshaped towering mountains into hallowed halls, a multitude of wills converged to pry it from the grasping hands of raiders.
The sky offered no reprieve from a battle this large: The dwemer could not break the mountain with the scant time given since establishing themselves in this new land. They could, however, buy time to break the wills of the human and elven host. Souls from southern shores and red-stained badlands offered their skills in battle to repel the raiding party from their homes. In the capitol of Rittersburg, inside a palace of white marble and crimson floors, one could imagine the Emperor with bloodshot eye issue orders and observe their tenacity in penned ink and scout's report.
The minstrel saw him twice in times before, where he heard the pleadings of peasants and merchants and to decide the fate of a loyal knight - the Sunspear of Qalasheen. Gennad var Vigo, proprietor of the Pour House where he worked, brought wine to every observer and prepared his own plea to curry favor. He thought himself blessed then, as probably many others, that he did not stand out or fall out of line with the Empire's laws. Squinting from the back, what scared him most was not his booming voice, the way he seemed to pull ire and wrath from deepest winter, but his gaze that pierced through each petitioner. In it, was the restlessness that cursed every son of Horen: to die before greatest deed was completed.
His face was contorted in a sneer or a common grimace, but his expression constantly shifted from moment to moment. Disinterest at a petitioner's plea for a court chef position - A young's child curiosity at a request for his sister's hand in marriage. He raved with unbridled rage when a knight justified abandonment with morality, yet showed temperance offering clemency and an exception to its most closely-held law - to never practice another religion within the Empire's borders.
SHUNK
The whistling of an arrow disrupted his musings. How could he have been so daft, to remember something that was not involved in one of many battles! His horse toppled upon him, and Rewan laid there trapped upon its lithe frame. He grimaced in pain, yet armed with only a lute, he could not help but take in every scream, every battle cry as merely an observer. He laughed grimly at his situation, as the dark seemed to circle round Rewan like sharks.
With one eye gone, did the good doctor remove an eye of bloodshot rage or clear-eyed judgment? Will his friends in Cerulia, the pirate Salem and the guards that treated Rewan with kindness, find themselves at the end of this conflict with their lives intact? Will the subject of tales written, the dragon-slayer Obok Irondrinks, the Golden-Lyre, now Admiral O'Rouke, find eulogy within heated battle? And even now, as the light was fading from his eyes, the Dwarves plan in league with orcish might and human rebels to strike further in the heart of a united Empire.
Does it matter? These were just the musings of a humble minstrel.
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Birds fly high oe'r mountain and seas to find themselves home at last after cut o' Winter winds.
Thankful then, that carrion birds and vultures find not the mounting feast inside Mountain's mouth, lives reaped in Spring.
Death passes by: at his left a flock of black feathers, at his right the legs of crawling swarm.
On this day, under mountain dark and damp, the flock passed by, but grubs and worms stopped and ate their putrid fill.