Seasons of Sorrow and Stolen Years

1. Under the Walls of Psilos

Erastis twisted sideways as the Psilosian’s sword whistled past the side of his head, but his attempt at dodging was foiled as he stumbled on the twisted fingers of one of the many corpses that littered the battlefield. He tried to recover, but the weight of the hoplon he carried on his right arm robbed him of his balance. He landed on his stomach, face to face with the dead man that had tripped him. It would have been impossible to tell which army the shattered, mud splattered body originally belonged to, but such allegiances didn’t matter to the dead. They, like the shattered spears and broken shields that also littered the plains, formed an ever growing third army that existed solely to punish the Psilosian defenders and the Kakosian Alliance which had besieged them.

Erastis grunted as he forced himself onto his side, just in time to avoid being impaled by the sword that was thrust into the mud he had been occupying a moment ago. He struck out with his foot and was rewarded with an audible crack as his bronze-sheathed sandal broke his opponent’s leg. The Psilosian screamed in pain and rage, but the adrenaline coursing through his system kept him on his feet as he lurched towards his victim.

“I’ve never killed a king before,” the nameless soldier gasped between pained breaths. “Then again, I never knew it was this easy!”

“Do not boast of what is not yet done,” Erasti retorted as he managed to bring his hoplon up in time to block the next strike, but that was all he could do. There was no room to escape, so all he could do was huddle under the broad, curved shield and hope that his imitation of a turtle would be sufficient until someone came to rescue him.

Salvation came from the same source that had tripped him in the first place. The Psilosian foot caught against the corpse’s ribs, and this time the fresh spasm of pain from his broken leg was too much to ignore. He shrieked as he fell to hands and knees, instinctively letting go of his weapon in order to brace his fall. He realized what he had done, but it was already a moment too late. His hand reached for his sword just as Erastis struck, and the peasant soldier was not nearly as well protected as the king he sought to slay. The leaf shaped blade of his xiphos hacked through the side of the Psilosian’s neck, spilling fresh blood into the corpse’s mouth.

The low, nerve wracking cry of cattle horns began to cry out as Erastis pulled himself back to his feet, signaling the end of another’s day fighting. The setting sun began to paint the landscape in lurid hues, its blood red blending almost perfectly with the gore soaked earth so that it was impossible to tell where the battlefield ended and the towering walls of Psilos began. It had been built from massive blocks of granite, each the size of a small cottage. Thousands of slaves had died forcing them into place, and hundreds more had died constructing the towers that lined the top. The sheer scale of it made the wall immune to any ordinary siege weapon, and any spellcraft that sought to bring it down was thwarted by the enchantments the city’s mages had worked into the mortar and continuously renewed and replaced over the centuries.

‘Another day done, scores more dead, and for what?’ Erastis wondered as he considered those walls. ‘Because that bastard Aplistos didn’t want to pay the taxes the Psilosians were charging his merchants. Never mind that nonsense about his wife running off with one of the Psilosian princes. Poor girl is younger than his youngest son, what would she want with that shriveled old penny pincher? Omorfia’s been Prothlitis’s ‘unwilling captive’ for more than six years and if the spies are correct they’re on their third child already. Pah.”

A horse bellowed behind him, causing Erastis to turn and watch as two wild spirited white horses charged towards him at full speed. Rather than retreat he sheathed his sword and stood his ground, earning a wide grin from the young man in the chariot behind them. “So, you survived again old man!”

Erastis couldn’t keep his lips from turning upwards into a quirky smile. Where Erastis was short and stocky, Neanias was tall and lithe, but only because it would have been impolite to call him skeletal, and while the drying mud covering Erastis was actually lighter in tone than the ebon skin it clung to, Neanias could disappear into a pile of snow just by standing still. “It seems Erebos is still willing to delay our meeting a mite longer, Neanias. Remind me to leave a little extra something with his priest tonight as thanks.”

“You know, you wouldn’t have to keep leaving him those extra offerings if you didn’t insist on running out in front of all of us every time the fighting started,” Neanias replied as he helped his mentor into the chariot. He gave the whips a quick snap, sending them hurtling back towards the Kakosian camp as fast as his horses could manage. “I understand that your guards are starting to complain about your enthusiasm.”

Erastis’s smile faded at the reminder. His guards were the cause of this enthusiasm. Six years ago, when the war with Psilos had started, he had been able to name every single one of the dozen men who made up his personal guard. Now the only one he was on any sort of familiar terms with was Skylos, the only surviving member of that original dozen, and it was possible the only reason he was still alive was Erastis’s absolute refusal to allow the other man to take the field any longer. He had tried to be as friendly with the replacements, but they were often dead all too soon, making it easier to just remain distant from them as people.

“It is not their responsibility for them to die just because I am a target,” Erastis said as they finally reached their camp.

“They are your guards,” Neanias pointed out as they dismounted. “It is their honor to be selected to stand by your side, and if needs be lay down their lives for your own. You do them a disservice by avoiding them. Others will think them cowards, or incompetent.”

“And what will their wives think, when we ship their swords and shields home while demanding they be replaced by their sons?” Erastis asked. “It is the duty of the king to live and die for his people, not to sit his throne on a carpet of their bodies. By drawing the enemy’s attention to myself I draw it away from them, so that when our ships finally sail for home there might be more men standing on their decks than laying in their holds.”

“What’s this about laying in a woman’s hold?” The voice that interrupted was loud and rough, like an avalanche of thunder. It owner was a tall, bald headed man by the name of Iroas, whose olive skin had been burnt a darker shade of brown by all his time spent fighting under the sun, save for a stretch of his right forearm that was almost paler than Neanias. It was the sign of limb replaced by magic, regrown rather than reattached, and such patchwork men were common on both sides of the fighting. Heliod’s priests refused to pick sides in any conflict, instead offering their services to those who could afford the proper offerings in accordance with Heliod’s dictates.

In theory, this was to preserve the sanctity of war. According to his priests, Heliod viewed war as the court of kings, where they would be judged by the quality of the men they could lead rather than a jury of their peers. To ensure such ‘trials’ remained pure the priests were responsible for healing wounds and preventing the natural spread of disease. A man might be shot full of arrows, run through by a spear, or his cut off by a sword, but he had nothing to fear where scurvy or dysentery might have been concerned. Limbs, too, were replaced, as well as wounds healed, on the belief that a soldier was dependent on his body, and to deprive him of it was to give his opponent an unnatural advantage.

(Of course, magical diseases were allowed to spread unchecked, as such were considered to be a viable, if double edged, weapon in a mage’s arsenal. Similarly, wounds acquired by accident or by assassination or other carelessness were ignored.)

In reality, Erastis thought it made war into a glorious rather than terrible thing, and that in itself spawned a new nightmare. A man who expected to be whole within two days took far more risks than a man who was forced to leave himself on the field, and the braver (or crazier) one acted the more likely he was to be held up as a hero, showered in the riches of his conquered enemies and the accolades of kin and countrymen. They never realized that their hollow glories were no more proof against Erebos’s gaze than an infant’s swaddling clothes. Erastis had watched more than one man get himself killed in the name of bravery, only for his son to step into his father’s place and make the same mistakes all over again.

Worse, it made the survivors too good at killing. A veteran was a survivor, and part of that was making sure their opponents never lived long enough to see the priests. Fresh troops were poured into the gaps in their ranks like olives into a press, and often with the same results. Some, yes, would live to become veterans themselves, and every once in a while a veteran would be claimed by Nylea’s choice, but never would the cycle break. It was as endless as the patterns used to decorate the walls of a Thassian temple.

The Psilosian war had lasted for six years. Six years of the fertile fields outside the city walls standing fallow. Six years of fathers away from their wives’ embraces, from watching their children play in the yard or making their first choices of adults. Six years of bloodshed and funerals. Six years of funerals, revenge, and more funerals.

It was enough to make a man sick.

“I’d pity the poor woman who ended up in the clutches of this lot of apes,” Erastis replied with a wane smile. “Not that I think half of them would know what to do with her in the first place!”

“Then just imagine how surprised she would be to find a real man amongst us!” Neanias said, giving his chest a thump as he grinned at the two older men. Unfortunately, his voice broke at the last word, rising to a high squeak.

“Try that boast when you have a bit more hair on your chest, lad,” Iroas advised him. “Or at least some on your chin, for a start. Still, I heard you managed to stand-off that bastard Nothos at the south gates this morning. Be proud of that, but be careful. Nothos isn’t one to forget a slight, and he will be looking for you come morning. If he finds you, fall back to me or Erastis. That one is god touched, he’ll be too much for you to handle alone.”

“I so swear,” Neanias acknowledged, crossing his arm over his chest and giving a formal bow. From anyone else his age Erastis might thought it sarcasm, but he knew that Neanias actually respected the two older men, and actually listened to their advice. It was one of the reasons that he had survived so long, despite his relative youth.

“Good, now go,” Iroas said, thumping the smaller man on the back. “There were some bulls on the last ships in, so if you hurry you might still be able to get some meat.”

The two men stood silently as the watched their younger compatriot race to the mess tents, and as soon as he was out of sight Iroas let out a heavy sigh. “I remember being that age. I spent each night in drunken revelry, competing with a band of satyrs to see who could handle more wenches in a night. I slept until Heliod was wandering back to his abode, then hunted for my dinner. I watch him spend every night wrapped in muddy blankets, eager for a few quick bites of meat that is really nothing more than scorched leather. How did we come to this?”

Erastis clapped the bigger man on the shoulder. “Because we are good men, and good men will follow a bad one when he speaks to their sense of honor and duty. Aplistos knew just what to say to manipulate us into this war, and I do not know if I should be proud or shamed to say that if I were presented the same arguments today that my decision would be the same, but that I would is not in doubt. And it is because we are good men that we stay, not out of some false sense of duty to that villain, but out of duty to our living and our dead.”

He paused and looked skyward, where the first stars were just appearing against the blue black sky. It was said that sky was truly the realm of Nyx, home of the Gods, and not for the first time did Erastis wonder if they could really see the struggles of the mortals below them. “Come, my friend, and let us go to the priests and pray that this might be over soon.”

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A/N: This pre-dates the current block by roughly 20 years from the start point. That should keep it from causing any problems with canon. Yes, I know there is a god named Iroas, but this is not he. I suspect that Creative and I are just equally lazy with naming things.

Quite an interesting tale, I must say.

Um, I've actually got a lot on my plate at the moment to read the Theros Planeswalker Guides, much less this; but once I get caught up, I'll make sure to come back and check this out. Therapy was extremely enjoyable despite my disdain for Innistrad and I've kept you in my "seriously good authors" area of my mind since then.