Erhard has a minion!

Silence the Conflict

premade profile by Chen

The city has never been this quiet.

In all of the years I’ve been king, I’ve never been able to hear the echo of my footsteps bounce from building to building as I ascended the throne on the overlook. It has never been this deafeningly silent, not even in the beginning when my empire was not an empire but a village.

The silence screams to be let in. In it, I imagine I can hear my people wailing as the invaders smashed their heads in with their boots, as they cut through soft flesh with gleaming swords in the soft candlelight, as they tore down curtains looking for whimpering children.

Not my baby please not my baby

No. It has never been like this. Nothing like this.

If only I'd had some forewarning, some notice, maybe I could have called the soldiers to their posts. Maybe I could have organized something. Anything. Maybe I wouldn’t have to stand here listening to the ghosts of their screams as the rain dilutes the blood on the cobblestone.

But their army was too large, too quick, too disciplined. They came from nowhere. We wouldn’t have been prepared if I’d have been given a year’s notice. They were too strong.

It took them seven days to kill all of my people. They slaughtered without discrimination. Soldiers, civilians, women, children – it didn’t matter. If they were mine, they were dead. Seven days to kill seven hundred thousand. I can’t say they weren’t thorough. They left not one child crying for mercy on the bloody street.

But they did leave a man.

And so here I am. Aloneness. Isolation. I have felt it before – but this time the sheer seclusion is more extreme than it has ever been. More surreal. Even before my army was large, before all of the conquests and the immigration, I’d always had a small group of reliable soldiers and friends. But not this time. This time they are gone, and it is just me.

The invaders came at night, shrouded in darkness. I suspect that they killed hundreds on their way to the castle. The guards must have been first. I can imagine the arrows hitting each and every one of them, picking them off and leaving the gate open and vulnerable. They were expert killers, quick and efficient. If the loss hadn’t been so painful I might have envied their skills.

I wonder what might have happened if the bridges to the castle had been drawn. But it will do no good to ponder the what ifs. We hadn’t drawn the bridges that night – hadn’t in years, because we’d had no need to with the prevailing peace in the kingdom – and so they rode in unassuming. There was no alarm. There was no resistance. There was no army to protect my people. I hadn’t been ready.

I awoke to the cold, pinching sensation of a sword pressed against my throat. A man in a veil stood over me. His eyes were golden and haunted and they were, I thought, as he pushed the tip of the sword further into my skin and watched me squirm, disturbingly familiar.

When he withdrew the veil I remembered him. It had been over a decade, but I never could have forgotten his face. After all, I remember everyone that I have killed. I think it’s their eyes. The fear. A thousand different eyes, the same choked fear.

His face was harder, more rugged, and he had, through that miracle called aging, grown facial hair. Seeing him dragged me back decades, kicking and screaming, in a millisecond, to the hot summer night that we raided the nomads of the steppe. We called them the wolf tribe.

I will make no excuse: we were brutal with them. We showed them no mercy. How could I show them mercy without showing them weakness?

This was, of course, when I had my fledgling army of misfit recruits. This was before I had all my subjects and before I made the conquests that brought the other empires to their knees and before my land was a kingdom. This was before I was mighty.

In short, we were brutal – but necessarily so.

We came at night as they slept in their tents. My band of rogues was equipped with knives raided from the steel merchants in the East. Our numbers were small but my fighters were skilled. I handled the guards myself, cupping their mouths with one hand and slitting their throats with the other. They breathed their last breaths into my palm. In those days I was a god.

I had my men on the flank set fire to the tents in rapid succession. We smoked out their camp. That was the first stage. I told the rest to pan out, kill the resistors, and take captives.

This was how my empire began. I can’t say that my kingdom had noble roots. I would be lying if I did. But the end result was worth it, at least for as long as it lasted. We were prosperous and peaceful for well on two decades. We controlled the iron moving across the trade routes. Immigrants poured in. No one rose against us – until the wolves came for me.

In the distance there is howling, mournful howling, and the crackle of flames as the tents burn

While my men looted and raided, I captured the king. He was taller than me by a head and a half, a giant by men’s standards, and his eyes were flecked with gold. His teeth were sharpened to points. The wolf pelt on his back shook when he snarled at me.

But he bent before me when I pressed my sword to his neck. In the end we are all like this: shameless, pathetic. Yielding. But there was no fear in his eyes, only hatred. Beside him, his daughter whimpered. His son growled, jaw clenched.

When I grabbed the girl and pulled her towards me, the king made to stand. I pushed my sword further into his neck until little red-black droplets welled in the hollows above his collarbones. His chest moved rapidly and he warned me not to put my hands on her. When his son lunged my men tossed him back like an animal. I signaled to one of my men to restrain him.

The king closed his eyes. And then he opened them and spit at me and I slit his throat in front of his children and I watched as the blood flowed unbidden and stained his wolf pelt.

Mercy is weakness. It always has been.

The boy screamed and wrestled his arms free. He ran to his father and placed his hands on the wound to staunch the flow of blood. But it was too late. The blood gushed out in thick waves, escaping between his fingers. The king’s head lolled, slit gaping. The girl’s eyes rolled back into her head and she slumped to the floor.

Father please father no father no no what have they done to you

I can remember his eyes, then, when I turned to walk out of the tent. They were hot coals and his teeth were knives and he told me to go, go, go away, to never come back, to run as far away as I could before he could get his hands on me and tear me apart.

What have you done to him

I left them there, village burning around them. I thought I’d imagined his shrill scream and I shrugged it off and walked out of the suffocating heat of the burning village and into the crisp black air of the steppe.

I’ll deal you a hand worse than death

But that was long ago. That was before I had my loyal subjects, before my empire grew large, before I was feared. But the fear dulled us: my army has been dormant for many years.

And there he was again. The boy. The same yellow eyes, the same dark skin. He was tall, taller than me by half a head, and he looked like his father. I might have thought him his father if his beard had been longer.

But I had killed his father, and I thought that I had killed him too. He should have died, both he and his sister, in the midst of the burning village with miles to go and no food and nothing to trade.

But he was there, his sister beside him, mouth curled into a snarl. Behind them, their wolves growled. I felt foolish, yes, a fat old man lying dully in bed quivering at the tip of a sword. It was probably the pity in their eyes that was the worst.

What have you done to him

They told me that it was over. That they had been waiting their whole lives to do to me what I had done to them, and now they had done it. All of this, for vengeance.

But they wouldn’t do as I did to their father. They said it was weak. There were other ways to inflict pain.

I’ll deal you a hand worse than death

His voice was almost too soft for the sharp accent. He was a living contradiction.

“I could kill you right now. Cut your soft neck. Watch your blood pool on the floor. But that would be too easy for you.”

His sister had nodded, running her dagger along my jaw. The blood made my beard sticky. My mouth was metallic. The taste of fear.

“No. That would be much too easy. Too merciful.”

I’ll deal you a hand worse than death

And so they left as quickly and quietly as they had come, on black horses, with the black wolves moving beside them, an army garbed in all black under cover of night.

And now I am here, on the overlook, suspended a million leagues above the streets. But I can still smell the tart reek of blood on pavement. I can still hear the ghosts of swords echoing through the alleyways. I can still hear the screams. I can smell the rotting flesh of the corpses in the alleys. I cannot rest. There is not a man who can sleep in a city of the dead.

They left little more than a fortnight ago. Since then, I haven’t slept a night in the sickening silence. My empire is no longer. But I am still here, a show with no audience, a book with no reader, a king with no one to rule. They had spared me but it was not out of mercy.

Worse than death

What is it that I have always said?

Mercy is weakness.

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Wonderful story by Europa.