A Quiet Morning
Would his footprints have sunk even deeper if his heart had carried more weight?
In the early hours before dawn, Beck walked slowly toward the kingdom's encampment.
The night was tilting toward its end, yet the hour was still too early to call morning. The cold air blanketing the northern plain proved, without a word, that the night had not yet fully released its hold on the land. From the damp earth rose the faint scent of dew that had settled through the dark. Grass grown as high as a man's waist brushed against itself whenever the wind passed through, and each time a low, quiet friction drifted across the plain. Far off, a nameless bird called once, short and sharp. The sound circled the endless field and sank back into silence.
Only one person cut across that wide expanse.
Beck Chereson.
He was alone. With nothing but his own two legs and the sword at his hip, he crossed the northern plain.
With every step he took, the wet earth pressed down beneath him. He heard the firm sound of his boot soles packing the ground. Damp soil slowly gave way along the edges. Dew that had pooled in the deep prints seeped quietly into the soil.
He had walked the same way toward collapsing gates. He had walked the same way on mountain paths where blood had frozen solid. He had walked the same stride across the red carpet leading to a victory ceremony. The way he walked had never changed. Not when he went toward death. Not when he returned alive.
The northern wind slowly stirred the hem of his coat. Cold air brushed past his face. His graying hair moved with the wind, then settled back into place.
Beck narrowed his eyes and looked into the distance. It was land so vast that humans could fight and die for a lifetime and still fail to soak it all in blood. Across that wide ground, countless nations had raised their swords to plant their own banners. Countless young men had returned to the earth without leaving even a name behind.
Beck had passed through all those years. Perhaps he had sat in that place too long. It no longer seemed strange to count his own life among those same numbers. If today was that day, he would accept it. If that was enough to end the war, it was enough.
He was not walking this road to come back alive. If survival had been the goal, he would have brought a legion. He would have brought thousands of knights and mages, siege engines and support troops. He would have calculated the safest possible victory. But Beck walked alone. Because he had judged this a road that had to be taken alone.
If a war could be ended with one man's life, that was a far cheaper price than burning another legion. That was the conclusion Commander-in-Chief Beck Chereson had reached.
He drew a calm breath. The cold dawn air sank deep into his lungs. The breath he slowly released became white vapor and scattered into the empty air. Even that white vapor did not linger long. The northern wind took it almost at once.
How far had he walked? Beyond the horizon, faint shadows began to take shape one by one. Low wooden palisades. Watchtowers. Thin smoke rising from campfires kept alive through the night. And behind them, the long stretch of the kingdom's encampment.
Beck did not stop walking. He knew what waited for him there. So he walked more slowly. He walked forward without the slightest waver.
Beck halted before the kingdom's camp when only a few dozen paces remained to the palisade. What moved first was not the kingdom's army. It was the wind. The dawn breeze that had been skimming the plain shifted as if changing direction, and through the cold northern air a single black robe gradually came into view.
At first only the robe was visible. Between the dawn mist and the shadows of the palisade, black cloth swayed quietly, and beneath that cloth small footsteps pressed one by one into the plain's earth.
Not one of the kingdom's soldiers gave an order. They simply made way, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Soldiers with spears. Archers with fingers still on their bowstrings. Knights who had planted their shields. As though the path had been decided long ago, they fell back to either side without a word.
At the end of that path, a person walked out.
The black robe swayed softly with the dawn wind. Silver hair freed from a thrown-back hood caught the first thin light of the rising sun and glowed faintly. That light was not cold like a blade. It was not light like snow either. It was as if the thinnest light that hangs at the edge of the sky before dawn fully touches the world had settled on every single strand of her hair.
The face revealed beneath the robe was small and pale. Even amid the dust of the battlefield and the chill of dawn, it was strangely vivid. A faint weariness lingered at the corners of her eyes, and small shadows lay beneath her lashes as if she had not truly slept through the night. Even so, that fatigue did not blur her face. If anything, because of that faint exhaustion, she looked less like a sacred figure from a painting and more like a person who had simply walked out onto this ground. And that fact held the eye all the more tightly.
Red eyes turned toward Beck. Those eyes shone with a calm, deep crimson, as if a very old sunset had been locked inside clear jewels.
The black robe hid her body, yet because of that the white face, silver hair, and red eyes stood out all the more sharply. The word witch slid oddly aside before her beauty. The word saint did not fit completely either. In the cold-touching light of dawn, she was pale and quiet enough not to belong on a battlefield—and at the same time she existed with such certainty that she drew every gaze on that field.
Beck looked at her. He had never lived as a man who lingered long over beautiful things. To a commander of the field, beauty was often a dangerous illusion, and the moment a man with a sword lost his eyes usually came back as the price of his life. So Beck looked at a person's stance before their face. The position of the hands. The direction of the toes. The depth of the breath. The speed at which the gaze shifted. Those things were a more precise language to him.
And yet Lakia slowed his judgment for a moment. Clad in a black robe, silver hair streaming in the dawn wind, red eyes fixed straight ahead—somehow that ordinary movement was changing the air of the battlefield. Beck quietly acknowledged the fact.
The Dragon Witch. That was what the soldiers called her. That was how she was written in the reports. But the being standing before him now was strangely too quiet to be held in the single word witch, and too dangerous to be called a flower blooming in the middle of a cruel battlefield. Flowers do not summon dragons that set the sky on fire.
Lakia walked at her usual unhurried pace and stopped quietly a few steps from Beck. Silence passed for a moment. The dawn wind brushed between them. From far off came only the faint sound of a banner stirring.
Lakia looked up at Beck without a word. Broad shoulders. A body tempered by a lifetime of holding a sword. At his hip, a blade that would not even let light remain. And more than any of those things, the stance of a man who stood without a single tremor even with death before him.
A very faint smile touched the corner of her mouth.
"Hello, Sword of the Empire."
Her voice was not loud. Even so, it carried clearly on the quiet of the dawn. It was a greeting. But it also held the meaning of acknowledging the one before her.
Beck looked at her for a moment without speaking. A name he had only read in reports. A presence he had heard of through the mouths of countless soldiers. And now, the woman standing before his eyes. He opened his mouth very slowly.
"...Dragon Witch."
In that short form of address there was no mockery, no hostility, no anger. There was only the calm recognition of a knight who had crossed countless battlefields, finally calling the one he faced as she was.
Lakia's brow lifted slightly.
"Witch, is it."
She murmured softly.
"I'd rather you called me Mother of Dragons."
A few of the kingdom's soldiers blinked at a tone so out of place for the situation. Beck, too, fell silent for the briefest moment.
"That title would be difficult to write in a report."
"Imperial reports always did look dull."
"True enough."
Only then did Lakia smile faintly. The smile was brief. Like a tiny lantern lit for a moment at dawn and then gone, it rose on her face and sank almost at once. But even that short smile was enough to shake the gazes of the soldiers around them. It was a face that did not belong on a battlefield. In a place thick with the smell of blood and ash and iron, the mere fact that someone so beautiful could stand there as if it were nothing felt unreal. And at the same time, that unreality was the most certain reality of this field.
Beck did not change his expression at that smile. He had lost his gaze to Lakia's beauty, yet it did not unmake him. A swordsman who has lived long still measures the distance of the blade even before something beautiful. He looked at the space between Lakia and himself. A few steps. An awkward range for drawing the Lightless Sword and reaching her in a single motion. Enough distance for an ordinary person. But for the Dragon Witch, it might mean nothing at all.
He looked near her shadow. On ground faintly laid with dawn light, her shadow stretched small and thin. Yet the air around that shadow wavered ever so slightly. As if an invisible blade were holding its breath. Beck filed that movement away.
Lakia was watching Beck as well. Up close, the Imperial First Sword was far larger than the reports had suggested. Broad shoulders and a thick neck, a coat that seemed to have put on old battlefields as they were, and below his hip a scabbard quietly swallowing light.
The Lightless Sword.
Lakia knew how many people that blade had cut. A veteran character she had rather liked. But she thought she could guess a little of how the man who wore that sword had lived. A man who held a sword only to cut things did not stand like that. A man who killed only as ordered did not stand like that. Beck Chereson wore the face of someone calculating death. And in that calculation, he included himself.
Lakia blinked very slowly.
"You came alone?"
Beck answered without shifting his gaze.
"If I brought an army, I'd only be teaching the dragons more ways to kill imperial troops."
His voice was low and heavy. It did not sound like a threat. It did not sound like an excuse either. It was the tone of a man who had already reached a conclusion and was briefly stating the reason attached to it.
Lakia moved her brow for a moment.
"They already seem to know quite well."
"Then there's no need for them to learn more."
A faint breath mixed into the end of Beck's words. Too dry to call a laugh, a little too light to call a sigh. Hearing it, Lakia realized this man knew how to joke more than she had expected.
"Did you come here to die?"
The breathing of the kingdom's army stiffened all at once. It was far too blunt a question. But Beck showed no sign of offense. He looked down at Lakia quietly, then slowly shook his head.
"I came to end a war already heading for ruin... with this old man's life alone."
Lakia closed her mouth for a moment at that answer. He seemed to have no attachment to surviving, yet he was not drunk on dying either. These were not the eyes of a man intoxicated by words like an honorable death or a final duel. He had calculated how far the war would burn, and he had judged that he could throw his own body into the fire to cut it short. Whether that judgment was right or wrong was another matter entirely.
Lakia let out a small breath.
"For an imperial man, you say strange things."
"I dislike insults that miss the mark," Beck said. "Accurate insults are occasionally useful."
The corner of Lakia's mouth moved very faintly. It was the expression just short of a smile. But in the end she did not smile. She lowered her gaze to Beck's hip. The Lightless Sword rested quietly in its scabbard. Even so, the light nearby seemed a little darker only around it. It was not that the sword threatened first so much as that the world itself seemed to avoid that blade of its own accord.
"You came to draw your sword, then?"
"I did."
"Against whom?"
"The strongest."
Beck did not hesitate. He was a commander-in-chief who had come alone to spare his army, and at the same time a knight who refused to betray, to the very end, the years he had lived with a sword in hand. A man who meant to end a war. And a man who meant to choose for himself where his blade should go. Both lived in the same body. That balance was precarious, but it was not ridiculous.
Lakia asked without taking her eyes from him.
"Do you know how many of my children there are?"
Beck's eyes shifted minutely.
"From the reports, several."
"Several isn't enough."
"I suppose not."
"It's been a long time since I counted them properly, but..."
Lakia spoke with a faintly awkward look. That face was so beautiful it did not belong in the middle of a battlefield, and a few soldiers felt a strange sensation. Was an expression like that allowed on a blood-soaked plain?
"Even so, it easily passes a hundred."
The moment those words fell, the dawn air grew a little colder. Beck said nothing. He did not close his eyes, and he did not let his expression crack. He only drew a breath very slowly.
The being that had burned an imperial legion was one. The being that had come down from the sky and erased soldiers and shields and barriers without distinction was one. And of such things—a hundred.
Beck set that number in his mind. Then he set the Empire's strength beneath it. The equations of war the Empire had built over decades moved rapidly through his head. The conclusion came quickly. It shattered. Too simply. Too hollowly.
Killing one would not end it. Killing two would not end it. Even if, by some miracle, he severed the neck of the strongest dragon today and lived, the next dragon would still be in the sky, and the next after that, and beyond them wings too many to number. Every method by which the Empire had pressed Heireden lost its meaning here. Front lines meant nothing. Supply lines meant nothing. Morale, command structure, formation, training—none of it. The moment the number of dragons passed a hundred, a human war struggled to keep the name of war.
Beck accepted that fact. Accepting it did not take long. Humans often die late because they hate reality. Beck had discarded that luxury long ago.
He laughed softly. This time it was unmistakably a laugh. Low and short. A few of the kingdom's soldiers felt their spines go cold at the sound. No one who could laugh in this situation would look sane. But Lakia knew that laugh was not the laugh of a madman. It was hollowness. The laugh of a man who had realized that the conclusion he had come out to stake his life on had already been insufficient from the moment he set out.
"A hundred," Beck said slowly. "I arrived late."
Lakia did not answer. Beck looked at her again. There was no emptiness in those eyes of the kind a broken man might show. Only the conclusion had shifted a little. He had come to end the war. That judgment remained. Only the new addition was this: it was not a war his sword alone could end.
He lowered his right hand very slowly. His fingertips came to rest near the scabbard. He did not draw. The kingdom's army tensed even at that small motion. Spear tips wavered. Bowstrings drew a little tighter. But Lakia did not raise her hand. Something stirred very faintly near her shadow, yet when she pressed it down with only a glance, the presence vanished again. Beck saw that movement as well. Something invisible stood at her side. Likely another dragon. The empty places in the Empire's intelligence filled themselves like this. He did not ask. The question he needed now was a different one.
"One request."
Lakia's eyes narrowed. In that moment her red eyes caught the dawn light and shone more vividly. They were beautiful eyes. But that beauty was not the kind that put people at ease. It was a transparent beauty that seemed as if it would cut your fingertips if you came too close.
"A request?"
"Call the strongest of your children."
Those words meant, in short, summon the most terrible catastrophe to this place. Beck knew exactly what he was saying. That was why he was all the calmer.
"I have no wish to leave behind the story that the Imperial First Sword cut down a weak opponent."
For the first time, Lakia's expression hardened a little. The wish not to bend, even at the final moment, the direction his sword had faced for a lifetime. That was the way of the man called Beck Chereson, the way he had kept to the end within the Empire.
Lakia looked at him for a long while. The hem of her black robe stirred lightly in the wind. A few strands of silver hair slipped down across her cheek. The silver strands against white skin and the red eyes were unnaturally vivid among the rough colors of the battlefield. Even when she tilted her head only slightly, the soldiers' gazes followed. That beauty was soft, but it was not weak. If anything, it was so quiet that it made those who looked unable to speak carelessly.
Lakia did not brush the fallen hair aside. She only looked at Beck and spoke low.
"That's the request of a man who came to die."
"The courtesy of a man who came to end it."
Beck's answer returned at once.
"My sword has faced the strongest enemy all my life."
He continued very slowly.
"I have no wish to abandon that principle to the last."
Lakia lowered her eyes. Briefly—only for a very short moment. In Beck's words she did not see the Empire. She saw the person remaining inside them. The Empire taught efficiency. It taught how to weigh usefulness, reduce losses, and clear away the weak. That a man who had earned the name Imperial First Sword in such a country should, at the end, be holding not efficiency but a principle left a strangely bitter taste.
Lakia murmured softly.
"The Empire raises people strangely."
"That one is close to an accurate insult."
"It's not something to laugh about."
"I know."
Beck raised his head. His gaze went past Lakia toward the kingdom's encampment and the sky stretched beyond it. The sun had not yet fully risen. But the east was brightening little by little. The blue light of early dawn spread across the black plain. Soon everything would become visible. The blood-dried earth. The burned wagons. The broken spears. The faces of soldiers waiting for the next battle for no reason but that they had survived. And the dragon that would come down from the sky.
Lakia finally lifted her head. Dawn light struck her face full on.
"You might regret it."
"I already do," Beck said.
"And you're still going?"
"And I still came."
Silence settled between them again. The two stood in the same place and, each in their own way, accepted what was about to happen.
Lakia slowly drew a breath. The breath was small. Yet the kingdom's army strangely did not miss that moment. The soldiers knew by instinct. Something was beginning. With nothing more than that beautiful, small woman drawing a breath, the weight of this wide plain was changing.
Lakia did not look up at the sky. She did not raise her hand high. She did not chant a spell. She only spoke a single name in a very low voice.
"Alduin."
At first nothing happened. The wind flowed as before, and the banners above the palisade still stirred in the same direction. Dawn light continued to spread slowly across the plain. A few of the kingdom's soldiers glanced at one another. In that brief gap someone may have thought they had tensed for nothing. But Beck did not move. He looked at the sky. The sense of a man who had survived old battlefields was already answering. The air grew heavy. The grain of the wind changed. Distant clouds trembled. And very far away, somewhere in a sky where the sun had not yet fully risen, a low and vast resonance began to spread.
Grrrrrooooom.
The sound resembled thunder. But it was lower than thunder. The horses on the plain went mad first. The kingdom's warhorses kicked the ground and screamed, and from the direction of the stables urgent shouts from soldiers burst out. Soldiers with spears looked up at the sky. Archers lowered their bows without realizing it. Knights with shields raised them a little higher, yet their faces already knew that it meant nothing.
Beck slowly lifted his head. One side of the sky was darkening. It was not that clouds had covered the sun. Something was flying toward them. So vast that, even still far away, it seemed to be devouring the dawn light. Each time the enormous wings moved once, the edges of the clouds tore. Each time they moved twice, the grass across the plain began to lie flat in a single direction. Black scales shone first out of the darkness. Between them, golden eyes opened.
Beck saw those eyes. And he laughed, very softly.
"Good."
A vast shadow finally fell over the two of them. The dawn light vanished. The entire northern plain entered the shade of black wings.
The King of Dragons was descending.