Steel had not yet clashed, but the war had already begun.
Along the contested borders, the air was thick with whispers—disguised merchants bearing tidings too neat to be coincidence, intercepted letters scrawled with figures and troop placements, innkeepers repeating rumors planted like seeds.
Hiral sat bent over a low table, the parchment before him spread like a patient under a physician's hand.
The reports from the Ro border came in torrents: supply lines moving north, fortifications weakening along the river, whispers of famine among the Ro ranks.
It was too clean. Too convenient. Alexis's hand was all over it.
"Falsehoods," Hiral murmured, tracing the ink with his finger, "but crafted with purpose."
Tirin frowned. "Then what's true, General?"
"Not the words themselves," Hiral said softly, his eyes narrowing, "but the choice of lies. Every omission, every misdirection tells me what Alexis wants us to believe. And what he wants us to believe… is not what he believes himself."
Rather than hurling his own falsehoods into the current, Hiral chose another path. He let rumors breathe and twist on their own.
A whisper of cavalry strength here, a suggestion of secret stockpiles there—subtle strokes, never enough to be traced back, but just enough to blur the truth.
While Alexis built illusions, Hiral stirred fog.
Time and confusion were his allies, buying him the chance to gather scraps of truth hidden beneath Alexis's design.
Yet Alexis was no less sharp.
From his camp across the borderlands, Alexis had anticipated Hiral's mind. He knew Hiral would sift falsehoods for meaning, weighing what was left unsaid more than what was written.
So Alexis turned the blade upon itself. Information marked to be false, so neatly misleading, was sometimes made true.
Troop placements that looked like traps were, in fact, real. Supplies supposedly vulnerable were genuinely exposed.
If Hiral tested the surface, he risked mistaking truth for trick, and trick for truth.
Thus the two danced unseen, a war of shadows where no soldier fell, but where each move forced the other closer to hesitation.
In their respective camps, both commanders knew: the other sought not destruction but delay.
Neither rushed for bloodshed, both maneuvering in silence, as though hoping the war might break without breaking the men who would be crushed beneath it.
It was a battle of wits, of mirrored hesitation.
****
It began in the market square of a border town—nothing more than an afternoon quarrel that should have died with the dust kicked up by wagons.
A merchant, broad-shouldered and quick-tempered, struck a Ro scout across the jaw.
His wife's family hailed from Eldara, and his tongue loosed in rage, he screamed of slaughtered kin and Ro treachery. The scout, startled and surrounded by foreign eyes, drew steel in defense.
Before blood could even dry on the cobblestones, an old woman, her hair white as frost, shoved her way through the crowd. Her voice, sharp as a knife, cut across the square.
"Lies! It was the Eastern Alliance that drew first blood! You cover their sins with your accusations!"
Her gnarled finger stabbed toward another merchant—a trader from an Eastern nation, whose son now marched under Hiral's banner.
The crowd fractured in an instant. Shouts turned to fists, fists to blades. By the time the city watch broke through, the Ro scout lay bleeding from his side, and the Eastern merchant clutched his ribs, blood soaking through his tunic.
The damage was already done.
Word of the skirmish spread like wildfire. By the time it reached Alexis's camp, men were shouting for retribution.
The Ro army, already stretched thin by weeks of wary marching through hostile towns and scrutinizing eyes, seized the excuse like dry tinder catching flame.
"They call us murderers—let us show them what real murderers look like!" one noble son bellowed, drunk on his own imagined glory. Others joined, stirring men who were already frayed by hunger, fatigue, and suspicion.
Alexis rode among them, teeth grit, his hands white-knuckled on the reins.
"Stand down!" he barked, again and again. His words bounced off restless armor and youthful arrogance. The noble sons, pampered in peace but starved for reputation, were the worst—shouting for swift vengeance, their voices louder than his commands.
He cursed under his breath, cursing the king who had saddled him with them, cursing their horses, cursing fate itself.
More than once, he thought bitterly that it would be a mercy if the fools tumbled from their mounts and broke their necks.
But his men would not be reined in forever. They were already marching faster, drawn by anger and fear, spurred by pride.
On the other side, Hiral watched the reports come in with measured calm. His camp, by contrast, was steady—no shouts, no panic, no rash calls for blood.
His men tightened their ranks, sharpened their blades, cleaned their gear, and waited for his word. They had learned, from his years of leading beside them, that patience was as much a shield as any armor.
Tirin remarked as he folded one of the intercepted missives, "The timing… too sudden, too wide-spread. Someone wanted this chaos lit."
Hiral gave a small nod. "A staged fire. But even a staged fire can consume forests if left untended." His gaze lingered on the maps. His men's loyalty steadied him, but unease coiled in his chest.
If Ro was forced to march faster, then the moment of confrontation—one he had labored to delay—was no longer a distant specter. It was at their heels.
And soon, no words, no shadows, no cunning would be enough to hold back the storm.
****
The reports came almost at the same hour, as though fate enjoyed its cruel sense of symmetry.
In Hiral's tent, the parchment bore the Empress's seal—her hand unseen but her intent clear. The merchant who had struck the Ro scout had been nudged to fury, his grief fanned by whispers carefully planted by one of her agents.
"Blood will draw the people's gaze more than silence," the note concluded. So she grows impatient with shadows and silence, Hiral thought grimly. Bored of waiting, she reaches for spectacle.
Across the plains, Alexis crushed a sealed letter in his hand. His scouts had uncovered the truth—an old woman had not wandered into that market by chance.
She had been bought with silver by a young noble son eager for the scent of blood. Alexis's jaw tightened, his body vibrating with the strain of keeping his composure.
The urge to drag that puffed-up parasite from his gilded tent and choke the life out of him was nearly overwhelming. Instead, he turned away, breath hissing through his teeth. I march with wolves, and they dare call themselves men.
Both leaders sighed in the same night, separated by distance, bound by circumstance.
Two generals tethered to follies they did not author, watching as chaos was scripted above their heads by hands too proud and too reckless.
That night, the moon rose full, silver and pitiless.
Hiral slipped from his command tent without a sound, his cloak catching the light like a shadow unfurling. He had left orders, had left his men secure, but still restlessness gnawed at him.
Seran, seated on a stool just beyond, caught his movement.
"Riding out?" Seran asked quietly, his voice even, without reproach.
"For air," Hiral answered, the words short, steady.
Seran inclined his head, no more questions. His eyes lingered, though, as Hiral swung into the saddle and rode beyond the watchfires.
The barren lands stretched an hour away—a vast sweep of stone and sand where wind keened against the cliffs.
He remembered the view well: wide skies, the kind that reminded men how small they were, how fleeting.
Perhaps, if the gods had mercy, he might find peace there, before the storm demanded his every thought.
But what he did not know was that another rider had the same destination in mind.
Two days ago, Alexis had left his camp under the excuse of scouting routes, though in truth his generals could chart the terrain without him.
He had needed distance—needed silence—needed the barren lands where the noise of command could not follow.
The cliff was etched in his memory, a place carved not by maps but by moments. He could still feel the cool press of night wind against his face, still recall the way the moonlight had burnished stone into silver.
And more vividly than anything else—Hiral's figure standing there, poised between shadow and light.
That night had begun with steel.
[In one fluid motion, Alexis had found himself pinned, Hiral's blade unsheathed in silence, its edge angled at the vulnerable hollow of his throat. A knee pressing him down, a hand gripping his shoulder with precise, unyielding force—until recognition flared.
Then the knife-wielder froze.
"…You?" Hiral murmured, breath steady but taut.
He drew back as swiftly as he'd struck, retreating with a smoothness born of endless discipline. His blade vanished into its sheath, leaving only the ghost of its touch.
"My apologies," Hiral said, voice controlled, too controlled. "I didn't expect company."
Alexis had rubbed the spot where death had hovered, unable to help the amused glint in his eyes despite the lingering chill.
"You didn't just move fast. You moved like a ghost trained to haunt generals." He had laughed softly then. "How fortunate you recognized me before I lost a pint of blood."
Hiral did not laugh. Instead, he had tossed him a small tin of herbal balm.
"You're still not denying it," Alexis had said, brow arched. "That you're not the grand general everyone fears."
"I'm giving you medicine," came the flat reply.
Alexis's laugh had rung into the night, startling against the stillness of the barren cliffs. "So you're sticking to the mystery act. Fine. Be the elusive shadow man with a dagger in the dark."]
Now, Alexis had found himself whispering to the silence what he had not dared speak aloud:
How I wish to meet Hiral, the not-General Hiral…
Now, as he stood once more at the edge of the same desolate horizon, his chest tightened with a restlessness he could not name.
The war had dragged them to opposite ends of duty, yet here, in the wasteland between kingdoms, he longed for another stolen encounter.
For the quiet honesty that had slipped between them under moonlight, unburdened by banners, crowns, or titles.
And as fate—or something crueler—would have it, they were both drawn again to the same solitude.
Two men, two paths, converging not by strategy but by yearning.
Enemies in name, yet seekers of the same barren horizon, where the silence might once more bridge the chasm between them.