The rain slowly cascaded through from his hair, dripping past his nose and onto the muddied dirt beneath him.
Every droplet of water clung to the kneeling figure, like a mother to a dying child, inching towards acceptance. Acceptance of failure. His failure.
Face blurry under the shadows waning across his brows, the pale gleaming light of the moon seemed to resonate off of his body, creating an aura around him, glistening with revelry.
Gospels and priests would have described him as being angelic, artists would have depicted his stature as a king, and kings would have bowed before him as a divinity herself.
He would have been beautiful to behold, had it not been for his eyes.
Eyes that screamed against his soul. Eyes which pierced and maimed. Eyes that sought vengeance, the booming and surging of war. The hunger, the hate, the envy, the anguish. His eyes never blinked, never lost focus, and continually fumed with rage.
His eyes burned more fiercely than the war around him.
The musty rain filled with the smell of blood and ash. Dying men screaming into the night, of fear, of pain. Screaming his name, their hero to save them. Whispering his guilt, cursing his name.
A burning ember ricocheted off of his helm, screeching into the abyss of the downpour. hissing of betrayal, weeping of trust. His trust in his comrades in arms.
Comrades. The word stung against his flesh, aching in his heart. The fury he felt in his soul at their betrayal ravaged his body more than the poison from the blade they used to pierce it.
A guttural sound leaked from the gashed throat of the kneeling man with burning eyes.
Faint was the sound against the roaring of the war, yet so unmistakeable even amongst the clashing of steel and grinding of metal that it forced the woman walking away from him to whip around, back towards the dying man.
Laughter.
What a terrifying sound it was. A choking, gurgling laugh. Ripping through the posse of blood, a deep bounding chuckling.
Her face paled and her skin began to form goosebumps. The hair on the back of her neck leaped, seemingly revolting against her very skin. It shook her very bones, striking her to her very core. She scrambled for her blade, but realized too late her scabbard was empty. The blade she reached for had already been used on him.
In a flash, a hand bolted from the corpse, seizing her neck and lifting her above its head. Panicked, Ilydia struggled to grip the blade from his chest, fingers scraping and slipping against the blood and the rain. Failing to reach it, she scraped and kicked against the man, bashing and digging her nails into the hand around her neck, struggling desperately to do anything to free herself from him. Fingernails drawing blood and clumps of flesh began to peel off from her attempts, but the hand refused to yield. A face with no emotion, a gargoyle roosted in perch.
The other hand of the man reached for the blade, savagely yanking it out from where it was embedded deep into his chest, and in a fluid motion, impaled its edge into her gaping neck. In continued fluidity, the knife carved through, completely severing her head from her now lifeless body. Seemingly suspended, it slid from her torso, as blood covered the man head to toe, erupting like a volcano from his victim, a bath of Baal.
If he had been admired as a hero during life, the creature that stood before his doom now radiated a demon of bloodlust. A cruel symphony of precision and death. An instrument of carnage.
Where had it all gone wrong?
His comrades. His friends. The others. After the start of the battle they had deserted their positions at the pivotal moment in battle, leaving him alone to face the final Echelon despite their plan to maintain formation. And when he barely managed to defeat it, they attacked his worn and exhausted body, stabbing him in the chest with a poisoned dagger, using the chance to quickly escape. All except Ilaydia, the Daughter of Mercy. What a joke the name seemed.
Ilaydia. Lucius. Joffrey. Groken. Even Dyur? All of them betrayed me?
He had been so close. The end had been right in front of him. He could have seen his family again.
Never had he shed a tear, not after his realization that he would never be able to see his family , nor after losing his sister, nor after countless failures and years of torment he had endured in slavery, as a mercenary. And yet bitter tears formed for the first time. Too weak to lament further, to roar his frustration, Dartyr silently wept, his tears becoming mixed with the rain, trickling down his face and onto the knife in his hands. Mixing with the grime and mud, seeping into the dirt
His fist tightened around Ilydia's blade. He could barely make out the crest on its handle, a coiling serpent. The Mark of Tyr.
Trying to keep himself upright with the last of his might, the final wake of vengeance left his body. Dartyr crumpled to the ground, his worn body finally collapsing from the strenuousness of combat.
His eyes, once raging like a thousand suns, faded into deep oblivion, as Dartyr fell face forward into the grimy mud, his body tumbling down the mountain of littered corpses behind him, falling into an eternal rest.