War is not a song sung by poets. War is a nineteen-year-old boy lying in a frozen ditch with his intestines in his hands, crying for his mother while the snow covers his face.
It was the second month of the great siege. King Olaf and the Swedes had surrounded Axiomra. The temperature had plummeted to a bone-snapping minus twenty degrees.
During a brutal, chaotic skirmish outside the southern gate to destroy a Swedish battering ram, an Axiomran scout named Kael was separated from his unit. Kael was a "Silk-Born," a boy raised on the Giant's beef and math. He had never known true horror.
A sudden, blinding blizzard swept through the valley, reducing visibility to zero. Kael stumbled through the deep snow, his leg bleeding from a spear graze. He fell into a deep ravine, seeking shelter from the lethal wind.
He was not alone in the dark.
A Swedish mercenary had fallen into the same ravine. His collarbone was shattered.
By the laws of war, they should have drawn their daggers and killed each other. But the cold does not care about crowns or flags. The cold only kills.
As the night wore on, the shivering became violent. The Swedish man began to weep, his teeth chattering so hard they chipped. Kael, the educated Axiomran, looked at the man who had come to burn his city. He saw no demon. He just saw a terrified, dying farmer from Uppsala.
Without a word, Kael crawled across the snow. He lay down back-to-back with the Swedish mercenary. They pulled their heavy wool cloaks over both of them, pressing their bodies together to share their core heat. The Axiomran and the Swede, enemies sworn to kill each other, huddled in the freezing mud like frightened children, keeping each other alive through the longest night of their lives.
When morning broke, Kael woke up. The man pressed against his back was stiff and cold. The Swede had died in the night.
Kael respectfully took the dead man's thick fur coat to survive the walk back, leaving his own blood-stained Green Tunic over the Swede's face.
But when Kael finally limped back to the stone gates of Axiomra, there was no hero's welcome.
The recent spy attacks had poisoned the city's mind. The Law-Wardens saw Kael wearing a Swedish coat. They didn't see a survivor; they saw a traitor. They drew their swords.
"I am Kael! I am of the Green Tunic!" he pleaded, shivering.
"Strip him," the Sergeant ordered coldly.
They tore the clothes from him in the freezing courtyard. They interrogated him for six hours in a dark cell. Even when they finally believed his story and let him go, the damage was done. His friends stopped sitting with him at the hearth. They whispered that he had made a pact with the enemy.
Kael sat alone in the corner of the mess hall, staring into his cup of hot water. The Giant had taught them logic and equality, but the war had taught them paranoia. The utopian brotherhood was dead. Fear had won.