In a vast hall, hundreds of steps had gathered outside its doors—some drumming the floor nervously, others unable to hold still and shifting in place, while others stood rooted to the spot.
The hall doors burst open, and three pairs of heavy footsteps entered—heavy not from the men themselves, but from the man they were carrying. Every other sound stopped, and the hall held its silence for a moment until a scarlet drop fell from the man's leg and struck the floor.
That man was the lord of everyone in the room—the baron of the territory. He had marched at the head of his army to war against the neighboring baron, who had declared a territorial war against them.
He had left with his back straight, smiling and joking with his knights, his armor gleaming, and his sword sharp; now he returned with his armor filthy, covered in dents and cut marks across every surface. His face was twisted in pain, lips pressed tightly together; no trace of his smile, and the corners of his eyes red.
In the hall, the silence was broken by the rhythmic tap of small drops striking the cold floor, falling from the baron's leg. Below his knee, his entire leg was gone, with a cloth tied tightly a few inches from the wound, stemming the massive blood loss.
"Quickly!" the steward shouted at the soldiers. "The doctor is already waiting in his chamber! Take the baron there!"
The soldiers ran with the baron in their arms. They nearly collided with a young man frozen in the middle of the hallway. There was no time to waste; the baron had received only basic medical attention at the camp, which had barely slowed the blood loss, but his wounds were far too grave, and he needed more treatment.
One soldier stayed behind, at the young man's side; he was one of the baron's knights and had personally seen to it that the baron made it back to the manor. Now he found himself at a loss for how to approach and comfort the young man before him. He reached out slowly toward the boy's shoulder when, all at once, the boy spun around and looked at him.
"Why? Why is my father like this?!" the boy cried, staring at the soldier.
Knight Marlleo looked at the young boy before him. He had never seen him like this. He took a few seconds to gather the will to answer.
"It's… quite difficult to tell. Even to me it feels impossible," he sighed, helpless. "We won many battles, one after another, driving them back to their main village with nowhere left to run—but who could have known what tricks Baron Grojo had waiting for us? We started losing. We fell back again and again, and in this last battle we lost nearly a quarter of our company and our lord as well," he said at the end, defeated. But then a tremendous rage rose in him, and he clenched his teeth hard, his temple creasing deeply, his hands closing tight. "Those filthy bastards managed to bring in one of the Marquis of Chrysalis' theurges."
Marlleo's words entered Licerio and swirled through his head, impossible to process. The air left him. A theurge. Devastating enemies for any army without one of their own, where the finest spear is no more than a dead branch before them.
The mere mention of a theurge was an omen of defeat; all they could do was hope for a miracle. Just thinking about that enemy made Licerio's legs and hands tremble, his heart pounding furiously.
Licerio was pulled from his thoughts and brought back to himself when a hand settled on his shoulder—Marleo's hand. He had knelt, bringing himself close to Licerio's height, his eyes fixed on him.
"Young master, we have failed, and in this last battle a quarter of the company has been put out of action, and the morale of our troops falls lower with every passing moment. With the baron's fall, all of them are broken, and the look in their eyes holds no will or confidence at all. We need the young master to be our commander and raise the army's spirit."
The hall, which had managed to recover some of its previous movement and noise, went completely silent again; these people knew nothing of battles and wars, and hearing the state their troops were in struck them without mercy.
Licerio, for his part, stared in disbelief at the knight beside him. This knight was one of the men closest to both him and his father—it was possible his father had shared certain secrets with him.
His attention was caught entirely by the look in the knight's eyes. His legs and hands trembled, no longer for the same reason as before, and his mind fought to make him run, to flee somewhere safe. But against that, something rose inside him—a furious rage. He squeezed his hands shut, the trembling that had held them went still, and he drew a deep breath; the look in his eyes changed, and he nodded. When he raised his gaze, he was no longer searching for comfort but for the flames of war.
"I will take command of the army. Knight Marlleo, I will ask you to have my horse prepared. We leave in twenty minutes."
With that, Licerio turned and went down the side hallway to his room to get ready.
When he entered, he went to a corner of his room where a suit of armor had been kept ready; his father had always told him that a man must always be prepared to go to war for his bloodline and had commissioned armor for him when he turned fifteen. He had never thought he would truly have to use it so soon, and even less without his father at his side.
After putting the armor on, he was ready to go, but he stopped when he passed in front of a rough mirror in his room, looking at his face and the figure inside the armor.
One of his hands moved to the mirror, touching the face reflected at him—a face that still felt like a stranger's even after seventeen years. His lips were trembling, his eyes unsteady and marked by the tracks of tears, but behind it all lay a burning gaze, a resolute gaze. His mind was still somewhat in turmoil as he tried to process everything; yet now he could only focus on one thing: fighting a war.
He took his hand from the mirror, and his reflection faded behind him as he left his room and made his way to the manor's entrance.
There Marlleo and the other two soldiers who had brought his father back were waiting. When they saw Licerio entering the hall, they moved toward him and knelt before him.
"Rise. Let's not waste any more time."
The three soldiers rose and cleared the way for Licerio; with a steady stride, Licerio left the manor. Outside, the steward and other servants stood with the horses already prepared.
The steward kept his face composed, but his eyelids were half-lowered, trying to hide the sorrow in his eyes as he looked at the figure of Licerio. He opened his mouth—no words came. He closed it. Then he closed his eyes. He opened them slowly, seeming to fight with himself just to manage it. After a long struggle, he parted his lips, and what came out was not what he had truly wanted to say.
"Please take care of yourself, young master."
Licerio and the three knights left the village on horseback, heading north toward a vast plain that stretched for miles.
The boundary between territories had been drawn along the natural divide made by a river cutting through the plain. Baron Grojo's troops had crossed it in a cowardly advance, and by the time Baron Bareo arrived, they were already on the other side.
That did not stop him. He ordered a swift charge. His men had lived through the demands of war more times than could be counted, and their force was something the enemy troops simply could not hold—they drove them back toward the river, where the enemy wept in fear and fled in panic, crossing back and turning their backs on their pursuers.
After that, Baron Bareo pressed on, taking two victories in a row against an army that was already broken, its morale gone, ready to flee at the sight of their shadows alone.
Licerio listened as the knight recounted his father's campaign. He could not deny the excitement and pride rising in him as he imagined his father's courage—but he was unable to hold onto those feelings; the memory of his father's current state gnawed at him, a sharp pain that made his heart beat with something close to grief.
Licerio's brow tightened and his gaze sharpened in pace with the change in Marlleo's voice and expression, watching him press his lips hard together and clench dirt in his fist.
"The lord led the campaign all the way to the main enemy village, ready to lay siege to it quickly. He decided we would rest for a day, raising our spirits to their peak and recovering our full strength. The next day we had the army ready to attack—but ultimately we couldn't," said the knight with anger and a trace of helplessness.
The knight could not find words, and his mouth stayed open without sound. The rage and humiliation had cut off every passage to his voice, and he closed his mouth, dropped his gaze to the ground, and glanced sidelong at Licerio.
"Why not?! Keep going!" he ordered. "What happened?!"
Pressed by Licerio, Marlleo had no choice but to fight through his reluctance and continue, knowing this would bring more pain to the young man before him—and there was nothing he could do to prevent it.
"When we moved to charge the city, twenty of Baron Grojo's soldiers blocked our approach. The lord quickly gave the order to hold, having spotted the emblem they wore on their hand—the marquis's—and the baron went to speak with them. They said the marquis's second son was staying in the village for a week before he was due to leave and that we would have to wait before laying siege."
"What kind of nonsense is that?! What right does this son of the Marquis think he has to act this way?!" Licerio snarled, consumed by fury.
Marlleo stayed quiet through Licerio's outburst and waited for him to settle before continuing.
"The lord always placed great value on his word and on promises, and he trusted them," he sighed, helpless. "Two weeks later they were still there, and the baron held his patience; another week passed, and we watched a blue and gold carriage bearing the marquis's emblem leave the village. We prepared ourselves and moved to attack—but who could have expected that those three weeks they made us wait were to give one of the Marquis's theurges time to arrive."
Licerio squeezed his hands, and the rage flooded back through his body like something that could not be contained. He could not believe the Marquis of Chrysalis would play things this way. His son appeared to have no regard for his name, using it and his word to stall his father while throwing his weight behind Baron Grojo.
To think the Marquis had no hand in this was impossible. Moving a theurge is as consequential as moving an army.
"How could the Marquis move one of his theurges for this? What would he even gain?" Licerio murmured.
He was deeply curious about what could possibly exist in their territory that would make even the Marquis agree to support Baron Grojo in this war.
The horses had rested, and they set off again, riding without another stop until they reached the camp of their lord's army.
At nightfall, they arrived at the camp's edge.
The sight was grim—his eyes could not settle anywhere for long. Wounded men everywhere, lying on the ground with nothing but cloth between them and the dirt, crying out or muttering in agony, trying anything to ease the pain. With every breath, a metallic smell hit Licerio's nose, making his head swim and sending waves of nausea through him that he barely held back.
Some wounded bore deep, very clean cuts across their bodies; others had limbs severed with an impossibly smooth edge.
But he had to focus on other things now and forced himself away from the wounded. After finding the company captains, he requested their reports on troop numbers and asked them to gather in his tent in half an hour.
He went to the largest tent, the command tent, and sat down before a table covered in papers and topographic maps. At that moment he had taken full command of the army, and he felt something growing in his body—a tingling that moved through him from the inside.
It was a force welling up within him, a force transmitted by his current vassals through the talent bound to his very being. A force he had felt as a child, without ever achieving any real results, since no one had ever truly felt and accepted him as their lord.
With an entire army under his command, that connection had become a significant advantage, with all his bonds to his vassals like tangible threads feeding him a considerable physical enhancement—though nothing worth mentioning before a theurge.
He had tried to experiment with this strange power inside him without ever managing any concrete results. He had more speculation than answers.
As he lost himself in the maps before him and drifted through his memories, he found his mind wandering to older ones—memories of his childhood in this world. Not many in the house knew it; from a young age he had been known as a great prodigy, astonishing his father during lessons, drawing on the knowledge of his previous life.
To keep people from bothering him, he had asked his father to tell no one of his gifts, with only his tutor and a few people very close to his father knowing.
Among his abilities, he had shown remarkable command of mathematics and some interest in the art of war. He was no great master of it, but it had been required learning during his education as a noble, and he had ended up being quite outstanding in it.
Those were mere facts in theory, and he did not know if he would be able to put them to use in actual combat. He had to arm himself with courage and move forward one step at a time.
Time passed and the reports came in; they were grim enough that a troubled expression had settled on Licerio's face.
The army his father had raised initially numbered one hundred and fifty-two men: three knights, eight mounted squires, fifteen archers, twenty mercenary crossbowmen, and one hundred and six infantry lancers.
This formation spoke to the great wealth of his father's domain, but more than fifteen soldiers had died and over twenty were wounded—six of them critically.
The weight of those final words pressed down on Licerio, a dull ache at the deaths of the farmers and villagers from his territory—but this was not the moment to make room for his feelings; he had to think of the common good.
Baron Grojo could not have had a large force, given that his domain had only recently been granted to him, leaving him with a weaker economy and fewer trained troops, but before a theurge, every advantage crumbled.
Baron Grojo's initial army consisted of one knight, two mounted squires, twenty archers, and seventy-four lancers—a respectable force for a newly titled baron.
From the reports on the table, his father's army had killed both squires, nine archers, and over twenty lancers, gutting the enemy force entirely. Licerio's side had lost one squire and fourteen lancers in return.
The night moved too fast. Licerio and his knights had stayed up the whole night trying to build a plan to deal with the enemy theurge; at least they knew he was an elemental practitioner, bound to the law of wind.
Nor could they kill him even if they managed to capture him or cut him down in the middle of battle; they could not withstand the Marquis of Chrysalis's wrath.
The most complex part of the plan was the theurge's safety itself; they were unable to wound him badly, let alone kill him. A theurge was a great prize for any noble, and they could not endure the Marquis of Chrysalis's fury if he learned they had killed one of his.
Everything seemed to be working against Licerio and his knights as they pored over the maps with only a few hours left before the next engagement.
The reports indicated that the theurge could launch blades of wind capable of inflicting severe cuts and could also use updrafts to raise dust and blind the enemy army.
What remained unknown was his third technique, since an apprentice of tricks could only use three.
To capture the theurge, they settled on forming a squad—one knight, three squires, and five lancers—who would carry the heaviest shields available to protect against the wind blades and be tasked with distracting and capturing him.
The rest would charge hard into the enemy, creating a chaotic melee so the theurge could not pick off anyone else if he slipped away from the squad.
One of the greatest problems with this plan was the uncertainty around the theurge's third technique. It was a dangerous variable they would have to face, and they hoped their preparation would carry them through. The worst case was the one a company captain had raised: that the theurge had an escape ability. If he spent the whole battle running and planted himself firmly behind his lines, the battle would end in defeat; to win, the theurge had to fall.
He organized his soldiers, and they marched to the field, moving to the position they had chosen to intercept the enemy advance—a place with sparse grass and relatively damp ground, with little loose dirt.
Licerio led the army at the front, with Marlleo at his side, always ready to offer his knowledge and occasional counsel. There had been some pushback from Marlleo and Astor about him leading from the front, given that this was his first battle. They feared he would end up wounded in a possible ambush, which would destroy what remained of the army's morale entirely.