Chapter 340: The Cost Of War

Darion remained standing before the pyre, the heat washing over his face in waves. The smell of smoke and burning wood was heavy in the air, thick enough to coat the back of his throat. Behind him, the surviving Vrethkan warriors remained kneeling on the cold ground.

Nobody was celebrating. Nobody was speaking loudly. They simply watched the flames consume the bodies of the people they had fought beside. The silence was heavy and suffocating.

Darion looked around. The atmosphere was getting too grim. He understood why. Hundreds of warriors had just watched their comrades, brothers, friends, and perhaps even relatives disappear into the flames. It was a stark, brutal reminder of what his army had done to them yesterday.

He didn’t want to stand there and let the silence become something worse. He also didn’t want his first real interaction with these warriors after conquering them to be nothing but death and mourning. If he walked away now, they would just sit here in the dark, letting their grief curdle into hatred.

He turned toward them.

"You know..." Darion’s voice carried across the open ground, cutting through the crackle of the flames. "This is the cost of war."

Several warriors slowly looked toward him. Some were still staring at the fire, their eyes reflecting the orange glow, but they were listening.

"I know that better than most," Darion said.

He didn’t speak as some distant, untouchable ruler who had never experienced loss. He spoke as someone who had bled just like them.

He told them that just one month ago, he lost a massive portion of his own army.

This caught their attention. Heads lifted. Eyes narrowed. They looked at him with a mix of suspicion and sudden curiosity.

Darion explained that they might look at him now and think his army was impossible to defeat. They had seen the undead, the monsters, the endless tide of death he commanded. It probably seemed like he had always been this strong.

But it wasn’t always like this.

"Imagine you had ten thousand knights," Darion said.

A few warriors lifted their heads, their brows furrowing.

"Ten thousand men standing beneath your banner," Darion continued.

He paused, letting the image settle in their minds. Ten thousand men was a massive army. It was enough to conquer a kingdom.

"Then imagine losing six thousand of them."

The warriors stared at him. A wave of shock rippled through the kneeling crowd. Six thousand dead. It was a catastrophic number. It was the kind of loss that broke nations.

Darion let them process the number. "You’d think that was the end, wouldn’t you?"

He told them that losing that many soldiers would hurt. It would cripple an army. It would destroy morale. It would make a lord question whether he was even capable of protecting his people.

Then he gave them another example. "Or maybe you only had two thousand... and you lost twelve hundred."

Again, silence. More than half the army gone. It was a slaughter.

Darion told them that loss didn’t suddenly become easy just because the surviving army eventually wins. The pain didn’t vanish.

Darion admitted that it was sad. Very sad.

He remembered the soldiers who died. Men he knew. Men who had served under him. Men whose deaths could have been avoided in a different battle or under different circumstances. The faces of the dead haunted you.

But Darion told them something important. "It made me do better."

He learned from it. He changed his approach. He became stronger. He stopped making the same mistakes. He built his army back up.

Darion gestured subtly toward the almost silent flames burning. For a moment he thought he should probably have one of his undeads standing beside him. "If I had simply sat down and mourned forever, what would have happened?"

Nothing. His enemies would have come. Percvale would have fallen. The people depending on him would have suffered. Loss couldn’t be allowed to become an excuse to stop moving.

Darion looked at the burning pyre, the flames roaring into the dark sky. "What happened yesterday was tragic."

He didn’t dismiss their grief. He didn’t tell them their dead didn’t matter. He acknowledged that they lost people.

"But that doesn’t mean Vrethka ends here," he said.

The surviving warriors looked at him.

He told them that their fallen comrades were gone. They couldn’t bring them back. But the living remained. Their families remained. Their homes remained. Vrethka remained.

And now they had to decide what they did with what was left. His point wasn’t that they should forget their dead; it was that they shouldn’t allow their deaths to destroy everyone who survived.

Darion gave them one final piece of advice.

"You lost warriors yesterday," he said. "I lost warriors before I ever met you. The difference is what you do afterward."

He looked over the kneeling men, meeting as many eyes as he could in the firelight.

"You can spend the rest of your lives staring at the ashes..." He paused. "Or you can become stronger because of them."

That landed.

Some warriors looked at the fire. Others looked at Darion. Their expressions weren’t joyful. They were still broken, still grieving, still processing the trauma of the last twenty-four hours. But they were listening.

Darion didn’t need applause. He didn’t need them to cheer his name. He simply turned away.

Darion walked away from the pyre. The surviving warriors remained behind. The flames continued burning, reaching high into the night sky.

Marrick watched Darion for a moment, his expression unreadable. Then, without a word, he followed him.

As they walked away, Darion didn’t look back. He knew the speech wouldn’t magically make everyone loyal. Some would still resent him. Some would still mourn. Some might never forgive him.

But that was fine. He didn’t need them to love him. He needed them to understand. And perhaps, eventually, they would become stronger under him.

Darion and Marrick disappeared from the open ground. Behind them, the flames continued rising into the sky, carrying the ashes of Vrethka’s fallen into the wind.