Part One Hundred Two — Eris’s Account, Part Two

Continuing Eris's own telling.

　By midday, what remained of Ashford's coordinated assault had fully collapsed into something closer to a rout — soldiers breaking formation in clusters, mages fleeing the field the moment their own numbers thinned past whatever confidence had carried them this far in the first place.

　I want to be honest about the part that actually scared me, though, because it wasn't the fighting itself.

　It was how easy it became, somewhere in the middle of it — how quickly my own hesitation, the last traces of the girl who used to flinch from violence, simply stopped showing up at all.

I don't know if that's growth or something else entirely. I'll think about it properly, later, once everyone's actually safe.

　Celica took a real wound near the fight's later stages — a mage's desperate final spell catching her across the shoulder before she'd finished closing the distance.

　Luke was at her side instantly, shielding her retreat with a ferocity that told me more about what these three had actually become to each other than any training report ever could.

"I'm fine," Celica insisted, through gritted teeth, already pushing back into the fight despite Luke's obvious reluctance to let her.

"You're bleeding," he said, flat.

"I'm still standing," she countered, and that, apparently, settled the argument.

Good instincts. Both of them.

I'll make sure Vance looks at that wound properly the moment we're back, whatever Celica currently insists.

　Elva handled the formation's collapsing center with a precision that genuinely impressed me — reading the enemy's fracturing coordination faster than I could have managed myself, directing our own smaller numbers exactly where they'd do the most good against soldiers who no longer had any coherent plan left to counter.

"They're breaking," she called out, somewhere past the fight's midpoint. "Full retreat forming on the eastern flank."

"Let them go," I called back. "We're not here to slaughter people who've already decided the fight's not worth dying for."

Kai's rule, really, more than my own.

Take only what's freely given, even in war. Even when the alternative would be easier.

　The last real resistance came from a cluster of officers near the army's original center — men who understood, apparently, that fleeing meant answering for this defeat back in Ashford, and had decided, grimly, that dying here was the less humiliating option.

　Ignivar finally moved for that part, unhurried as ever, ending the small, desperate stand in under a minute without so much as raising his voice.

"That took considerably less effort than I expected," he observed, entirely unbothered, returning to his hilltop the moment it was done.

"Could've helped earlier," I told him, still faintly annoyed.

"You didn't need me earlier," he said. "You needed me now. There's a difference."

Fair, I suppose. Doesn't make me any less annoyed about it.

　By the time the field finally settled, the sky had gone orange with evening, bodies and broken formations scattered across ground that would, I suspected, carry the memory of this day for a long while regardless of who eventually wrote its history.

　We counted our own losses carefully, gratefully finding them far lighter than the scale of the fight should have allowed — Elaine's preparation, Borga's craftsmanship, months of Kai's own insistence on training properly rather than hoping strength alone would carry us through.

"We did it," Luke said, quiet, disbelieving, looking out over a battlefield that had, hours earlier, held an army twenty times our own number.

"We did," I agreed, letting myself feel it properly for the first time since the fighting started — not triumph, exactly.

　Just relief, solid and real, that everyone I'd trained, everyone I'd fought beside, was still standing at the end of it.

Kai's going to want the full account of this.

Every piece of it.

I think, this time, I'm actually ready to give it to him properly.

That's where Eris's account ended that evening — full, honest, considerably more detailed than the tidy summary I'd first received.

　I sat with it a long while after she finished, understanding, properly, for the first time, exactly what everyone had actually risked and won on my behalf that day.

I don't think I'll ever be able to properly repay what all of them gave, fighting that battle without me.

I think the only thing I can actually do is keep building something worth what it cost them.