I was challenged to writing a "peasant's perspective" of a world event. I have chosen a progression piece - written by @MonMarty - for its status as an epic 'capstone' battle and its sprinkling of draconic deus ex machina (ft. the "Imperial Dragon").
In the Northlands, there is a grassy plain dotted with the cookfires of a company on the move. Banners flutter in the whistling winds of an open field. Mercenaries. They sat in an unnamed grassland, near an irrelevant village, fighting a title war that would be forgotten in a generation.
On the outskirts of their camp, near the edge of the sentries' range, sits a small host of soldiers around a bloom of light. Their little fire sputters and spits, cooking over it a thick cut of meat - it's a true soldier's cut, heavy with salt and fat. Every so often, the low hum of chatter is broken by laughter at an idle story.
Just outside the fire's light is a man with a rough cloth patch bound tightly over a head wound. He polishes the butt of his heavy crossbow with small, practiced circles - it's already gleaming, but, like the fidgeting of the rest of his company, it gives him something to do. His dull chevrons mark him a 'line-captain' - a rank all veterans receive eventually, for those sparse few who remain with the company and survive long enough.
He'd sat idle for a long time, but now he cleared his throat with intention. The circle fell dead quiet, some out of respect and some in surprised anticipation, and he spoke in a raspy voice - weary, but firm.
"Let me tell you of the corpse-fields of Daendroc."
=
Daendroc
There was order to their war, some days ago, before supply tents ran dry and became cloth houses for the dying. The Regalian levies flooded in after the marine forces stormed the beach and bit their way into enemy lines, consolidating a zone of control and giving the officer's corps more time to plan and more room to maneuver.
The veteran's company - one of the several dozen Tenpenny-based mercenary elements in the Regalian Empire - entered under government contract. By contract, they were to be an "auxiliary force" reinforcing a "mission-critical line of control" on the Daendroc front. In reality, that meant disposable.
And so they came in force to crowd the Empire's lines as it assaulted the first bastion of the enemy - a black tower atop a hill.
Their company could form a shield-line well enough - Tenpenny soldiers were built for that - but when the tower fired it hit like a ram and no shield wall, however well-drilled, could stand against it. The tower's foul magic dug bloody furrows into the ground and kicked up clouds of poison, killing professional soldiers in droves. Many of the feckless peasant auxiliaries routed and the mercenary captains rallied their men and pulled them back from an impossible-to-hold line.
The veteran's company avoided the brunt of it. They held well; while they met sometimes with sporadic skirmishes against the enemy's scouting parties, their encounters were brief and rarely resulted in any serious casualties. They continued in this manner for a long time, skirmish after skirmish, until the tower finally found them at the very end of its range. It spat its magic and carved a poison canyon in the earth, right through the bulk of their small force, turning a bundle of men into a screaming pyre. The veteran fell, sundered, to the sound of the field army's cannonade pounding relentlessly at the thin black tower - it stood firm, taunting them. He cursed it as he died.
Until a fleet-footed medic snatched him from the field and saved him from the jaws of the void.
There were officers gathering - lots of them. Even the field marshal stood there barking preparatory orders, in his bleak dark garb wreathed in curling gold filigree. They must have been waiting on some government chief - one of the Council-issued bureaucrats, maybe, from the Empire's Crown City.
He watched them with sleepy interest as the clearing lapsed into an active buzz. The hiss-rattle of tree beetles mixed with the swirl of their voices to create a calming backdrop of white noise - it was relaxing in its own right, and his thoughts drifted towards a dream.
Thump. He jolted awake.
Thump. A sudden pressure stabbed like nails into both sides of his head.
Thump. He stuffed his thumbs in his ears in a futile attempt to protect them.
Thump. His teeth rattled like panes of glass.
Thump. A dragon dropped from the sky.
It was a dual sense of majesty and fear, to see such a beast standing here. The relief of divine intervention sloughed the weight of uncertainty from his shoulders. They were not alone. There was something greater than them all that would carry this war, and everything would be alright.
The dragon, the biggest beast he'd ever seen, was feathered just as the legends said. The span of its wings could hold a trade-frigate from end-to-end and it could shelter men with ease, belay a volley of arrows, while the dragon tore with a maw of gleaming swords. Its scales, too, were worthy - in some places, where the light caught them just right, chips of radiant blue spread and danced across the ground.
The dragon flicked his big eyes as the officer's corps buzzed around him. The veteran didn't catch much of the talk - something about arming the dragon for a renegade operation. They would fit it with a special contraption: a basket with hooks to fix it on the dragon's scales, and it would bear a group of special commandos to assault from the air. The veteran felt a pang of regret at the idea of marring the creature's brilliant hide.
Then the dragon looked at him and for a moment his heart paused. Its eyes were a pool of clear blue, ringed with a dusty corona of Tyrian purple. Looking at them was like staring into a twilight sky, and he was taken aback by the volume of intelligence that he saw behind its eyes - any doubts he had of tales of a dragon's sentience and high cunning were shattered. Above all, the dragon's eye held a spark. It was impassioned, betraying a maelstrom of controlled emotion, like a just-exposed nerve. There was a depth of personality there that he never expected; the dragon was alert, curious, and perpetually judging. He felt open and exposed - like he was being read.
Then it looked away and his second was over. He breathed out and settled, dazed, against his crate while the camp shifted around him and the army prepared to move.
The tower was thin - a stygian splinter biting towards the sky, its spire sheathed in a purple false-light that cast its stones in a wan, sickly glow. And it was wrong. Its angles met in ways that didn't make sense, curving and twisting so that it was impossible to follow any one edge completely from the bottom to the top. The tower was like a fever dream and it hurt his head to look at it too long. It was simply not supposed to exist, and their army strove desperately to make it so.
He could hear them a mile away: a metal clamor of swords against a backdrop of battle-screams and the keening of wounded men, blowing across the plain with the wind and buffeting the trees with a sorrowful wail. The top of the tower shimmered like a mirage and spat its defiance. A crackling bundle of purple energy arced into the sky and fell like a comet, detonating at the edge of the medical camp nearby. Somebody screamed. The air stank of sulfur and it burned in the back of his throat, subsumed quickly by the foetid wet-meat stench of dying men.
Then around the curvature of the slim tower, from some hidden launch, rose a sapphire gym with wings. It closed the distance to the spire with a single-minded determination, circling it like a carrion bird. Explosions rattled its hide, cast by the point-defense magii manning the tower's turrets, and the dragon's own commandos threw their own magic back in the form of roaring fire and cracks of arcane lightning. In an incredible display of endurance, the winged creature punched through the magical defense and closed the final distance, landing atop the tower. Its commando passengers leaped out of view.
The tower itself cried an eldritch lament, like a sad whistle, the death-throes of a doomed instrument. The dragon, its payload deposited, dove back with a roar and let gravity pull it towards the melee below.
The veteran thought of foreign knights in their gleaming armor, dying on the tower's lonely hill, baked in Dragonfire. Nothing breaks hard soldiers like a winged devil scything through a line of metal men. There was no room for him to doubt the power of his Empire - not while a champion, at once man and beast, snarled at its fore. God, in the wings.
=
The fire snaps. The breeze picks up slightly, rustling through the camp, whispering against the banners and forcing groups to cloister in closer to their cookfires. The line-captain's squadron remained as still as a circle of gravestones.
The line-captain casts a glower on his men, one empty of the raw exaltation of his story, free of a younger soldier's awe, extinguished by experience in war. He looks to the side and hawks a wad of bloody phlegm on the ground, then turns slowly back to his stiff audience.
His eyes were hollow, and demons danced in them.
"It is now as it always shall be. Good men die in sad, sad places."
The campfire was quiet again.
God in the Wings
On the outskirts of their camp, near the edge of the sentries' range, sits a small host of soldiers around a bloom of light. Their little fire sputters and spits, cooking over it a thick cut of meat - it's a true soldier's cut, heavy with salt and fat. Every so often, the low hum of chatter is broken by laughter at an idle story.
Just outside the fire's light is a man with a rough cloth patch bound tightly over a head wound. He polishes the butt of his heavy crossbow with small, practiced circles - it's already gleaming, but, like the fidgeting of the rest of his company, it gives him something to do. His dull chevrons mark him a 'line-captain' - a rank all veterans receive eventually, for those sparse few who remain with the company and survive long enough.
He'd sat idle for a long time, but now he cleared his throat with intention. The circle fell dead quiet, some out of respect and some in surprised anticipation, and he spoke in a raspy voice - weary, but firm.
"Let me tell you of the corpse-fields of Daendroc."
=
Daendroc
There was order to their war, some days ago, before supply tents ran dry and became cloth houses for the dying. The Regalian levies flooded in after the marine forces stormed the beach and bit their way into enemy lines, consolidating a zone of control and giving the officer's corps more time to plan and more room to maneuver.
The veteran's company - one of the several dozen Tenpenny-based mercenary elements in the Regalian Empire - entered under government contract. By contract, they were to be an "auxiliary force" reinforcing a "mission-critical line of control" on the Daendroc front. In reality, that meant disposable.
And so they came in force to crowd the Empire's lines as it assaulted the first bastion of the enemy - a black tower atop a hill.
Their company could form a shield-line well enough - Tenpenny soldiers were built for that - but when the tower fired it hit like a ram and no shield wall, however well-drilled, could stand against it. The tower's foul magic dug bloody furrows into the ground and kicked up clouds of poison, killing professional soldiers in droves. Many of the feckless peasant auxiliaries routed and the mercenary captains rallied their men and pulled them back from an impossible-to-hold line.
The veteran's company avoided the brunt of it. They held well; while they met sometimes with sporadic skirmishes against the enemy's scouting parties, their encounters were brief and rarely resulted in any serious casualties. They continued in this manner for a long time, skirmish after skirmish, until the tower finally found them at the very end of its range. It spat its magic and carved a poison canyon in the earth, right through the bulk of their small force, turning a bundle of men into a screaming pyre. The veteran fell, sundered, to the sound of the field army's cannonade pounding relentlessly at the thin black tower - it stood firm, taunting them. He cursed it as he died.
Until a fleet-footed medic snatched him from the field and saved him from the jaws of the void.
+ + +
Now the veteran lived in a triage tent on the outskirts of the war camp. Every so often a nurse would come and pass him a mixture that would stay the claws of death just a little longer, settling his leaping heart, battering back a sense of doom. The medicine was floral but not unpleasant and he wasn't sure what to think of it. Truth be told, this wasn't a bad situation; the doctors were competent and motivated and the food was better than his field rations, but the feeling of idleness was like a vice around his chest. The nurse had even allowed him a little sun - he'd propped himself up outside the tent against a crate, facing a muddy clearing.
There were officers gathering - lots of them. Even the field marshal stood there barking preparatory orders, in his bleak dark garb wreathed in curling gold filigree. They must have been waiting on some government chief - one of the Council-issued bureaucrats, maybe, from the Empire's Crown City.
He watched them with sleepy interest as the clearing lapsed into an active buzz. The hiss-rattle of tree beetles mixed with the swirl of their voices to create a calming backdrop of white noise - it was relaxing in its own right, and his thoughts drifted towards a dream.
Thump. He jolted awake.
Thump. A sudden pressure stabbed like nails into both sides of his head.
Thump. He stuffed his thumbs in his ears in a futile attempt to protect them.
Thump. His teeth rattled like panes of glass.
Thump. A dragon dropped from the sky.
+ + +
If he'd been standing, he would have fallen to his knees.
It was a dual sense of majesty and fear, to see such a beast standing here. The relief of divine intervention sloughed the weight of uncertainty from his shoulders. They were not alone. There was something greater than them all that would carry this war, and everything would be alright.
The dragon, the biggest beast he'd ever seen, was feathered just as the legends said. The span of its wings could hold a trade-frigate from end-to-end and it could shelter men with ease, belay a volley of arrows, while the dragon tore with a maw of gleaming swords. Its scales, too, were worthy - in some places, where the light caught them just right, chips of radiant blue spread and danced across the ground.
The dragon flicked his big eyes as the officer's corps buzzed around him. The veteran didn't catch much of the talk - something about arming the dragon for a renegade operation. They would fit it with a special contraption: a basket with hooks to fix it on the dragon's scales, and it would bear a group of special commandos to assault from the air. The veteran felt a pang of regret at the idea of marring the creature's brilliant hide.
Then the dragon looked at him and for a moment his heart paused. Its eyes were a pool of clear blue, ringed with a dusty corona of Tyrian purple. Looking at them was like staring into a twilight sky, and he was taken aback by the volume of intelligence that he saw behind its eyes - any doubts he had of tales of a dragon's sentience and high cunning were shattered. Above all, the dragon's eye held a spark. It was impassioned, betraying a maelstrom of controlled emotion, like a just-exposed nerve. There was a depth of personality there that he never expected; the dragon was alert, curious, and perpetually judging. He felt open and exposed - like he was being read.
Then it looked away and his second was over. He breathed out and settled, dazed, against his crate while the camp shifted around him and the army prepared to move.
+ + +
The veteran had bribed his way from the encampment to the edge of the treeline to watch as the assault began anew. In the heat of battle, it was impossible to sit back and absorb the epic scale of a thousand men clashing at once in a rage of opposing wills. It stole his breath. From here, the opposing armies looked like two anthills in opposition, fighting under the baleful watch of a black tower.
The tower was thin - a stygian splinter biting towards the sky, its spire sheathed in a purple false-light that cast its stones in a wan, sickly glow. And it was wrong. Its angles met in ways that didn't make sense, curving and twisting so that it was impossible to follow any one edge completely from the bottom to the top. The tower was like a fever dream and it hurt his head to look at it too long. It was simply not supposed to exist, and their army strove desperately to make it so.
He could hear them a mile away: a metal clamor of swords against a backdrop of battle-screams and the keening of wounded men, blowing across the plain with the wind and buffeting the trees with a sorrowful wail. The top of the tower shimmered like a mirage and spat its defiance. A crackling bundle of purple energy arced into the sky and fell like a comet, detonating at the edge of the medical camp nearby. Somebody screamed. The air stank of sulfur and it burned in the back of his throat, subsumed quickly by the foetid wet-meat stench of dying men.
Then around the curvature of the slim tower, from some hidden launch, rose a sapphire gym with wings. It closed the distance to the spire with a single-minded determination, circling it like a carrion bird. Explosions rattled its hide, cast by the point-defense magii manning the tower's turrets, and the dragon's own commandos threw their own magic back in the form of roaring fire and cracks of arcane lightning. In an incredible display of endurance, the winged creature punched through the magical defense and closed the final distance, landing atop the tower. Its commando passengers leaped out of view.
The tower itself cried an eldritch lament, like a sad whistle, the death-throes of a doomed instrument. The dragon, its payload deposited, dove back with a roar and let gravity pull it towards the melee below.
The veteran thought of foreign knights in their gleaming armor, dying on the tower's lonely hill, baked in Dragonfire. Nothing breaks hard soldiers like a winged devil scything through a line of metal men. There was no room for him to doubt the power of his Empire - not while a champion, at once man and beast, snarled at its fore. God, in the wings.
=
The fire snaps. The breeze picks up slightly, rustling through the camp, whispering against the banners and forcing groups to cloister in closer to their cookfires. The line-captain's squadron remained as still as a circle of gravestones.
The line-captain casts a glower on his men, one empty of the raw exaltation of his story, free of a younger soldier's awe, extinguished by experience in war. He looks to the side and hawks a wad of bloody phlegm on the ground, then turns slowly back to his stiff audience.
His eyes were hollow, and demons danced in them.
"It is now as it always shall be. Good men die in sad, sad places."
The campfire was quiet again.
