This one-shot was a surprise gift written for seerofart on Tumblr on October 23, 2017. The reason? She came up with a picture of one possible, morbid ending for the Guardian and Ezarel: running into human mercenaries with a taste for elves, and no sympathy for other humans.

After that, I just had to try writing a tragedy. Forgive me in advance, Ezarel fans.

The Ambush

They've shoved him face-down onto the forest floor: black turf kicked up by the flight of boots caking his hair and face, soiling from collar to waist the remnants of that samite tunic he has always been so proud of. Still, even with his rapier lost, the weight of a mercenary full on his back, his arms wrenched backwards at a preposterous angle to feel the first snap of the manacles, he's struggling.

Ezarel's mouth surfaces again from the dirt. He wrings one hand free, stretching it forward across the floor of the copse.

"Please!" he's crying out now. The second time still louder, the roof of his voice fracturing like glass. It's the first time I've ever heard him beg. And I know it's not for himself.

The third mercenary steps away from my side and to his. And as a matter-of-factly as snuffing out a cinder, his steel-spurred boot lifts and descends on my lover's sword-hand with a wet crunch. Grinding the knuckles and the fine bones flat before it lifts again, dashing its armored tip into the skin of his cheek, punctuating his scream.

My own sword is still caught in that broad, gauntleted fist; an early trophy. When the brigand flips it with a practiced toss, angles the carmine-stained tip down at the crown of Ezarel's head, what's left of my throat collapses.

Move. Make a noise. Show him you're still alive. Let him turn around and use that blade on someone who won't miss it.

But one of his comrades speaks in my place: a tarantella roll of syllables that peaks and breaks into a rough laugh. My stolen blade descends again, blood wicked off the steel and onto the mercenary leader's sleeve, before sliding to rest in the first of the new scabbards tied to his belt.

Under the faint lattice of moonlight that found us, Ezarel's chest is heaving in fits, his face turned to the dirt. His back, shoulders and knees spasm with a suppressed cry as they wrench his broken hand behind him, and lock the second manacle over his wrist. Suddenly, without turning his head from the ground, his voice emerges again: the rack of defeat, and grief, stretching the elvish syllables hoarse, ragging the fine edges of his words.

The trio don't deign to respond. Except with twin claps of steel to his ankles.

I hope it's ignorance, and not anger, that's curbing their tongues now. A sudden image bursts through my mind's eye: hot tongs grasping that infamous tongue in a distant dungeon, the slide of my blade across and through his flesh.

If they feel like they must, they'll do it. Elves to them are no better than cattle.

Ezarel, don't make it worse for yourself. Please.

Another terse exchange– Italian; no, Latin–, and they're peeling him off the late autumn ground, half-suspending him by the upper-arms between two of their number, his legs motionless. What's left of his face slips into– and out of– the shaft of wan moonlight that steals through the roof of the woods: the right half of his face is a mess of crimson, azure locks plastered in a tangled mat across his cheek and the high bridge of his nose, his eyes seared shut.

The mercenary leader scans the grove again as its peripheries fade deeper into black, his eyes skipping over mine as he poses a terse question to Ezarel. When he's met with silence, he gestures to his comrade on the right. Without a word, the woman grabs the back of his hair, wrenching it down to lever his chin up as her captain barks the question again, scant inches from his ruined face.

He had beautiful skin. I never told him that, not on the night when he first bared it to me in the silence of my room, and not in the months since.

The curve of a dagger catches the moonlight as it flies to a halt at the edge of Ezarel's ear, digging against the lobe. And this time, I see him open his blue-green eyes by a crack, staring back at the mercenary in leaden silence.

He isn't about to speak. Even if they remove both ears, eviscerate him here and now for the location of our rear party, he won't even deign to offer his last words to them. Perhaps– and this thought buries a new sting through my broken ribs, sends my free hand inching across the warm, iron-steeped grass towards him in turn– he hopes that they'll finish him here.

The mercenary at his left shoulder now speaks, low and confidential, over his ear. The dagger slides home into its sheath. And now they're pivoting him away, marching him through the half-stripped birches: an odd, three-pronged figure lumbering through the matrix of moonlight, tree, and shadow.

He can't have seen me move just then. Perhaps it's better if, from here, he believes I bled out before watching them take his sword-hand, his face, and his pride.

For the first time since the mercenary's dagger traced the line of my throat, a sound escapes me: a sob almost entirely gutted of air, reduced to a gasp as thin as a bubble, barely audible to my own ears. My outstretched hand closes, the warm well of blood slipping between the fingers of my glove, already cold at the tips.

It's hard to tell now where his silhouette ends, and where the shadows of the wood begin.

I never was religious. And even now, I don't believe I can be: too much has transpired in these final months, days, seconds, to allow me to pray on this forest plot soiled with autumn mire and blood, and leave with faith.

So all that's left is to hope. Hope that he'll cooperate, and live. Hope that the rest of the Guard will find him before they seize their chance to break him in a cell. Hope that these people– because now it leaves an acrid taste on the tongue to call them 'mine'– would cease to exist in this country within a month, year, a decade from now, surviving only in the musty pages of the annals, signed and sealed as a warning for all posterity in Kero's hand.

Above all, I can only hope that they'll forgive me for failing here. We don't write our choices; it's our friends who do, on the day that they collect our bones and our scabbards, when they declare that we had done all that we could have. Or not.

But above even that, most of all, as the cold and the closing night finally steal him away, I can only hope Ezarel will forgive me for leaving first.

END

Disclaimers:

- The Knights Templar and the Illuminati are mentioned at least twice in the game as human antagonists of the Guard of El, with a habit of stealing rare faery artifacts. In this case, they happen to be stealing rare faeries, but that's not considered canon.

- After the collapse of the Roman Empire, Latin continue to be the lingua franca for law, medicine, and religion in Europe all the way up to the first decades of the 19th century (with its spoken form fragmenting into the various modern Romance languages). But in my headcanon, I like to think that the Knights Templar (a religious paramilitary from the 11th to 14th century Crusades) and the Illuminati (an 18th century underground society of philosophers who were anti-papist and anti-monarchy), are both dab hands at formal Latin. It's up to you to decide which ones have got their hands on Ezarel in this story, and why.

- We've got no evidence to suggest that Chii no Miko and team are going to be this sadistic to the Guardian and their LI. This scenario ain't gonna happen in the game.