A / N: Llamrei is a warhorse in the Nasuverse. Not a mare. Anyway, things are heating up.
Chapter 4
There was, long ago, a barbarian queen. Tall and terrible, a bringer of destruction. Once, a mother. Loving and kind. Then, a warrior. Horrible and cruel. Later, a goddess. Indifferent and disposed. She was the Queen of Carrion, nourishing her appetite on the corpses of those who dared to stand in her way. She was Boudica, a woman of rage, and regret. And, nothing, not the fates, nor the Eagle, could hold back her fury. Not until Rome itself, and the one responsible for her pain, burned.
They'd won their first battle to unify the north.
Crouched knee-deep in the battle's aftermath, Arturia thought of that barbarian queen and her other self in the wet, iron-scented rain. Voided bowels and blood-churned mud. Broken teeth, punctured flesh, scattered brains and bits, split bone and torn limb, bodies littering the field friend and enemy both. Arrow cushioned knights drowning in their own gurgled cries. Crushed by hammer, cut by axe, skewered by spear, hewn by sword. Silenced with the coming down of steel upon skull. The survivors, brandishing dented armor and bandaged wounds galore. Stained blades, shattered lances, splintered shields. Her, standing alone, staring out into the horizon, oblivious to the carnage behind, eyes ever on that light which blinded them, looking forward to the glimmering sunlight of a destiny she was born to lead, fading beneath dark clouds further on into rugged valley and tundra. White, rolling hills and clusters of mist, masking a land with a history of savagery and violence indigenous to the invader's homeland an ocean away. Barbarians. Horned horrors, helmeted marauders, crow-loving fiends. Terrorizing the people she vowed to protect when pulling sword from stone. From where the Tall and Terrible once marched, burning and bleeding the land in her war of vengeance. A perversion of what she'd been before and, watching Bedivere's father and others in the shadow of the naive girl-king she herself had once been, Caliburn under clasped hands, now simply another amid that carnage and helping tend to those she previously kept her back toward, Arturia better understood the monster she too would become—the unshaken ideal—to those very same.
Helping move bodies and body parts drowned in the mud with Lucian, rolling them over face-up to identify them, the total tally of their dead was only little more than a handful. The rest, the overwhelming majority, were the enemy's. A cloth covering her mouth to safeguard from disease and smell, one of their dead in particular caught her attention. A knight, the symbol upon his breastplate the only way to distinguish him for he was missing his head. She ran her hand across it—the blood-splattered golden flower across the channel. The lily of the battlefield, fleur-de-lys. The owner of Llamrei. The horse was nowhere in sight, and she wondered if it'd run off during the chaos or its aftermath. Though, there were no words, and she raised her eyes to Bedivere offering pitchers of water to those still alive, making rounds with several others. Instead of the boy he is, she saw the man he was and yet to grow up to be, and the sorrow on his face, sobbing over friends and allies slain and not for the arm he lost after that final battle. After he knew she was safe. There'd been no words then, only tears, as she felt one of her own roll down her cheek.
Something had to change. Even if it were her destiny to falter, stumble, and ultimately fall, didn't mean she had to pull those she held dear along with her. In the dark of her mind, she heard those dark waves gently crashing upon the cliffs once again. Another dark storm brewed and its focal point was becoming clear through eyes only a King of Storms could perceive.