Mythinformed
The undead had collapsed upon the ground. The living looked set to join them.
In Adric's case, he was already lying on the grass that surrounded the Great Devoid, he, and what little remained of his fellow soldiers. Boys as young as sixteen, men up to four times that number. Young and old had been thrust together into the Legion in the battle against the Armies of the Dark.
They were all that remained of the Legion. The lucky (or unlucky, depending on one's perspective) few. A band of brothers, who based on what words had reached their ears, had no families left to return to.
Madrigal had fallen. The West had burnt. Alric had claimed there was no way home save through victory, but here, now, with Balor's head cast into the abyss and his armies scattered and crumbling, he wasn't so sure. Thousands had perished on their march here. No doubt others would perish in the march back west. Victory, they might have claimed, but the way home? He was not so sure.
"Wine?"
Adric opened his one remaining eye (he'd lost the other years ago) and beheld Uther standing above him, offering a waterskin with his one remaining arm.
"Snagged it from Otters Ferry," the footman added.
"Snagged? Or stolen?"
"Hey, all I know is that some lass wanted me to have it as a going away present. Told me to drink it on a special occasion." He chuckled. "Can't get much more special than winning a war."
"Right…" Adric closed his eye again. Like many towns the Legion had passed through over their long years, the men had had their fun, and the women had obliged them. Inevitably, the Legion was given everything from bread to pigs, and inevitably, the men left presents of their own. The type of presents that took nine months to be unwrapped, but presents all the same.
He would have said as such to Uther. But his tongue was as exhausted as his body – it had the energy to sample the wine, and nothing else, the red liquid tricking down his chin like blood. Staining his tunic, which was already stained with the dark red blood of ghouls, and ichor of the walking dead.
"So it's really over?" Uther asked, as he sat beside him.
"Ask Alric, if you care to."
"I would, but I'm a bit far down the pecking order for that."
"Really? There's only a handful of us left. At this rate, he might as well make you a lord."
Uther tried to shrug, but with only one arm, he looked like a demented chicken. Still, he took his waterskin back and chugged down the rest.
"Hey, save it," Adric protested.
"I need sleep. This helps."
Sleep, Adric reflected. He didn't have any trouble going to sleep. It was the nightmares that occurred after sleep which were the problem.
Still, he thought, as he sat on the grass under the sun's fading light, at least the nightmares that had plagued him his long years now had no basis in the world of the awakened. At least, not of the active kind.
He looked around the field. It wasn't just his fellow soldiers that seemed stunned by their victory, it was everything else. Dwarfs smoking from their pipes, managing not to blow themselves up. Fir'bolg sharpening their arrows, as if unable to comprehend that the war was over. The banners of the West fluttered in the breeze – fiefdoms and nations that likely no longer existed.
And through it all, a silent, suffocating dread. The wine had been bitter, Adric reflected, but victory tasted all the more so.
"They say that Balor was Connacht."
There it was, Adric reflected. The unspoken whisper that Uther, bless him, just had to give voice to.
"The one who saved mankind in the Wind Age returned a thousand years later to grind what he had once built into dust."
"So Alric says," Adric murmured.
"So says everyone!" Uther yelled, a madness shining from his eyes as bright as the comet that had appeared above the Legion nights prior. "There are few of us left, yet upon each of their lips there's the same rumour."
"Rumours are for peasants."
"I was a peasant, thank you very much," Uther spat. "Before I left my parents, before they shoved a sword in my hand." He looked at the stump where his left arm had once been. "Fight," they said. "Fight, as did the heroes of old. Fight like Connacht himself. And now, upon Balor's defeat, what do I hear that it was all a lie?"
Adric wanted the conversation to end there. Alas…
"Was it?" Uther whispered.
No such luck. With a sigh, Adric whispered, "who says it's a lie? If Balor and Connacht are one, do the deeds of Balor mean that the deeds of Connacht are but void?"
"They are now. Or did you miss the desolation east of the Cloudspine?"
He hadn't, Adric reminded himself. No-one had. But the rumours of Balor and Connacht being one…to his ears, they were insane. A rumour that could only arise during the end of the world. A rumour even more preposterous than the one that claimed the Fallen Lords had once been Connacht's allies. A thousand years prior, returned to unlife to serve the Dark.
"Perhaps it was all a lie," Adric said. "Perhaps we were, ah, mythinformed."
Despite everything, Uther snorted.
"Perhaps history became legend, and legend myth. Perhaps a thousand years from now, our names will be long forgotten, this war covered up by desolation's sands. Perhaps new kingdoms will have arisen in place of old, perhaps Man will be at nature's mercy, scant different from the myrkridia. But now?"
"Now?" Uther whispered.
"Now, victory," said Adric, before lying on the ground and closing his eye.