A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor-Chapter 1194 Candles in the Wind - Part 2
1194: Candles in the Wind – Part 2
1194: Candles in the Wind – Part 2
The light was fading from the world for him.
He rose up a hand to his face to shield one eye.
It wasn’t chariots he seeing any longer, but candles, being blown out by a breeze.
It was far too much, far too easily.
Never before had he seen his chariots be made to look so weak.
When the Stormfront infantry arrived, finally catching up with their cavalry, it was all over.
Any hopes of those handful of chariots returning back to camp were lost.
They were brutalized where they stood, and hardly a thought was spared for the damage that was inflicted.
It was a horror.
To see such beautiful machinery treated so casually.
If ever there was a better display of barbarity, Zilan knew it not.
Even the warlords further to the east in Verna, who had not yet sworn loyalty to the Emperor, knew not to make such ruins of their spoils of war.
They did everything that they could to capture the beautiful pieces of equipment that they called chariots, ensuring that not a mark was left on them.
It was unforgivable.
Now those Stormfront men were lining up once more, marching through the ruins and wreckages.
There was no fire, but Zilan fancied that he could see them distorted all by flame.
He fancied that they were the ones that had brought these plains to such a state of desertion, where only the hardiest of grasses and small bushes could hope to grow on it.
Where not even the climate accustomed people of the Verna had chosen to set up towns.
“This is what they’ll do,” Zilan realized with a sudden start.
“They’ll do it to all of us…”
He saw in those marching men the towns that they’d burn, and the people that they would dispossess.
He saw now past the chariots, and he saw the corpses that littered the land alongside them.
As the Stormfront army came together again, it was the corpses that they marched over too, not sparing the dead even the slightest thought.
There was a rage at that brewing in Zilan, how could there not be?
Steeped in the hot water of such a defeat, how could he not find himself feeling rage?
Chariot men were just like the chariots themselves – they were rare creatures.
They took time to manufacture.
To see them trampled, as if they were no better than some Yarmdon savage, it made him stir in a way that he hadn’t stirred in years.
Their destination was obvious.
They were coming to inflict more destruction on the other chariot detachment.
They sought to save what was left of their men.
“And if they manage victory there, then…” Zilan’s mind flitted ahead.
His chariots were his strength.
To lose them all would be to put his army at a considerable weakness.
For his army to be weaker would mean that the entirety of the Verna army was weaker too.
His blood ran cold.
The possibility of their losing came to him unbidden.
Bloody and full of flames, he saw the future.
What had begun as a casual distraction from the monotony of governance had transformed into something far more weighty.
He recalled the conversations that he’d had with Khan, brief though they were.
He recalled how he misliked the man’s seriousness, and his unwillingness to laugh at a single quip that Zilan had made.
He’d thought that to be a weakness on Khan’s part.
An unnecessary prudishness, but now Zilan wasn’t so sure.
He thought he understood the look.
When the man’s eyes had looked to him, and they had looked past him.
It wasn’t that he was being underestimated, as he had first thought.
There was sadness in the eyes of memory that he hadn’t noticed at first.
Khan had foreseen the possible destruction.
He had supposed this future that Zilan had now just recognized.
And his eyes had foreseen defeat, and he’d mourned Zilan in advance.
Zilan clawed at his cheek, and he bit his lips.
Rainheart stood up at the wall, looking down at them, ever imposing.
Gods, how he wished he could storm that castle himself.
That would change the battlefield in its entirety.
It wouldn’t matter if he’d lost his chariots or not, victory would be his.
He wondered how he could have treat this battlefield, and this war, so casually.
He’d not seen the significance and weight that his actions had carried.
He hadn’t seen the possibility that he might lose, true enough… but nor had he been greatly pursuing the prospect of victory.
It was all the same to him – war had grown boring.
He knew he would never be the greatest General in the land, not whilst men like Khan existed, but still he’d fancied himself to at least be amongst the top five.
He’d been content with that, to a degree.
“I’ve blundered,” Zilan realized with a start.
A complete and irrevocable blunder.
It didn’t matter that he had used such a strategy hundreds of times before, and he had confirmed it to be sound.
What mattered were the results.
He’d underestimated his enemy.
They’d had the strength to perform the most reckless of tactics against him, and as a result, their destruction of half of his chariots had been complete.
And now he needed to find a way to rectify those losses, before the battlefield slipped any further from him.
There was General Rainheart watching his every decision.
A man who seemed to embody the word white.
General Zilan didn’t even really see his face.
All he saw was that long white beard, and that long white hair, flowing down past his helmet.
Even that shining silver plate armour seemed white.
Zilan had been engaged in battle against Rainheart long enough to know that he was no slouch.
The new foe, that Oliver Patrick, he was chaos incarnate, and Rainheart was the complete opposite.
He was of the old school of strategy.
He was steady.
Now that an advantage had been seized, he wasn’t the type to let it loose.
If Zilan were to move carelessly, then those enemies at the gates would move too.
“Then what..?” Zilan muttered.
He needed recklessness to fight recklessness.
When one was at a disadvantage, to play the board normally would simply mean to draw out a slow loss.
