CHAPTER 34: THE AFTERMATH

The field stank of smoke, blood, and churned earth.

Where moments ago Ignarion’s banners had charged like an unbroken tide, now they lay trampled and torn in the mud, their owners scattered among shattered shields and splintered lances.

The once-bright gleam of enchanted plate was dulled by powder burns, pitted by jagged holes that gaped like black wounds.

Caedrion stepped over the body of a horse, its barding split clean through, steam still curling from the wound.

He holstered his revolver with deliberate calm, the smell of ash lingering on the weapon’s frame.

Captain Jeren approached slowly, as if afraid that raising his voice might shatter the fragile reality of what had just happened.

His armor was spattered with blood not his own, his visor up, revealing wide eyes that hadn’t yet decided whether to believe or fear the man before him.

"...By the Eidolons..." Jeren breathed. "We... we actually broke them."

His voice was hoarse, disbelief wrapped around every syllable. "I thought for certain we’d be the ones running."

Caedrion gave a small, humorless smile. "They’ve ruled too long on the illusion of their own invincibility. It makes them soft. Predictable."

He glanced toward the ridgeline where the Ignarion camp still burned, smoke rising in lazy columns into the late afternoon sky. "All it took was showing them that illusions are not reality."

Jeren looked back toward the carnage. Hundreds of Ignarion knights lay in tight clusters where their charge had fallen apart under the first volley.

Others had been cut down in their panic to flee. Even now, Ferrondel riders were rounding up prisoners from the shattered remnants trying to limp away.

"They’ll come back for us," Jeren said quietly. "No one suffers a humiliation like this and lets it lie."

"They’ll try," Caedrion replied, matter-of-fact. His eyes swept the field again, not in admiration but in calculation.

"But next time, they’ll come expecting to win. Today, they came expecting to parade."

He turned, catching the Captain’s gaze. "Have the wounded tended to. Strip the dead of anything useful. And burn the rest. We’re not leaving trophies for them to reclaim."

Jeren nodded, still half in a daze, but the order lit a spark of motion in him. "Aye, my lord."

As the Captain strode away, Caedrion lingered a moment longer, his boots sinking slightly into the churned mud.

He could hear the crows already gathering, their harsh calls mixing with the groans of the dying.

The battlefield was quiet now in that awful way only victory could bring, when the killing was done, but the dying was not.

He looked to the horizon where the last stragglers of the Ignarion host disappeared into the hills.

Run home, Valerius, he thought. Tell them what you saw here. Tell them the age has changed.

---

Far below the crushing weight of the Shivering Sea, in the pearl-lit halls of Submareth, the waters within the great scrying basin shimmered like liquid glass.

Queen Thalassaria Virelleth leaned forward over it, her fingers curled on the basin’s coral rim, knuckles whitening.

The image rippling within showed the mortal battlefield in miniature, smoke and ash boiling over a trampled field, sparks flashing like fireflies amid the chaos.

Her gill-frilled jaw was tight, voice low but urgent.

"My foolish little landlubber," she murmured, almost hissing through her teeth. "Don’t ride to your death. Don’t—"

The image shifted, Caedrion’s line holding, then surging, his pistol in hand, his cavalry saber cutting a silver arc through the press.

The Ignarion knights crumpled in their thousands, the once-proud host breaking and scattering like startled shoals before a shark.

Thalassaria’s words caught in her throat. She straightened, eyes fixed, unblinking, her tail slowly coiling and uncoiling beneath her.

The sea itself seemed to hush in the great throne chamber, the ambient currents slackening as the queen’s gaze locked on the mortal man who had just turned the tide.

When the Ignarion standard bearer fell cut clean from his saddle, and the enemy rout became absolute, her lips parted in a silent gasp.

For a moment, the great queen of Submareth looked not like a sovereign of the abyss, but like any woman watching someone she cared for cheat death by inches.

Then the corner of her mouth curved upward, not with relief, but with something far more dangerous. Pride.

"That’s my man..." she whispered, almost to herself.

Around her, the gathered advisors, generals, adorned in coral-etched armor, high magisters of the tide-arts, and ancient courtiers older than most surface kingdoms, shifted uncomfortably.

None dared meet her gaze. A few bowed their heads outright, as if pretending not to have heard the queen’s sudden, unguarded claim.

The scrying basin’s image faded back to the slow, hypnotic swirl of ocean light, but Thalassaria’s eyes lingered on the empty water as if she could still see him there.

And in the silent court, every soul present knew that whatever madness had gripped their queen today, it was the kind that could shake empires.

Though none showed it on their person, many of the men who had for centuries, or perhaps even millennia tried to pursue Thalassaria as a proper suitor, grew inwardly resentful.

For their stoic, proud, and chaste Queen to suddenly be filled with such desire for another man, let alone a human man on the land above...

It was unthinkable.

It was maddening.

It was damn near sacrilegious.

That night, more than one Naga scion found himself in the Drowned Temple, praying to the Abyssal for their Queen’s deliverance from whatever evil was possessing her.

When the silence was their answer, they only grew more enraged.