It is a memory.
It is a dream.
Even now, after all these long bloody years, it still has the power to wake me –wide-eyed - with a scream almost falling from my lips.
The battle was over, we had won. I stood there, bloody sword in my hand, but still not entirely sure that I still lived. Then Lord Bernwick staggered across the bodies that lay all about me. He held his one upper arm, a bloodied rag wrapped around it, with his sword hand.
‘You are wounded, sir,’ I said.
‘This… it does not matter,’ he replied, dismissing it with a shake of his head. ‘Your… your father, sire… the king…’
I did not believe him, but still I followed him past the corpses, past those slowly becoming corpses as their screams faded and their blood spilled all around us as we walked. There were some already going through the dead and dying, looking for what could be found: money, jewellery, arms, armour – a battlefield is as wasteful of goods and chattels as it is of life and blood.
My father, the king, lay there; his men at arms gathered around him already with the air of those who mourn at a funeral. I could see that my father was no longer whole. He had been sliced, butchered. One leg was gone and there was little the Blood Priests could do to save him. Those that were not chanting rituals to the gods were drenched in the king’s blood as they laboured to save him, even though they knew it was all in vain and pointless.
I knelt and he smiled at me, a smile of agony, but still a smile. He was not a father who had smiled often and a king who had smiled less.
‘I’m glad to see you still live…,’ he said. ‘…unlike me. You, my son, are king now.’
Then he died; screaming in agony as his death, as his injuries, overpowered the feeble medicines the Blood Priests had administered to him.
When I stood again, I was king… and that was when the nightmares began.
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