The Wake

Sato

The rain had finally stopped. Fortunately, not before dousing the bulk of the blaze that was consuming the Sea of Chaff. Sato had attempted to save the Messiah, but the mess of parts that was left of him was well beyond saving. That was his doing. It was already too late. His will to live had long since extinguished. Sato gave up his fool's errand and helped his friend home. He was in rough shape and required the Masked Doctor's treatment. Sato was a much more a medic than a doctor. 

As they made their way back towards the Hill, they passed through not a battlefield but a graveyard. They were horrified as they saw hundreds and hundreds of bodies, more than either could count. Æurean and Undien, though in truth that was a false distinction. They were all the same in death, same as they had been in life. They all lay motionless in the mud. Sato sat Leo down on a charred cartbed and ran off to see if he could aid any of the wounded or spare the dying. 

"Find Daniel and Bruno and the girls," Sato shouted out to Leo as he made his way over to hopelessly examine the dead. "Call me over if anyone is still alive or is thereabouts," Sato tended to his most difficult of works. It was worse than fighting Death. The smell of death.

Leo

Leo stumbled through the bloody, burned Chaff. The fields were burnt, chopped, or trampled all around the Hill. He saw so many dead and so many more maimed. He had been such a fool. These were all his people, and he had let them kill one another. For what? A castle? The Duke?

Leo knew from the number of captives that the survivors had taken that they had been losing the battle, badly. It was only through Grimm's demise and Reaper's destruction that the Undien waves' unnatural strength diminished. Without their Messiah and his relic, most of the soldiers were just spindly, sickly, malnourished masses. They surrendered in mass. To an army, that they could easily have overpowered by sheer force of numbers had they fought on. Even in their state. But they were tired, hungry, and dying. They didn't want to fight anymore. 

Leo saw some of his men, soldiers of Pax, tormenting the prisoners. They were throwing, shoving them in the mud, and force-feeding them muddy, ashy grain. Leo approached their Siergent and ordered him arrested and stripped of his knighthood. Sier no more. He accosted and reprimanded the men and had another abuser arrested. Leo helped the prisoners out of the mud and offered them his rations. He sat amongst them. They said nothing, only sat in silence. Eventually, after ensuring his punishments were enforced and the prisoners were under proper care, he moved on

Leo found in the centre of the clearing, Green Grower Percia, dead, surrounded by several dozen fallen Æurean soldiers. She had more spears in her than he cared to recount. He called for aid from Sato and the other healers when he saw need. 

Leo made his way slowly cross the bloody, muddy Hill, and there he discovered that the town gate had been totally obliterated. The portcullis was ripped down and pushed off to the side. The gate tower from which Luci first spied down on them had collapsed. 

As many bodies lay within as without.  Leo passed a sorry sight indeed. At the gate stood, still, a body all too familiar. The body. The forks within it.

"Sato, come quick!" He knew in his heart it was too late, but he could not bring himself to tell his friend such. Leo fought a torrent of tears.

"Look who I found," Sato came rushing up, surprisingly gleefully, until he saw the gate, and then he saw what Leo saw. 

Filled with the forks and blades of half a dozen Undien fighters was Sensei. His duel blades were still held tight in his hands. Leo knew the moment he saw him that Sensei had held the gate so the citizens could retreat to the castle. Leo knew he would have fought till his very last breath and decently long after that, too, until everyone made it into the castle walls. 

Sato ran over to Sensei. Desperately and diligently, he began his work. He removed the forks and sealed the wounds. The internal bleeding was worse. He got to work. He ground up some herbs in his healer's pouch. 

"Sato I... I think he's gone..." Leo weakly whispered. Leo fought the words out of his mouth.

"No, no. No. He can't be. I can't lose another. Not to war. Not him." Sato cried out, tears welling down his cheeks. He was slowly grasping the truth. 

Bruno emerged from the gate, limping badly, crutched on the end of his broken spear, the tip having shattered away. He was bathed in blood. No doubt more his adversaries than his. He dragged went to his prince and embraced him. Neither could stand on their own, so they both leaned on each other. 

One of the many oddities of the Kintsugi was that you sometimes were able to say goodbye even when it was too late. It was both a blessing and a curse. This was such a case. Sensei's eyes did not open, his mouth did not move, but words came silently from his mind. Only Sato could hear it. He listened. Whatever Sato heard moved him to tears. Not normal tears, but the type of tears you have when you have no tears left. Salt and blood. He wailed. Leo and Bruno broke and embraced around him. They three were one in mourning. They three cried.

Sato

Eventually, Sato was in a state in which he was able to leave Sensei to the corpsemen, under special instructions. He rose to his feet and aided the other. He had much more work to do. He quickly treated Bruno's external wounds, only for the man to collapse. Upon closer inspection, while his external wounds were mostly superficial, he had broken a lot of bones and lost a lot more blood to internal hemorrhaging than he realized. By all means, the man should have been dead. Sato treated the hemorrhaging, and he got back up as if nothing was ever the matter.

Sensei's death had not been in vain. The sole surviving gatehouse guard told them what had happened. Sure enough, all the villagers, except those who had not refused to leave their homes or stayed behind to fight, had all made it up into behind the castle walls. Sensei had given his men the order to live. Apparently, the town drunk and two of the gatehouse guards had stood and fought besides him. Following their heroism, many more men defied their orders and held the fallen gatehouse alongside Sensei. Their bodies lay besides him. They held back the tide of Undien just long enough. 

They three continued inwards looking for the girls, and Daniel and all else sheltered in the castle. They found that the castle gate, too, had been shattered. The courtyard was all but empty. They found a few guards, both living and dead. The castle doors had been ripped off their great hinges, and inside the castle appeared in tatters. Leo deployed their growing entourage of knights and guards to clear the castle of pillagers and plunderers. 

They three made for the tunnels. The bell tower had been totally collapsed. Under the tower's wreckage, they found her. Luci lay there on the ground. Torn limb from limb. Her innards were exposed. Not flesh, but cogs, gears, and wheels. His skull was crushed, and springs and screws fell out. She was indeed inorganic. She was a machine. A dead machine. Sato's blade was no good for inorganics. He couldn't help her. 

They three recruited more onlookers to help them uncover the entrance to the tunnels. It was slow work, but they had a lot of bodies. Sato focused on treating everyone in the castle while Bruno led the excavation effort. Conveniently, they had just confiscated all the spades they could possibly need. Bruno had the biggest spade of all. Leo supervised. Turns out, having your chest burst open takes a lot out of you. While he managed, the Masked Doctor nursed his chest wound and inspected his heart.

"Sato, we need you over here. Hurry," Bruno called out. He was the first to uncover it.

Sato ran over to find the exposed cellar of the bell tower. Inside. covered in dirt. There were more than a dozen bodies. They were all Undien. Dead by asphyxiation. In the centre of the cellar was what could only be described as a jade earthen chrysalis. Through its translucent crystaline casing, Sato could make out Rebe's silhouette. Without stopping to consider the consequences, Sato brought Kintsugi down on the crystaline chrysalis, splitting the sack in two. The colour on the inside of the casing was that of an amethyst. Out of the crystaline chrysalis came Rebe... and Frenchie. They both began gasping desperately for air.

 Sato craddled Rebe in his arms. Her clothes were desachurated, but she was uninjured, except for a single sick scar. Frenchie too. Bruno collected him out of the pit and called off the excavators. Rebe opened her eyes and stared into his. They were glowing like emeralds before returning to their natural colour. Everything else in the world went away when she looked at him like that. It was an indescribable feeling of elation. All his doubts went away in the moment. And if they hadn't, they soon would have. The next thing she did was grab his cheek and pull him into a kiss. It said so much without words. It said: I like you, I'm glad you're not dead, I'm happy you're here, I can make cacoons that protect me from cave-ins and suffocation, and I think we need a vacation from our vacation all in one. That's where they had their first kiss. Lying on a cellar full of dead bodies in a crystaline chrysalis, which she just emerged from with an older man. They stayed there together in silence.

"Alright, enough. Can you put me down already? Creep," Rebe joked. It was probably about then that she noticed his missing arm. "Sato, I don't want to scare you, but your arm is invisible." That was probably when she noticed the gilded stump and pieced it together.

Daniel

After Sato and Rebe migrated out of the cellar, Bruno and his crew were able to remove the bodies and begin to excavate the stairwell. It was around that time that Daniel snuck up behind him and offered to help. Bruno turned aroundhanding him a shovel, and then froze.

The townsfolk, Daniel, the Queen, Sam, Earl, Princess Jo, and much of the servants and guards had all made it into the tunnels below the castle. They were all unharmed but well rattled. Daniel had first led them all out through a secret passage that let out in the loch. Then he led the guards and Earl back to another secret exit that came out under the Grandfather Clockers' desk in the Guild Hall to see if it was safe to return. Earl was now taking the long way to the loch in order to avoid becoming permanently lost in the passages to gather the Queen, her bodyguard daughter, the servant, and the townsfolk. 

Daniel saw what the rest had seen and lost himself the way the rest had. Sato showed Daniel Luci's body. He picked up Luci's head. Her face fell off its frame and hit the ground, cracking. Her wig of pink hair remained. Her eyes stared at him. Daniel started to scream. Sato cried to comfort him, but he pushed him away. His confusion drowned in the rolling sea that was his rage. He had loved her. He didn't care what she was. He desperately tried to gather up her pieces, thinking Grandfather would know how to fix her. He must have made her after all. He carried her in pieces back to the Guild Hall. 

Sato

Bruno and his crew began the laborious task of clearing the castle of bodies. Everyone from the loch had returned to the castle and was horrified with what they saw. The Queen was icy and betrayed little emotion, if she felt any, on her face. The Queen dispatched a contingent of her personal guard to aid in the effort. Sato had long since returned to the field to aid the Masked Doctor, Gran Greenthumb, and the other healers. He attempted to escape his feelings and thoughts in his work. Leo went with him to take charge of the prisoners, hoping to prevent further abuses.

The reinforcements from the north arrived, late. Sire Phineus, the long-retired Dolphin Knight, rode with them. He had helped them break free from Sier Sullivan's trap at Hill Crossing and taken command after Sier Fredrickson's demise. The Dolphin was armoured in splendid silver-blue guided armour with a barbute helm and carried a giant long trident. He rode on a horse formed of surf. 

The reserve forces of Undien, commanded by Sier Sullivan, retreated to one of their more fortified towns, having lost much of their forces to capture and killing. The Battle was over. For now. 

They tended to the dead. Sato managed to save more than a dozen men that day, 13 to be precise. He failed to save more than 80 men, including Sensei. Many villagers, guards, and servants they had known well and liked well were among the dead. Adelaide, the baker, and most of the castle guard. All were dead or missing. Sato's Shield under Sier Macs survived, but his own Sier Armold had been among the many fallen knights. Sier Dorish, Sier Temet, Sier Erest, as well as others, Sato didn't know. 

The town and castle were in shambles. But the worst damage was to the Sea of Schaff. A massive bald spot had burned straight through it, end-to-end, and Farmtown was in its path. Sawyer's father was among the casualties, of which there were many. They now held several thousand Undien captives, whom they had to fashion the castle courtyard into a cell to hold. They sent a raven to Sire Sully to discuss terms. He replied in turn.

Leo

Leo wore his mane with pride. He could not grow so much as stubble, but his neckerchief made up for its absence. It filled his neck out brilliantly and complemented his wig quite nicely. With their matching collars, he saw himself a Lion grown and not the Little Leo he was without it. Much like his wig, it gave him confidence and power. Power he would wield for good. With Wyrm scabbard about his hip and his elegant royal red frock coat, and his calf-high, tall brown laced leather boots, he felt armoured for battle. Under his armour, he wore a simple cream poet blouse and striped black breeches. His wig was a bob cut with bangs. To finish his armour, Leo equipped his most powerful weapon indeed, a practiced smile that was so well rehearsed it almost made for the real thing.

Leo looked down from his mounted position onto a sea of frowns and tears, and sad, somber eyes. It caught his attention the moment he spotted it. Something different. Something out of place. A smile surrounded by so many of its inverse. A bright, warm, childish smile. A smile that spoke of relief, freedom, peace, and joy. The smile belongs to a very familiar face indeed. The smile sat upon the face of Leo's childhood friend Bethie, who his father had beaten and scarred, and abused even worse than he had ever done upon Leo. His father's victim and his friend. He realized in that moment, and she was finally free. Then he realized he was free too. He smiled back at her, a warm and childish smile. He smiled wider than he had ever been able to practice in the mirror. Then the laughing fit came upon him like a sickness. He began to hack and wheeze with uncontrollable, cathartic laughter. All eyes turned on him in horrified silence. He looked at Bethie, and she emitted a single soft weak chuckle, and then she smiled again and turned and left. Leo fought hard to regain himself. He compartmentalized and composed, and the sickness left him. He steeled himself, closing his castle gate and donning his armour. He had never felt so free. He hoped she felt the same. Leo never saw his childhood friend again.