Of What is Past

“Arrows!”

The walls of Dionysia were built with human attackers in mind. For an army to deploy monsters was a rare novelty, done in ones and twos for the purpose of shock and awe. Most forces did not have any means of controlling the beasts, once they were loosed. There were ways it could be done with Lunar or Stellar magics, but it was often just as effective to have the practitioner wield their spells directly in combat, rather than spend the battle steering some creature like a glorified mahout.

The Bolthoi, however, didn’t need to control their monsters. They and their monsters were controlled by the same will.

Longinus had loosed a whole quiver of two dozen arrows at the Death-Hawks flying overhead. Though he was a skilled archer, he would normally have expected to land half a dozen hits or less on the creatures– nimble half-bird, half-serpent things with wingspans of four or five cubits. Instead, he had felled one on more than half the shots he had taken. They seemed somehow sluggish, slower than normal to react, and he wondered if they had crossed some invisible threshold of distance from the Shadow’s source in Bolthoi lands, or otherwise had found their connection to their source weakened or severed.

A few, however, had still found their marks, dropping pots of burning pitch within the city and occasionally starting a fire. The blazes were in check, for now, but a single particularly lucky hit could send the whole thing completely out of control.

Pressing his back to a merlon, Longinus waved urgently to a boy running across the wall with a basket of arrows, javelins, and bandages on his back. As he drew close, the monster-hunter rushed forward to meet him.

As soon as he stepped out from behind cover, talons dug into his shoulder. He dropped his bow and went for his sword, as the monster dragged him, and his feet were half off the back of the city wall before he could slash it across one wing.

It loosed its grip, tumbling to a rooftop below, and he slipped.

His sword shattered against the cobblestones of the street, as he caught himself with both hands on the ledge. He tried to pull himself back onto the wall, but his shoulder screamed in protest where the Death-Hawk had torn at it with its talons.

The boy took his wrists, grunting and straining as he tried to pull a grown man up. The struggle held in equilibrium for the better part of a minute, and Longinus’ hands grew sweaty and began to lose traction, until a second pair of hands took his and pulled.

The boy and an old priest together pulled Longinus back onto the wall. The newcomer was maybe sixty, beardy, in a simple cassock with a field surgeon's bag. He helped the boy clean and dress Longinus' shoulder, then dashed off as quickly as he arrived.

The boy offered him a bundle of arrows, but Longinus held up a hand. “Only one good arm. Give me some javelins.”

The boy left him with a few of the short spears propped against the crenellations, and he waited for the Bolthoi warriors to come within throwing distance of the walls.

They never did.

The several hours of wheeling cavalry maneuvers and desperate last stands on hilltops made Longinus doubt his own senses. The khan's command pavilion in the distance was charged by… knights? In Aleani royal heraldry? But then, closer to the walls, light foot soldiers equipped in the style of Imperial militiamen, with weighted darts and a stout melee spear and a kite shield, swarmed over the assembled ladders and battering rams of the besieging force from somewhere outside the walls. Then the force that had attacked their main camp was itself charged, by extremely heavy cavalry armored from the horse’s hoof to the rider’s head, though whether these were Imperial cataphracts or Bolthoi nobles was not clear, at this distance.

The account he heard later in the day was that a reinforcing Imperial army had met and defeated a second invading army, a force of Aleani just off their boats from Rhatia, and the survivors of that engagement had been driven deeper into Lyria as the Imperial forces gave chase. They then came upon the besieging Bolthoi, to the surprise of both barbarian forces, and the Imperials had been able to encircle and crush each of the scattered, confused skirmishes that resulted. The soldier who told them this gave the account confidently, though it seemed to him an oversimplification at best.

The end results, at least, were obvious: the King of the Aleani in Rhatia had been slain in battle; the Khan of the Bolthoi had been captured by Aleani knights, who had in turn been captured by a cataphract unit of the Imperial Army. Every last man of the Aleani army had died or surrendered, and the fleeing Bolthoi force was already visibly dividing itself along tribal lines. Whether the Empire ransomed their leader back or executed him, he had proved himself weak, and blows would be exchanged between warlords looking to replace him. The emperor himself rode into the city at the head of this relief force, and Longinus pushed through the crowd with his good shoulder to see whether his would be a familiar face or not.

His grandfather rode into the city square. There, he conferred with two priests. Despite the simple garb and rolled-up sleeves he wore, Longinus recognized one as the Supreme Patriarch of Urba Rhatia. The other was the priest who had helped him on the wall.

Emperor Valens kneeled in front of this man, and Longinus realized it must be his counterpart in the east, the Patriarch of Aureliopolis. The two priests conferred with each other, and then the Patriarch of Aureliopolis stepped aside in deference, to the man who was in theory his superior in the hierarchy of the Church, but had not been acknowledged as such for many decades.

The Patriarch of Urba Rhatia took up a handful of ash from a half-burned building, and the crowd fell to a hush. He smeared the ash across Valens’ brow, and his words carried over the square:

“Remember, Man, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Then a hulking barbarian warrior brought forward a box lined with some white fabric. The Patriarch of Urba Rhatia pulled from it a resplendent crown, with pendants of the sun and moon and three icons adorning the brow. He stood behind Valens, and placed it on his head.

“Valens, under the auspices of the King on High, Protector of his One, Holy, Universal Church, Emperor and Autarch of the Rhatians in the West.”