Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

The sky outside was wan and bleached, the light that filtered through the lone, narrow window high in the tower laying a pale beam across the grey walls.

No door stood open, no wind stirred. The tower had been built for silence, for secrecy. No cry could escape it. No sound could enter. The chamber was a tomb,except its dead were not still.

Winter had come and gone, leaving only the cold echo of its passage, like a wound half-healed. Spring touched the world outside with warmth and bloom, but in this room, there was no season.

Only rot. Only foul ritual.

The Imperator lay on the slab, sweat pouring down his waxen face, snot slicking his upper lip. His cheeks were sunken, his skin the shade of corpse-linen. Bloodshot eyes, wide and feral, followed the slow pacing of the man draped in a wolf's pelt, his only chance at life, the shaman.

A thing that the more Landoff looked, the more it seemed beast than a man, with fingers blackened at the tips from the herbs and poisons he ground, eyes cloudy with the kind of knowledge men were not meant to have.

The Imperator's gaze never left him. In those eyes, Landoff saw something terrible: not fear, not guilt, but hope. Hope and agony, braided together in a knot that could not be undone without killing him.

At the far end of the room, the cauldron hissed softly, steam and something thicker than steam rising in a slow, choking plume. When something inside gave a wet thump, Landoff turned his face away, bile lurching up in his throat. He knew what had been cast into that iron belly.

He had smelled it when the fire was stoked, and the fat began to pop.

And yet the Imperator did not flinch. Did not avert his eyes. He had watched it all, and accepted the price.

Landoff shivered, a cold crawling down his spine like spiders on bare skin. He would have liked to think himself appalled. To take comfort in the idea that he at least still had a soul. But how could he? When it had been his hands that delivered the child.

His grandson. His own blood.

The Empress, his daughter, had shrieked like a dying hawk when she saw the lifeless child laid in the cradle. She had clawed at the servants, tore her own hair, screamed until her throat turned raw.

She believed the babe had passed in the night, a cruel whim of the gods, a twist of fate. But it was not fate that took the child, it was a man's hand muffling the infant's mouth and nose until the breath stopped.

Until the twitching stilled.

The real child, heir to the throne, was taken even before that. Carried up this tower. Delivered to the shaman. Sacrificed not to gods, but to power.

As right now that very child was being boiled inside that pot.

Two full days of mourning were held.

Black banners flew from the citadel. Bells tolled. But the Imperator did not weep at the funeral of his "son." He did not even attend. His health was the excuse. But Landoff knew the truth.

The Imperator watched his son die. As he was now listening to the bones crack as the cauldron boiled.

Inhaling the smoke of his own bloodline rising into the dark stone ceiling , damning their souls forever more...

The stink of it clung to everything. It had sunk into Landoff's beard, into the seams of his clothes. He smelled of burnt marrow and boiled flesh, and no washing would probably get rid of it. It made him gag every time he breathed.

He glanced at the Imperator again, lying so still now, as if in trance. It was a monstrous thing he had done. They had done. But it was necessary.

There was only one linchpin to the imperial succession. This son. This heir.

The rituals demanded sacrifice, equal weight, the shaman had said, for what is to be preserved. As long as this man lived, more could follow. The bloodline would hold.

Still, no words could soften what had been done. No logic could cleanse the act.

In this tower, with only smoke, shadow, and silence, Landoff wondered, when this Imperator died, and the next rose, and the generations turned, would this tower ever be used again?Or would the stench make people burn it down?

Would his descendants one day sit where he now stood?

He clenched his fists, hating the thought. Hating himself for not being repulsed enough.

But most of all, he hated the realization that if given the choice again, he would do it all the same.

He was as wicked as the dying bastard...

The shaman meanwhile moved with a lazy rythm, like a librerian searching for a book.

His wolf-pelt dragged behind him like a shadow that wouldn't quite obey, soaked through with the scent of ash, old smoke, and other things too ancient to name. His fingers, yellowed, calloused, and crusted with powder, nched a bundle of dried roots, whispering to them before casting them into the boiling cauldron.

He hummed as he worked. Then the hum became a chant. Then a rhyme.

Landoff stood by the far wall, hands clenched behind his back. He had promised himself he would not look. Had sworn it. But the sound, the wet, thick churn of the boiling brew, the rattling hiss of ingredients too foul for the world, called to him. His resolve eroded like chalk beneath a flood.

He turned his head.

The cauldron was a gaping maw of black iron, large enough to fit a grown man's torso. Fire licked around its base, fed by coals stolen from the temple. But it was what came from within that struck Landoff breathless.

Great plumes of smoke, black as pitch, billowed upward like the breath of a dying god. They curled along the ceiling, thickening the air into a paste. It was no longer smoke but substance. A thing you could choke on. A thing you could drown in.

He wanted to touch it , but refrained from doing so.

From within the brew, monstrous bubbles rose,, swollen, glassy domes stretched to breaking. They popped in slow, wet plaps, flinging droplets into the air that sizzled where they landed. Some struck the stone floor, leaving smoldering pits behind. One struck Landoff's boot and hissed angrily, he stepped back at once.

Still, he did not look away.

The shaman added something else, a length of sinew, grey and fibrous, tied with a red string. It vanished beneath the blackened froth with a slurp. Then, with a grin that showed yellow teeth, he stirred the brew with a stick, no, not a stick. A femur. Landoff saw it now, knotted with old runes, polished by years of use.

A new bubble rose, larger than the rest, trembling like a blister on the world's skin. It burst, and from within, something pale and jagged was thrown skyward.

A bone. Tiny. Curved. A rib.

Landoff recoiled.

The shaman's staff snapped upward, fast as a viper, and smacked the bone mid-air. It spun down and vanished back into the brew with a plop and a hiss. The shaman muttered something in a tongue Landoff had never known and prayed never to understand.

It was only then that Landoff turned away, bile souring in his mouth. His eyes stung from the smoke.

Behind him, the shaman laughed softly.

Like dead leaves catching fire.

It was over.

The chanting had ceased, leaving only the steady hiss of cooling coals and the slow beat of Landoff's heart pounding behind his ears. The shaman stepped forward and took a wooden bowl, rough-hewn and blackened at the edges.

Then, with the same eerie grace, he dipped it into the cauldron, now only simmering, its hateful plumes reduced to a sluggish steam.

Landoff expected the bowl to come out overflowing, brimming with the gore and ruin they had witnessed moments before. But it didn't.

He blinked, at first thinking it a trick of the smoke, the light. But no, he saw it clearly. The shaman had taken only a meager portion. Barely a mouthful of the foul brew swirled at the bottom of the bowl. A thin, dark liquid the color of old rust, flecked with something gritty and iridescent that swirled like oil in water.

Landoff's mouth curled into a frown.

That the price they had paid had been reduced to this sip of power?

He took a step toward the cauldron.

And stopped.

It was empty.

Gods...not a drop remained. No smoke. No bone. No trace of the child's body. It was as if the brew had never existed—swallowed whole by some unseen hunger. It was impossible. It was unnatural. But it was true.

He stared at the wooden bowl again.

Where were the bones? Where was the meat? Where was the body?

His questions had no answer. The shaman was already moving, his crooked silhouette gliding toward the Imperator, who sat propped up like a broken idol, skin pale, sweat glistening like dew on his brow, lips trembling.

The shaman whispered something in a language only gods and madmen understood.

Then, with both hands, he lifted the bowl.

And tipped it to the Imperator's lips.

Landoff watched, paralyzed, as the Imperator opened his mouth with the desperate need of an infant. He drank hungrily, greedily, gulping the thick liquid like a babe sucking from its mother's breast. It dribbled down his chin, staining his throat a dark, sickly red.

His hands trembled, clawing at the bowl, wanting more even as he drank it.

There was a sound, low, animalistic. A whimper, then a grunt, then something between a moan and a sob. The Imperator was weeping as he drank. Not from sadness or disgust at what he had done. From want. From hunger. The kind that lived in the marrow, the kind that would never be fed.

Landoff turned his eyes away, shame burning like a fever in his chest. But the noise continued, the slurping, the wet gulps, the rattling breath. Until at last, the bowl was empty.

And the Imperator leaned back against his chair, panting. The stain on his chin had spread, darkening his neck like bruised flesh. His pupils were wide, his eyes glassy. The shaman stepped back in silence, his part done. Whatever came next belonged to something Landoff did not know.

He had delivered a boy to the flames. He had lied to his daughter.

And now, he wondered—what price would he pay when the god behind that brew finally took hold of his soul?

And what then would become of them all?