This is where the book truly starts and I believe that it needs to be its own page in the blog recap. I’ve done a bit of work to it, to make it flow in the direction that I want and clear up some of the inconsistencies in the previous draft.

Prologue: The Echo of a Father’s Scream

The air had been heavy that day, not just with the weight of the enemy horde pressing at the edges of Blackfang Pass, but with the iron tang of something far more volatile: pride, ambition, and fury.

The taste of dust and old blood. The creak of leather straps as soldiers shifted their weight. The shrill, familiar voice rose again from the past, impossible to silence even after all these years: the voice of the King’s youngest son, Liranal.

My orders from my King were to bleed the enemy, to hold the pass. Not to attempt to win the day, but to delay the enemy, there were too many for a combination light horse regiment and archers to attack them. 

But to delay the horde, we might be enough to give the main army a chance to escape from the horrible nightmare of a battle where we were routed. My second order was to save as many of my regiment as possible, but to give the army time at all costs. The King knew that I would lose troops, perhaps even be routed ourselves, but the rest of the army was in disarray in their retreat. He needed to save as much of it as possible, to keep fighting another day.

“Damnit Elros, we need time, as much as you can give us. Otherwise they will be in Aethelvale within a seven day.” The King had shouted as he left to rally the remaining troops, making sure that everyone had heard the Command.

The canyon pass was a bottleneck, they couldn’t go through without taking horrible losses and we hoped that their General would stop before attacking my regiment, thankfully, they had. We held the other end of the killing field before us primarily with Elven archers. About a thousand paces of open rock with cliffs on either side. 

Prince Liranal had bristled from the moment we had been given our orders, furious at the King’s order, that we held our position instead of counterattacking immediately. Still young, still raw, he wore his station as a Prince of the Realm like an unsheathed blade; gleaming, dangerous, and begging for an excuse to be used. There had been several conversations earlier that morning with him, even his brother and the other Lieutenants telling him why we were positioned as we were and that his idea to counter-attack would only result in the death of all within the regiment. 

Calm voices explained the plan again and again. Even the General came and took him aside and explained the situation. Simple. Strategic. Words like: “The Orc General will wait. That is what we want and need, while the King rallies the troops we are protecting. And we wait too, until the King calls us to rejoin the main host.”

He mocked the caution that was needed in the moment. He spat it out like poison. He called me a coward, then a traitor to him and Sylvaenor, despite my following his father’s orders. 

The Prince’s eyes, usually clouded by aristocratic ennui and boredom. Suddenly narrowed into slits of venomous rage. “You dare countermand me, a mere Captain?” 

He yelled almost incoherently, “No mere captain, should ever question a Prince of the realm? I am now the commander here, the regiment is mine! Their lives are mine to expend as I see fit for victory!” He spat the words, his face contorted in a sneer. “You are a coward, Captain, like the other cowards who are afraid to engage in a glorious battle with the enemy before you?”

A low growl rippled through the ranks of the elven regiment. The Captain saw their faces, hardened by countless skirmishes, turn from the Prince with undisguised contempt. Their hands tightened on their weapon hafts, but their eyes, sharp as winter ice, then became re-fixed on the Prince. They knew. 

His voice rose with every accusation, until the whole regiment could hear him. When no one responded, when I gave him the order to shut up and return to his post. Humiliation had set its claws in deep. The regiment was not his.

I knew trouble was but a heartbeat away. Still, I hoped his training would hold, that the discipline his father had tried so hard to instill would keep him from breaking. We would have words after we rejoined the main army, and those words would be in front of the father.

He stormed away, muttering vengeance against me and everyone who had defied him. His brother went over and yelled directly in his face, telling him to get his ass back in formation or he would order him put in irons and carted off to their father. Liranal did as he was ordered, returning contemptuously to his waiting sycophant friends who made up his platoon. They did nothing to calm the Prince, instead adding their own serpent’s whispers to his ears.

The afternoon crawled by. The sun climbed. We waited. The horde waited, just beyond the rocks. Every so often sending out regiment just to test our resolve, before beating a hasty retreat from the killing field as hundreds would be killed by our arrows. They settled in to wait us out, their general loath to waste his troops against our arrows. Just as we had hoped. 

As the bright sun began to fade later in the day, the young fool finally acted.

His horse charged forward to the center of our ranks. He raised his sword and screamed it, not a command, but a tantrum given steel: “Charge them! Charge them! We will rout them! Follow me NOW!” He charged toward the enemy line at a gallop.

It was madness. The horde outnumbered us ten to one, and that was only the portion visible within the pass. There were two more hordes beyond our sight that we knew of. The pass held only because the enemy remained cautious, hesitant to waste troops in the killing field between us. There was no victory to be had for either side in this canyon, only death. The leaders of both sides knew this.

The voice that answered him, hard, sharp, cracking like thunder over stone, was mine. “My Prince,” I bellowed, “return to your post. That is an order. The rest of you, stay in formation, do not move!”

He continued his charge, I called the bugler to sound the recall. 

Prince Liranal ignored it.

A handful, perhaps twenty or so, followed him, only those from his own personal platoon. The sons and daughters of lesser houses who had attached themselves to his star in the royal court. Sycophants dressed in polished armor, more used to tournament fields and whispered court intrigue than the stench of blood and iron.

Many of them cheered their prince, waving their swords and lances. Perhaps believing in his imagined glory, or perhaps too afraid of royal wrath to defy him. Perhaps he and them believed once they began their charge the Regiment would follow. 

We did not.

I watched as several looked back to see if we followed. When they saw no one else had left their posts, they slowed, but it was too late. They had followed him across the killing field.

The sound of hooves and their shouting rose in a confused crescendo, then broke like a wave against a jagged rock. The horde simply waited, crouched low behind bristling shields and crude pikes. The moment the charge came within reach, they surged, opening up a space to allow the charge through into the elite troops behind the first lines. Then I watched as they closed back around them, encircling and catching the prince’s charge mid-stride.

The screams that followed were not like the battle cries of warriors; they were shrill, panicked. The screams of young men and women dying. The charge stopped. A few managed to turn in time before the trap shut, but the Orcs sent a cloud of arrows after them. They were all dead in less than a minute.

They all died with Prince Liranal.

A short time later, their heads were returned on pikes.

The horde’s General wasted no soldiers on returning their heads. They used the spectacle to make a point and stopped right at the edge of our arrow range. The Prince’s head was speared highest, his gilded helmet still perched mockingly atop it, now crimson and dented. Around him, the heads of the noble-born sycophants, lips still twisted in the last expressions of disbelief or pain. The elite Orc troops lifted the trophies high, howling in triumph, then planted the poles in the ground with the defiled heads before our lines.

Daring us to come get them.

Mocking us.

I ordered the lines to remain steady, though most of us had tears streaming down our faces. I looked at the Prince’s brother, he just shook his head as the tears ran down his face. I rode up and down before our lines to steady the troops to ensure that nobody did anything foolish that would start something that would result in the annihilation of the regiment. 

The regiment was all seething in their silence, ready to charge, if I only said the word. I continued to yell at them to hold the line. No one moved, they all obeyed my orders.

Even so, I knew the damage was done. Not to the regiment, but to the realm.

A Prince of Sylvaenor  had died, a son of the King and Queen, my guide-son. Others, too, sons and daughters of dukes, barons, voices with power in the court. The Horde had not breached the canyon, but the walls of politics and power in the capital were already collapsing around me.

And I knew. Even as I sat there, my bow in hand on my horse, my mind had already turned toward the aftermath. There would need to be a reckoning. A scapegoat. Someone to answer for the stupidity and arrogance that had stained Blackfang Pass with noble blood.

And someone would have to live in disgrace to preserve that lie. It would not be the King’s son, who now was dead. Nor would his memory be stained by what he had done. Instead, they would say he was brave, that he had attempted to seize an opportunity, leading a surprise counter-attack to overwhelm the horde. They would claim he had led a noble charge from the front, dying with honor. They would declare that I had ordered the troops not to follow Prince Liranal’s order out of cowardice, that I was afraid to follow my Prince.

I could feel it, like the first scent of smoke on the wind. I knew without any doubt that it would be me. I would be their scapegoat.

The King was too new to his seat, I was too favored by him, too blunt in my manners. Others wanted me gone to get closer to him and his Queen.

I knew that I would be sacrificed for the greater good.

That night, after the King sent word for us to retreat ourselves. The Horde poured through the pass, their General saw what awaited him if he chose to attack. He turned and left to prepare for a more favorable battle, one that he could win. Even he knew if he attacked where the King’s army had retreated that his Horde would break.

Then under a full moon that hung like a judge’s eye in the sky, I was summoned to the King’s tent. We had been friends before today. As boys, sparring with wooden swords beneath the boughs of The Greenwood, as best man at each of our weddings. The tent was silent save for the crackle of the brazier and the soft shift of silk.

The King said no words of greeting. Only this:

“Tell me why my son died.”

“He died because I failed him.”

The dream repeats itself again and again. 

The fruitless charge.

The screams filling the canyon as my prince died.

The prince’s retinue of noble sons and daughters being slaughtered.

Their heads sitting on blood stained pikes before us.

The world burned, again and again.

My father’s eyes flew open, wild and searching. I do not think he saw us at all. Then slowly, painfully, the world returned to him, the screaming stopped. His breathing slowed. His fists unclenched. He looked at me, but did not truly see me.

That night left a scar on all of us.

And now, as I begin this tale, his tale as well in many ways, I remember that scream. That storm. That night. It was the first time I knew that we do not walk untouched through our stories. We carry every step of them, even in our sleep.

It was a look I have seen only in broken veterans of terrible battles, where horrific deeds were done and they bore witness. It was the same look some have seen in my eyes in the mirror over past centuries when I awake from screaming with my own night terrors.

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Thank you for taking the time to read this section, if you have any ideas or thoughts that will constructively help me improve it, please do so