Wolves of Empire [EPIC DARK FANTASY] [Book One Complete]

Six

Estrid

Varanos, Kalduran

5th of Satimus

Her army was a radiant slash of colour on the bland grassland rippling away from Varanos's wall. She stood on a gentle rise overlooking them, an almost maternal pride blooming in her chest as they moved through their formations. At her side Borso, her masantra, grunted approval every few minutes, flicking his fingers in the air as if he could rearrange their army from this removed distance.

"We'll need a portion of our heavy cavalry for the supply guard," Estrid noted. Though her army was the smallest in Kalduran, she boasted the highest percentage of heavy cavalry. They were used in battle to break defensive enemy lines and sow chaos through sundered infantry ranks, and away from the field they served as efficient guards for supply trains.

The Imperial armies of Denjin and Asineo had arrived at Varanos with only a fraction of their original train intact. Estrid happily took the blame for that; before Kavan had defected to her outside Allodek, she'd stolen their train with Kavan overseeing it, leaving them vulnerable. Not only was the Baltanos now lending some of Kalduran's supplies to the two arch-generals—some of which had been stolen Imperial property to begin with—but he also supplemented their damaged arms and armour. She knew Endarion would bristle at having to accept this sort of charity, and she found the thought of his discomfort amusing.

Apparently, the state of his supplies had been compromised even before he'd fielded his army, because the assassins who'd fomented the Imperium's invasion of Kalduran had targeted one of Iana Mallian's armouries. Iana produced Endarion's arms and armour at a steep discount. Now Endarion was an Imperial enemy, it was doubtful his ex-paramour would continue supplying him even if she'd restored previous levels of production. The burden, therefore, fell on his new Kaldurani allies.

However, that meant they'd had to requisition food from the city's inhabitants, and already isolated riots had broken out in the streets. She understood Kaldurani citizens were reluctant to offer aid to armies they still considered enemies, but the sooner their stores were replenished, the sooner they could leave Varanos behind.

She recalled the meeting in Aladar's office, two days ago now, and grimaced. She'd known, the moment she'd decided to leap to his defence and help him defeat Dobran, she'd once again tied her fate to Endarion's after twelve years living apart. What he'd learned from his niece in Empyria regarding the Caetoran hiring an Arisen's assassins made the matter of national importance, but that was irrelevant now. Had the Baltanos refused to march on the Imperium with Endarion, she knew she would've gone with him alone, no matter the consequences. As much as her feelings about him remained conflicted, she'd listened to him outside Varanos, then she'd saved his life, then she'd gone to his pavilion after like a lovestruck girl and promised her aid.

It was foolish; most of her life had been spent either pursuing Endarion or wishing she could. She was, after all, in her mid-forties, and about ready to accept they weren't meant to be together. But, if she'd ever been serious about leaving him behind, wouldn't she have secured an advantageous marriage in Kalduran and started a family without him?

Despite the many opportunities to do so, she hadn't, not even to secure her legacy or strengthen her ties, and the ramifications worried her. Idly, she reached a hand into the breast pocket of her coat, where she'd stowed her family's ring. The last surviving Elerius kestrel, it existed now as an uneasy weight against her chest, a reminder of the ties that still remained between her and her homeland.

"You're either daydreaming, or you're incredibly interested in that one line of infantry your eyes are fixed on." Borso punctuated his words with a shoulder pat, hard enough to rock her on her feet. She pivoted round and punched him in the chest, more friendly than angry. Her knuckles caught the gleaming buttons of his coat and she winced.

"Maybe I was deep in thought," she retorted.

Her second rolled his eyes and swept a hand over his shaved scalp. "I've told you before, Elerius, I'm not interested. You can stop mooning over me and my pretty face all the time."

"Don't flatter yourself," she scoffed. "I don't care for men who'd rather take themselves to bed."

She knew he jested to draw their attention away from her lapse in concentration, and usually she'd be more than happy to verbally spar with him. Today, though, she was distracted. Not just by Endarion's presence in Varanos, and Aladar's decision to field two of their armies in his aid, but by the prospect of the campaign itself.

She thought of returning to her homeland at the head of a Kaldurani army, of toppling the empire she despised and killing those who'd wronged her, and wasn't entirely convinced she'd made the right decision. She owed the Caetoran and Dobran for her family's execution, for sabotaging her courtships with Endarion, for eventually driving her out of her home and forcing her into the protection of those she'd once considered enemies. But, at the same time, she believed herself above and beyond everything that'd befallen her in the Imperium. If she marched south now, if she stood before Empyria's walls alongside the man who aimed to seize the throne, she would be involving herself in the Imperium's politics again, and she'd find herself irrevocably anchored to the nation as it would be under the Boratorren dynasty.

Did she want that?

What were the options? Retire as kandras and Aladar's heir, and live out the rest of her years alone in her estate in Volėnis? Ask for Ilona or Laszlo to campaign in her stead, and stay behind in Varanos as the world changed around her? Seek out Aladar right now and tell him she was wrong, and helping Endarion and his insurrection was a mistake?

When her thoughts drifted into oblivion, her vision refocused and she saw a splayed hand in front of her face. "Hello, Estrid. How many fingers?" Borso asked.

"That you're holding up, or that you want me to break?"

He lowered his hand and smiled. When she said nothing else, the smile slipped by small degrees. "You should talk to someone, maybe," he said.

"Is that you offering?" she asked. "You want to sit down with me and talk about feelings like we're both pampered, oversensitive children?"

"I'd only further twist your mind," he said, then folded his arms, trying to affect a stern visage. She knew him too well, had been his commanding officer too long, to not see through the façade. "But someone else. You can't head out into battle unsure of your loyalties."

"I'm not unsure," she said in what she hoped was her firmest tone. "How could I be? I placed my entire army in Boratorren's hands, was prepared to trust his sense of honour. We came out the other side, so I made the right call."

Borso nodded as if he agreed, though he surely didn't. He'd been by her side in the mountain passes outside Varanos, when Endarion had turned his army against Dobran Tyrannus's and Daria had come to her imploring her aid. Borso had stood next to Estrid as she'd hesitated, likely seen the indecision on her face. Even though she'd lured Endarion there with the intent of forcing his hand, and even though she'd trusted him in that moment, she'd not leapt straight to his aid. She'd entertained the notion, however briefly, of letting her old lover die.

She shook this inner conflict off like an unwanted coat. "What I think and what I feel don't matter anymore," she said. "This is about more than the Imperium's campaigns into Kalduran. More than the Boratorren insurrection. This is about Arisen, and the possibility of Kalduran and Drasken being targeted."

Borso's smile returned, not quite as genuine as before, and he grasped her forearm. "All right then," he said. His eyes snagged on something behind her, and he nudged her.

Moving up the rise, accompanied by two of her Dasjuran infantry, strode Daria. She felt a surge of something unpleasant at the sight of the young woman under the supervision of her soldiers as if Daria were a common criminal, though it was the way of things now. Daria was no longer the girl Estrid had almost considered a daughter, nor was she the inexperienced youth who'd journeyed to Shaeviren with Estrid to rescue her father. As much as it pained Estrid to acknowledge, Daria occupied the same space as Endarion: a precarious ally of unknown worth, to be treated with mistrust and held at a distance until she and her father had proven themselves.

"Good afternoon, Kandras Elerius," Daria said with a bow. "Master Farkas." The formality of her tone wounded Estrid.

"Exalt-Lady Boratorren," Estrid replied after a moment of consideration. Though her father's heir, destined to one day wear the rank of arch-general, the young woman currently held no title beyond that of her noble birth.

Daria rolled her eyes, looking younger for it. "I doubt I can call myself that anymore," she said. "I'm a traitor, after all."

"That's subjective," Borso replied before Estrid could. "To them you're a traitor, but to us you've just made the best decision of your life." He offered Estrid the shallowest of nods, punctuated it with a grin, then said, "I'll leave you to it."

She waited until her deputy had dipped beneath the rise she stood upon before looking over to the two soldiers and dismissing them with a wave. They retreated reluctantly, tracking their gaze between her and Daria as if they expected the younger woman to attack her.

"What can I do for you?"

"I just wanted to talk," Daria replied, clasping her hands behind her back in an unsure mirror of her father's usual posture. "I haven't seen you since the meeting at the Baltanos' estate."

"I've been busy. We're about to leave for an extended campaign, and there's been much to do."

Not exactly a lie, though most of the Kaldurani ranks across all four armies had been in a state of readiness even before Endarion had stood before the Baltanos and shared what he knew. She might've spent more time organising them, forcing them through repetitions of formations, looking over reports, tallying supplies, than she needed to, but she could claim it was caution, not distraction.

"I'll go if you want," Daria said, turning to do so. "It was probably wrong of me to impose."

Estrid watched the other woman's back, gritting her teeth against the desire to call to her. Let her go, she told herself, it's for the best. Better for everyone if they didn't try to rebuild any previous bonds and campaigned as the tenuous allies they would have to be from now on. They would only go their separate ways when the campaign was concluded, in any case.

These thoughts, and myriad others, circled her mind as she kept her eyes locked on Daria. Her mouth shaped out her next words without her consent. "No, I don't want that."

The young woman stopped and looked over her shoulder, heavy brows raised.

"I want to talk," Estrid added, "but it's a difficult situation."

"I understand that," Daria replied as she paced back over. "It's been a difficult situation for a long time." Her hand flitted up to her face, to the small cut still adorning her cheek. The bruises Estrid knew had once been there had faded, but that didn't erase the memory of them. They were the first of undoubtedly many battle-scars the young woman would earn before this campaign was done with.

"I never meant for you to be punished," Estrid said, tracking Daria's movement.

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"But you meant for Father to be."

It wasn't a question, though she answered it with a shrug. "Can you blame me?" she asked. "I heard what happened in Dykumas. Some of it, anyway. A whole city, Daria. And all he got was a couple of lashes."

For a moment, the girl looked like she might argue, her knuckles white at her side, jaw clenched, eyes stern. Instead, she shook her head, averted her gaze from Estrid's, and said, "I didn't come here to talk about that. That's between you and Father."

"What did you want to talk about, then?"

"I wanted to see how you were," Daria replied. "So much has happened since Shaeviren. I wanted to… well, I guess I came here to see… where we stood." The uncertainty in her voice and the nervous pauses made the woman look like a child. Estrid had to remind herself that, though Daria was twenty-four years old, she was still inexperienced, still reliant on her father and his officers, still likely saw Estrid as the maternal figure she'd once been.

"Where do we stand?" she asked.

"I don't know," Daria replied. "We've done horrible things in the last few months, and I appreciate that. But I don't want to lose any family." She hefted her shoulders, as if physically drawing the strength to say something more. "You're family, Estrid. Whatever anyone else says, you've always been family. I don't want what's happened to poison that. I don't want you to hate us." She sighed. "Father's been regressing over this campaign. Not quite going mad again but moving in that direction. If I'm going to lose him, I don't want to lose you too."

For a strained moment Estrid had no answer. She could only look down at the young woman who, in a better life, would've been her daughter by blood, and wonder where it had all gone wrong.

"Regressing?" she said instead of the numerous other things she might've voiced.

"They made him lead the razing of Dykumas," Daria replied, then raised her hands in a placating gesture. "I know, I know. It's no excuse, but that's how it is. They made him do it by threatening to decimate our army. Then Dobran stripped him naked in front of everyone and whipped him for something he didn't do as Khian beat me in front of him. Then they told him he had to kill you, threatened our family repeatedly, told him, without any preamble, that he would either be killed or stripped of his ranks once Kalduran was conquered. I think he was ready to die for you."

She'd gotten that impression in Zaljuras, when she'd lured him to the ruined city to speak with him alone. He'd told her of his plans for attacking Varanos, allowing her and Aladar to prepare an effective defence. He hadn't expected to survive that battle. Because of her, he almost hadn't.

"He was ready to die for what he found out about the Caetoran and his pet Arisen," Estrid replied testily. "Not for me."

"You really think that?" Daria said. "You need to talk to him."

"There's no time," she said. "And nothing to say."

The younger woman frowned, an argument loaded on her tongue.

"But I will say this: Daria, I don't hate you," she continued. "I've never hated you, and nothing could make me hate you. I will always think of you as a daughter." She extended a hand into the space between them, bridging the gap. Rather than shake it, Daria seized it in an enthusiastic grip and yanked her into an abrupt embrace. Though she couldn't help but remember her embrace with Endarion in his pavilion after the battle, and how ill-advised that had probably been, Estrid returned Daria's grip. They stood there for a moment, Daria content, Estrid troubled.

When it came to the Boratorrens, she knew her judgement was skewed. She just hoped twining her destiny with theirs once again wouldn't prove to be the biggest miscalculation she'd ever made.

―

She arrived at Aladar's estate a few hours shy of midnight, a fattened moon heavy in the night sky, the early summer warmth riding the breeze. Predictably enough, he was in his office again, and she wondered whether he even spent time in any of his other rooms. He stood at the far end beneath the statue of Godking Skiron, Elek at his side. They bowed together in hushed conversation, and Estrid tapped her hand against the door as she shut it, lest she surprise them.

Elek pulled away as if he'd been caught doing something illicit, his surprise twisting into anger when he saw who'd intruded.

"Kandras Elerius," he said as he dipped his head in a bow he somehow made insulting. "We were discussing the division of Kaldurani Prime between myself and the Baltanos. If we could have some privacy?" He turned his smug expression to Aladar, expecting support.

"What do you need?" Aladar said instead, addressing her.

"To speak with you alone," she said. "There's a pressing matter I must share with you."

Elek shook his head. "We're busy, Elerius. Be gone."

She remembered the morning at Dujaro, just before her disastrous duel with Endarion, when Elek had beckoned her into his room in order to share his suspicions of her. He suspected her of harbouring ulterior motives, of planning to betray the Baltanos.

As much as she understood his paranoia and would've likely acted similarly to him had their positions been reversed, there was something about him that always made her want to antagonise him. Maybe it was his unearned confidence, or the naïve assumption that Aladar favoured him above his fellow kandras. Before Aladar had declared Estrid his heir—a position most thought Elek would be granted—the man had studiously ignored her. It was only recently he'd realised she existed and decided she was an opportunistic traitor waiting for her moment.

For that reason, and for the smugness of his expression, she fixed him with her most insincere smile, her crooked jaw exaggerated, and said, "I wasn't actually talking to you, Elek. Now, be a good boy and leave your superiors to their business."

The younger man screwed his hands up, the right one hovering down to his hip, where his sword would usually be, though he'd come to the Baltanos unarmed. Before he could consider an alternative method of attack, Aladar took his arm. "It's okay," he said. "I'll talk with Estrid, and then we can finish organising this division. I'd like you to seek out your masantra, in any case, and bring them here for this discussion."

Though Aladar's words weren't spoken as a command, Elek still complied. He saluted, then marched towards Estrid. Rather than let him ram his shoulder into her and take up his challenge, as she was sorely tempted to do, she stepped aside to let him pass, then waited until he'd slammed the door behind him before turning back to Aladar.

"That was rude, Estrid," he said. "As much as you may not like him, Elek is one of us."

"He's too easy to provoke," Estrid replied with a lopsided smile. "It's almost too much fun."

She approached her superior, looking between him and Skiron's statue and finding them an odd contrast. Though Skiron was often associated with soldiers and warfare, and Aladar could claim him as a strange sort of patron for his role as Baltanos, he looked less like a warrior standing beneath Skiron than he did in any other setting. Aladar wasn't built for fighting, and Skiron made that more obvious.

She considered then how mysterious the Baltanos was, how strange it was for such a powerful individual to have so little of his background known. She was his heir, had been friends with him and served beneath him for twelve years, yet she didn't know the first thing about him. Did he have family, and if so, where were they? How had he managed to rise so spectacularly through the ranks of Drasken's military command when he possessed no obvious combat skills, and didn't hail from a lineage with any overt military connections? Most important of all, why did he suffer from debilitating fits that seemed to escalate in severity, and no one, not even his husband, could explain them?

That last question was why she was here. A final prod before the campaign consumed them all.

"Pressing matter?" Aladar prompted.

Estrid folded her hand behind her back in as formal a pose as she could manage. "Yes," she said. "I wanted to talk about Incáraï."

He cocked his head at the strange word, but nothing in his expression suggested surprise or recognition.

"What's that?" he asked.

"Incáraï," she repeated. "You said you didn't kill it, whatever it is, when you had an… episode, right after we found out Dykumas had been razed. I was just wondering what it was."

His brow creased and his eyes narrowed. "Incáraï?" As soon as the last syllable slipped from his lips, his eyes widened and his face smoothed out into an expression of frozen shock. His hands twitched at his sides and his fingers spasmed. He shook his head and snapped his eyes shut, his jaw clenched so hard she was afraid he might break his teeth.

"Incáraï," he said again, though it came out in a slurred jumble. He spluttered, then lashed out a hand as if warding off an invisible threat. As he did, Estrid lurched forward and grasped his wrist, pressing her fingers to his bare skin.

She'd done this once before, some time ago now, and was prepared for the ravenous wave of blackness that tugged her headlong into the dead void. As bodiless as a ghost she tumbled, the darkness intense and total. It crushed her, smothered her, filled her with empty despair and convinced her nothing else would ever exist again but this impenetrable absence of life and light. She snapped her arms around herself and drew her knees to her chest, though in truth she had no body here and could only imagine herself in a foetal position.

A feeling like the gentle breeze of a sheltered valley licked at her ethereal skin, and a lightness studded her limbs, not unlike the sensation of being drunk.

All at once she was deposited from the void, the darkness retreating from a sickly landscape and fading like a shadow into the night. Sensation returned to her in waves, her limbs suddenly heavy, her mouth and nose clotted with the odour of rot and death. Her head rang with the aftermath of complete silence, and the breeze she'd felt in the dark stirred against her.

She stood now in an expanse of grassland which rolled against the horizon. Beneath her, armies heaved against one another, their clash so chaotic she couldn't define one side from another, nor identify any of the combatants. There were more fighters down there than she'd ever seen in a single battle, too many to be plausible. Hundreds of thousands, maybe more. Brilliant flashes of aasiurmancy illuminated the racket of steel on steel, and winged creatures flitted above it all.

No, not creatures, she realised with a start. She'd only ever read about them, but those were Novhar, resplendent in their organic plate armour and ten-foot-tall frames, their wings demonic and bat-like.

A presence at her side almost made her heart scale up her throat. She turned with an alarmed cry, her hand cutting down to the sword belt at her side but finding it missing.

"Incredible, isn't it?" Aladar asked. He stood beside her, his calmness an eerie antithesis to how he'd been just several seconds before, at the onset of his latest fit.

"How are you here?" she asked, incredulous. He hadn't been present in the first vision he'd inadvertently forced on her.

He shrugged, as if the answer was obvious. "It's my head, isn't it? It'd be foolish for me to be absent from it."

She nodded down to the battle still raging less than a mile distant. "This is your memory?"

"Of a sort," he replied. "Why are you here?"

A surge of guilt left a bitter taste in her mouth; she'd forced this vision, pushed Aladar into it by voicing a word he'd once uttered in madness. "You started fitting and I touched your hand. It's happened before."

"I have fits?" He turned his full attention to her, and she noticed there was something different about him here. He held himself taller than the Aladar she knew, and his features were sharper, more memorable. The man back in Varanos was plain-faced and unremarkable, but this one almost vibrated with a great power barely submerged.

"Often," she replied. She nodded her head down the rise. "Who are they? What are they fighting for?"

"Some of them are Erdohan's," Aladar replied.

"The Novhar who opened the Abyss?"

The Baltanos inclined his head in the barest gesture of acknowledgment. "So… this is, what, ten thousand years ago?" she asked.

He flashed her a knowing smile, quite unlike anything the man she was familiar with could manage. Then he jutted his chin towards the horizon, and she squinted and saw heavy, black storm clouds encroaching. They formed a solid wall of darkness to the north, staining the sky and smothering the land beneath. Only when the clouds rolled closer, blotting out the sun entirely, did Estrid realise they weren't clouds at all, but something worse. She tasted the taint on the wind, scented a stench of death that had nothing to do with the fight below. A roar, louder than a thunderstorm, split the air and made the combatants freeze.

"This is my favourite part," Aladar said, his knowing smile becoming malicious and predatory.

The blackness roared down upon the grasslands, as complete as the collapse of the sky on a moonless night. Something writhed in the void, exulting as the wave consumed everything in its path. Estrid saw people caught in the shockwave directly preceding the black wall, watched with an open mouth and wide eyes as they disintegrated.

Faded into nothing, just like the table in Aladar's pavilion when he'd touched it during a fit.

"The Cataclysm," she muttered to herself.

The apocalypse had ravaged the continent ten millennia ago, leaving all land north of the Drasken Empire dead and barren. Humanity had been all but destroyed, driven back to the darkest eras of its evolution and forced to eke out a life in the ashes of its fallen civilizations. Only now, ten thousand years later, were they even beginning to approach the level of development they'd been at when the Cataclysm had toppled them all.

And here it was, the opening act playing out before her eyes.

"Beautiful," Aladar said, and spread his arms wide.

As the escaping Abyss approached, she saw his skin ripple and burst, as if something monstrous beneath tried to tear out of him. Rather than fragment into nothingness as everyone below them had, he changed; limbs stretched, bones twisted, flesh bruised a multitude of clashing colours. His eyes, deep pits, blazed with murderous hunger, and his lips pulled back to reveal wolf-sharp canines.

He latched a twisted hand around her neck and drew her close. She felt the brutal tips of his fangs press into the skin of her throat.

Before he could rip her windpipe out, she blinked and found herself back in his office, her hand still clamped around his wrist. His eyes, the same plain brown she knew, were fixed on hers. A frown had replaced whatever rage gripped the version of him that existed in his own mindscape.

Unlike after every other episode she'd seen him experience, he'd come out of this one perfectly lucid.

"I wouldn't suggest doing that again," he said, tone barbed with warning.

He pulled his hand from hers and stepped away in time for his office door to swing open and permit his husband's harried figure. Behind Tanas, Elek shot her a scowl.

"What's going on?" Tanas demanded. He stepped up to Aladar, took both hands in his, drew him close. The Baltanos acquiesced to the attention.

"Nothing," Aladar replied. "Estrid and I were discussing some reservations she had regarding the Imperials in our city." As if to assure his husband of his sincerity, he flicked his gaze towards her and lifted his mouth into a small smile that didn't touch his eyes.

Somehow, he knew she'd been in his head. He'd shown her the Cataclysm on purpose, presenting the scene to her as if he were intimately familiar with how it'd transpired. She recalled what he'd done to the table and found herself wondering what manner of illness his fits really were, and whether he could destroy a person in a similar manner.

With all three men now regarding her, watching her as if she were an intruder, she bowed to the Baltanos and murmured thoughtless goodbyes. When she departed, she felt the weight of Aladar's gaze on her back and couldn't suppress a shiver.