I know what did go into the moat. My general's stars, my fancy cloak, the sword I had killed my king with. That last was the hardest, it had kept me alive through so many hard years of war and heartache, was a shard of myself, yet it would have marked me as surely as the rest of it.
In the royal chambers, upon the mantle, was a huge, sharply honed bastard sword. It boasted no pomp, nothing decorative at all, its lethality all common soldier.
It had belonged to my king's father. I took it up, tested the weight.
Strange. I took to it instantly.
In the hours that followed I don't know how many people I killed with it.
When the battle was over I was among perhaps a hundred survivors, out of an army of thousands. They took that magnificent blade from me, and I fully expected execution, yet they sent us to the Mines of Murafa instead, where the conquered dug for diamonds in a sweltering desert hole until they died.
And that is where it begins. Though...
That isn't where it ends. The sword's story wasn't over either, we'd meet again.
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