Spring, 1332

The Reconquesta began as soon as the snow and rains stopped and the roads hardened enough to allow wagons to cross the mountain passes. The Coalition Army of Nablin advanced into the foothills of the Southern Ranges and immediately ran into trouble, clashing with strong rearguard elements of the Tassurian Empire positioned along the mountain passes. General Carmel was too intelligent to face the Auxians in open battle and risk potentially destroying what was left of the Imperial Armies. Instead he withdrew his forces skillfully, setting ambushes, delaying actions and minor raids to keep the Coalition forces off balance. The entire Spring of 1332 was thus filled with innumerable ugly little skirmishes across Cnaeus, Antium and Alba, resulting in incessant warfare and destruction, suffering and bloodshed, without a single location to be memorialized for the sagas and history books.

The Stanton Brigade, with Logan and Mera at its head, slowly advanced with the rest of the Auxian forces. Held as an operational reserve in case the Tassurian forces elected to make an actual stand, the unit was largely spared the frustrating, pointless scrimmages that slowly bled so many other units. Instead they just marched. For hundreds of miles the Stanton Brigade trudged- through unbroken grassland littered with broken and abandoned equipment and the occasional body, over rough wooded hills with paths rutted from innumerable wheels, around small villages burning to the ground, beneath towering mountains that dwarfed all comprehension of such mortal squabbles, and past flooded farm fields reflecting their images back upon them- the dragon and his human and their unit kept on marching.

As the coalition army slogged onward however, something else became apparent. Despite the repeated bloody reversals the veteran Imperial forces dealt upon the advancing troops, the Trasgu were suffering heavy losses as well.

Everywhere Logan’s troops passed they came across burnt encampments and Other Men cemeteries, lonely spots half hidden off the road. Earlier burials had been organized and formal, gravesites arrayed in uniform position and topped by standard, utilitarian cairns of a sphere and two tusks, all arrayed with discipline in death as reflected in life. Occasionally a Northern Lord or high-ranking officer’s tomb remained, decorated with intricate bas-reliefs of glorious past battles or strange lands up North that may have been some home that the dead had not been shipped back to-and now would now never return to. As time went on the burials grew simpler, just a plot with a large stone as a marker, and then more and more chaotic, as the uniformity of the dead broke down and simple mounds began to appear in haphazard fashion, even across previous burials. And then for the dead stopped being organized altogether. The Stanton troops silently walked past mass plots of disturbed ground, some only a few weeks or even a few days old, or the remains of mass pyres, some with melted metal or fragments of charred bones denoting that they once held mortal remains. An occasional body, not found by the Northern burial parties, simply rotted along the sides of forests and fields.

Were all the recent ones from Lord De Trobliand's plague? Logan didn't want to know.

“That’s the fifth Other Men cemetery we’ve come across today. It’s like we’re walking through a goddamn charnel house.” Woden finally muttered as the brigade passed a small plot on a saddle between two large grassy knolls.

Logan did some quick mental calculations. “We’ve come across the equivalent of an entire regiment buried just along this route today. They’re losing a lot of their people, and fast.”

“All the less enemies for us to fight.” Came the bodyguard’s reply with a shrug.

Liza pointed to a line of Tassurian graves running along one edge, the markers toppled over and the dead dug up and strewn along the road. “Someone is already vandalizing the tombs.”

“I’ve heard rumors passed along that the Other Men bury their dead with gold atop their foreheads.” Bidgewell offered.

“Ugh.” Liza gave a grimace of disgust. “Looting corpses? People do that?”

“What does it matter?” Woden cut in. “The dead’s dead, and someone could use that coin. It’s just some Other Man.”

Liza stared at the road ahead. “Don’t like it, Northerner or otherwise.”

“And why should they leave their bodies here on Auxian soil?” Came the retort. “It’s our land. I don’t need a reminder of their invasion every time I pass here.”

Bidgewell shrugged. “The cost of an empire. Burying your sons in foreign lands and relying on the mercies of your enemy.”

The dragon ended the conversation with a loud snort.

---

Michael Kamen - Fire On Lake

From  Chickenzaur!