A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

Those mighty foes, they were what seemed to pull it out of him, that fear. It allowed him a blanket to hide himself with. A place in his heart to curl up away from the world. He'd been afraid of the Emerson army, and of the prospect of defeat. But that fear had turned a spool, and woven a thread that should not have existed. He had to trust in that too.

He had to believe that there was something left for him. For he was not equal to Blackwell and the Generals under him, but they had left a mark on Tiberius' face. They had managed to scar him. He was not immortal, or beyond defeat. Even if their bodies now littered the battlefield, there was much to be learned from their deaths, if Oliver had the bravery to confront him.

The strength of that thought brought strength to his voice, when he raised it in a whip of command, raw and unrefined.

"MEN OF THE STORMFRONT!" He beseeched them, for they were no organized group, with no unified cause, aside from survival. "OUR DEFEAT IS NOT YET WRITTEN IN STONE! BIND TOGETHER! BIND TO ME! EMERSON MAN, TO TAVAR MAN, TO YOU TREEANTS, AND YOU PATRICKS!"

It was a loud noise in a void, echoing over the sounds of battle. There hadn't been enough morale before for those men to shout. Now it came to them, raw Command, tainted by overwhelming sadness. A complicated, searching emotion, terribly incomplete. A storm is what it was, and in them, Oliver evoked his tempest.

"WE HAVE NO ENEMY, BUT THAT WHICH IS IN FRONT OF US! NO MATTER OUR CAUSES, LOOK BEFORE US AND SEE, THIS IS THE COMMON ENEMY OF THE STORMFRONT! THIS IS THE COMMON ENEMY OF OUR HONOUR!"

He pointed to Tiberius, who stood sneering at the top of his hill, in the centre of his cavalry formation, and with a dispatchment of heavy infantry gathering next to them, set for a two pronged assault. He watched, with barely contained amusement, as Oliver tried to do exactly that which Blackwell and Asabel had done before him – to make orderly his army, by Claudia's laws of progress. That same, simple, tired Stormfront strategy, he stood by it, as if it was the honourable thing to do.

Never before had there been placed such a weight on Oliver's heart. The crushing from all sides. Even as he spoke, he thought he might break. He clutched at his chest, but he continued to speak. The faces of the slain ran unbidden through his mind. He could not pull himself away from them. They took the scars of the past, all that had threatened to break Oliver so long ago, and they made for a monstrous combination, a great swirling spiralling mess. One that created an immense pressure on the centre of his existence. It sought the heart of him, and it tried to have him break.

Different creatures, little monsters of his own mind, destroyed him in different ways. All that which he worried about, and had weakened him, they blossomed into dozens of little dragons, flittering their way around inside the centre of his existence. The ancient winged beast that guarded all his troubled thoughts relating to his family. That creature, more like a Hobgoblin than anything else, that guarded the rawness of Dominus' swift and sudden passing, when Oliver had needed him for so much longer than he'd had him. The angry griffin that squawked accusingly, whenever he thought about the battle that had seen Lombard and Tolsey slain. So many monsters, and all of them starving. He couldn't fend them off. He couldn't hang on to all that he was.

So instead, he opened his arms wide, and to those fleshy dollops of weakness, he had the unfathomable urge to let them feast. The demons of his own imagining. A seemingly self-destructive impulse, like that which had afflicted him earlier, to tell Verdant who it was that he really was, fully expecting to be struck down for it. Now he knew his psychology to be a churning wreck, and he knew the worst of himself to be feasting upon the best of him. But he bid them to. Like the General before his troops now, he gave all that he was.

"A QUEEN OF THE HIGHEST SORT! A GENERAL THAT ALL KNEW TO RESPECT! YOU MAY NOT HAVE GLANCED UPON THE FACES OF THE SLAIN AS I DID, BUT YOU STILL KNOW WITHOUT A DOUBT THAT THEY WERE NOT GIVEN WARRIORS ENDS," Oliver said, struggling to even speak for those memories that he wrought. He ground his teeth. Tears ran down his cheeks. He had to believe that the men could not see him. They needed his words, not his face – this was the only way he knew how to inspire them.

"PLEASURE IS WHAT THAT CREATURE CALLED TIBERIUS KILLS FOR," Oliver said. "HE MISTAKES THE SOLDIERS PROFESSION – HE THINKS OUR PROFESSION IS KILLING, MEN OF THE STORMFRONT! HE IS MISTAKEN!"

His shouts tore at his vocal cords, all his pain, he put into his words. Anger, sadness, fear, a swirling torrent. He knew not towards what end he even fought. Was it even truly the killing of Tiberius? He did not think it was so simple. There were too many little monsters in his heart that he'd set loose and he had to wrestle with. It was no longer so simple as a single charge, a single victory. It was a storm, truly, and in a storm, one could only bear it.

"A SOLDIERS' PROFESSION IS NOT KILLING," Oliver told them. "A SOLDIER'S PROFESSION IS DYING!"

Command twirled, a strange contradictory thing. Not a compulsion towards victory. That was not what Oliver stirred up, for he had no true direction, other than the pain that he felt in his own heart. Yet, the binding quality of it was not to be dismissed. That objective that he'd been given, that he'd half-forgotten, in seeing his army unified… The results were evident on the faces of the men, in the tightened grips on their spears. In the steps back towards the man that shouted them on. A hard shoulder to their left, and then to their right. The sternness of the ally next to them, thinking the same thing, swirling with the same mixture of fear, anger, and despair.