“Bullshit,” accused Sodan.

“Straight, just like I said,” the governor reassured.

Sodan looked aside again, taking a drag of the cigar, “I’ll think about it.”

“No time,” Crovacus pushed him. “I need an answer.”

Sodan looked back at him and spat: “Get a new tank engineer.”

“You and I both know the war’s only over on paper, Sodan,” Estoras said. “We need him alive.”

“I don’t give a fuck about your war,” lashed out the Prisoner halfheartedly. “Or your knockoff tankman project.”

“Is that your answer?” Crovacus prodded.

“I’m thinking about it,” sighed the Prisoner.

Crovacus leaned in over his desk, staring down the Prisoner as close-up as he would dare before he said, “Think hard.”

A few moments of tense silence. Strake’s ice-cold blue eyes stared back at him, and it almost felt like in them he could see the unwritten feats and tortures of this man-beast that sat before him. 

Then, a reluctant question: “Why me?”

He took the opportunity to lean back and pulled out another paper from the file. This one was hand-written, penned by the hand of one who knew the things that got expunged and redacted in official records. Its writer had made clear that it only contained what he thought necessary to convince the Prisoner, and it had still taken Crovacus a few readings to believe it. 

“You know why, Steel Comet,” he said, and saw an immediate reaction. If before it had been a slow uphill battle, now the scales had shifted, just by using that name. Just by proving that he really did know who Sodan was. What he was. “The Battle of Klinig, you single handedly broke a cavalry charge. Battle of Stonog, you took out two full squads of Inquisitors before they could destroy a single artillery piece. At the Siege of Jade Harbor you went up against Gonubana of the Azure Bullet and Gau Hong the Eclipse Edge, leaving them crippled and broken. All throughout the war you infiltrated and exfiltrated active combat zones in a walking tank without ever being captured and you have one of the highest recorded Inquisitor kill counts. You’re all I’ve got.”

Sodan stared off into empty space, then looked back at the Governor, “Guess I go in or it’s back to scrapin’ a gate glyph into a boulder. Doesn’t mean shit to me, rewrite my soul signature.”

“When you come out,” Crovacus said. 

Strake instantly cut in, “Before.”

“I told you I wasn’t a fool, Sodan.”

“Call me Strake. Do I get supplies? Equipment? A partner?”

“You’ll be operating alongside a Renegade Inquisitor. No bullshit, stripped of the mask, stripped of iconography."

“You should’ve just opened with that,” the Prisoner grinned. 

The sun rose into the heavens. At the very edge of the forest a poor lone farmer had finished weeding one of his fields, and it was now time to harvest the crop of another. A row of makeshift graves topped by shrines made of swords and helmets greeted him along the footpath, ones he had put up when he was first tilling this soil. When he had first been given this field by the Provisional Governor he had gathered every bone, counted the dead, prayed for them and spent much of his farming stipend on incense to burn in their honor.

The wheat which he had sown in this field had burgeoned from the earth so quickly he could see the difference between a day’s morning and evening, it had choked the weeds before he could root them out and grown boughs twice as long and twice as thick as it should’ve. 

The Farmer sharpened his scythe, its blade that of the very war-knife he had used in war - its back ground down to a facsimile of a scythe’s edge, for he could not afford a scratch-made blade.

The Farmer took to reaping, taking no breaks in the face of the scorching sun except to partake of the water of a nearby creek.

By noon he knew he could never finish the harvest before the bugmen stole the grain, even if they had grown cowardly in recent days. He knew, and he kept reaping to the fullest extent of his capabilities, even as muscles burned and the stabbing pain of an old scar wracked his body and made his head feel like it would split in half any moment now. He was an urchin soldier, after all. He had come from nothing and gone through worse, and he would sooner die a hundred deaths than give up this livelihood of his, meager though it was. Even what modest equipment he had for his farm was paid for with money earned from what he understood to have been quite literally selling a pound of flesh to some alchemist, money that he had painstakingly saved all throughout his service to the state. That wound had taken forever to heal, and somehow the scar would always reopen when he thought back on his fallen comrades... 

So it was that he reaped long into the afternoon and found that a strange mist rolled in around him, that the pains of his body somehow grew dull while his scythe sailed through the stalks of his grain as if they were nothing, cutting down even those twice over beyond its reach.

So it was that he carried his grain to his cart long into the night, and with his scythe cut down the thieving locusts that dared intrude upon his fields, for he could smell them and hear their wretched chittering. 

In the evening he prayed for those who had fallen in his fields, and in the morning he rose to take his grain to the markets. The Farmer worried himself not with high-minded ideas like cultivation or Fog-breathing, or even the primal aspiration to rise above one’s limitations. 

He knew this livelihood to be his, and he understood the price he had paid, that of suffering, blood, and myriad dead in his stead. He understood, and he would make those who would take this from him pay twice that price.

Akaso

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