Realms of tomorrow, p.3
Realms of Tomorrow, page 3
part #4 of The Falling Empires Saga Series
If he could find Lauriston’s Erlonian army, or any of the allies, he could warn them of the golden-armored enemy cutting down the Kurakin Horde in the north.
He had to tell them what destruction marched south. He had to warn them that they were all doomed.
Lodi
Lodi dug his heels into the sides of his mount and urged the horse to speed up to a gallop. A regiment of mounted Jinetes fell in behind him and wove through the trees of the pockmarked forest north of Rouche.
Marshal Lauriston’s division would be close behind Lodi’s own. The Kurakin fled somewhere beyond their sight, but Lodi was determined to find them first, even if it was for only an initial cavalry skirmish.
If the Lakmian division discovered the rearguard of the main Kurakin force, Lodi could rally his men to attack them before Lauriston could even begin to change the direction of his march with his foot soldiers.
It was a selfish desire. Every leader wanted the final glory of this war. But the fighting was almost over. Lodi and every other Jinete behind him knew the Horde had been broken at Bordin. Their main army had been smashed to pieces and forced to flee back across the river.
No one, not even Emperor Lannes, seemed to understand why the Horde now fled north instead of south or west, but that didn’t matter to Lodi. All he cared about was the end of the war.
All he cared about was freeing the empire and returning to Lakmia in a time of peace.
Lodi held up a hand as they reached another stretch of broken forest. A few scouts in the rear of the cavalry formation broke off and slowed to inspect the open field for signs of the fleeing Horde.
The scouts would catch up to the galloping horses later and report on their findings. Lodi didn’t want to slow the entire group down to search for tracks. They knew the general direction of Duroc’s Kurakin, so they could push on and hope to come upon the rearguard and catch them unaware.
The land here was still rocky as it dropped from the hills and boulders of Rouche. Lodi knew this area well from the start of numerous campaigns back in the height of the empire under Lannes.
Between Rouche and the coastline was usually where the army had mustered before marching east. This was where the might of Erlon and Lakmia combined before sweeping across Wavre or Lakmia and into the east to fight off another rebellion from the former powers over the Continent.
But the land here never returned to quite the same farmland to the south of Rouche. They were now too close to the coast, and too near the delta of the rushing river on the border with Wavre in the east as well. The soil was sandy. The trees turned to pine. And shore birds appeared, drifting stoically on the gusts of salty-smelling wind.
Lodi gave a quick glance up at a lone seagull as he tugged on the reins of his galloping horse to direct the mount off the road and deeper into the next stretch of woods. He signaled his Jinetes to follow and the formation spread out through the trees.
Lodi could only hope the enemy waited for them somewhere close.
The Kurakin didn’t have much more room for retreat. They would soon reach the coast and have to turn and fight or surrender. Lannes and Lauriston feared the Horde had navy transports waiting for them in the northern ocean, but Lodi didn’t believe it.
The Brunian allies claimed their navy had the entire western coasts of the Continent blockaded, even along the shores of Kura far in the south. Lodi trusted their word and saw no reason for Duroc to have spent time and effort getting his navy to the north before the defeat at Bordin.
Before that battle, the Kurakin Horde had all but conquered Erlon. They had control of everywhere but the extreme north.
If Marshal Lauriston and the army hadn’t defeated them on the western banks of the Kal River, the conquest would’ve been complete. If the brave soldiers of the empire hadn’t held strong, if their gunpowder and cannons had failed, the war would be over.
But now the tide had turned. Emperor Lannes was free and had returned to lead his warriors once again. Duroc fled before the might of the empire, fled before the people he sought to conquer.
It didn’t matter to Lodi what direction the Kurakin fled. Lodi’s division was moving the fastest of the four groups probing north. He would find the Kurakin first and start the last battles to end this long war.
The Lakmian general smiled and urged his horse and the men behind him onward. They would ride until evening, hopefully finding the Kurakin before dark and setting up for an attack the following day.
It would be a glorious end to long years of fighting. Lodi would find that glory first and send word back to Lauriston to hurry forward. But the Lakmians would land the first of the final blows against Duroc’s struggling army.
The war was almost over, and Lodi wanted to be the attack that struck true and ended the Horde invasion for good.
Elisa
Elisa awoke early to the sounds of the army stirring. Every soldier seemed to rise with the dawn now and get up with a fire stirring from deep within them. The war was almost over. There were only a few battles left to fight, only a few enemies left to kill.
That drove all the soldiers forward, most of all Elisa and the officers.
The princess climbed out of her sleeping bag and rolled out of her tent. She would go see Junot and the other soldiers of her unit around their normal campfire. Then she would visit her father’s headquarters and prepare for the day’s march with him before finally mounting up and resuming the trek north after the enemy.
But before Elisa could take a full step away from her tent, a voice broke the bustling noises of the morning camp.
“I was hoping you’d rise early.”
Elisa turned towards the voice and found her guide sitting cross-legged on the ground. He had his eyes closed, but opened one of them to look at her when she didn’t respond immediately.
“I don’t have much time, but I wanted to check in before you traveled much farther north,” the guide said, opening his other eye and beckoning her closer to him.
Elisa took a single step forward and stayed standing. She’d thought very little about the war going on between her guide and the evil Kurakin god Chaos recently, especially compared to the worry and stress she’d felt daily on the topic over the past few months.
Chaos would no longer bother her; she and the guide had stopped him before the Battle of Bordin. They hadn’t fully defeated him—Elisa wasn’t naive enough to believe that—but she could feel something in the air that felt more peaceful than before, like Chaos no longer had sway over things.
She expected the guide to feel the same way as the rest of the allies around the princess, to be joyous and confident. But he was anything but calm.
Now that Elisa took a second look at him, she noticed the red cracks forming within his eyes and the deep bags underneath that she’d never seen on his normally smooth features before.
The joy of the morning faded a little as the guide spoke.
“Something has happened,” he said. “We missed something around the last battle and during this retreat.”
“What?” Elisa said, even as she realized the guide wouldn’t give her a straight answer, whether he knew the truth or not.
“I don’t know.” The guide shook his head. “But something has happened to Chaos.”
“That’s good, then,” Elisa said. The fearful chill that had threatened to jolt down her spine faded and she unclenched her fists. She didn’t see the issue with another setback visiting their enemy.
“Not exactly.” The guide closed his eyes again and held his hands together on top of his crossed legs.
Elisa knew he was drifting off over the land in search of his enemy and she wanted to join him, but chose to stay standing and in the present. There were too many nightmarish memories from using her ability in the past months to casually drift off, even if Chaos wasn’t a threat anymore.
“I can’t find him,” the guide said, snapping his eyes back open and taking in a gasping breath. “Not like he’s hiding, but almost as if he’s gone from this world.”
“That’s good,” Elisa said again. She still didn’t see an issue that could be causing the guide to stress.
The guide shook his head. “This means there could be something more dangerous out there. Something capable of silencing Chaos,” he said.
Something more dangerous. Elisa thought back on the evil god appearing before her during the Battle of Neuse, right after Montholon had been shot. She thought on the Battle of Lake Ohain and the air growing colder and the lake freezing to form a flank of their position. And she thought on the evil being killing Bassano and hunting and attacking Elisa and ripping her into another world full of smoke and destruction.
She couldn’t believe that something else would be more powerful than such a god, not at the end of this war, not after they’d fought so hard against both Chaos and his Kurakin Horde.
“Maybe we weakened him enough that he was vulnerable. Maybe we finished him,” Elisa said, her mind already drifting over towards the breakfast that awaited her with her unit around the campfire.
The war was almost over. Her father had returned. What did she have to worry about regarding the squabble between gods?
“I don’t know,” the guide said. He shook his head. “We missed something, and it’s not good. I just don’t know what.”
The vague statements from the guide didn’t give Elisa any more cause for concern. If he had concrete evidence of a new threat, she would help him. But nothing was ever certain with the guide, and more often than not, he only provided more stress and no answers for the princess.
The guide opened his mouth to continue but a new voice called out to Elisa from behind the adjacent line of tents.
“Elisa!” It was Captain Junot, most likely calling from the campfire for her to join the other men.
“Here,” Elisa called out in reply. She was surprised to hear Junot’s footsteps coming towards them down the camp path.
“I will return soon,” the guide said, his image already starting to fade away. “Be on the lookout for a new threat. This war may be far from over.”
Elisa didn’t have time to process the guide’s last words, no matter how ominous. Junot appeared around the closest tent and his face told Elisa she would soon have other things to worry about.
His brow was creased and he hesitated before speaking.
“What is it?” Elisa said. Fear threatened to grip her again, but she couldn’t yet be sure what kind. This was supposed to be a normal and calm morning.
“Your father is asking for you immediately.” Junot paused again, his mouth half open with the start of his next statement.
Elisa raised her eyebrows.
The answer was something she’d never expected to hear. It shocked her and brought a range of emotions she couldn’t even begin to process.
Junot took a breath and spoke all at once. His words echoed around Elisa’s head as the morning light grew across the camp.
“Sorceress Epona has returned,” he said “Your mother is here, she’s with your father. They’re asking for you.”
Chapter 3
A general should be apprehensive and cautious before every fight.
Maxims of War, Entry Twenty-Seven
Emperor Gerald Lannes
Lannes
A general on campaign should work through the night and find sleep during the day. Lannes kept this belief even after becoming emperor and the practice had always proved effective for him.
But the early-morning hours after a night of working were where his resolve grew weak. The fatigue of the productive previous evening pulled his eyelids down and clouded the edges of his vision. He needed to stand up and move. He needed to walk through his men and reinvigorate his mind for the coming day’s march.
But there was more to finish on his desk. His hand cramped from holding a pen all night but he pushed forward with the last few letters to his generals and the marshal just to the north of his position.
Marshal Lauriston was moving through Rouche. Lodi rushed ahead with his own division. Quatre held the line in the west.
Once they located Duroc, Lannes could rush forward with the rest of his army and Erlon would converge to crush the foreign invaders. The war would be over and he could return home with his daughter and start to rebuild.
Lannes signed the last few documents with a rushed flourish. The glorious feelings of the end of a grand campaign were beginning to form in his stomach. He knew he couldn’t get ahead of himself— there could still be plenty of fighting left in the north—but he was beginning to feel hope for the first time in what felt like a lifetime.
The emperor stood up and shifted the papers on his desk. He combined them in organized stacks for his aides to distribute and then stretched out the tightness in his back. Hunching over a desk for hours was hardly the heroic image the Erlonians pictured when thinking of their warrior emperor, but it was closer to the truth than the great war paintings back in the palace.
Lannes chuckled to himself as he moved about his tent and prepared for the day. He changed his shirt and splashed water across his face.
His thoughts drifted back to the orders he’d drafted all night and the adjustments he made to the army’s march. Coordinating multiple divisions was always difficult, even when momentum was on Erlon’s side.
Lodi and Lauriston raced to find the Kurakin first and take the glory away from each other. Lannes knew the competition wasn’t malicious or detrimental to the army. In fact, he encouraged friendly rivalries as much as possible.
But Lannes needed to make sure Lodi didn’t overextend himself or Lauriston pull too far east and lose contact with Desaix and Quatre.
They couldn’t afford to let any Kurakin columns slip through back to the south. They had to funnel Duroc farther north and then trap him against the coast.
The thought of the opposing commander’s name gave Lannes pause. He pulled back from the details of the orders now stacked on his desk and thought on the big picture of the Continent’s great war.
General Duroc was said to be the only general to ever defeat Emperor Lannes in battle. That wasn’t entirely true, but the sentiment was close enough. Duroc had ended Lannes’s string of victories across the Continent and turned Erlon’s empire back from unstoppable expansion and orchestrated it to collapse.
Now Lannes would have his revenge. He would end the Kurakin invasion and rebuild his empire and shape the Continent’s future into something great and better and more prosperous.
He no longer feared facing Duroc. Erlon had the upper hand and Lannes would use their advantage to crush their enemies, no matter who led the massed barbarians on the other side.
Lannes finished with his morning washing and switched out his shoes for his riding boots. He would ride with the initial march this morning but switch to his carriage to gain a few moments of sleep around midafternoon.
Lannes’s fatigue was still present, but had faded as his thoughts picked up speed again. He walked over to his secretary in the corner and picked up his bicorne hat. He placed it on his head and adjusted it down tight on both sides. He looked down at the top of the secretary and found a letter pulled loose from under the hat. The name at the top sent Lannes’s thoughts in another direction entirely.
The letter was one from his daughter, sent while he was still in Brun with King Nelson. That felt like years ago, almost as far back as his coronation as emperor or wedding to Epona.
Now the emperor was back in Erlon, leading his own countrymen, and marching with his daughter. He and Elisa spent as much time as possible together and Lannes savored every minute of their interactions.
They each still had their duties to the army to perform that pulled them away from each other. Lannes was most impressed with Elisa’s work with her unit and larger regiment and wouldn’t take that away from her or the army.
But he longed not only to free Erlon from war, but to be able to spend full days with his daughter again. He longed to spend summers in the south at the palace near Mere or springs in Plancenoit or the winters in the northeast at Papelotte once again.
Elisa was now a grown woman; she was no longer the little girl that Lannes had left so long ago to fight his doomed war in the far south. She was now a warrior, a brave Erlonian soldier.
Lannes was proud of her. He hoped Elisa’s mother, wherever she was, would be as well.
The emperor smiled down at the letter and the flowing handwriting and told himself he would go and visit his daughter as soon as the officers had their orders within the camp and the call to march went out for the columns.
He turned towards the tent flap, all aspects of fatigue now gone, and prepared to enter the bustle of his army.
But the tent flap moved before he took his first step. Lannes stared as a woman entered the tent.
She stopped just inside and looked at Lannes, her wide-eyed expression mirroring his own.
The emperor at first thought the woman was Thirona, returning from Wahring in the east to help finish the war. Lannes thought to inquire about King Nelson and see if the king had returned as well before realizing his mistake.
This was his wife.
Epona had returned.
There was too much to say and nothing that needed to be said. Lannes stepped forward and then rushed to his lost wife and wrapped her in his arms. She did the same, falling into his embrace and burying her face in his shoulder.
There weren’t words to speak, not after being away from her for so long. There was only the return of her touch and the flowery smell of her hair and the slightness of her figure.
“I’m sorry, Lannes,” Epona said when they finally let go of each other.
Lannes didn’t know how long they had embraced. He wouldn’t be surprised if it was now evening, the entire army marched off without them and the world empty outside the tent.
