The cries of the dying still echoed when the news spread like wildfire through both armies. Adrien Valebrand — the Duke's heir — was dead. Viscount Gerald, the butcher of two border rebellions, was slain. Viscount Aurelian, the duelist without equal, fell alongside Marshal Tyron.
The morale of the Duke's right wing plummeted like a stone thrown into the sea.
Men glanced nervously at one another. Officers shouted orders, but their voices cracked with fear. Even the banners, once raised high, seemed to falter in the smoky haze.
Aleric, bloodied but unbowed, seized the moment. His lungs burned, but his voice cut through the battlefield like a blade.
"Forward! Drive them back! The right flank is ours to take!"
His sword, still slick with Adrien's blood, pointed toward the wavering enemy lines. Around him, the men of House Deryn, Count Rick's seasoned infantry, and mercenaries raised their weapons with a roar. The chants of his name rose again, echoing over the din.
"Aleric! Aleric! Aleric!"
Jaren, still panting, his blade dripping with Gerald's lifeblood, moved beside him. For once, there was no hesitation in his stance. His voice joined his brother's.
"For the Crown! For victory! Press them!"
The left wing surged like a tide unleashed. Shields locked, spears thrust, swords hacked downward. The Duke's soldiers, already shaken by the loss of their commanders, faltered under the relentless assault.
Still, not all broke.
From among the chaos, Gerald's household knights — a handful of hardened veterans clad in blackened steel — stepped forward. Their armour bore scars of a hundred battles, their visors painted with snarling beasts. They formed a wedge, determined to avenge their fallen lord or die beside him.
"Stand firm!" one bellowed, his voice muffled through his helm. "For House Valebrand! For the Duke!"
The wedge slammed into Aleric's vanguard with brutal precision, cutting down a dozen men in the first charge. Their discipline was iron, their blades deadly. Even Crown soldiers who had been roaring with confidence now hesitated before such a wall of steel.
But Aleric refused to yield.
"With me! Break them!" he shouted, charging directly into the fray with Jaren at his side.
The clash was savage. Aleric parried a knight's downward slash, the force nearly shattering his guard, then pivoted to drive his sword through the knight's visor, killing him instantly. Jaren, emboldened by his victory over Gerald, fought with reckless courage, skewering another through the gut.
The elite knights fought valiantly, each one worth ten men, but they were too few. Slowly, inevitably, Aleric's forces surrounded them. One by one, the knights fell, their defiance ending in sprays of blood and shattered steel.
The last of Gerald's knights stood defiant, his banner still in hand. Surrounded, bleeding from half a dozen wounds, he thrust the banner into the mud, roaring, "We do not yield!" before Aleric himself cut him down.
The banner toppled. The symbol of Duke's household lay trampled beneath the boots of Crown soldiers.
That was the breaking point.
The Duke's right wing, leaderless and shattered, dissolved into chaos. Men threw down their weapons and fled. Others were cut down where they stood, too slow to retreat. The once-mighty wing crumbled into nothing more than a tide of fleeing soldiers, streaming away from the battlefield in panic.
Aleric raised his sword again, blood glistening on the steel. "The right is broken! Press on! Crush them!"
His men surged forward, cheering wildly, chasing the remnants of the Duke's right flank.
On the far side of the battlefield, the Crown Prince's right wing was a very different story.
There, men fought with their backs to the earth, every heartbeat a gamble for survival. They had not advanced like Aleric, nor did they have a man like Marquis Brandford in the centre. Their only command had been clear: hold until relief comes.
But relief had not yet arrived.
The Duke's left wing had hurled itself at them with brutal ferocity. Waves of infantry crashed against their shields again and again, like the sea battering a rocky shore. The ground was slick with blood, trampled into mud by countless boots.
Men shouted, screamed, and died in the press. Shields shattered beneath the weight of heavy axes. Spears snapped. Sword-arms grew heavy, trembling from exhaustion. For every enemy they cut down, two more seemed to take their place.
One Crown soldier — his helm dented, face streaked with grime — slammed his shoulder into an enemy, driving his short sword into the man's ribs. Pulling free, he turned just in time to see his comrade beside him felled by a halberd, skull split open like ripe fruit.
"Hold the line!" the captain roared, his voice breaking. His banner, the sigil of the Crown Prince, was torn and frayed, the staff barely upright.
But the line wavered.
The men were already a thousand short compared to the enemy, and now, pressed from every side, they fought on the edge of collapse. The Duke's left wing pressed harder, sensing weakness, driving their advantage with ruthless precision.
The sounds were chaos: steel on steel, the guttural cries of men locked in death struggles, the bellowing of enemy sergeants demanding the Crown line be shattered.
Crown soldiers fought in desperation, some forming tight knots of resistance, others breaking ranks in panic, only to be cut down. Horses screamed as cavalry tried to reinforce the line but were dragged from their saddles by spears and axes.
Blood turned the soil black.
From a distance, those on the far right could see little of what was happening elsewhere. They did not know that Aleric had triumphed. They did not know that the Duke had already committed his reserves. All they knew was the crushing weight of the enemy before them.
"Where is the left?!" a soldier cried, parrying desperately before being dragged into the press and stabbed a dozen times.
"Just hold!" another shouted back, but his words were drowned by the thunder of a charge breaking through their shield wall.
The right flank of the Crown Prince was at its breaking point. The men fought on, but many wondered in their hearts how much longer they could last before the line finally shattered.
The ground still trembled with the aftershocks of the slaughter on the right wing. Aleric's men, their blades wet and their lungs burning with victory, regrouped beneath his banner. The corpses of Adrien Valebrand, Viscount Gerald, and hundreds of the Duke's finest lay scattered in the dirt — silent testimony to the price of defiance.
But Aleric's eyes were not on the fallen. They were on the field ahead.
The Duke's centre still stood strong, reinforced by his reserves, and to the far left, the Valebrand banners still surged forward, pressing the Crown Prince's weary right to the edge of collapse.
A lesser commander might have joined the centre to press the advantage. Aleric did not.
"Form up! We march wide!" he barked, his voice carrying like thunder. His officers echoed the cry, and soon banners turned, men wheeled into disciplined columns, and the victorious host began to move — not toward the centre, but around it.
The manoeuvre puzzled even some of his own captains, but Aleric's eyes burned with clarity. "Ignore the centre," he said to Jaren at his side. "The Duke believes his reserves will hold us. Let him think so. Our prey lies elsewhere."
The Duke's Horror
From his command post behind the centre, Duke Valebrand squinted through the haze of dust and smoke. At first, he thought Aleric was pulling back to regroup. Relief threatened to stir in his chest — until he saw the banners of Deryn angling westward, their formation curving like a scythe.
The realisation struck like a dagger.
"No…" he whispered, lips pale. "No, damn him!"
He slammed his gauntlet against the table as his aides stammered. "They are bypassing the centre!"
The Duke wheeled his horse, desperate to see the state of his left. His banners there were still surging forward, driving deeper into the Prince's faltering right wing. They were winning — but they didn't know the truth. They didn't know the right wing was already annihilated, that Adrien and Gerald were dead, that Aleric's host now bore down upon their exposed flank and rear.
"They've overextended…" the Duke muttered, colour draining from his face. "Gods preserve us, they've overextended."
Aleric's men descended like wolves upon sheep.
The Valebrand left flank, drunk on their apparent success, had stretched thin. Their vanguard pressed ever deeper into the Crown's battered right, leaving their rear poorly guarded and their formation ragged.
Then the thunder came.
Aleric's entire host slammed into their backlines and flanks with devastating force. The clash was a cataclysm — screams, splintering wood, and the wet crunch of steel meeting flesh. Knights were toppled from their saddles, and infantry cut down before they could even turn their spears.
"Deryn! Deryn!" the men roared as they carved into the unprepared flank.
Panic rippled through the Duke's left wing like fire through dry brush. Cries of alarm turned into shrieks of terror as soldiers realised they were surrounded. Those still pressing the Prince's right suddenly found their rear collapsing, their supply wagons aflame, their officers screaming contradictory orders.
Jaren rode beside his brother, sword crimson, cutting through a sergeant who tried to rally the line. "They're breaking, Aleric! They're breaking!"
"They're surrounded," Aleric corrected grimly. "There's no escape."
As more and more men were cut down and they were surrounded, there was no hope left for the Duke's left flank. The soldiers watching the carnage surrendered as it was their only hope.
The battered and tired right flank of the Crown Prince was ordered to capture the enemy soldiers while Aleric and his host started to converge on the centre.
The chaos did not go unnoticed.
The Crown Prince finally decided to join the fray with his Elite Knights and, of course, with Marquis Brandford. With increased morale and their King by their side, the soldiers became unstoppable.
In the Crown Prince's centre, Count Rick and the royal bannermen had fought like lions, their shields dented, their arms numb, barely holding against the Duke's braced reserves. They had been moments from faltering, their morale stretched to the breaking point.
Then, like a spark in the night, they heard it: the deafening roar of victory from the left. They saw the rising smoke, the scattering Valebrand banners, and the panic flashing across enemy ranks as news spread of the disaster on their flank.
Men who had been moments from collapse straightened. Their war cries rose anew, thunderous and defiant.
"The left has broken them!" Count Rick bellowed, lifting his sword high. "Push, men! For the Crown!"
The centre surged forward with renewed strength. And with the Duke's attention split, his once-steady line wavered.
Back at the Duke's command post, his Grand Tactician, old Lord Marvin, watched with cold, calculating eyes.
The right was gone. The left was collapsing under encirclement. The centre was faltering under the surge of Crown morale.
The war was lost.
Utterly humiliated, he resorted to guerrilla tactics as they fled to Ebonreach(the Capital city of the Duke)
He placed a wrinkled hand on the Duke's arm. "My lord… we must withdraw. If we remain, all will be slaughtered here, and the kingdom's fate sealed with us."
The Duke stared at him, jaw clenched so tight it looked as if his teeth might shatter. Adrien's face flickered before his eyes, then Gerald's, then the thousands of men who would die should he refuse.
At last, he nodded.
"Sound the horns."
The order echoed like a death knell across the field.
Trumpets blared. Standards dipped. Shouts of "Retreat! Retreat!" rolled across the Valebrand host. Units disengaged where they could; others fled in chaos, abandoning weapons and shields as they ran. The once-proud army of forty thousand became a tide of broken men streaming from the field.
Aleric's banners, bloodied but unbroken, rose high as his men cheered. The battle was theirs.
A devastating blow to the Duke, crippling his ability to fight again on the field, this battle marked the War of Succession as it neared its end.