If the Three Rivers made my name, Aethelgard made my soul. The Gamma Empire had finally dropped its mask of diplomacy. They sent forty thousand men to take our northernmost bastion. I had four thousand.
The siege lasted two hundred days. We ate our horses. We ate the leather of our boots. We drank the morning dew from the stones of the ramparts. Every night, the Gamma catapults would rain fire down upon us, and every morning, I would walk the walls, my armor gleaming, to show my men that the Shield of Ohm had not yet cracked.
I remember the 150th day. My second-in-command, a man I loved like a son, begged me to surrender. "There is no shame in a brave defeat, General," he said.
I looked him in the eye and pointed to the families huddled in the cellar of the keep. "I do not fight for honor," I told him. "I fight for the five minutes of life those children get every time we repel a ladder. If we die, we die. But we will not give them the satisfaction of a bow."
We held. Not because of magic, but because of the sheer, stubborn refusal of the Ohm soldier to blink. When the relief force finally arrived, I was the only officer left who could still stand. That victory was the proudest and saddest moment of my life. I had saved the city, but I had buried my heart in its soil.