— Third Person —
The field had been called the Thornfield Plains before the battle.
Nobody was sure what to call it afterward.
People tried. They came up with names that sounded appropriately serious — names that acknowledged what had happened without quite describing it. None of them stuck. Eventually, most people stopped saying the name at all. Which was its own kind of answer.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
Alistair stood at the eastern edge of the field in the grey morning and looked at what he'd done.
He'd been here for a while. He wasn't sure exactly how long. The light had been changing around him slowly, the way light changed over hours rather than minutes. The cold had settled into his coat and made itself comfortable. He didn't mind it.
Fifteen thousand.
That was the number the Northwood commanders had given their king before the battle. Fifteen thousand soldiers — the finest force the eastern coalition had built in three generations. Trained. Well-equipped. Positioned on ground that gave them every advantage.
Alistair had looked at their maps for about four minutes.
He'd seen the solution in the first two. Spent the remaining two checking it. Then he'd gone to sleep, because there was nothing left to do until the time came and waiting while awake was just a waste of an evening.
He'd woken up forty minutes before dawn on the third day. Got dressed without waking anyone. Walked out past the sentries — they moved before he was close enough to require it, which still faintly amused him — and crossed two miles of open ground alone in the dark.
He was back by sunrise.
The commanders didn't ask what had happened. Smart men. The survivors — he'd left some deliberately, because leaving none required no more effort than leaving a few, and he had a use for witnesses — couldn't give a clear account for several days. When the reports finally went up the chain they all said variations of the same thing: impossible, singular, forty minutes, no further engagement required.
Every report ended identically.
We recommend no further engagement required.
Alistair thought that was very sensible of them.
He stood at the edge of the field in the grey morning and looked at it without any particular expression. There was nothing inside him that found any of this remarkable. The field was what it was. He was what he was. One had followed from the other. He'd known for a long time what he was capable of, and he'd never had much patience for pretending otherwise.
What he had was boredom.
Not about the field — the field was a result, and results were just results. Boredom was the general state. The underlying condition. He'd been bored for most of his life, in the specific way of someone who found most things too easy and most people too predictable, and had long since run out of ways to be interested in either.
He watched a bird land at the far edge of the field.
It looked around.
It left immediately.
Then came the presence of his retainer.
He heard her before she reached him.
Lighter on the right than the left — Eleanor's step, the same as it had always been. She'd developed that habit as a child and never bothered correcting it. He'd been able to recognise it anywhere for as long as he could remember.
She made her way through the field toward him. She didn't look away from what was there. She walked straight through it, picking her way carefully, looking at the ground with the steady, direct attention of someone who had decided they were going to look rather than not look, and was doing it without making a thing of it.
She stopped beside him.
Neither of them said anything.
There was nothing to say that the field hadn't already covered more thoroughly. Eleanor understood silence. She'd always known the difference between the kind that needed filling and the kind that didn't, and she'd never been the type to fill the second kind just because the quiet made her uncomfortable. It was one of the things about her that made being around her genuinely easy — which was not something he could say about most people.
The sun came up. Grey at first, then pale gold, then grey again as clouds moved back in — the flat, decided grey of a sky that had seen this and didn't particularly want to light it up.
Alistair stood there for a long time.
He thought about nothing in particular. He looked at the field. He listened to the wind, which had come back after the silence and was moving through the plain without caring about anything it passed over. He stood with his hands in his pockets and looked at forty minutes of work and waited to feel something about it.
He didn't.
He wasn't sure if that was a problem or just a fact.
After a long time, he turned and walked away.
Eleanor followed without being asked. She always did.
Behind them, the wind moved through the Thornfield Plains with the low, steady sound of wind moving through a place where there was nothing left to slow it down.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
A few months later, the war ended.
If you could call it a war. Technically it qualified. There had been two sides and an outcome. But it had lasted less than a season, and the decisive moment had lasted forty minutes, and calling it a war felt like calling a thunderstorm a siege.
The Northwood Kingdom sent envoys within the week.
Negotiations were short and very one-sided. The envoys had all read the Thornfield report. Every man in the room had read the Thornfield report. They had all arrived at the same conclusion, independently and without discussion: every term the Eldenberg Kingdom was asking for was, on reflection, extremely reasonable. Reasonable enough to agree to without argument. Reasonable enough that pushing back on any of it seemed like a bad idea in ways that were difficult to fully articulate but very easy to feel.
The terms were signed. The borders were redrawn. Diplomats shook hands with the careful warmth of men performing normalcy for each other because the alternative was acknowledging what they'd all just been thinking.
Life in the Eldenberg Kingdom went back to something that looked like normal.
People worked at making it seem that way. They mostly succeeded, on the surface. Markets opened. Courts convened. The ordinary machinery of the kingdom kept turning.
But the name stayed.
In taverns, passed between strangers over drinks. In barracks, mentioned in low voices between soldiers doing nightwatch. In the corners of conversations that stopped when someone walked past who might repeat what they'd heard. Passed carefully, the way you handled something fragile.
The Annihilator.
Thornfield. You heard about Thornfield?
Fifteen thousand. Forty minutes. Don't say it loud.
And nobody looked too long at the third prince when he walked past.
Nobody asked him questions about the gap in his schedule on the third night.
Nobody brought it up at court.
And Alistair walked through all of it the way he walked through most things — hands in his pockets, expression flat and pleasant, completely aware of every eye in every room, and profoundly, genuinely unbothered by all of it.
He went back to his couch.
He went back to his velvet pillow and his afternoon naps and his policy of aggressive non-participation in anything that required sustained effort.
The whispers followed him around. He let them. They were accurate, and he'd never had much interest in correcting things that were accurate.
However…
Far to the north, in a cold room in a stone manor at the edge of the kingdom, someone interesting had just woken up.
She didn't know about the Annihilator yet.
But she would.
These are the two people this story is about.
One woke up in the wrong life with the wrong face, with a clear picture of how badly things could go and no intention of letting them.
One has always been exactly what he is — and has never once met someone who already knew.
They haven't met yet.
But soon…..They will.