I cocked my head to the side and tried not to peer too deep into this Beastkin, and waited to hear his account fresh.
"Protection is part of it," Ruggah continued. "But it is not the whole of it. We are a Warband, and we want to fight, and we are here looking for the opportunity. The losses we suffered can only be answered in blood."
His single golden eye burned with a fire that had nothing to do with the flames between us. I understood that fire. I had felt it myself, many times, in the endless loop of death and rebirth. It was the fire that kept you going when everything else had been taken from you.
"The blood of my men cries out for vengeance," Ruggah growled. "Thirty thousand souls who trusted their commander and were betrayed."
He looked at me, and I saw the grief beneath the anger. "I will not let their deaths be meaningless. I will not let them be forgotten. I will fight until my last breath, and I will make sure that the enemy pays for every life they took."
