The shattered bowl, the last remnant of the life he had left behind, lay cupped in his trembling hands. The smaller shards slipped through the gaps between fingers, his arms twitched each time, barely resisting the urge to seek to recapture them before they could reach the ground.
It wasn’t that the bowl was particularly beautiful. It lacked the shine it had once possessed, and the color, the burning orange of a sunrise captured from a mountaintop, that had long before faded to faint yellows in places. In others, barely a pale shadow of even that.
It was that this had been the bowl his mother had fed him from, those long years before. Each spoonful gently stroked against its rim to loosen the broth that may have clung in hiding the underside of it’s well-worn, cupped end.
One tear, he allowed himself.
One tear to pay homage to the love of his mother, the peace of his childhood, and the warmth that those memories brought to his breast…one final time.
With hands already returned to the strength and steadiness that comes from a long years of discipline, born of necessity in the fires of what his life had become, he placed the remaining fragments upon the oaken table at the mouth of his tent.
They came to rest beside the small but spreading pool of broth that he had almost finished and the arrow shaft, which stood arrogantly at attention with it’s wickedly sharp tip buried within the wood where the bowl had briefly rested, just moments before.
Taking up his helm and cradling it in the crook of his elbow, the man came to the jagged edge of the rocky plateau and gazed down the steep rise that fell away to the broad flatlands below, ignoring the risk that the same archer might pose.
Men and beasts moved about there, in massed and synchronized formations. Clouds of dust sought to obscure them, but the faint breeze that drifted in from the distant shoreline offered both the cool scent of the sea and no place for the churned earth to linger. Their banners fluttered gently in the passing flow.
His last, lingering connection to the idealistic child he had once been was broken, seeming to take with it the love and compassion to which he had been taught to cling.
His hands, with fluid grace and no hint of urgency, brought the cold, steel helm up and slipped it over his head. They dropped to rest upon the twin axes that waited, tucked within his worn, leather belt, as he turned toward his closest advisors.
He gave them a solemn nod and snatched up his towering battle axe from where it leaned against his chair. The long face of it’s notched blade glinted in the morning sun, as he turned it over his in hands.
This had once been a struggle to keep his people free. To defend them against those that came to these shores in search of plunder and slaves. To drive the invaders from these lands and force them to return to the sea and wherever they had come from, beyond.
To be done with those that had once taken his mother from him, long before.
Those that now had taken the last thread that connected him to what that woman had represented to him, in his earlier life.
Those that would pay the price, with the final thread that had kept him here broken, releasing the grip that had kept him in check.
He felt the cold of this spread within him, as he looked upon the enemy and hungered for the first time not just for their defeat and expulsion from his homelands…but for their end.