War comes to the land. Crops are burned. Cities razed. People slaughtered and enslaved.
Who is to blame for this travesty? The Khan of Crows’ fury knows no bounds. It is matched only by the limitless ambition of the Twelve Western Kings.
None of them see the people below their feet, they only see one another, like mountain peaks sticking up over a veil of fog. All that lies below is easily trodden upon to get where they are going.
The common folk are terrified. Unarmed. Disorganised.
The nobles’ taste for blood is never slaked.
The course is set. A hundred years of exhausted war for the innumerable masses who do not want it as the behest of the thirteen men who do.
Until.
One of thirteen peaks falls. A mountain, reduced to dust, in an instant. Men die all the time. Kingdoms do not slide into oblivion so quickly.
And yet here one lies, its people scattered, its King dead, its armies tearing themselves apart.
Who is to blame? The Kingly opponents? Then why do they look so nervous to see their enemy dead?
Perhaps they see their own fates reflected in this bloodbath. Perhaps something is interrupting the great game. Breaking its rules. Snapping its pieces.
Perhaps someone has had enough.
Paddy Dobson
5th September 2022