A mounted dragoon stands on the snowy crest of some northern Coerthas hill, bathed in the bloody light of an evening sun. Gaetan is a rawboned beast made of muscles and a phylaterical fortress of bones, holding in them heaven’s war-time scriptures. He is wrought from iron, his face hard and handsome, contrived through battle and the harsh northern wind. He consumes myth. He is a man of God but steps into His kingdom and determines it his and will make it so. He will shatter the temples if they do not sing his praise and will burn every idol that is not graven in the image he chooses for it. The elezen was born a tyrant with a sword in his hand and a holy book of lust and ambition tattooed over the surface of his heart because what worth is there in the world that cannot be bought with iron and the shedding of blood? Before the razing of a hamlet, he is beautiful like the divines. A smile that catches somewhere in the soul and rots it from within. Soft, pale skin is sculpted over a thick skeleton by holy hands that know of nothing but how to make a creature that kills and conquers. His stare is like a challenge, like his father’s when he was told that he could not have the world. It is a stare that laughs and says: watch and see.
This you see here is the Devil. His heart is a desperate and dying animal. Throes of passion and longing and obsession capsize him nightly. He entombs his hunger in guile and gilded promises, in a voice deceptive with good cheer and the promises of pleasure – walk softly or you’ll drown in them. He bears the scripture of God in his mouth and butchers the heathen with abandon. His sword is smoked in blood like his bankrupt heart and he will drown cities and worlds in fire. He will promise conquest to kings, and kingdoms to peasants, and will drag the screaming choir to hell with him, chanting litanies all the way down and swearing by his god. See now the staunch imperialist with patriotism muddled in blood. See the knight and the brigand trapped in the same flesh. See the boy, the son of his father and born of the same sin: to him, the holiest empire is that which he sits at the forefront of.
On the 26th day of the second month of water, fifteen-seventy, a knight and lord of Ishgard and the House Sorel is found guilty for his involvement in a plot deemed heretical by the Church and Her Holy See. He and several of his co-conspirators are sentenced to death by hanging. Their families are spared, but they are stripped of all titles and holdings and they will carry this great shame for the rest of their days.
The cold creeps in, up the spine, into the fingers. Gaetan, cloaked, huddles in closer to his steed against the bitter wind. A gilded stare watches the men move in the valley below, small and distant. Pinchbeck soldiers fumbling around like savages lost in a new world. Gallowglasses, they were, bought from the clans out in the east. He sneers. The young once-lord can’t remember when he had to start relying on sellswords. His fingers tease out a waterskin and he bites the cap off and goes to suck on it but the water’s gone frozen. He’d decided not to tie it somewhere inside his clothing because it was harder to reach there. He curses and goes about the chore of finding a proper, warm place for it. His bones ache and creak.
He tries to avoid thinking, but he can’t out in this miserable place. He rummages through his mind for distractions - through supply reports and navigation and objectives - but he can feel memory coming like a freight train. Like the end times. He can feel it in his bones, the rage and then the quiet. Seven years. Small words, incomprehensibly vast. Seven years since whores and priests and politicians sunk their talons in deep, into everything they owned, and started prying it away from them. Seven years since he and his family had to start bowing and scraping and clawing for every bit that was theirs by right. Seven years since his father stepped out onto the gallows sprawl and decided their destiny for them.
His entourage speaks little, their eyes glassy and empty, all huddled up in their own, waking dreams of being somewhere else, anywhere but this frigid hell. They are a squalid lot, these soldiers of Ishgard, hollowed out and unwashed. Unshaven, their chainmail and their blades still tracked with the blood and the gore of prior victims. Their eyes wild and bloodshot. Out here, their appearance matters little, and better yet that they look nightmarish for those that they hunt. Out in the still white, the heretic breeds ravenously and tries to hide his iniquities in any hole that would have them. They would flush them out, one by one. Flay them. Drag them screaming into the fire. They sucked at hope like it was the last breaths of the world. At a good catch that would bring them renown. There was opportunity in war.
And the soldiers and sons of the disgraced House Sorel knew war.
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