All his thoughts are washed away as the shape of a horseman emerges from the tangle of dust.
Suddenly, his pounding headache is just a dull throb, his dizziness gives way to enhanced perception through a rush of adrenaline. The boy hears his own heart beating frantically, as if trying to escape his chest.
The moments in which the man rushes towards him pass agonizingly slowly and at the same time much too quickly, because Payton has just enough time to raise his shield, when his opponent's sword crashes into him with such force that it all but pulls him out of the saddle.
Poets and bards tell in long ballads of great battles for glory and honor. They adorn their heroes with praise, rave about bravery in battle, about iron faith in the gods in the face of the enemy.
But when Payton faces the horseman, this demon in brazen armor, the boy does not waste a single thought on kingdom and honor.

All that follows is instinct to survive. A desperate drive for life, and nothing but that. It is mortal fear that guides Payton's sword, not anger. And it is desperation that makes him cut the throat of the enemy knight's horse. Crimson blood spurts from the fatal wound. The steed screeches, stumbles, falls to the ground and buries the brazen knight under it. He is alive, still stirring, reaching for his sword, but Payton has heard the breaking of bones as the horse dragged him along, heard him scream muffled under the helmet. A broken leg is as good a death sentence on the battlefield as a slit throat, so the boy leaves him lying there.
What happened in a few minutes felt like an eternity to Payton. Breathing heavily, he looks at the blood-soaked blade of his broadsword, the unfamiliar weapon heavy and strange in his hand.

He hadn't lied when he said all those months ago that he was no soldier.
Payton had come of age on a battlefield, but behind maps and battle plans, not wielding a sword.

There are sounds of hoovesteps approaching and the boy steers the horse to face them single-handed, raising his weapon with his free hand.

His heart skips a beat when Payton recognises the ornate armor and he exhales the breath he has held.

„Told ya I'm gonna hold back", Lowell says, waving with the barely blood-stained blade of his sword. „But those scumbags dun' care about holding back much", the man states grimly.
Only now, escaping the immediate danger, does Payton perceive the deafening sounds of a battle. Metal hits metal; horses neigh, snort; men scream in pain, anger and belligerence.

The dust has cleared a little, the extent of the carnage visible.
It is impossible to tell friend from foe, but with some despair Payton must assume that those fighting with their backs to him and hopelessly pushed back are probably his. Not only do most of their men usually wield pitchforks and not swords, and are inferior to the enemy in single combat, no, for every fallen enemy a new, even more fearsome man takes his place. They are so numerous as if they were literally sprouting from the ground like weeds.
Payton composed himself. For his men it might be hopeless, but for their cause it was not. The more of the besiegers they brought down with them, the more likely it was that the straggling royal troops would be able to defeat the remaining attackers.

But there was no time to lose themselves in musings, as they were attacked the next moment.

Lowell was a beast on the battlefield, hacking and stabbing one after the other, not with swordsmanship but pure violence and dirty maneuvers.

In any other situation, Payton would have despised Lowell for his atrocity, but now, that it was saving him from being impaled by a lance, he was grateful.
As the boy himself wasn't much of a soldier, he focused on staying alive rather than fighting. Unusually agile and in control of the horse, he dodged the sword blows more than mirrored them. That is, until piercing headaches made him curl up. On the edge of consciousness, Payton hears Lowell shouting, shaking him, then the boy gives in to the pressure on his mind, letting darkness engulf him.

This time it takes him longer to manifest in the marble halls of the palace and when he does, Reimund is waiting for him already.

"You could have made yourself felt. Just now", he accuses, his voice so demanding and statly as ever. There is a certain coldness and detachment in it when he talks to someone other than his betrothed.

"You know very well I have less control over it than you have, my king." Payton didn't intend for it to sound mocking, but somehow addressing Reimund with his title felt bitter, like tasting unripe fruit. They had been friends, an eternity ago, then rivals, for a long time.

Now, they were even less.

A king and his vassal.

„I suppose this moment is indeed suboptimal to summon you, as you are in the midst of a battle, but there are pressing matters to discuss", the man says, ignoring Payton's objection. He has this unsettling habit to pace back and forth across the room when concerned and his long gold-embroidered cloak grinds noisily over the marble.

„We are beeing attacked from several fronts. Under no circumstances may the capital fall. In other words: We have to give up the North. Including the Tower. We don't have the capacities to send troops up North to help you and hold the capital."

A cold shiver runs down Payton's spine, making the boy shudder. How was that possible? How could they have overlooked multiple battalions encircling them?

"The siege of the Tower-", Payton draws in a deep breath,"they knew exactly where to approach to stay hidden as long as possible. They knew exactly which trade routes they had to cut off and they knew of the Towers water supply system." The youth stops in his enumerations to give Reimund time to grasp what he is implying.

Understanding lights up Reimunds features and he clenches his square jaw tightly until the grinding of teeth can be heard.
"You think it's one of us feeding them information? A Burdened one?" His handsome face hardens to a grim, unreadable expression.

"At least it's not impossible", Payton answers quietly.
Suddenly, something is tugging at him, but looking around, there is no one in sight. The sensation he felt must been happening to his real body, on the battlefield, up north.

One last look over his shoulder at the tall, broad-shouldered man in robes of gold and a crown that sparkled in the morning light like the sun itself, and Payton is whirled away, back to the last place he wants to be.

He must have been unconscious for quite a while, because when he opens his eyes, a completely changed scenery stretches out before him.

The first thing Payton sees is the ground, as he lies face forward on his horse's back.

The little withered grass that the fires had spared is trampled down and covered by a dark layer of mud from stirred-up dust and a liquid that Payton recognizes only much later as blood.
Groaning, the boy lifts his head, only to bend over the floor again shortly after, throwing up. As what little he had for breakfast is vomited up, his stomach still convulses, forcing a sour-smelling stomach fluid up Payton's esophagus. Spit and vomited stomach acid slowly trickle down Payton's chin, wetting the gambeson the boy wears under his armor. His arm trembles as he wipes his quivering lips with the back of his hand.

Only then does he dare to lift his eyes from his sullied armor again. Broken shields and spears protrude from the devastated landscape, bundles of cloth and metal in between, in pools of dark blood.

At first glance, they don't look corpses, not like something that had once been alive. Too grotesquely they lie there, limbs stretched out at strange angles; covered by breast plates, gauntlets, helmets, swords, as if they themselves were made of iron rather than flesh. Payton can't suppress the thought that in a few weeks, maybe even days, when rats and birds have gnawed the flesh from their bones, they will be nothing more than hollow armor.
And over the corpses the battle rages. Spears bore into the gaps at the knees and arms of the armor, hail of arrows poured over their heads, and now and then a man goes down on his knees to join the fallen, screaming.
But nothing is as bad as the stench of drying blood hanging over the windless field.
Slowly, Payton braces himself on his forearms and pushes up, but a sudden resistance holds him back. With one hand he reaches back and gets a grip on a rough rope at his side. Someone, Lowell very likely, had tied him to the back of his horse after he lost consciousness. With the blade of the sword pointed at the horse's flank, Payton cuts loose.

The dust has settled, so that the wet sweaty fur of the horses has been dyed sandy brown and the previously shiny armor shimmer only dimly, where they are not soaked in blood. The battle continues, but something about the way the swords crash against each other, the way the knights steer their horses on foot soldiers and trample them to death, has changed. Each stroke is carried out with full force, because they seem to have understood what Payton knew from the start, it could be their last one. The reality of their hopeless situation had caught up with them all, no thought was wasted on kingdom and crown, even the faces of their families blurred behind the instinct to survive.

Lowell was nowhere in sight, but a man in dark armor came running toward him with his sword raised, and Payton, getting a grip on his sword at the last moment, dropped the hilt with force on the stranger's helmet so that he, losing his bearings, stumbled straight into Payton's blade. He was gasping and coughing, blood spurting from the visor of his helmet, and gladly Payton would have shown him the mercy of giving him a shorter, less agonizing death, but just at that moment a horseman charged toward him, lance raised high. The boy held the shield close to him, but the force with which the lance hit him flung him out of the saddle.
He had fallen from his horse many times, but never with such force and never in heavy armor. The fall squeezed the air from Payton's lungs like a punch to the stomach, and for a moment it felt as if no new air would ever be able to flow in. The chest plate, bent by the impact, now curved inward, cutting into the teenager's ribs with its edge. Every breath hurt as if hundreds of small knives were stabbing simultaneously into his rib cage.

However, Payton stood up and surprisingly, his trembling knees did not buckle under his weight.

Nonetheless, even with his sword still in his hand, the youth knew he was even more useless without his horse, his chances of defeating the men that came running at him incredibly slim.

Still, Payton fought to the end. And the end was when a sword with the blunt side of the blade hit his back button and the boy fell forward into a pool of blood and the sky eventually collapsed over him until everything went black and finally stayed black.