1 Prologue

    He stood up, covered in blood, surrounded by gore. The aftermath of the battle was truly a sight to behold; a lone man standing in the midst of a field, surrounded by a haze of blood and the moans of the fallen. His long black hair blew in the wind, strands sticking to the blood on his face. His grey eyes pierced through the veil of suffering that surrounded him, searched for another to send into the welcoming arms of death. His canines protruded slightly through the gap between his lips as a grim smile worked its way onto his grizzled face. He reveled in the pain, the agony. Their pain-warped faces were comforting art to him, their tortured screams his lullaby. He did not know magic; to use it was, to him, the greatest act of cowardice. All of his feats of strength and battle prowess were his and his alone, fought and won with his own hands. He was but a man, albeit a man who could face down a hundred men and come out unscathed. He had had a name, once. But none but a select few knew it, and most of those few had died by his hand. Now, they only called him Zoridan, a name made by the bastardization of the ancient words for warrior and death. He was alone on this battlefield, as was always the case. The small vanguard of soldiers sent to aid him had long since perished, pierced and broken by the weapons of the enemy. They had been weak, unable to survive the slaughter that surrounded him. 

    "Zoridan!" He heard a distant voice call his name. It was familiar to him, familiar in the same way that a rat was familiar to a peasant. 

    "Use my name, brother. None of these shall live to tell it." He gestured to the wounded and dead scattered across the field as he said this, once again being filled with a small rush of endorphins as he saw their dying faces and heard the sounds of agony being forced out of dying lungs. He watched as his brother, Magerin, sauntered over to him. He was light haired, fair skinned, and almost delicate in the way his thin body was structured. But there was hidden strength there, as Zoridan well knew. He had made sure his brother was capable of defending himself, should his magic or mind fail him. He had always slightly disliked his brother, who was both a mage and a bit too delicate for his taste. 

    "Very well Michael. But I would also wish that you use my name as well. 'Brother' seems a bit cold for people related to each other. Do you require healing at all?" He mentioned this last mainly as a pleasantry. Michael almost never needed healing, especially after a force as small as the one they had just vanquished. 

    "You could have saved my men, Magerin. They did not need to die." He was particularly upset about this, for he knew that Magerin could very well have saved them, but had instead focused on helping Michael. At the moment of their deaths, he had been surrounded by a great number of the enemy, and Magerin had chosen to keep him from minor injury rather than save the men from their deaths. "Better my injury than their deaths." And yet, he was slightly grateful for his brother's caring nature. He had almost lost control and allowed Magerin to see how much he enjoyed the carnage, how much he reveled in the utter massacre that he was capable of inflicting. He knew that if anyone were allowed to see just how much he relished death, he would meet it at the hands of an executioner shortly after.

    "I sensed that you were under a peculiarly high amount of mental stress, brother, and I worried for you. Is all well with you?" inquired Magerin, gazing concernedly at his older brother. "You seemed to lose hold of reality for a moment."

    "I am fine, Magerin, but my men are not. They did not need to die." He repeated, still considerably aggravated with his little brother for his failure to save the common men for the sake of sparing him from injury. "They had families, Magerin! I can not say as much for myself, and neither can you. And now I must tell those same families that I could not save their sons, their husbands and Fathers. What do you think that the families of the fallen think of us when we come back alone?"

    Magerin was considerably confused. "But it is not our fault that they died, Michael, they merely could not withstand the amount of enemies that we faced, and that is just fate."

    Michael could have punched him in his naive and innocent face. "The mind is not the same when grieving, Magerin. They will only see that we survived and assume that we were strong enough and COULD  have saved them, but chose not to."

    "I see." stated Magerin, although he clearly did not. 

    "Whatever. Let's just get them loaded up on the cart that I assume you remembered to bring, and get back to Arrindale. We have a long day ahead of us."

    So they loaded up the bodies of the vanguard onto the cart, and headed back to the capital city of Arrin.