The Birth of a Leader - Part 8

It was those same instincts that have given him all he had. To turn on them now would be to deny all that he was. No, he was not the sort of man to do that. He hardened his face, and closed his eyes.

The sword whipped mercifully straight through the neck, severing the head without causing any more pain than necessary.

The men surrounding the body still could not find it in themselves to relax, even as they saw the giant head fall from the giant neck. It took them a good few moments before they dared to remove the spears that pinned the man in place. Even dead, Gorm was a terrifying man.

"Luck to those that bare the darkness in our place," Gorm's last words, murmured in a foreign language, had caught the wind.

They didn't know what the giant had meant, nor what that greater instinct was that he was operating on, but still, even with that body lying flat in front of them, and all the Yarmdon bodies strewn around it, many a man could not bring himself to relax.