the oathsworn

{the sequel to "Of Confessions"}

Aeshaeidr followed the Oathlord into the mead-hall that had become his seat of power in recent weeks. With the high ceilings and openness of the main hall, the echo of their footsteps across the wooden floors only echoed back louder to her ears.

I should see my honor spent, as readily and as redly as blood. 

“Cease your bids for murder, you wretch,” she hisses, letting loose a stone across the ground. The heavy thunk where it sinks into the dirt sends a cry of alarm into the air as one crow takes flight; following it are many others, joining in the cacophony of piercing screams as they take into the night sky. The absence of the crows milling around offers her little comfort where she sits, by a cold hearth, acting as the lone warden to a dead man.

She turns the spearhead thrice over in her hand as though it is a ritual, the sleek metal cold on her fingertips. Her hands are warm and slick with sweat, heated by the ire that still burns warm in her breast. Her shoulders heave in sharp exhale as her thoughts mire and simmer on the outcome of the trial - or the excuse of a trial that it was. Aeshaeidr gently rubs her thumb along the slight curvature of the iron.

It was a familiar dream.

He was standing out in the barren fields. His only companions were the wintry winds that moaned with all that which he could never put to words. Those unspoken agonies usually gnawed at him like beasts at the roots of an apple tree—above the earth, all sweet scents and blossom-laden boughs and the promise of something more; below the earth, a ruin.

He who sleeps with a spear by his bed is a fool every night but one. 

Howling. He had heard it too that night, and for all his jests, Thorvall had pulled the hide blanket tight about him.
Dawn was still a ways off, and sleep seemingly had no wish to embrace the Oathlord, and so he walked the ramparts of the makeshift fortress. 

Word-fame they hoarded in heaps, even now it lays glittering about them. A name that will wear out the tongues of men in it's telling. Sometimes a name is not enough to leave behind though. Sometimes we leave our friends in the earth, a mark of our deeds.