hollow victory / hey @inexalt
Victory felt like it was the identical twin of defeat. With each passing day of this war, battles won looked nearly the same as battles lost. Blood, ash, flames, crumbled buildings and spatterings of gore, it was hard to look upon a battlefield with these as constants and feel like the victor.
Claude stood on the remnants of a collapsed shed and looked over the shambles that once was this village’s market square. Corpses of Empire soldiers littered the ground, among them were also the bodies of church soldiers and those bearing the insignia of the Lecicester Alliance. So many lives lost, so many candles extinguished. Claude tilted his chin up and he looked towards the sky, the sun’s halo could be seen faintly behind the thick clouds, trails of light still managed to slip through the cover and touch his skin. It was all for something, the lives lost on both sides weren’t in vain.
He saw Ignatz and Raphael emerge from between a pair of houses, draped across their shoulders was a wounded Alliance soldier. Claude took a step forward with the intention of going to help them, but the sound of hurried, and uneven flapping overhead caught his attention. A large shadow cast down over him, and his Wyvern ungracefully descended and fell the last couple of feet with a loud thud. It curled up in a patch of grass a bit away from the village square, in one of the few parts of the battlefield that wasn’t composed of scorched earth.
Claude hurried to his Wyvern’s side. He dropped his bow to the ground and slid to his knees by its head. At Claude’s touch, the Wyvern let out a pained exhale through its snout, and it rose one of its wings to reveal a gruesome looking wound that was bleeding considerably on its flank.
“Hey, hey girl, you’re alright,” Reassuring words, more for himself than the Wyvern. He slipped his gloves off and wiped his brow with the back of his hand. A long smear of soot now stretched down his temple. Gently, Claude petted her head as he raised his head and looked around.
He couldn’t remember where he last saw Marianne. Or Flayn for that matter. Claude looked left, then right, and there he saw Byleth helping Hilda to her feet.
“Hey, Teach!” Claude called, “I could use a hand!”