[center][h3][color=993333]István Shilage[/color][/h3][/center]

The clamoring of the world's animals in the face of Mayon, and her silvered, gentle grace was nothing new, all told. Many beasts of certain nobility called into the night— owls, intelligent and dignified, or the noble and loyal wolves, for instance, cast their voices into the night regularly at little more than a stone's throw from the reach of human civilization. The act itself was not debased, yet...

A bubbling hiss rose from the corpse of the slaver at his feet, who had been woken from a drunken stupor by his second and third ribs crumpling. Before he could reach for a blade, Istvan's most recent patronage of the Company Merchant had found a new home, splashed across his brow, and even through the haze of alcohol, a beaten dog could scream as loud as any creature of the night. The language was garbled through pain. A falling Meteor silenced it in short order, as the tower of black iron turned his gaze to the disarray ahead.

In Morahti tongues, "surrender" was not a word worth learning. It meant willfully giving yourself to their particular arm of conquest, to conscription as a slave, to theft of all your property. Death, by any measure, would have been preferable, even with allowance for some supposed cultural understanding of "fair play" on the end of the speaker. The young Earl and he had long been given cause to familiarize themselves with the vulgar language of these raiders— supposedly, such a term [i]did[/i] exist for them...

Another, collapsed to his knees, ahead, gaze worlds away in shock. Behind him, a third warrior, this one with wits about him rushing to protect his fellow from the oncoming storm of the Lions— doubtlessly seeking to rouse the former into fighting shape.

"Surrender" wouldn't leave their lips, surely.

Not in any language Shilage had heard.

His march continued.