Work Text:
'Once a boy a rosebud spied,
heathrose fair and tender
Röslein, Röslein, Röslein, rot
Röslein auf der heiden!'
>>>
When Erhardt Aufderheide awoke, there was the stinging pain of thorn-rose blooms in his mouth.
They bit and clawed at his windpipe, robbing him of all breath and blood, forcing from him all his bile and ill-gotten misfortune. Pristine, beautiful things – stained with the blood of the innocent and the surviving.
Tears were drawn from him next. They nourished the accursed flowers – whispered naught but hollowed reassurances, mocking him with the realization that in spite of all his agony and grief and deep willingness to die – he was alive.
He was alive and well and it was everything that he didn't want.
The taste of death was there – it was a coppery, crimson shroud that held his soul close to its still-beating, still-rotting entirety. It whispered to him sweet, sorrowful nonsense speech with the voices of everyone he has ever loved – everything he has ever known.
'Thank the gods, you're here, you're still here...'
'Bless your soul, bless you.'
'May Brand shine his guiding light upon you, our child.'
'Our sweet, sprightly spring child.'
The world spun on its heels like his mother had, in that last Maypole dance. For all her grace and kindness and bright, white smiles, she was showered in white rose blooms.
(Red. Red – brilliant, vermillion red. She died as she lived – in a spectacle of red shards like embers from a bonfire.)
That last Maypole dance, his father had a rare smile on his face. He had a rose in his mouth, delight and restful play gracing his hardened features. He, too, spun upon his heels – drawing circles with his feet around his mother.
(And in the end, he was reduced to embers too. There was nothing but ashes left now.)
Nothing but ashes left where living flowers once stood.
Spilling, vile memories rose from his throat, and the ghosts fed on that too – desperate and lonely, lifeblood trickled down their phantasms. All around him were only the smoky apparitions in the dying and killing fires that raged - they screamed, ringing echoes into a blazing horizon. It was loud – like an ensemble of panicked angel choirs, into that fading, distant light.
He couldn't bring himself to reach for it. He fell to the cold, sterile floors of the infirmary he was kept in. It was unfeeling and unsympathetic to his plight, his pleas for salvation. There were only vague sparks at the tips of his fingers where they gripped the linen sheets tight enough to tear its stitches. He felt weak – malnourished and dirty and plagued with ticks that swelled with ichor.
The nurses that came for him a few minutes later couldn't understand a word – couldn't understand his language. It was all noise – senseless and meaningless and he wanted nothing more than for everything to stop.
But his heart continued to beat.
All was taken from him in that everlasting instant. Erhardt Aufderheide saw before his eyes an eternity – and it was filled with nothing but the bright, burning light of death.
>>>
'All array'd in youthful pride,
Quickly to the spot he hied,
Ravished by her splendour.
Röslein, Röslein, Röslein, rot
Röslein auf der heiden!'
>>>
He spent weeks on the streets of the Hornburgian capital. Two of these weeks were spent simply watching and taking what he could from the praise and glory granted to the heroes that came too late. Where there was celebration, there was excess.
It brought with it denial as well – deluded veils hung above those who knew only news spoken upon silver tongues.
How he envied them. How unpleasantly correct were his eyes to seethe.
Tytos was the hero's name. His magnificent build stood gaunt and tall above the masses, next to the unwitting young king who sat further above him. King Alfred was not small by any means but Tytos was like a fabled titan who towered over him – casting shadows over royalty as though it were simply in his nature. Erhardt hated that king, so powerless and so easily concealed in the shroud of others.
For however much he loathed that young King, Erhardt thinks he hates Tytos's eyes even more.
His were the eyes of a savage, hungry beast – a beast who hungered only for power, as if it were its divine right. They were a dull, dangerous pair of blades that pierced themselves through the masses without warning nor consideration for how they wither under that steel-cold gaze. All that mattered was that they had power like angry rust, eating away at their golden, gilded throne.
It was funny. And he meant it – it was so funny that it brought tears to his eyes – how this man with a heart so miserable and shriveled could only be kindling for a fire so strong that it could claim the lives of brave, better men.
He saw red. He was clad in red. His sword glowed with faint red, and it was all that Erhardt could see.
He wanted to scream. Amidst the praise and gratitude and endless, worthless nonsense – he wanted to scream tales of the true pain he saw that day. He wanted to scream of the tales of Grynd – of the sparks that lit their forges, of the bonfires that welded the hearts of every man and woman and child together as one, of the torches in the eyes of the people in the face of certain and unjust agony.
Only tears came out. Only faint whispers.
Only apologies to the ones too quiet to hear them, he owed them everything – gone unheard and uncared for, spoken in blubbering, pitiful spouts of wetness and loneliness.
Grynd was nowhere now.
And Erhardt Aufderheide was no one.
>>>
'Said the boy, "I'll now pick thee,
Heathrose fair and tender!"'
>>>
The hate festered and blossomed within him over time – an Eden of thorns and self-righteous fury. He carried on his back the legacy of some thousand people, of families and faces and voices he could all put names to.
He called out to them, sometimes. In blubbering, broken pleas for them to bear witness to the machinations of a lost, nowhere boy.
One voice heard him.
It sounded like a solemn judgment bell.
He remembered not the date, nor the time at which he first heard him speak.
"You look like you're down on your luck, boy."
But he remembered the way that he stood. The man Werner carried himself with all the grace and poise of a man who would do anything to watch the sunset from the summit. A sellsword clad in black, cape whistling in the wind like a deadly miasma. Behind him were men who only served as the steps he would take to get there – shoulders as leverage, bent backs building atop each other to resemble something akin to a deadly structure.
It was twilight now. In front of him was everything he hated about what made a person more than its cursed cocoon of flesh and bone. There was fire in his eyes and it raged with relentless, deadly intent.
His was a prism that reflected human desire – the fraught, carnal instincts enclosed carefully in sunbeams and moon rays – in a disheartening facsimile of warmth.
It was human desire that Erhardt regretfully shared. He has never seen himself so clearly for what he was – not until him, not until now.
“If you’ve nowhere left to turn, swear yourself to my company. I’ll see to it that that steel in your eyes is sharp enough to slay kings.”
After festering for so long in lacerations and boiling blood, Erhardt Aufderheide emerged – as a moth born of flame.
>>>
'Said the rosebud, "I'll prick thee,
So that thou'lt remember me,
Ne'er will I surrender!"
Röslein, Röslein, Röslein, rot
Röslein auf der heiden!'
>>>
He learned how to slit the throat of a man in the span of a week. In the next week, it was disembowelment. The following month had him learn all the ways in which a man would rend the flesh and organs of fellow man. Werner had called it an art form. Erhardt persisted in calling it murder.
But it fed him – fueled his spirit, gave him strength and experience and every other hallmark of what an efficient killer. His thorns grew sharper, longer, and they craved the taste of violence.
Its growth was attractive to maggots and chrysalises and they all burst in fire work. Their young were all the stronger for it, Erhardt's own trace vestiges of his humanity becoming food for these phantom monsters.
"Nevermind all that," Werner said one day, heel embedding itself deep into Erhardt's side as he struggled to rise. Failure today again – like so many other dreary days. He would be dead if his vengeance were not in Werner’s best interests. "Call them monsters. Call them memories. They're all weapons in the end – so sharpen them, boy. That's all a man will ever need to get ahead."
Pretty words dripping in sarcasm and lies – it was plain to anyone that Werner had no patience for such fair nonsense.
The time finally came when he burrowed further into himself – so deep into the overgrowth that he couldn't see past even a single bloodied petal – and nobody had suspected a thing. Nobody saw the scrounged-up, strangled shell-youth for what he was. As far as the knighthood was concerned, Erhardt Aufderheide was simply a tragic child who set out to earn back what was taken from him.
They weren't all wrong, by any means. Not by a long shot. And perhaps that was what frustrated Erhardt the most about his fellow youth.
They were young, too – young enough to afford to make ugly mistakes, young enough to fumble their sword arms – too young to be thrust out into that vast, accursed sea to die. Certainly, too young to be filled with nothing with starving thorns and unbridled wrath.
Erhardt had heard of their existence before, the green-eyed monsters that called broken hearts like his home. They call it envy – and in time he grew so bitter and loathsome that soon, he envied it too, as it had a home to languish around in.
He envied these young, spry men who entitled themselves to clumsy swings and open sides. These boys would be dead if Erhardt were so willing to show them what sorts of true depths there were to the despond of combat – just outside of them, they were waiting to greet them with bared fangs and open claws. He yearned to shatter their rose-tinted dreams of knighthood like their motherland did his own – left to die and rot and ask themselves what they did to deserve this folly.
He will make them envy the now, the home they risk missing. One day, they too will know the taste of blood. Perhaps it would be by his own blade – or it could come from someplace crueler.
Cruel – it wasn't a word that his mother would use to describe him. It was never a word that any of his old folk would know him by.
It was all he was now – all the world would know him by. He couldn't help but feed on it like a scavenger, in a world that seemed to think that he didn't deserve to exist. Torn whispers of his fallen people began to sound like lies and Erhardt would not be able to say exactly when these pleas began to mimic harsh scorn.
It was well-deserved all the same. Anything would seem like worthy prey to any hungry beast, no matter how bitterly it tastes. No matter how many apologies he would stutter out, it drove him, kept him moving, in the face of dark sin his burning wings will set it all aflame until they, too – are reduced to smog and dust.
It will look like home.
It will look like home and they, too, will learn the shape of pain – of the world slowly morphing around themselves the longer they mourn and yearn.
Eventually, they will forget.
They will first forget its smell. They will forget that home smelt of homemade mead and the sweat of blacksmiths on tavern counters. It does not smell of young men who took up arms against yet unseen threats, and it certainly did not smell of their sweat and tears and blood. And how could it – they barely even smelt like the burning coal from his father's forge, or the mountain blooms his mother lit alight for incense.
(There was agony in the way he remembered the scent of his fellow squires better than his own mother's roasted ram dinners.)
He'd heard from Werner that the next thing to go would be the sounds of those close to them. How Werner knew this, Erhardt had chosen not to question it, but he could imagine the despair of it.
"It's silence that scares people the most, I reckon." The sellsword mused aloud the day he led Erhardt towards his first village raid. It was one of dozens they would do – the first of many times Erhardt would cut his hair shorter in a feeble act of mourning. "It hardens people. It makes them forget how to laugh like a real person. The sooner you forget, the better. More room for you to remember what you are."
And what Erhardt was is a killer – a traitor to those who dared consider him one of theirs.
(One who doesn't deserve to remember what it felt like to laugh at dinner tables, talking and talking about nothing and everything.)
It was screams that filled his dreams – desperate pleas and rambunctious shouting and crude battle cries and the drunk giggling of men who remain blissfully ignorant of certain doom.
(And hearty invitations for nights out and the clanking of ale mugs and spirits and shared blood and sweat and tears for that glorious day –)
The training had been relentless. It was nothing to Erhardt, and everything for these men. They found heart and meaning in being shaped in peaceful times – the privilege of silent, unassuming mornings. They took with them skills that could never quite measure up to the tempest of the uncertain future.
This was a sentiment that Erhardt had for every single one of his classmates, but there was one with a heart so antithetical to his own. His meaning is what completed the rugged image.
Olberic Eisenberg was a soft thing, despite all that his stature would say about him otherwise. He was tall and grim and solid, and held his blade with ease – but what strength he could put into the power of intimidation, he devoted instead to dogged and dog-like loyalty. He too, was driven by the legacy of those long past – but with none of the same strife, and certainly none of Erhardt's thorns.
His was a pristine garden tended to by the sordid expectations of a land that loved and needed him, and among those that Erhardt was forced to grow with, it was Eisenberg that he envied most of all.
It was in Eisenberg's company that he felt threatened.
>>>
'Now the cruel boy must pick
Heathrose fair and tender;'
>>>
Time passed and they were knights, and all that changed were the seasons and the lodgings by which they were required to stay in. Not much has changed even as he knelt before that most incompetent king, knighted for his efforts and seething through his teeth – it was a wonder to him how he managed to recite his vows to that blasphemous crown in perfect clarity.
They've crossed swords with the Schwarz Corps once or twice as squires. The knowledge that this problem was viewed as no more than an exercise to look forward to made acid churn in his stomach. It is only with the crest that they were encouraged to treat these attacks with a renewed sense of gravity.
But Erhardt has not endured for years in Werner’s company and the mediocrity of the squirehood only to break in the face of everything he already knew. Perhaps that was why Eisenberg’s very presence alarmed him –
“You look stiff.”
– because everything he did was everything that Erhardt never had to account for.
He thought himself a perfect actor. His reality was enclosed in a house of cards that shielded it from scrutiny – a sturdy blend of half-truths and convenient lies. He was known and unknown all at once – both a lit brazier of adolescent energy and a cold, distant star. Nobody dared approach him without reason. The Eisenberg youth was no reckless, unthinking soul. There was no reason for him to ignore all these things about Erhardt.
“Though, I suppose that’s how you look, half the time…” Eisenberg muttered, before shaking his head. “There’s never a good time for anyone to try and talk to you, is there?”
But against all reason and Erhardt’s calculations, the man had reached into his grove of spikes and bleeding blossoms and forced him to look.
“...there isn’t,” Erhardt said slowly. “Because there’s nothing to talk about.”
Olberic Eisenberg was everything that Erhardt Aufderheide was not – and yet, impossibly, there are things that made Erhardt doubt such a notion.
Eisenberg was clumsy and awkward with his words and his heart was in all the right places – with none of the words to express his intentions. This much was obvious from the way his mouth opened and closed like a dead fish as he scratched at some itch in the back of his neck. “...I’ve been watching you, since we were squires,” he admitted – in a voice too shaky for his stature. “And I worry about you.”
“Get to the point.”
“I’m saying that I want to know who you are.”
“I said,” Erhardt snarled, and he shouldn’t have, as he advanced towards the taller man to push him against the wall – and he shouldn’t have – swearing that his hair flared up behind him and his eyes had narrowed into dangerous slits and they really should not have done any of that. “To get to the damn point.”
It was frustrating – that though Eisenberg was the one trapped between a wall and a hard place, it was still Erhardt that felt so small.
Eisenberg looked at him strangely. Erhardt didn’t dare put any names to the feelings flying about in his cloudy eyes, because none of them would spell malice nor disgust nor even fear – and he couldn't even get that right.
"If you wanted me to be honest, I couldn't stand another minute of seeing you look so pained."
It was a joke.
"Maybe in the end, I'm worrying about nothing. But the eyes don't lie."
Yes, they can. Erhardt was living proof of this. This was just a horrid joke.
He felt a large hand on his chest pushing him back gently. He prayed to the Twelve that his heartbeat couldn't be felt through the thick leather of their uniforms. Eisenberg sighed – simply – and his hands fell to his sides. There was a warmth left upon Erhardt's chest where the other man's palm had been. "My point is that we're comrades. I don't know what sort of things you would have me do to have you rely on us a little more, but the offer stands."
The twisted images of bloodied blossoms set aflame crossed his vision – and it horrified Erhardt that he couldn't feel the cinders.
He took a step back. And another – and once more – until the world steadied itself beneath his feet. There were too many things that he wanted to do to him – too many things to say, all drenched in bile and grime and grief. None of them sounded right nor fair and he began to wonder if the man in front of him truly deserved to shoulder any of it.
The answer was no. But oh – it was tempting, like a demon whispering in his ear the great many grievances and faults that he was entitled to, to stab the man with the red-hot blade in his sheath – he would do anything to make whatever this was stop so that he may bury it under his nightmares.
That’s all this was – a nightmarish joke.
It’s with this delusion in mind that Erhardt decided to indulge Eisenberg in his misplaced show of kindness and companionship. It would be like every other lie he’s ever told.
It was easier to believe that it was a lie – that Eisenberg’s relieved smiles were meant for him when he decided to sit himself closer in the next briefing. Yet another lie when Erhardt doesn’t spend his next evening drinking his sorrows away alone. One more lie, when Erhardt lets the Eisenberg youth hear him laugh.
It didn’t sound like his own voice, but it was convincing enough – Olberic certainly believed so, when his persistence and Erhardt’s own addled delusions earned him a place deep within Erhardt’s heart. Try as he might, he couldn’t help but respect him.
He couldn’t help but love what made him, and it was a feeling that ate him alive and left no trace.
>>>
'Rosebud did her best to prick–
Vain 'twas 'gainst her fate to kick–
She must needs surrender.'
>>>
There is such a thing as a double-edged sword. It was the sword of all overconfident men. Erhardt has seen them hung upon the blacksmith's shelves in the capital downtown. Boys come into the forge sometimes to ogle their brilliant sheen, and every time they ask about the blades the blacksmith scoffs into his ashen beard.
"Don’t you boys go on to get silly ideas now, it takes more effort to wield them than they look." He would say, gruff as the coals in the forge. "Now I ain't no fighter, but there’s more than meets the eye to knights that can swing them around so nicely. Lumps of showy steel are all they are, if you ask me – there’s reasons the garrisons ask for more pikes than swords every year."
And the boys, perhaps dissuaded by the blacksmith’s solemn words, went back to talking about the single-edged blades, and the smith's hammer resumed its clanging. All was well.
In spite of those words, the blades shone brilliantly against the fires. Erhardt wielded them himself, a longsword with a polished double-edge – it sent a message, it served to strike fear into the hearts of man. Werner deemed it fitting. The masses followed suit. It carried not a name, but dread – etched into the hilt.
A foreboding saber. What Werner needed was a man mad with grief and power. He supposed he was both no matter what blade he carried, but his fingers itched to cleave the steel asunder all the same.
Such a blade required skill, strength, and long years of practiced malice, but Erhardt knew undoubtedly that above his own heart, there sat the tip of such a sword – and the feeling was never so pervasive as when he was next to Olberic.
Erhardt has never been more convinced of the audacity of his situation than when Olberic laid his hand upon the hilt of a large, rectangular blade. It had a blunted tip, and solemn words inscribed upon the flat of its center. At a glance, it was too large to be an executioner's sword – but as the other man lifted it from its place on the counter, the pieces fit to form a complete, gruesome image. In Olberic's hands, it seemed more like a guillotine's blade – and he was the frame that supported it. His eyes scanned the beautiful metal with a thoughtful hum.
"You're not thinking of bringing that thing into the front lines now, are you?" He asked.
It was a long while of ruminating before Olberic gave him his answer. His large fingers ghosted over the words. "... it's an inefficient blade. Too large for most men."
"You're not most men."
"You think so?"
"You want a mirror?" Erhardt raised an eyebrow at him, before shaking his head. "...well, if you want to show off so badly, I won't be the one to stop you."
"I’m to do nothing of the sort… and I'm certain I'll get the hang of it. Besides – it's Hornburgian steel –" A quick swipe to the side, and the metal glinted in delight. Its cutting edge seemed to sing praises of the Eisenberg youth's skill. "Isn't it?" He said, turning to the blacksmith behind the counter.
"Hit the nail right on the head," he grunted, the swinging of his hammer not missing a beat. "Fine thing for when you want to cut down cheap bastards carrying one of them soulstones around."
"Now wouldn't that be a sight," Erhardt muttered. He could almost see it – clearly, amidst that maelstrom of flowing fire and ice and thunder, Olberic weathering it all and charging forth. Olberic was simple like that – he was both the impenetrable wall and the unyielding spear. He'd heard enough of it in songs from passing minstrels and drunken ballads.
Erhardt did believe that not even magic could stop Olberic. Maybe the all the bluster and embellishment held some truth to them after all, when Hornburg had so meticulously forged itself its perfect son – the Unbending Blade.
Funny then, that they reserved the same words for Erhardt, their dearest Blazing Blade. Funny that this kingdom has convinced itself that it could still call him its son, that he deserved to share this spot at the top of their world with Olberic.
Olberic Eisenberg was not innocent – he was raised to soak his fingers in blood, to taste the soil of his kingdom as he prostrates himself before it. There is dirt on his tunic and scars across his broad frame, but he is still as soft as he ever was. There was no steel in his eyes – only a bright, blinding love for the only home he has ever known.
How dare he look so familiar to Erhardt, like this? Indeed, he is not most men. This was a man who was raised in love and has never known how to cope with the loss of it.
He caught the glint of the words inscribed on that cursed blade, and turned to leave the shop – Olberic trudging after him mere moments later, asking what was wrong. He didn't have an answer for him, not anything close to truthful, anyway. It was nothing that an invitation to the tavern couldn't fix.
'When I raise this sword, so I wish that this poor sinner may receive eternal life.'
It was a matter of time.
Never mind the way that his heart ached and thundered. Never mind the way that it tore itself apart when he is pushed to the wall of Olberic's quarters in the castle, tasting blood on his chapped lips and chasing flames that didn’t rage for him. Never mind the hollowness past the flames, that great empty void where his soul should be – bringing him to hot tears for what felt like the millionth time that year.
Erhardt Aufderheide was twenty-seven and standing at the edge of history, with a double-edged blade in his hand and a guillotine's edge to his neck.
He was in the gallows of his own making, and it felt like love that he didn't deserve.
>>>
'Röslein, Röslein, Röslein, rot
Röslein auf der heiden!'
>>>
The day was fair. Far away clouds in the sky. He has not heard from Werner in months, but he didn't need any missive to know that the cursed moment was upon him.
His sword arm felt heavier than it had ever been. He should be used to this weight now.
There were no embers. Not even when Olberic had been successfully lured away by a diversion from the South, and King Alfred had been none the wiser to the scent of blood that covered the trails leading up to his tent. No, the air had been too full of ash and grime.
He heard whispers, sometimes – there were reasons why Werner had chosen this specific spot, though Erhardt had never been privy to the details. Erhardt never wanted answers.
All that Erhardt Aufderheide was, it had led to this moment – this was everything that he had ever wanted.
(And he could see red. Red like roses, red like his mother’s smock, red like the fires that consumed everything he ever loved, red like hell – like Hell, like Hell that he would unwittingly unleash upon the world, like the rending flesh of a slumbering god –)
Red like the blood that will soon stain his blade.
Red like the future, caked in ash and smog and blazing flame.
King Alfred’s eyes held the weight of a thousand years. In that moment, Erhardt saw eternity.
In that moment, Erhardt saw the eyes of a man that looked to the future with dignified, unbearable fear, and he wondered just how much of him was actually so known. He stared at Erhardt like he would stare at a pitiful, bleeding beast.
The bright, burning light of death had come to haunt him once more.
It enveloped him in its warm embrace, but he felt nothing.
He felt nothing anymore.
There was no liberation in his swing when he brought his sword down upon the good king. There was no freedom in the way his face contorted into an abyss – no sneering, no mockery, nothing like he had ever envisioned for the past fifteen years, not even towards Olberic – whose eyes shattered like glass, resolve crumpling under the weight of what Erhardt did not doubt was all-encompassing failure.
He should kill him, he thinks – when he struck Olberic with what remained of his strength.
A scar over his brow. Bright bleeding red.
He should kill him, he thought again – when Olberic had transformed into a wailing, raging tempest – a bent and broken man wielding a blade that did not yield to anyone – losing himself in rage and the Erhardt’s destruction.
He bled like fountains. He remembered the shape of the new fountain the King Alfred had just built in the castle square, and it flowed just like that.
He should kill him, he thought once more – when he left Olberic in the dust with a great, gaping wound on his side, on his arm, his legs.
He caught the sight of the man’s grip on the executioner’s blade. He didn’t bother reading the words. Crimson bathed the hand that clasped tight at the hilt, though Olberic no longer held resolve. It made for a pretty sight, the way that the blood splattered all around this blessed son of Hornburg like the petals of a blooming rose.
Erhardt unfurled that hand – that large, rugged, loving hand that had once loved him dearly – finger by finger. He should be free now.
But as Erhardt descended the steps, the scent of blood filling his nose – he walked into that blazing, screaming sunset, and he thinks the heard the world’s voice, he saw it dance dizzily into infinity, fading away further and further into a place he couldn’t reach.
Flames licked at his very being, but he felt only the bittercold of nothing in the vast horizon.
Hornburg was nowhere now.
>>>
'Röslein, Röslein, Röslein, rot
Röslein auf der heiden!'
>>>
And Erhardt Aufderheide stood alone.