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There’s a tale hidden behind grief and pain and sorrow. It’s a story rarely told, and in more cases pushed under the rug out of fear, fake heroism or a combination of both. There’s no point in showing reasons when a sharp pointing finger and a clear sentence would do the trick just fine, some might believe. It is, after all, the story of a villain. And who wants to hear about villains who might have been the hero if the coin had fallen on its opposite side.
This story starts with a funeral.
It’s not a pretty funeral. It’s dirty and wet, rain pouring down on a battlefield that should have not, otherwise, been witness of such finesse as it is a funeral, of all things. And yet, an hour away from another clash of steel and flesh, such a short time away from more blood spilled and unaccountable death, a funeral takes place in choking silence.
A head knight is buried in a, for now, single grave. The soil covering him is still clean, and in years to come it will grow a tree that will shade what’s hidden underneath. Blood and decaying flesh have this way of feeding the earth, but at this time that’s not important.
The prince is. He stands straight and white as a ghost, the shock of his expression almost boredom if one ignores the heavy stains of dark under his eyes, the tense of his brows and the tremble of his lips. A sword the head knight is missing hangs from his hip. He should be chanting for a soul to fly home, but instead of words the only thing leaving his body are steady breaths. In and out, in and out.
No songs for the dead will fill this battlefield, today or ever.
The soldiers surrounding him fear to even look in his direction, such is the power of his rage. If the rain weren’t as heavy as it is, they feel, the prince would have burnt the whole forest down to ashes ages ago. And so no one dares speak, nor sing, nor judge what in any other circumstances would have been unfathomable. Who wouldn’t offer a dead man, a dead knight , his earned right of eternal rest in the riverside of where he’d fallen down for his prince?
But the silence speaks volumes, of the prince’s unspoken truths, but louder still of the impossible future that awaits them all. A funeral an hour away from a battle is a practical joke, and although the soldiers can see the unlucky taint of it, the prince appears untouched by its bad omen.
In the years to come, the remaining soldiers, —few in number—, will whisper in secrecy about the prince and that uncanny fight. Words like death wish, godlike, fearsome, bloodstained smile would fill their conversations, but any positive connotations will die sooner than any of those young soldiers.
But we are getting ahead of things.
The funeral lasts mere minutes, for an army has no time to spare when war is knocking on one’s door. There are bows and murmured sorrow, no chants and less tears. It’s hard to cry for a death when one’s staring directly to one’s own. As soon as the prince makes a sign, the soldiers scatter, rushing to prepare their armours and weapons, their mounts and their prayers. The prince doesn’t bother with any of those. Metal is already covering enough of him, there’s a weapon he’s not prepared to wield at his side and the promise of a wicked reunion right across the hill.
A smile breaks his face, and if it’s shaky and hollow, no one cares, because no one sees.
The soldiers who survive will be right in their assessment of their prince. In the battlefield later that day, against all odds, the prince becomes god, and like the enraged god he has buried together with his head knight and his love, he brings down death with an expecting smile and a rush no one will ever call contained nor safe. A fighter looking for death usually dies by his own means, but a god with a death wish rarely does so. A prince, protected and cared for all his life, should have never survived such bloodbath. A human prince, unscarried and unmarked by any weapon but his own loss, should have never lived to tell the tale.
But who knows if the prince is human by then. A funeral on a battlefield is a tricky thing. A promise to a dead man in a single grave, soon to become a mass grave, has all the potential to morph into something nasty and unwanted. Dark magic, they say, a land no one should ever cross into if they don’t want their soul to be spoiled forever.
They should have warned Tooru while he buried Iwaizumi in no-one’s land, that’s the guilt that will chase the remaining soldiers, so young and yet so stained, for the rest of their lives. While they see the raise of a demon wearing the shoes of their prince, even before the demon grows his horns and curses the land he had once vowed to protect. They will have sleepless nights remembering the sight of their prince, bathed in blood, wielding a sword not meant to be his after promising his knight and himself they’d be reunited by death and never fulfilling that promise.
They will die knowing they failed and they are at fault, and all because no one dared to sing a single chant in a funeral that should have never come to be.