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Rain fell like cold needles, soaking through the battered leather of Corren Dael’s tunic. The battlefield was quiet now, save for the distant groans of the dying and the faint hiss of blood mixing with mud. His sword, nicked and dulled, rested heavily in his hand, but it was not the weight of steel that bowed his shoulders.
Before him stood Alira, her eyes devoid of the warmth they once held, now hollow with grief and betrayal. In her trembling hands, she held not a weapon forged of iron, but a small, blood-streaked pendant; their son’s.
“You did this,” she whispered, her voice a fragile thread fraying against the storm.
Corren’s lips parted, but no words came. His hands, trained to wield blades with deadly precision, shook as he reached out, not for a weapon, but for her, for the family that had slipped through his fingers like sand.
“I may be trained with the blade,” he rasped, his voice ragged with despair, “but not that one.”
Not the blade of loss. Not the weapon of guilt.
The war had been long, its reasons lost to time and pride. Corren had fought for kings and causes, but none of his battles prepared him for the moment when his sword’s shadow fell upon his own family. In a cruel twist of fate, his son had been caught in the chaos of a siege he led, a nameless casualty in a ledger of the fallen.
Alira dropped the pendant, the soft thud louder than any war drum. She turned away, leaving Corren alone with the echoes of his failure. The battlefield grew colder, the storm indifferent to his silent pleas.
Years passed. Corren wandered from war to war, a blade without a cause, haunted not by the lives he took, but by the one he failed to save. His name became a ghost story told in hushed tones by campfires, a tale of a man who could conquer armies but not his own heart.
In the end, he found himself atop a barren hill, the pendant clasped in his calloused hand. He placed it on a simple stone, carved with trembling hands: For the battle I could not win.
Corren Dael, the soldier unmatched with a sword, fell to his knees, unarmed against the sharpest blade of all—regret.