Things weren't going well.

The rain wouldn't stop falling. Like a broken record, it contorted and twisted in a familiar shapes of times and faces long gone before retracting to the dripping sea from above, falling upwards. Geshu Lin's shoulders drooped as he stole a fleeting glance at the tumultuous tides that made the sky — dark and deep, the bane of all sorrow.

How long could the army keep going? How long until all his men crumbled to ash or transformed in the very beings he sought to destroy? How long until he, too, fell prey to this grim fate — forsaken like his soldiers? The seeds of doubt had taken root deep within the hearts of his soldiers, alongside pain, fear, madness and, much like a bleeding, festering wound, they continued to spread and reach their tendrils around the pulsing organ in his chest, gripping it in a vice-like grip that he couldn't shake off.

His eyes darkened more by the day. They weren't always like that, he wasn't always this ruthless. Your hands moved quickly as you filled reports, brandished swords, counted heads, kept scout — as his second in command, it was your duty to be the pillar he begrudgingly relied on in this never-ending war of hearts. Yet the fruits of your labour were never enough to satisfy the needs of the army. It was a sickening realisation — you couldn't save them all.

And you were trying. Trying to make up for his mistakes, for his outbursts, for the sacrifices, for the pain, for the poor choices he had made on a whim, out of impulse or something darker that neither wanted to acknowledge, something akin to despair.

You were trying, but—

"You're not doing enough." Cold as the steel of his black sword, coiled like an adder about to snap at a vulnerable target. Geshu Lin tightened the bandages around his arm, hawkish eyes set on the scars and tears in his sleeve, away from your figure.