Defeat scored his flesh, rending cloth to ruin, grinding bone and steed to ruinous wreckage.

His eyes, dull as tarnished glass, drifted unfocused. Step after step a labor, each breath a shuddering gasp, blood and regret swallowed in the same bitter mouthful.

His broadsword hung slack in his grip, its weight forgotten. He planted his feet in the yielding soil, but his vision smeared into shapeless blotches, darkness pooling at the edges.

He waned, swift and certain, yet it failed to stir him. No faces wavered in the dusk of his mind... no ghosts, no echoes, no tether. Only the hollow drag of his own fading name.

His mission? Scattered to the void. Her name? A whisper swallowed by a dream. A dream that was nothing more than a nightmare veiled by sweet nothings.

In the end, the hand that felled him was the one he had wielded all along - his own.

Before the darkness swallowed him whole, before his feeble light guttered like a weak candle's flame, his eyes widened... stark, hollow, grasping.

He was going to die. And the name he had bled for, the cause he had burned for? Fleeting, like ash on the wind. Too far gone now to recall. A name he was sure he once held to his chest, to feel their heart beat alongside his. The only one who made him whole.

His tears had been spent on the rest of himself; the ones he had cut down, the lives he had stolen from his own hands. There were none left to mourn him. No one would.

The world tilted, the ground rising to meet him in a slow embrace. His fingers slackened, his blade slipping from his grasp, lost to the hush of the grass.

The night yawned wide, swallowing color, sound, breath. Everything collapsing into a vast and unfeeling oblivion. His knees buckled, his body folding like a marionette with its strings severed, yet there was no hand to catch him, no voice to call him back.

The stars above blurred, streaking across the sky, and his chest shuddered with one final, fragile breath. A sigh, a surrender.

Darkness did not take him with fury... it cradled him.

Stillness.