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Sausage almost couldn’t believe it, the sight he was seeing.
Having passed through so many elven villages on the way up the mountains he had certainly heard rumours, and the quiet from the elven king hadn’t left him with much hope. Not after every other tragedy he’d been forced to reckon with over the last weeks.
But seeing it in person, it still shook him. Enough to steal any remaining hope from his bones and leave him weary with grief.
Another emperor whose fate he could keep record. Word for a candle to be lit in Pixandria’s vigil will have to be sent as soon as he returns home to Mythland.
But not yet. Not now.
Before the lord, still reasonably young yet feeling so much older than he should, is the body of one of his peers. Once an enemy, never quite an ally. King Scott of Rivendell, first and last of his name, with a sword buried through his chest and a demon wrapped around him.
The land is tainted with corruption, thankfully dying already. It’s the only thing that gives Sausage the courage to step over it. That, and the ice coating the ground.
It must be why the bodies are so well preserved. Despite weeks since his presumed death the late king and his foe look fresh.
It churns in Sausage, a deep seeded grief he fears will never leave him. But it is a grief he has faced many times in the past weeks, and he refuses to let drag him down. Not until his work is done.
He kneels beside the king. Icy eyes wide and distinctly lacking in the gold Sausage had learned in recent months to associate with Scott. With his frigid god.
A shaken gloved hand reaches to close Scott’s eyes. Staring into them, glassy and lifeless, feels wrong.
There’s consideration in the lord as he sits beside Scott. Is it wrong to touch him? It hardly seems fine to leave him like this. But despite all the rumours, no citizen of Rivendell had thought to move him either. Had thought to put him to rest.
That sits worse than the idea that he might be desecrating some elven tradition. There have been no royal funerals in Rivendell in Sausage’s lifetime, and he’d not been close enough with Scott to speak to him personally.
But considering bodies don’t litter the streets like statues, Sausage assures himself he wouldn’t be wrong. If he wanted to bury and lay Scott to rest, he can’t be wrong for that.
Several minutes pass before Sausage stands, walking a ways back towards a small entourage. Most of his guards have been left in Mythland, sorting out refugees fleeing from other empires. But he has a handful with him.
They are outside the capital by a ways, but not far enough that Sausage won’t make his demand. Someone must go to Rivendell, find someone, anyone, and ask them about Rivendell burials. Don’t stop until they have answers they can ferry to him, by book or mouth.
In the meantime, Sausage returns to Scott. Working as he has so many times, he moves stiff joints, fighting not to break the body, but to lay Scott out all the same. Untangle him from the demon wrapped around, and take the blade from his chest.
It’s in this grievous work that Sausage realises, it is Scott’s hands upon the hilt.
Scott, open eyed and wrapped in demon arms. Brotherly arms, Sausage feels faint to understand.
It strikes him, Scott was terrified.
Finally, Sausage cries.
He sobs, and sobs, holding onto the hand of the king, cold and lifeless. Frozen firm and making it all the more difficult, still all the more important, to lay him to rest.
Sausage and Scott had never been close. Sausage cries and feels guilty, as if he has no right to mourn the man. He hardly knew him. Does he only fear being alone? Being the last ruler of these lands?
Mythland had many times threatened to take over, by far the worst of the continent's warmongers. Yet here he stands at the top after generations of this threat and he feels more hollowed than any.
His soldier returns, quiet. They get to the point, tell him Rivendell does allow burials. Tells him they believe in an afterlife watched over by their gods, where peace can be met in their stags' snowy forests. Slumbering amongst the gods for eternity.
He tells Sausage solemnly that ideally, a holy elf of Aeor’s faith should be here, but he could not find any. They seem in short supply suddenly.
Rivendell itself had been sparse of people to begin with, they tack on awkwardly. Sausage doesn’t push, they’ve all seen the thinning crowds and abandoned villages in their journey across the continent.
Armoured hands reach out to Sausage, opening to reveal a small golden stag statue.
They explain there had been a woman praying. She had given this to him without question. Told him it would have to do. Bury this with the king, it will have to grant him passage without a priest.
Sausage takes it, nodding with a watery thanks. The guard says little more, leaving with the gathered crew to find a spot to dig. They move as a group, and without question. Leaving Sausage with the elven king.
Sausage wonders as he gathers Scott, if he would have wanted this. He can’t imagine there was anyone the king would have wanted at his funeral least. Maybe Joey, Sausage nearly laughs, tears in his throat.
Isn’t that a crime? That Sausage had to bury them both?
Joey’s remains were found in a scouting mission, after escapees from the Lost Empire found their way to Mythland. His body so severely burnt it was nearly unrecognizable. Even more so than the bodies of the king's princely brother and his wife. Still Sausage had gathered what he could, got the instruction from refugees, and laid the crazed king to rest alongside his family.
He had nothing to bury of Pearl, ashes in his arms gathered and later scattered over her recovering fields. Even as much as he wanted to keep her, he listened to her people. Returned her to her lands.
Nothing to be done for the Codfather, or the Ocean Empress. Sausage fears he wouldn’t have had the right to, if the merfolk would have let him had there been any to tell him. Those he found were dashed on rocks, their leaders missing alongside the water and so much of their population.
Lady Katherine had reportedly left on foot. But no trace of her has surfaced. No reference for where she had gone, or if she would return. The same can’t be said for Shrub, who disappeared without a single witness. Sausage can only hope, between the broken portal frame and not a single body left in the Undergrove, that she escaped with her people.
He hopes for her, that she finds a place to settle finally. That after so much torment the little gnome might finally find a place of peace. That she won’t ever have to run from ruin again.
Sausage has built up small tributes to them each anyways, on the chance they are gone as he fears.
His only solace comes in the escape of the twins, as bitter as it had been to hear reports of them fleeing on dragonback. The Grimlands in ruins had led Sausage to think he would find the same of The Cliffs. Instead he found stubborn survival and rebuilding efforts, floods of Grimmish and elven survivors finding their way to the wizards instead of to Sausage.
It’s a small relief to know Mythland does not need to take on the burden of all the continents’ refugees. That despite the loss of all his peers there are nations who have survived, even if still damaged.
It only makes the ache of loss hurt worse, to realise The Count and the Wizard had not needed to disappear. And yet disappear they chose to do, not a single goodbye.
Sausage hopes that they find whatever peace they had sought out, far far away from here. He can’t help but be angry. But he is so tired of being angry, he finds that fire extinguished every time it rears in his chest.
Squashed out with a breath, full lungs. Breathing lungs, and all of his grief returns.
He thinks of Joel finally. Wonders if the man had needed to breathe. Wonders what on earth killed him, what would, could even, have the power to kill a clay construct short of shattering.
King Joel hadn’t been found shattered through. He had been found, hands caked in dirt at the roots of a great tree at the heart of his empire. A great tree decorated with love, and entirely upturned. Roots ripped from the ground. Around it, alongside the king, as well as throughout the streets, hundreds of clay constructs fall dormant.
Sausage never knew much about Mezalea. About the Mad King’s culture. The human citizens of the country who passed through insisted that the constructs were as good as dead, and Sausage could understand no more to how the magic that kept them alive fell in an instant..
Still, Sausage would include King Joel, and an estimation of his clay citizens, in letters to the Vigil Keepers of Pixandria. He doesn’t bother to address it to King Pix, long missing as he is. Sausage did not know to grieve for him then, and he has no room left to grieve for him now.
He’s sure the people of Pixandria can do it better than he can. It’s their specialty after all.
Brought back to the present, Sausage mourns adding Scott’s name to his next letter. Holding the king, frozen in his arms. He can’t help but clutch him close. With so many gone, he’s had the chance to hold so few.
He feels hysterical, to cry over a man he had nothing but conflict with for most of his life. Rivendell’s centuries-long neutrality shattered by Sausage. Gods- Sausage had personally held Scott captive, had tortured him and flaunted the power of a corruption Scott fought with all he had.
Which he fought to the end, if the scene of his death is any indicator.
Sausage has no right to mourn him. Yet still he does. Afraid that no one else will, abandoning the king’s corpse out here. He mourns that he never made better amends, that he was never closer to the king. He mourns the man he once was, without the corruption. Without the demon whose body lay so near. He holds Scott tighter, as if he could protect him for once, finally, from the thing that ruined their lives.
Most of all, and most selfishly, Sausage mourns the fact he is alone. In only a few weeks he has lost every single one of the people he had called peers. Every single man, woman, and fae he had called equal. Who he slogged through meetings with, who he waged war with and against.
There is no vindication, no pride in surviving any of them.
Sausage sobs, painful in the cold mountains. None of his gathered guards speak, standing aside or else working to dig a grave. The earth is tough once the snow is broken. Frozen as much as the bodies who must be laid within it. Worse even, the roots of corruption, dead as they now seem, remain quilted within the ground. A solid network fighting not to be broken.
No one dares touch the lord, but the minutes roll onward and a voice dares cut his tears short. Tell him the hole is as deep as they can break in the mountain’s conditions.
Sausage nods, speaks only a quiet thanks before he takes action.
It feels wrong, he notes with a harsh feeling in his chest. It feels wrong to move the dead. To disrupt even a temporary resting place.
But he cannot leave Scott here, he can’t. A hesitant prayer and apology mixing on his lips as he gathers Scott’s body in his arms.
He shrugs off his overcoat, much to the brief warning of his soldiers before they fall silent. Wrapping the elven king in the thick fur and hide of the apparel. Despite the chill that hits him dangerously, something stronger in him shouts that he can’t leave Scott to the cold. He won’t be able to rest.
He tucks the stag charm he’d been brought within the folds of the cloak, close to the emperor’s heart. Then he moves, slow and heavy hearted, to lay the king in the shallow grave.
It’s not good enough. It never would have been. King Scott of Rivendell, first and last of his name, should have been mourned when he died. He should have been buried deep, properly by the hands of his people and the eyes of his faith.
But they have not done this. And Sausage would never forgive himself if he hadn’t at least tried to give the king rest. After all he’s done, this is the least he can do. Bury him on Rivendell soil.
Sausage steps back, climbing from the hole with ease. The man, with pale frosty skin and bloodied clothes, left laid within. With hesitation, Sausage retrieves the sword he had found in the emperor’s grasp.
He doesn’t know what Rivendell’s rules of burial tokens are. But Scott had died fighting, and any Mythland soldier would have been buried with their weapon.
So Sausage takes the blade, the power thrumming off it leaves him uneasy. He bites his tongue, laying it at the emperor’s side before once more climbing out.
The sight hollows him, and with no further tears to shed he murmurs prayers, and beckons for his men to fill back in the dirt.
He pulls his eyes away with the rites on his tongue drawn thin. Gaze falling across the terrain before landing back on the body of the demon.
He approaches, warily. Staring down at the creature more elf than monster. Sausage still knows it is them, it is Xornoth. The dark and bloodied antlers protruding from their head remain as grotesque as they’d always been. Their frame skeletal and the dark ichorous colouration that had seeped into their skin had yet to retreat entirely.
Still, the demon for the first time in Sausage’s life looks nearly mortal. As mortal as Scott had been at least, by the end there. With golden antlers of his own and a divine spark in his eyes.
For the first time, Sausage can see the family resemblance, and it makes his heart ache. He wonders with a sinking heart if things had not gone as they had, if Xornoth would have been a real brother to the king. Rather than the scourge of the continent, and herald of an old god.
Sausage wonders if Scott would have believed his kin deserved a proper burial. Even with how it all has gone. He wonders if it would be wrong not to give Xornoth a chance to rest as well. A chance to move on.
With a heavy heart Sausage beckons soldiers to help with another grave. He does not entertain their doubts, as much as he does not blame them for the much shallower pit that is dug.
It’s still enough to cover the demon. And Sausage will not ask anyone else to touch the corruptor, even in death.
His soldiers split, some waiting to fill in this new grave. Some to find stones or other effigies to be used as tomb signifiers. A refusal to leave the last king of Rivendell in an unmarked grave.
Sausage moves Xornoth into his arms. The contact almost burns, despite the fact Sausage knows the demon should be freezing. He feels sick for the contact to begin with, but he can’t back out now.
Xornoth gets no coat, nor any symbol of their Aeor. Sausage hardly even knows if it would do any good. Hoping halfheartedly that they find the stags white forest anyways.
He fills in this grave himself. His soldiers return with various tokens. Strong stones brought and stacked into piles. Sausage leaves a note in his mind to return with a proper headstone, when there is a chance to have one made. He only needs to know where the dead are.
With the final stones in place atop both graves the entourage steps back. The cold winds beat against Sausage’s face, through the thick protective clothes he’d kept under his coat.
With a final prayer, and a worn out heart Sausage turns to leave. Leading his men away from Rivendell. Knowing truly that he is the last emperor on the continent.
He is alone.