It was cold, colder than one would expect for this latitude, so long before winter. Frost rimmed the ancient trees, where no man had cut since the prior conquerors began their long retreat. The shadows were vague beneath a cloudy sky, and the leaves torn off the trees before them by gusts of icy wind. The men on horseback below the ridge tramped back and forth, their horses' and their breaths' forming a cloud that did not conceal how chilled to the bone they were, so far north of their bright and arid home.
It was here that history would turn, one of the few places where history was not merely made but actively formed. These men on the ridge, in heavier armor than most of their contemporaries, barely fazed by the cold, and outnumbered by the men on horseback below, were set to turn what seemed an unbreakable tide into a thousand minor waves.
They of course did not know that. They knew that the men below had defeated every force they had faced; that in the name of their creed, they had broken loose of terrible conditions and brought that creed in the face of steel borne by many more men than they. They knew that they had trained for a decade against this threat, and they believed in the man at the fore of the train who was even now demanding they stand firm for the Cross; but they also knew that no one else had ever succeeded before.
The silent figure, deeper in the trees, seeing them with sight beyond what any many could manage, knew. He knew the thousand events leading up to this and he knew the billion following from it. But most particularly, his eyes were on a young man, once one of several levies, and now a battle-hardened warrior whose lined face belied his mere two decades of life. On that man turned more than even future historians would know.
Suddenly, the men on horseback below charged. One of those men would escape this battle, and return to the bright lands of his birth. He would have a son who would have a son who would have a daughter who would be swept up in a series of events too tedious to recount; and her great-many-times-daughter, centuries later, would be given to cement a treaty to the south; and her daughter, many times over, would marry the son many times over, of the unusually aged man gripping his spear and preparing to kill his descendant's future great-many-times-father-in-law.
But not today. Not this time. It had finally been decided that every prior attempt was too small. History itself must be unmade, and recast, if anything was to survive. And so as the cavalry broke against the screen of ancient trees and men and horses screamed and steel flashed and blood exploded, the watcher released all of his power, all at once, and it poured forth as a bright wave of light, erasing all before him, trees vanishing, men and horses and ground vanishing
FIRE
