The people of Four Stands didn't like it when Elder Renka Alderan told war stories.

With others, it was an anticipated event. The whole community gathered around a flickering fire, leaning in close to the storyteller with shining eyes and smiling through his tales of epic charges and brave deeds and glorious victory.

But not Elder Renka.

With others, it was immersive in a way that brought sighs of almost-reminiscence to the lips of the listeners. They could almost hear the pounding of the horses' hooves against the wilted grass, the battle cries of the commanders as they rushed forward to meet their foes, the clash of swords and the clang of armor.

The Battle of Four Stands, from which the city got its name, was indeed something worthy of story and song. It had been the final fight in the War of the Age, ending the struggle against the Enemy once and for all. Twelve days and twelve nights it had lasted, and each hour they had barely eked by.

There had been four stands in the battle, starting only with four thousand brave men against triple that, joined by another four, then three, then, in the fourth and final stand, only a thousand additional men joined those who remained of the original eleven thousand.

The other Elders spun sugary tales of glory and virtue out of a loom of blood and deathblows. They glossed over the screams and the gore, the losses. They did not say that only a sixth of that twelve thousand strong army had survived. They did not say that each shout of victorious charge was multiplied a thousandfold by echoing screams of the fallen.

Elder Renka Alderan, with her too-harsh gaze and her unsmiling mouth, told it how it was.

She glossed over nothing. She leeched the sugar from the bloody fruit of the battle, throwing the bitter skin of the story at her grimacing listeners. She began each retelling with the same phrase, echoed over and over again.

"Our fate was sealed and we could do nothing to change it."

The other Elders had been part of the third stand, or the fourth, when victory had seemed more sure, and hope had begun to sing beneath the clash of fatal blows on either side. Elder Renka, however, was one of the few survivors of the first stand.

"It was a suicide mission," were her words, "We had been sent to our death and we knew it. The purpose of those in the first stand was to die, to cleave deeply enough through the throngs of the Enemy that the second stand would have some greater chance of survival. Only the third and fourth were meant to survive, to become storytellers and legends in their time, keep the tale of the battle alive. We, we who began it all, we who ensured the survival of all the rest, were just... Pawns. Given up for the grander scheme of the game."

"And some found glory in it, this ensured death. Some even welcomed it. But I saw the horror in their eyes when we saw the mutilated faces of those who we were meant to face, the faces that morphed and flickered into the images of those we knew and loved. I saw the tears streaming down their cheeks as they cleaved those bloody heads from their shoulders."

No one ever knew what to say when Elder Renka got to this part of the story. Those who had made it this far were always grim-faced and shifting uncomfortably in their places as they struggled to imagine it. The Twisted, as they had been called, the greater forces of the Enemy, had long since died out. But the thought of creatures who could make themselves look familiar to those meant to kill them, who would then take advantage of those moments of hesitation as a soldier looked into the face of a mother, or a sister, or a lover... So many dead, so little remorse and even less memory.

Few realized how lucky they were to even have Elder Renka's retellings. Many survivors refused to speak of the War or the Battle at all. Out of those who could, many were like the other Elders, painting over the gory tableau of the tale with a brush of virtue and bravery that they had not truly felt.

"Once we were past those twisted things," Elder Renka would continue, "We had not a moment of rest before the second act was revealed. Men and women like us, fighting for a cause no different than ours, they way they saw it. They regarded us in the same way we did them. The words their commanders used to ease them into the thrush of battle were no different than those ours used. It was like fighting estranged relatives, trying to think of the things they'd done and the people they'd killed, and not compare our thoughts to theirs."

"Once they killed someone, they'd throw themselves down on the body and feast with morbid relish on the corpse's innards."

Cringes from the audience, mutters of disgust. But Elder Renka always remained stoic.

"They would charge forward with renewed energy, refreshed by the stilling blood of their kill. We would stab them in the gut, if we could, and it was both their blood and the enemy blood they'd ingested that would spurt from their flesh and spray onto our armor like living rust. It was both the blood of our enemies and our comrades that would coat our swords after each slash."

Elder Renka's stories kept the children away, but attracted the youths who grew tired of hearing the same glorified words from the other tale-spinners. Sometimes one of the other Elders would linger on with them, listening to Renka tell of the things they had long since tried to forget. No one mentioned the tears that slid down the cheeks of those wrinkled men and battle-hardened women when they heard her speak.

Elder Renka told of the Mages, the eloigned Enemy, who had swathed their prey in a black mist so cold that the bones of their kills would crack and bend backwards on themselves, and they would fall screaming through frozen lips. When afterwards they had found corpses blue from cold with elbows bent outwards and finger joints snapped like ladder rungs in opposing directions, they had known who had killed them.

Elder Renka's voice would break when she came to the most painful part of the story: the end. She would whisper of how they had left the bodies to rot on the blood-stained grass for the entirety of the next month, because they could not dig deep enough in the harsh soil of the field to bury them, and there were too many dead to carry into the city.

Now the Four Stands Field was a flourishing garden, the ground nourished by the flesh of those who had died there, and some whose spirits lingered on. Though they fervently denied it, many who heard Elder Renka tell of the Battle avoided the Field as much as possible afterwards, the way they viewed it forever tainted by half-seen images of broken bodies and panting soldiers looking down at fallen comrades.

Elder Renka always ended her retelling with the same words.

"Ten thousand dead, out of the twelve thousand who fought. Their fate was sealed and they could do nothing to change it. Our fate, as the survivors, is also sealed. We are left to rot in what remains of the world, the same way the bodies of the fallen were left in the Field. Only it is more painful for us, those still standing. The rotting is slower, excruciating in its sloth."

"I look now to the Afterlife, and my brothers and sisters in arms who wait for me there."