The echoes of gunfire gradually faded across the empty battlefield, yet the smell of gunpowder still stubbornly hung in the air, mingling with earth, blood, and an indescribable rotten stench that belonged only to war.
Thomas stood there blankly, frozen in his firing stance like a stone statue weathered by the years.
His gaze fell upon Einar's corpse. The man who had once lorded over him, held power over his life and death, and embodied all his suffering and terror now lay motionless in a muddy pool of blood, twisted into an ugly, grotesque posture.
Blood slowly spread from beneath him, staining the surrounding soil and remnants of snow red.
It was over.
That figure which had haunted his nightmares countless times, that name he both feared and hated—it was over, just like that.
One lead ball, one gunshot, one life ended. So simple. So clean.
Yet the wild elation and relief he had imagined never came.
Instead, an even deeper, more bewildering emptiness surged into his heart like a tide, swiftly drowning him.
The bone-deep hatred that had driven him to crawl out from the heaps of corpses in Tar Valley, carried him through countless freezing, starving nights, and sustained him until now as he lived like a walking corpse seemed, at the moment Einar fell, to have suddenly lost its vessel and its direction.
Like a machine stripped of every last drop of fuel, he stood there in a daze, not knowing what to do next.
Surrender? To whom would he surrender? He wore the tattered clothes of the Sauron Army, and his hands were stained with the blood of who knew how many people—enemies, and former comrades alike.
Would the Carnford People accept an unidentified Sauron deserter? Would they believe that he had just killed a Sauron