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Lucius sheathed his sword.

To be truthful, it wasn't really a sword anymore, and there was no more need to sheathe it than there was for him to eat or rest.

But he went through the motions as much as he could to try and maintain some thread of connection to what he had been.

Battlefields always looked the same after battles...for some reason they were always overcast, the grim coloring of the sky being the eternal background for the stacks of bodies and the shrieks of the dying. At least the shrieks no longer bothered him now.

How long have I wielded a sword of flame, and marched the paths of wind?

Bah, not that it mattered anyway. What was now is what had always been and always will be: he supposed that had he feelings, that idea would have bothered him as much as the cries of the fallen used to have done.

He moved to the fallback line, where the side of Death had rallied and he had done the most damage. The old woman was tending to the wounded, although that wasn't as good for them as it would have sounded once upon a time. The Armies of the Dead would need replenishing after the battle.

Here, the mounds of the dead were the largest, and most of them were his doing. He had always done his best work from the reserve, moving quickly to the critical point and striking hard.

Get that fuhstest, fastest, with the mostest...indeed

And isn't that where he had started? Wasn't his greatest pride (when he still had pride), to take the brunt of the enemy attack, until they revealed their weakness, and then to strike brutally?

His mind, stripped of emotions like regret, could pinpoint the moment he had "enlisted" with the Armies of the Dead himself, even if he didn't have a sense of how long it had been.

While he still shed blood of his own; when he last been been able to do that. And it had been his pride to withstand and to retaliate for the victory. Up until that last battle. There were simply too many enemy. He knew he was lost and that pride could not withstand that.

So he had called on the forces of Death, and they had answered by shattering the battlefield, and his enemy with it.