From the closed door came the familiar figure of the mighty Mercenary King, his red hair blazing in the streaming sunlight, his iconic smile held aloft across his lips while his posture was, as always, proud as an old oak tree that has braved the mountain gales for innumerable lifetimes, and yet there was a difference, a barely perceptible discrepancy in his outwardly immaculate form, for his shoulders now bent a fraction of an inch lower than before, as though that unflinching tree had been covered by a thick cloak of ice and snow and is barely stopping itself from cracking under the weight of it all.
And the closer I continued to look the more I realized how unalike he was from the man I met on the hills above Appox, and then faced in the Anazoy Canyon.
