Due stood alone on the battlefield before dawn.
It was cold. It wasn't just the temperature, but the kind of cold that settles into a place after something terrible happened and the world just kept going anyway.
The grass had grown back over the spot where Arphus's soldiers fell. It looked green and ordinary on the surface.
The seasons had covered what they covered, the way they always do, without ceremony or acknowledgement.
However, underneath the surface, the obligations waited.
Due could feel them the way he felt every obligation. They felt like a weight with direction, like threads occupying a space only his Characteristic could reach.
There were hundreds of them.
Soldiers who died owing things and soldiers who died owed things were all there. It was the accumulated debt of a battlefield full of people who hadn't settled their accounts before the end came.
The threads were patient and heavy, waiting for someone with the capacity to call them in.
Due waited and let the silence settle around him. The sky was a dull grey in the pre-dawn light as the battlefield spread in every direction.
He felt Therasia's formation the moment it entered his range.
There were a thousand soldiers. They were organized and moving with the ease of a force that had done this before and expected a clean result.
Five commanders were distributed through the ranks. Their obligation weight was heavier and more structured than the men around them, which was the layered debt that came from being responsible for other people's lives.
Due looked slowly from the low rise as they settled into position on the eastern edge.
Four commanders wearing Rune Armor were exactly where he expected them to be, spaced through the formation.
The fifth commander he nearly missed. The reading was suppressed and placed deeper than the others, sitting in the position of someone who didn't want to be identified first.
Due noted the weight of the obligation threads around that specific commander. They were more personal than the others.
He waited until the formation had fully committed. He waited until the commanders were positioned and the soldiers had stopped moving.
Eventually, the entire machinery of Therasia's response was pointed directly at him.
Then, Due raised the accumulated debt.
What rose from the battlefield wasn't clean at all.
It was wrong in the way certain things are wrong before you even understand what you're looking at. It felt immediate and instinctive.
The air and the ground changed instantly. Due raised his hands, making small gestures that became much larger.
He was conducting hundreds of threads at once instead of just a few.
The obligations of the dead discharged.
Therasia's formation fractured. It didn't happen strategically, or in the way formations break when they are outmaneuvered.
The soldiers simply couldn't hold their positions.
The pressure to meet their obligations disrupted all communication. Each person's individual debts became more noticeable than the orders they were supposed to follow.
A soldier near the left edge dropped his spear and covered his ears, even though there was nothing to hear.
Two others in the second line stepped backwards without knowing why. Their feet made the decision before their minds did.
The officers shouted commands, but nobody responded to them.
Men who had trained for years were running. They weren't running from an enemy they could see, but from debts they hadn't known they were carrying.
The debts were suddenly demanding to be resolved all at once.
Due managed the threads with everything he had left.
His Expression activated, and the cost was immediate and visible. His posture, his breathing, and his handhold all changed.
Something important in his character changed forever in that moment.
The 15% capacity loss he had calculated vanished all at once, rather than slowly as he had hoped.
He took a deep breath and stayed in the moment. Being correct about the calculation didn't make it any easier to feel.
Following that, he raised the second obligation. It was much larger and pointed at what had already risen.
Suddenly, the ground shook aggressively and then erupted like a volcano.
The detonation was a resolution.
Every accumulated obligation from every person who had died on this ground was discharged simultaneously.
The volume was simply too large for the world to contain quietly.
The blast radius expanded outward along the battlefield's original contours. The places where people had died became the sites of the most violent resolution, and the ground split along those lines.
The sound reached the settlements on the horizon. In those settlements, people who didn't understand what they were hearing still knew something had changed.
Due ran.
The heat caught the back of his collar as he cleared the blast's edge with nothing to spare.
He collapsed against a stone outcropping and stared up at the sky, breathing deliberately to catch his breath.
The field was finally quiet.
'I nearly died.'
Due waited a moment before thinking again.
'Worth it.'
The sky above was lighter now. Dawn was arriving at the edges, grey and indifferent to what had happened below it.
Due lay against the stone and felt the new range of his Characteristic.
The ceiling was lower and there were fewer threads available to him.
The permanent cost settled into him the way a scar settles into skin. At first, he felt it clearly, but eventually, it just became a part of him.
He could handle the situation, but he didn't expect the silence that followed.
The responsibilities that had been weighing on him for months were now gone. He no longer felt the need to address the dead from Arphus's battle.
For the first time since that fight, he felt free of that burden.
The absence of all that weight felt stranger than bearing it had.
Boots landed on the rock above the crater's edge.
Alistair looked down at him.
His expression was unreadable for a moment as his scan ran over Due.
Then it settled into something simpler, and the two of them stayed like that without saying anything for an entire minute.
"You're late," said Due.
"I watched the explosions from the road," said Alistair.
"And?" asked Due.
Alistair looked at the crater and the smoke still rising from four separate points.
He looked at what had been a thousand soldiers forty minutes ago. They were now scattered across the landscape in every direction without any formation at all.
"Impressive," said Alistair.
Alistair had a proud smile on his face.
Due closed his eyes. "I nearly died."
"I know," Alistair replied.
They stayed like that while the morning settled around them.
Due's hands began their settling gestures again. They were slower than before, and the rhythm was permanently different.
The reduced capacity was already part of how he moved now.
"Still impressive," Alistair said again.
Alistair extended his hand to help Due up.
"I'm proud," Alistair said in a low voice.
Due's expression did something complicated, but he let it happen.