"They will look up to you someday" Casper's father spoke with a rugged, familiar tone, that carried with it a familiar pride
"I don't know about that" he replied with no small amount of uncertainty
"Oh they will, they already do to some degree. Mostly because you're my son…"
Casper looked to his father with a frown, only to be greeted by a wide grin
"Don't get me wrong, some of it's because of your own merit as well" he begrudgingly added, only to break and give in to a laugh. A deep, pure laugh.
Despite the jab at Casper's expense he couldn't help but laugh along with his father, and take comfort in the warmth the mans large hand resting firmly on his shoulder
"Just don't let it get to your head, a leader ought to be firm but fair, strong but kind, and most importantly level headed. Never act in anger"
"I've heard it all a thousand times," Casper chuckled, taking in a deep breath of the rich spring air.
"But you never know when you'll hear it last, so do well to listen boy"
Casper let his eyes trace the familiar shapes of humble homes, framed in a beautiful field of rolling grasses spotted with wildflowers, and took in a deep breath of its familiar scent.
Casper let out the breath, and with it the memory of the conversation him and his father had on this very hillside only a few weeks ago.
Then, they had looked down at their village, the one that Casper's father and his adventuring companions had built with their own hands nearly 20 years ago now. Casper and his father would often stand at the top of the hill after an evening out hunting, and his father would prattle off some words of wisdom in something akin to a daily ritual.
Casper and his father were always close, which made the conversations they had up here on this hill more like that between friends than between family.
As the memory is left to drift in the wind and mingle with the rolling fields of grass, Casper wished he had paid a little bit more attention to the last words of advice his father would ever say to him. To take them in more, to really listen to the sound of his fathers voice so it might not feel so distant now.
He knew that his father had told him not to act in anger, which was a damn hard thing to do as his vision filled now with the smoke and embers of what was once his home.
Corpses litter the muddy streets, the lucky ones do at least. They were trampled and pressed into the mud, cut down as they were running from burning buildings it would seem from the patterns in the churned mod. The unlucky ones were strung up on poles, their bodies pierced through with sharpened sticks from end to end. Mouths agape, heads tilted upwards, forced to drink the coming rain.
The passive sizzle of water on hot coals was the only other sound to accompany the agony of silence in the space as Casper walked through as if he was a corpse himself. Eyes hollow, stomach turning and mind incapable of fully processing what he was seeing.
Making his way over to his home in the center of his village, or rather, what was left of his home at the center of what was once his village, Casper took care to announce his arrival to the emptiness on force of habit.
The burnt interior was exactly that, a charged, blackened scar of emptiness on the green landscape. He looked around until his eyes lingered on a single body. Burned like the others but not unrecognizable.
His body moved on its own, some desire to confirm the dread now seeping into his every pore. He turned his father over, so that the rain pattered gently against his exposed and ruined skin. Casper, unable to even cry as the shock worked its way through his body, looked down at his father's hands. In one arm, his right, the sword he had forged himself all those years ago, and in his left, The remnants of a blood soaked banner torn from a uniform, depicting a black shattered star on a white background.
Then the emotions hit like a tidal wave. a torrent of feeling becoming all too real in a single instant. Casper's eyes locked onto where his fathers used to be, and grief washes over him. His body arches as the start of a sob wracks his guts but stops moments before escaping his throat. The grief, the horror, the ocean of despair giving way under the slow simmering fire of wrath that forces his muscles to clench the banner tight in his fathers hand.
Casper grabs his fathers sword in his other hand, as he casts his eyes east, the only direction they could have come from.
"I won't let them get away with this..." Casper speaks to his fathers corpse, his voice distant. "I promise you...I won't let them get away with this"