Request from @littlestartopaz for Harry/Corlath from the Blue Sword on the music meme. I got Bleeding Out by Imagine Dragons, so…yeah…that happened. ALL RIGHT HERE WE MOTHERFUCKING GO, goddamn but I love these books.
Corlath had known what it was to be king since his father’s death when he was a young man, only just eighteen. He had known he would fight a war for even longer, since before his kelar came to him—maybe he’d known it forever, maybe it was what his mother sang to him at his birth and whispered to him when he was wakeful at night. The first time he tasted the Meeldtar, it snatched him away from himself and brought him visions of Thurra and his fierce white stallion, streaked with blood and battle rage. When he came back, he dropped the leather pouch as if his hands were suddenly as weak as a sickly child’s, and he wept for the terror that was not his and the battle he had seen, and his father had soothed him with a gentle hand and quiet voice.
It was not until he was on the field before the Bledfi Gap, his soldiers holding well against the mere trickle of Northerners coming through, and he felt the prickle of his kelar stirring, that he understood that old vision. It was not his battle, no—but it was his terror.
