The war-tent billows slightly with the autumn wind, canvas walls rippling like the surface of a disturbed pond. I stand before the campaign table, my palms pressed against its scarred wooden surface, studying the carefully arranged markers that represent thousands of lives, men and women who breathe, hope, and fear because of decisions I have yet to make.
Outside, the Crimson Battalion prepares for tomorrow’s advance. The familiar sounds filter through, whetstone against steel, horses nickering in the makeshift stables, sergeants barking orders that echo across the encampment. A symphony of disciplined chaos that has been the backdrop to half my life.
Commander Alaric Ravencrest, they call me. The Unbroken Shield. The Hammer of Easthold. The Hero of Sorrow Valley.
Titles forged in blood and victory, each one weighing heavier than the armor I wear into battle.
The intelligence officer, young Maldon with his razor-sharp mind and too-innocent eyes—waits silently across the table, giving me space with my thoughts. He delivered his report twenty minutes ago: enemy troop movements, supply limitations, weather predictions for the mountain pass. All information I requested. All the information that now feeds the churning unease in my gut.
“Speak freely, Maldon,” I say finally, not looking up from the map where tiny flags mark the gathered forces of the Dornish Horde. “You have concerns beyond your report.”
He hesitates, weighing his answer carefully. Smart lad.
“The scouts may have underestimated their numbers in the eastern valley,” he offers. “The forest canopy makes accurate assessment difficult.”
I nod, having suspected as much. “By how much?”
“Perhaps another thousand. Maybe fifteen hundred.”
I shift a wooden marker slightly, adjusting our perception of reality. Fifteen hundred more warriors with nothing to lose, fighting for their ancestral lands against what they see as invaders. Fifteen hundred more souls I must account for, either through defeat or death.
This is what makes me nervous, though I would never speak the word aloud.
Not the prospect of battle itself. I have danced with death across a hundred fields, felt blade meet flesh and watched the light fade from enemies’ eyes. The chaos of combat holds no mystery for me. In truth, there is a terrible purity to those moments where existence narrows to survival, where the mind works with crystalline clarity and the body moves with purpose unhindered by doubt.
No, what unravels my composure in these quiet moments before decisions are the spaces between certainties. The thousand variables that cannot be measured, predicted, or controlled.
I trace the river’s path on the map, its ink-blue line winding through territories marked with unfamiliar names. Three days of rain could swell it beyond crossing. A single traitor among our ranks could reveal our strategy. A hidden illness could sweep through our camp and accomplish what enemy blades cannot.
“Have the healers checked the water source again?” I ask, the question seeming disconnected from our discussion of enemy forces.
Maldon blinks but recovers quickly. “This morning, Commander. They report it remains clear.”
I nod, moving to the tent’s opening to look out over the encampment. Cooking fires punctuate the twilight with orange eyes, around which gather soldiers whose faces I know but whose names sometimes escape me. There are too many now, our forces having swelled with each victory. Once I knew every man and woman under my command, their strengths, their weaknesses, the stories they carried into battle.
Now I command legends instead of people. It makes certain decisions easier. And that ease is what truly keeps me awake at night.
“Do you know why I inspect the front lines myself before each engagement, Maldon?” I ask, still watching the activity of the camp.
“To assess the terrain firsthand,” he answers promptly. “And to boost morale.”
“Those are the reasons I give the War Council,” I acknowledge. “The truth is more selfish.”
I turn back to him, seeing confusion crease his youthful brow. He cannot be more than twenty-five, nearly two decades my junior. I wonder what nightmares have yet to find him.
“I go to remember their faces,” I continue. “To see the men and women who will bleed because of the words I speak in this tent. It is dangerously easy, standing over maps and markers, to forget that each piece represents breathing souls who trust me with their existence.”
Something shifts in Maldon’s expression, understanding, perhaps, or concern that his commander has grown philosophical on the eve of battle.
“The strategist Korven wrote that a commander must maintain emotional distance to make necessary sacrifices,” he offers carefully.
I almost smile. “Korven died in his bed at ninety-three, having never set foot on a battlefield. His strategies are mathematically sound and practically useless.”
Moving back to the table, I rearrange several markers, creating a new formation that accounts for our possibly underestimated opposition. The configuration feels right, infantry protected by the natural ridge, archers positioned to cover their advance, cavalry held in reserve for the moment when Dornish lines inevitably break toward their fallback position.
And yet, doubt whispers beneath every certainty. This is what makes me nervous: the knowledge that confidence is often indistinguishable from arrogance until results prove which guided your hand.
“What you must understand, Maldon,” I say, placing the commander’s marker, my marker, at the vanguard position, “is that nervousness serves a commander, when properly harnessed. The day I enter battle without that tightness in my chest, that awareness of all that could go wrong, is the day I should surrender my sword.”
The tent flap opens, admitting Darius, my battle-hardened second-in-command. His face bears the latest addition to his collection of scars, a jagged line from temple to jaw, courtesy of a Dornish axe that came within a whisper of ending his thirty years of military service. He nods respectfully to Maldon before addressing me.
“The captains are assembled for final orders, Commander.”
“Send them in,” I reply, straightening to my full height and setting my features into the mask of absolute certainty they expect, need, to see.
As they file in, these men and women who will translate my commands into action, I perform the private ritual that has preceded every battle of my career: I acknowledge, in the silence of my mind, every fear that haunts me. The fear of miscalculation. The fear of underestimating our enemy. The fear of overestimating our strength. The fear of losing those under my protection.
Most of all, the fear that I have grown too comfortable with sending others to die.
I do not banish these fears or deny them. I simply recognize them as the shadows cast by responsibility’s light. They are the weight that keeps me grounded when titles and victories might otherwise lift me into the dangerous realm of believing my own legends.
The captains salute as one, awaiting the words that will set tomorrow’s wheels in motion. I meet each gaze briefly, committing their faces to memory, another private ritual, another anchor to humanity in the abstract mathematics of warfare.
“Tomorrow,” I begin, my voice carrying the unwavering confidence that not one of them would suspect is carefully constructed over a foundation of disciplined uncertainty, “we break the Dornish Horde against the anvil of these mountains.”
My finger traces our planned advance on the map, and as I outline each phase of the coming battle, I feel the familiar transformation. The nervousness doesn’t disappear, it transmutes into heightened awareness, sharpened focus, and the peculiar clarity that comes from navigating between the possible and the necessary.
This is the commander’s secret: we are never unafraid. We simply forge our fears into the steel that others mistake for courage.
And in that forging lies the difference between those who lead and those who merely hold rank.
If you loved this story then please leave a comment and consider subscribing to my newsletter. If you’d like to have all of the stories in one easy to read place then you can go to the following link where you can find the book series called Fleeting Fantasies. I have two Volumes out with a third set to release this Friday on the 25th. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F148V229
Chadwick Rye 
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