Welcome to my World

Firstly: thank you for clicking that link. I really appreciate it.
Secondly: you have just laid eyes upon the Fantasies, the newest, freshest fantasy blog on the Internet. I intend to make it my personal mission, whether through the medium of short stories or books (which your support will help realise), to bring you the best fantasy I can write, regardless of homework, food, or indeed real life. Any and all feedback is welcome and appreciated, and I urge you to say what you think. I am, after all, writing for you. If you could tell all your other friends whose taste is as good as yours, that'd be appreciated too. As regards more information on the world the Fantasies are set in, I will get around to that soon, I promise.
Thirdly, and most importantly: enjoy the very first story.

“Lanciars: close ranks!” Decanus Marbo shouted in his gravelly voice, the rain pattering off his faceguard and chain-mail gown.
Constantine complied, stepping close to the equally heavily-armoured man next to him, closing the gap in the shield-wall, and grounding his pike. The bronze butt-spike slipped in the mud, but Constantine wriggled it until he knew it would hold. Constantine had been doing this since he was four.
But then, so had all Lanciars.
He squinted ahead of him in the rain, the dampness trickling through the circular holes in his visor and running down his cheeks, soaking his greying moustaches, scanning the muddy plain ahead from the hilltop for any sign of the approaching Kamarean cavalry. The soft merchant-kings of the neighbouring Kingdom of Lain, under the protection of the Republic of Kamar, had decided, finally, to oppress their pesky and stubborn neighbours in the bogs to the north. They had guns and horses and all sorts of fine gadgets to aid them, and oh, were they confident!
But they were not Lanciars.
Marbo held a Thursian looking-glass to the eyehole of his helmet. Marbo was a good man, Constantine knew, and a fair commander. Still, it galled him to have a man ten years his junior commanding him, even if the one-eyed, one-armed, single-minded Marbo was as grizzled as they came.
“Here they come!” Marbo roared again, his voice like sandpaper. Sure enough, when Constantine squinted, he could make out the far-off forms of the raiding cavalry, rifles held high, whooping and screaming like young boys given toy guns. Which was, essentially, what they were. Most Lanciarial grandmothers could beat a Kamarean soldier, one-on-one. Of course, all those Lanciarial grandmothers had been fighting since they were four, which counted for something.
Quickly, Constantine himself assessed the situation. The Lanciars commanded the rise: behind them, there was a bog, and beyond that, Kallipolis, the capital city of the Duchy of Akar and home city of the Lanciars. To either side of them, thick, dark-green pine forest spread, dripping with the damp, which meant the Kamarean raiders had to attack the Lanciars by going between the two woods and up the hill. As good a fighting position as any, but the Kamareans' guns – even crude as they were; Constantine would sooner have trusted a Lanciar's gastraphetes, or stomach-bow – would count for something. Of course, Marbo – and, by extension, Constantine – knew something the Kamareans didn't.
Closer they came, whooping and cheering like wild things, dressed in vivid red uniforms, flying a banner with the Sphinx of Lain picked out in gold on a background of red. Marbo, face obscured beneath his visor, looked at the banner expressionlessly; then he himself shouted:
“Raise the Akarean Banner!”
Somewhere behind Constantine, someone raised the banner of Akar, the country which the Lanciars ruled. He sneaked a peek back: a shepherd's crook, a sword, a hammer, and a scythe, all picked out in black and white on a background of sea-blue edged with red. A beautiful banner, certainly, not as regal as that of Lain but fit for its purpose.
“Closer...” Constantine heard Marbo mutter, and the Lanciars shifted one last time before settling themselves permanently, freezing like statues. The woods narrowed into a neck, not far beyond the bottom of the hill, and the Kamarean raiding cavalry were approaching at a wild gallop. Benet save their horses, Constantine prayed idly.
“And... now!” Marbo roared. At the end of the line, a Lanciar opened her face-plate and huffed into a flute. A shrieking, strident note echoed away, bouncing off the hilltops and spires of far Kallipolis, reverberating through the countryside. The Kamarean raiders stopped, suddenly uncertain.
That was when the cataphracts charged.
Constantine knew that there was nothing quite like a charge by heavy cavalry, and not even normal heavy cavalry could compare to the monstrously armoured Lanciarial cataphracts. He could imagine what the Kamareans were feeling: the first signs, drips of water falling from branches or loose leaves falling from trees, perhaps, as the first tiny vibrations reached the unfortunate victims. They would notice, oddly to them, that the earth seemed to be vibrating, particles of soil bouncing and jarring against each other beneath their very feet.
Then they would hear it.
To the sight of pine-cones falling and saplings quivering like broken bows, the rhythmic, thumping sound of the huge horses' hooves would reach the unfortunate raiders like the drumming of a mad god. Perhaps now, as needles showered and branches shook loose about them and the thunder of the Lanciars' wrath reached their ears, the raiders would finally realise the folly of their mistake, realise that, no matter how powerful their guns or how rich their fathers, they and their pathetic little firearms would be ground into the muck.
The raiders stood, and Constantine wondered what must be going through their heads. Were they replaying regrettable portions of their lives, perhaps wondering what they could have done better, what they should not have done? Perhaps they were preparing to die well, to die bravely, to die stupidly with a shout on their lips, a mace in their skull and no meaning to their death. Perhaps they were trying to summon the courage to turn and run, to find the spunk to raise themselves to the level of what other men called cowardice.
Then they saw them.
Like a shimmering, vibrating tide, the cataphracts burst from the trees, smashing into the unfortunate raiders' flanks.
“Drop pikes and charge!” Marbo shouted. Constantine left his pike to fall rattling to the ground in time to the cataphracts' charge and his own, sliding and scuffling down the hillside, somehow maintaining order with the rest of his platoon. As he neared the fray, long, trained legs eating up the ground, Constantine began to see the melee better. Cataphracts, armoured as normal Lanciars but wielding maces and sitting on huge horses which were almost invisible under a thick chainmail barding, flailed about them with their blunt instruments, shattering skulls and arms and legs. Frightened Kamareans, their distinctive pale skin and short stature betraying them as natives rather than mercenaries, either scrambled to the ground, trying to get away from the hideous conflict they found themselves embroiled in, or sat on their horses grimly, their skinny muskets cracking until a cataphracts' mace put an end to their courage. Constantine had to respect them for that: some were more than wild nobleman's boys.
Finally, he reached the fray himself. A dismounted Kamarean, his eyes frightened but his face set grimly, turned to Constantine, musket raised in counterpoint to Constantine's sword. Constantine smashed the gun out of his grasp, kicking the dented carcass out of his way, and ran the lad through. He never screamed: he just looked at Constantine, blue eyes fierce, brown hair disheveled, lips sticky and red with his own foolish blood. Constantine ignored him, turning instead to another Kamarean. No such courage animated this child: he backed away until he tripped over a dead horse, screaming, pleading, asking for his life. Constantine denied him it, hacking off his head with one fell swoop. If he'd wanted to live, he should have clung to his fat merchant father rather than going to rob honest Akarean peasants of their livelihoods. No, Constantine had no time for such fools as these.
The fight ended, if fight it could be called. One or two raiders galloped away to the south, thrashing their horses wildly, but for the most part, they lay, wholly or in part, in the vile morass of blood and bodies that the neck had become. Cataphracts dripped red with blood; Constantine himself, and his fellow infantry, were less than pristine themselves. A slaughter, an honourless one, by his measure, but Kamarean raiders by definition had no honour. These rich auxiliaries would burn no more homesteads.
“Victory!” Marbo shouted, completely unneccessarily. “Why do they even bother?” Constantine was certain he smiled: Marbo was no stranger to blood.
Constantine wiped and sheathed his sword. Yes, today had been a success, but a relatively ordinary one. The two-month-old war, proclaimed for the sake of it, apparently, rather than any notion of getting of one's backside and actually hurting people, had followed this pattern for its entirety. There was nothing out of the ordinary here.
Except for one thing, towards the end.
Constantine was busy trekking back to the wagons which would jolt their way back to Kallipolis when the sun began to set. The rainclouds mostly gone, the sunset was left with only a few for its canvas, and it painted them gloriously in hues of red and pink and gold. Ever a lover of natural beauty, Constantine paused for a moment to watch the sun set.
And blinked.
Because – and his vision was confirmed, because it was still there after he blinked – he could have sworn that he had seen a tiny, burning speck shoot – apparently from the sun itself, though that was obviously not the case – towards the east. Like a little piece of the sun itself, it left a blazing contrail across the darkening sky above Constantine's head and fled towards the east, landing far beyond the horizon.
Ordinarily, Constantine would have dismissed the odd phenomenon as a shooting star, a comet, or perhaps another failed Kamarean flying experiment. Yet there was something about the quality of light of this one that gave him the feeling that it bore a malign intelligence, that it watched and waited and brooded, gathering its strength where it had landed.
Constantine looked to the east, towards the vast country of Farhight, and prophesied interesting times ahead.