Strategos: Rise of the Golden Heart

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A zephyr lifts me ever higher and the spring sun beats upon my outstretched wings as I soar across the rugged, golden heartlands of Anatolia. The first navigators to set foot on this realm named it the Land of Sunrise. Yet had they only known what torment was to be played out in the ages ahead, they may have chosen a more suitable moniker.

These last years have been more brutal than many past. Driven by the death of his uncle Tugrul, Sultan Alp Arslan and his Seljuk hordes have torn these lands asunder, smashing against the dying embers of Byzantine resistance with the tenacity of a beating black heart. The boots and hooves of his armies and the broad wheels of his war machines have ploughed the earth year upon year, sowing the corpses of Byzantine farmer-soldiers in their wake.

Of the few Byzantine souls who refuse to crumble under this pressure, one troubles me greatly. Once I thought he was the man capable of defying my greatest adversary, Fate. Now I see in him more darkness than light. The boy once known to me as Apion has become an embittered husk of a man, a strategos who leads his beleaguered border army into battle as though he relishes the prospect of death. In victory, he sees only the failures of his past, while his men chant the name that has come to define him.

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