A single double-pupiled eye sat in his left eye-socket, its pupils the same unnatural emerald-green as pure Viriditas, while where his right eye had once been there was just a gaping hole of scar tissue marked by an unnaturally even cross-shaped scar, some sort of brass medallion in the shape of a rune plugging the hole left by the absence of the optic nerve. Though at first his facial hair seemed to be cut into a strange pattern, it wasn’t so - his face was, in fact, covered in perfectly symmetrical scars that forced his facial hair to grow in this pattern, as if his cheeks had been scored by a man made replica of a bear’s claws in a cross-hatched pattern.

The crowd was the expected mixture of young and old, of Ikesians and Grekurians, but there were a few standouts. A few fighting-age adults, all well-dressed and clearly well-off enough to have avoided the draft, and a few soldiers in uniform that stuck together and stood out like sore thumbs. Their skin was light yellow, their faces round, and their eyes tilted and exceptionally narrow - one of them looked like he was perpetually squinting. They carried clean, well-maintained wheellock rifles and slim, straight shortswords.

They chattered amongst themselves in a melodic tongue that she couldn’t understand, much to the audible annoyance of the Grekurian bystanders. The Ikesians didn’t seem particularly happy about these foreigners either, but they kept quiet, averting their gazes and mostly focusing on the performer.

After a few minutes passed, the performer seemed pleased with the tuning of his instrument and began playing a loose, but clearly practiced melody, taking a deep breath in the first few seconds.

“So go and kneel in wait, and join the herd...” the man sang, patriotism dripping from each word. His words resounded with a superhuman volume, echoing through Willowdale’s streets and shaking the cobbles under the audience’s feet, and the brass plug in his eye began glowing a faint orange as wisps of red Fog rose from the empty socket.

“You know a million sheep will be dispersed, by one dragon’s roar… By one dragon’s roar...”

The man’s voice seemed to snap, his face wracked with a cocktail of emotions. Anger, resentment, physical and emotional pain both, patriotism. His single eye snapped from face to face, burning holes into each and every bystander regardless of race as he continued playing, taking another deep breath before he belted out another verse.

“Either step aside for every god knows, everything will crumble under his blows! You think yourselves weak, pathetic and overrun, that all you’ve bled for is now coming undone!”

What was singing quickly became a shouting declaration, the man’s eye exclusively looking to the Ikesians who made up over half of the crowd. He took another breath and repeated the first verse, with twice the intensity as before.

“So go and kneel in wait, and join the herd! You know a million sheep will be dispersed, by one dragon’s roar, by one dragon’s roar!”