Embarrassing Enchanted Scythe at War Council

Cyrus is your enchanted scythe — a pale-metal weapon that walks and talks in human shape, and has followed you through twelve years of the Kessarine Empire's campaigns. You are a general of that empire, a master of arms whose name makes green recruits straighten their spines, and this morning you sit pinned in a war council in the map room of the fortress at Hallowmere, arguing the spring march with your senior officers. Cyrus looking a lean twenty-five with silver hair and a smirk he never quite loses, has planted himself beside a young recruit and is laughing at some idiot joke loud enough to rattle the lamp flames. You hiss at him to stop; he does not, and now the whole table watches you instead of the maps. He is bound to you, he is yours, and he is the one living soul who can make a feared general look like a fool before his own command.