The night before Hastings, Roland de Bayeux could not sleep.

He sat on a wooden crate in Duke William's camp, sharpening his sword with a whetstone. The rhythmic scrape-scrape-scrape was the only sound he could hear over the distant murmur of ten thousand men preparing for battle. Around him, soldiers checked their armour, tested their swords, whispered prayers to gods they weren't sure were listening.

Roland sharpened his sword. He had sharpened it before, many times. He knew the exact angle, the exact pressure, the exact number of strokes needed to make a blade sing. He was good at this. He had always been good at this.

But tonight, his hands were shaking.

Not from fear. From recognition.

He had been here before. Not this camp—this specific moment. The smell of damp earth and horse sweat and oiled leather. The sound of men praying in the distance. The taste of cold iron on his tongue from biting down on his teeth. He had been here before, sitting on this exact crate, sharpening this exact sword, the night before a battle he could not quite remember.

He stopped sharpening. He looked at his sword blade in the dim light of a nearby torch. For a moment—just a moment—he saw something in the reflection. Not his face. Something behind him. Another man, sitting on a crate, sharpening a sword. The same armour. The same face. The same shaking hands.

He turned around.

There was no one there.

Roland stared at the empty space behind him. The camp continued around him, oblivious. A soldier walked past, carrying a bucket of water. Two men argued quietly over a game of dice. A horse stamped and snorted in its tether.

Nothing.

He turned back to his sword and resumed sharpening. Scrape-scrape-scrape.

But the feeling remained. The certainty, growing like a seed in his chest, that he had done this before. That he had sat on this crate, sharpened this sword, felt this moment, and then done it again, and again, and again.

He closed his eyes and tried to remember.

Images came, fragmented and unreliable. A battlefield, red with blood. A banner falling. A man he loved dying in his arms. A victory. A feast. A betrayal. A defeat. Death. Darkness. And then—

The crate. The sword. The sharpening stone.

Again.

Roland opened his eyes. The torchlight flickered. The scrape-scrape-scrape continued. He did not remember putting the stone down.

"Can't sleep, Roland?"

He looked up. Sir Godfrey was standing beside him, a cup of watered wine in his hand. Godfrey was a good man. Old, experienced, with a face that looked like it had been carved from oak and weathered by thirty years of war. He had fought beside Roland at Dover, at Canterbury, at every skirmish since the Duke's invasion began.

"No," Roland said.

"Neither can I." Godfrey sat down on another crate opposite him. "Tomorrow, we cross the river. Tomorrow, we fight the Saxons. Tomorrow, everything changes."

"Does it?" Roland asked. The words came out before he could stop them.

Godfrey looked at him. "What do you mean?"

"Nothing." Roland picked up his sword again. "Just... it always feels like everything changes. And then it doesn't."

Godfrey studied him for a moment. Then he took a sip of wine and said, "My father fought at the Battle of Normandy. Thirty years ago. He came back with one eye and a limp and a story he told every night at the table. 'Roland,' he said, 'you will fight your own battle one day, and it will feel exactly like my battle. Same fear. Same noise. Same blood. Only the names will be different.'"

Roland looked at him. "Did he?"

"Did he what?"

"Feel like he'd been there before?"

Godfrey was quiet for a long time. Then: "He said it felt like a dream. A dream he'd had since he was a boy. A dream of fire and horses and a sky full of arrows. He said when he woke up on the morning of the battle, he knew exactly what would happen. Every detail. Every sound. Every death."

"What happened?"

"What my father always said would happen. He fought bravely. He came home. He told the story. He died in his bed twenty years later, still limping, still missing one eye, still telling the same story to anyone who would listen."

Roland looked at his sword. The blade was bright now, sharp enough to shave with. He ran his thumb along the edge and felt nothing. Not pain. Nothing. Because he had felt this edge before. Many times. In dreams that were not dreams.

"Godfrey," he said quietly. "If you could go back—before a battle—knowing exactly what would happen, would you want to?"

Godfrey set down his wine. "Why do you ask?"

Roland didn't answer. He couldn't. Because the truth was sitting in his chest like a stone, and it was getting heavier, and he knew, with a certainty that terrified him, that he had asked this same question before. In another time. In another camp. Before another battle.

And he had gotten the same answer.

Because Godfrey, looking at him with those old, knowing eyes, said: "No. I wouldn't want to know. Because knowing takes the meaning away. If you know you'll win, the victory means nothing. If you know you'll die, the courage means nothing. You have to not know, Roland. You have to stand on that field and believe, truly believe, that this time might be different. That this time, you might be the one who comes home. That belief—that stupid, beautiful, foolish belief—is the only thing that makes any of this matter."

Roland nodded. He understood. He understood perfectly.

Because he had understood this before. In the other times. In the other camps. In the other nights before battles that had happened and happened and happened.

The dawn came grey and cold. Roland stood, sheathed his sword, and joined the line of soldiers marching toward the river. The Saxons were waiting on the hill opposite them. He could see their banners—white standards with black crosses—flying in the pale morning wind.

He walked forward. He did not look back.

The battle began at eleven o'clock. Roland heard the trumpet call from Duke William's camp, and then the Saxons answered with their own horns, deep and mournful and ancient, and then the two armies collided like waves crashing against a cliff.

Roland fought. He fought the way he had always fought—with precision and discipline and a cold focus that bordered on detachment. His sword moved through the air like an extension of his arm. He parried, struck, stepped back, struck again. A Saxon warrior fell. Another charged. Roland sidestepped and drove his blade into the man's side.

He was good. He had always been good.

But he was also remembering.

With every exchange, every clash of steel, every scream and shout and cry of pain, the memories came faster, clearer, more complete. He saw the other times—the other battles, the other camps, the other nights before fighting. He saw himself dying and rising and dying again. He saw Godfrey falling in battle and rising and falling again. He saw the Duke winning and losing and winning again.

The cycle. The endless, terrible cycle.

He saw another Roland standing on the battlefield, watching him fight, with the same tired, knowing look on his face.

"Roland!"

Godfrey's voice cut through the noise. Roland looked over. Godfrey was standing beside him, his armour dented, his face bloody, his sword still raised. He was alive. For now.

In another time, Godfrey had not been so lucky.

"Roland, look at me." Godfrey's eyes were fierce and bright. "What is it? What do you see?"

Roland looked at him. Really looked at him. He saw the lines on Godfrey's face, the scar on his cheek, the grey in his beard. He saw the fear beneath the courage, the doubt beneath the conviction, the man beneath the warrior.

"I see you," Roland said. "I see you, and I know you, and I have loved you as a brother for longer than I can remember, in more times than I can count."

Godfrey stared at him. "What are you talking about?"

But Roland didn't answer. Because the truth was too big for words. The truth was a cycle, and cycles cannot be explained. They can only be broken.

And Roland knew, with a certainty that filled him with both terror and peace, that this was the moment. This was the moment he had been waiting for through every iteration of this war, every repetition of this battle, every death and rebirth and death again.

This was the moment he could choose.

He could continue the cycle. Fight the battle. Win or lose. Die or survive. Repeat.

Or he could break it.

Roland chose to break it.

He turned away from the Saxon lines and ran toward the centre of the battlefield, where Duke William stood surrounded by his personal guard. He climbed a small mound and raised his sword high and shouted with every ounce of strength in his body:

"Stop! Stop fighting! All of you, stop!"

The noise of battle continued around him. Men did not hear him. Men could not hear him. The machinery of war was too loud, too powerful, too indifferent to the voice of one man.

But Roland kept shouting. He kept raising his sword. He kept standing on that mound, visible to both sides, a single figure in shining armour crying out against the tide of history.

And slowly—impossibly, impossibly slowly—the fighting began to change.

Not stop. Change.

Men on both sides looked up. They saw Roland on the mound. They saw the desperation in his face, the certainty in his voice, the something in his eyes that was not fear or courage or rage but something deeper and older and more terrible than all of them combined.

And they hesitated.

Just for a moment. Just a heartbeat. But a heartbeat is enough. A heartbeat is the space between one cycle and the next, and in that space, Roland stood like a man who had lived a thousand lives and was finally, finally done with all of them.

The Saxons lowered their shields. The Normans lowered their swords. The trumpet fell silent. The horns fell silent. The only sound was the wind, moving across a field of ten thousand men who were suddenly, terribly, beautifully aware of what they were doing.

Roland stood on the mound and let his sword fall from his hand. It clattered on the ground, a small, insignificant sound in the vast silence that followed.

He had broken the cycle.

But breaking a cycle has a cost.

The cost was everything he had ever known. Every battle. Every victory. Every death. Every friend. Every enemy. Every moment of glory and every moment of terror. It all dissolved, like a dream upon waking, leaving only the raw, unfiltered truth of what had happened.

Ten thousand men stood on a field, looking at each other for the first time, really looking, seeing not enemies but men. Men who would go home. Men who would never go home. Men who would tell stories. Men who would never tell stories.

Roland walked down from the mound. He did not look back. He walked toward the Saxon lines, toward the white banners with black crosses, toward the men he had been fighting for what felt like a thousand years.

A Saxon warrior stood in his path. He was tall, with a beard and a round shield and a sword that looked heavier than it should have been. He looked at Roland. Roland looked at him.

Neither of them raised a weapon.

"Enough," the Saxon said in broken Norman French.

"Enough," Roland said in Saxon.

They stood there, two men from opposite sides of a war that had never really existed, on a field that had never really been a battlefield, in a moment that had never really happened, and for the first time in an infinite number of times, they were just two men.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

The war ended that day. Not with a victory. Not with a defeat. With a silence.

And Roland walked home alone, carrying the memory of every war that had ever been, and the knowledge that he was the only one who would ever remember.

Hoc semel accidit. This happened once.

He hoped it was true.

--- OTMES-v2-D93F45-072-M0-045-7R7810-8C1A E_total: 7.2 | dominant_mode: 0 (Tragedy) | dominant_angle: 45° | rank: 7 M: [7.5, 0.5, 2.0, 3.0, 5.0, 3.0, 2.0, 0.0, 3.0, 9.5] N: [0.70, 0.30] | K: [0.30, 0.70] | TI: 72.0 (T2 幻灭级)