The sharp, shrill sound of the officer’s whistle cleaved apart the silence hanging over the battlefield. Answering the call, a mile long wave of armed and armored death crawled from their trenches and surged forth toward their foes. Howls of fury and desperation came from parched throats, unwashed and battered bodies that had spent most of the day baking underneath the mid-summer heat.
Dirt and dust kicked up from underneath bare feet formed clouds that obscured the attackers from their mounted foes who were currently in disarray. A volley of flintlock fire had stopped and stalled a massed charge of heavy cavalry resplendent in their shining and glittering banners and flags displaying which lord or lady they owed their service to. In the lull of fighting as screaming men and horses died in agony or struggled to reform their ranks, killers on foot sought to close the distance over the no-man’s land of battle. Swords rose and fell on kicking and whinnying horses with rifle wounds in their throats, sides, and elsewhere. Men moaned and begged for their mothers or else mercy even as they were hacked to death by their enemies. Blood flowed and pooled into one cohesive and metallic smelling lake rather than in simple puddles.
The butchers stepped over the dead, finished off the dying, and then finally began to move against those who had lived due to having been apart of the rear ranks of the failed charge. A howl that would have done a dragon-wolf proud erupted from Acren’s lips. The potent mixture of hatred, terror, and excitement served as the boost to his courage he needed to propel him from the organic hills of dead beast and man and into the ranks of the enemy. His sword arm rose, and fell, the blade biting into the neck of a horse, whose eyes were already so consumed by terror that more white showed than color.
