Slaughter at Dumhaven

     And the din of war died with one final sweep of blade. One last man fell headless to the earth, blood spewed forth from his neck, spear clenched in a death grip. Years later, legend would call it the Slaughter at Dumhaven. The wind keened like a woman given a stillborn after hours of painful labor. The lone warrior sank to his knees, neither relief nor depression yet able to wash over him, only pure exhaustion. His coat of mail shifted underneath a hard leather cuirass. Both were ripped and stained with the blood of fellow man.

     The field of Dumhaven extended for miles in every direction, stained with the crimson blood of fallen armies. The warrior let out a long breath, his eyes closed. The wind obscured the noise of his lungs as bloody mud wetted his knees. The corpse in front of him still emptied through the neck.

     All around him, corpses lay, twisted and bent like childhood toys thrown into the garbage once the child outgrew them. Bones poked out of limbs like a worm out of the earth, faces were frozen into expressions of agony, horror, despair. Blood pervaded all. Its metallic stench rose to the wind and swept southwards to let all know that the fell deeds were done.

     He could already hear the first crows beginning to descend. In a matter of minutes, this field would become as black as oil, the dead a feast for the living, their eyes the dessert. The knights would be lucky. Covered from head to toe in plates of steel or frost metal, their families would have a face to look upon at the funeral. The warrior saw one such knight two feet from him. The visor of his helm was open. The warrior took a weary hand and slid it shut.

     “I am sorry, my friend,” he whispered.

     The warrior looked at the sky. It grew blacker by the moment, the chorus of the death feast growing louder and louder. Thunder clapped somewhere in the distance and the wind continued to howl. The warrior gathered his last reserves of energy and forced himself to his feast, the hundred pounds of mail and leather dragging on his weary shoulders. Step by step, he moved south, the lone survivor of the Slaughter at Dumhaven.

     The crows feasted.