Sayjinn
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« Thread Started on Mar 31, 2009, 12:17am » | |
They could all feel the dawn coming. The way the men knelt in the grass, heads down, resting hands atop the hilts of their swords. The way the horses shifted nervously as their handlers fit them into barding… even the wind died down, letting the trees sit in silent memory of the coming day. The way that the pale, hushed and murky fog settled across the land, waiting to be sliced in two by the blare of trumpets.
In that sea of blue-green almost-dawn, everyone knew. The polished precision of the mail-clad men-at-arms, the collective tapping of arrows lodged into the ground, preparing for light’s breaking rays to herald the beginning. The night’s rain had passed, and now the dribbling drops through the trees had been replaced with the deep sloshing of iron-shod hooves in the softened ground. With an audible sigh of inevitable sorrow, the sun rose. A bask of yellow radiance illuminated the field. They all saw the other lines, across the long yet impossibly short rolling green plain. There was a glint of metallic sheen across the hills, punctuated by occasional blue and gold pennant.
And so it began, with the rush and rumble of feet, with the solid slam of hooves, surging forward towards some imaginary line, where some imaginary cause would be championed, where the very real honor would be gained. Lances shattered on shields, sending shards of wood into the air, as the lines surged back and forth, the sound and fury of glory echoing all around them.
At the center of the line a bulge formed, as atop their plated horses the commanders met, each a shining example of military dignity and nobility. Their knights retreated to honor the combat, as the Grey and Orange standard bearer faced down the bearer of the Blue and Gold. They charged at each other, both feeling their steel lance as an extension of their arm, both moving those few hairbreadths that could signal victory or defeat, honor and shame, life and death. After that split-second eternity, the silence shattered with the scream of tortured metal, lance and shield tearing at each other until each man released his grip. Wordlessly, their eyes speaking volumes in the space of an instant, they began to draw their other arms. Among the knights, a silence fell as they waited for their lords. Despite their differences, all were brothers-in-arms, awaiting the sacred rite of combat.
Yet outside the sanctuary of honor the circled horses created, the battle raged on. Like a drumbeat echoing from the bowels of the earth, the iron boots of both sides trudged on. Spears and swords, mail shirts and leather jerkins, all painstakingly honed and sharpened, forged and treated for this moment. From the trees the whistle of innumerable bowstrings snapping forward, throwing a forest of darkened, steel-tipped branches arcing towards the glimmering march of infantry on the plain. Then new sounds filled the battle, those of fallen men, sliding slowly to the ground as they unknowingly dropped their weapons, then collapsing into the soft earthen embrace of death.
Inside the circle of knights, not a murmur of this pain reached through, filled instead by the agonizingly slow sound of metal shifting from their leather sheathes.
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