They were powerless.

In any other war, against any other commander, a light riding force would have used its mobility to dance. They would have skirmished at a distance, stinging with javelins and melting away before the Kakunian steel could bite.

It was the "competent" thing to do, the strategy that had bled armies dry at the Bleeding Plains, at the Two Eagles, and under the sweltering sun of Apurvio.

It was a slow, agonizing death by a thousand cuts.

Latio had braced for that. He had expected to receive, and receive, and receive, until the casualties broke their spirit.

But the Hounds did not follow the scrolls, even the very one they had made themselves. With a single, fluid posture, they stripped the Kakunians of their only teeth.Like a dancer managing to disarm a man without him even aknowledging it.

The trap was sprung before Latio even realized the game had begun. The Hounds’ wide, sweeping maneuvers had been a masterclass in deception, baiting the Kakunian knights into believing they were facing a standard encirclement. Their host had huddled the infantry together in a tight, desperate square, the only sound response to a mobile threat, but in doing so, they had pinned themselves like sheep in a pen.

One charge against the river, and down all they would go.

It was the raw, desperate scream of Ser Cleo that ripped Latio back to the red reality of the field.

"NOROS!"

Latio turned just in time to see the slaughter begin. On the right flank, the Kakunian knights, the hammer of their small force, and their only way out, had seen an opening. A wedge of Hounds that seemed thin, an invitation to glory. No doubt Noros was among them, his heart hammering against his ribs, dreaming of the moment his uncle would finally dub him a knight on a field won by his own lance.

The Kakunian knights rode with the lethal arrogance of their class. With loud cheerful shouts of’’ For his Grace!’’, ’’Kakunia!’’ ’’Warrior bless us!’’ or some other that was lost in the air and was nothing more than a shout in the wind.

They grew up on the myth that the heavy horse was the sole arbiter of war. They set their lances, they lowered their visors, and they thundered forward in a "valiant" charge that was strategically bankrupt but tactically "noble."

Against the Fox’s Legions, nobility was just another word for a corpse.

Alpheo’s men had no such delusions; they were cogs in a machine, selfless and precise.If one side tried to overreach the other had to be pulled back.

They were no heroes. They were no legends, that was the teachings the Peasant prince had offered to his demonic forces.

There was no glorious clash of steel.

As the Kakunian knights reached the point of impact, the Hounds didn’t brace. They didn’t meet the charge. Like a hand pulling away from a flame, the entire enemy wedge dissolved.

In less than two seconds, they turned their horses on a copper, riding in the opposite direction with a fluid grace that mocked the momentum of the knights, the wolf’s pelt atop their head making them look like a herd of wolf going to the hunt.

Latio was mesmerized. Taller than the men around him by pushing on the end of his toes to the stirrups, he bore witness to the death of the old way of waging war. The knights had over-reached, lured out of the protection of the square by the promise of a fight that wasn’t there. They were now over-extended, their horses heaving for the clash, their formation shattered by the very charge they thought would win the day.

Then, the sky died.

The small patch of grey light above the panicked knights suddenly turned black. A sound like a thousand flocks of birds taking flight from a great oak erupted from the Hounds’ ranks.

A shadow loomed over the mortal plain, rising in a whistling arc before descending with a hiss that sounded like the breath of a dying god.

As black rain they fell and down the prideful knights they brought.

It was a slaughter.

To witness the end of one era and the birth of another should have been a blessing, a moment for the history books, but in the mud of the Zauern, it felt only like a red, screaming curse.

Long ago, Latio had believed his people had no real quarrel with Yarzat; when the Habadian princes came bearing gold and silk, the South had let its collective mind be dulled by the shine. They had fallen into a deep, comfortable sleep, thinking that with a short walk in a land that wasn’t theirs, they would have all their problem flutter away.

If only such a thing existed , it was not theirs to take.

This was the awakening. And its name was Death.

The javelins rained down upon the knights like the most hateful storm the gods had ever seen fit to send to unpious followers. The air, previously filled with the proud clatter of plate, was suddenly a cacophony of pained whimpers and the high-pitched, vibrating roars of dying horses.

The rest of the Kakunian square could only watch, paralyzed by a helplessness that tasted like copper.

They used heavy, specialized projectiles, iron-shod and weighted, that tore through double-linked chainmail as if it were silk.

Latio watched as a javelin punched through a breastplate that had likely been passed down through three generations of wandering knights, the steel no doubt brittle and ancient for having allowed such a thing. The spear didn’t stop at the metal; it drove the shattered plates into the man’s chest, pinning him to his saddle like a butterfly to a kid’s board.

When the Hounds did not aim for the man, they aimed for the beast, spitting on every tenet of chivalry the South held dear.

A horse’s shoulder caved in under the impact of a heavy throw, the animal collapsing in a tangle of snapping bone and thrashing hooves. The rider was thrown forward, missing one javelin that nearly hit him, but the dirt doing the deed, until his head came with a crack like that of a seeping melon against a rock.

The road became a carpet of meat, weaved together by people who spit on the very tenants that held the noble’s world together.

Latio saw Ser Bor, the scout who had questioned Cleo only minutes ago, trying to rally a handful of men for a final charge.

But it was as foolish as useless.

A javelin caught him in the throat, the point erupting from the back of his neck in a spray of crimson. He didn’t even have time to scream; he simply slid into the mire, his fingers clawing at the earth, choking on the substance that once gave him life.

’’Fight us fairly faithfless dogs!’’ Another knight shouted raising a shield to ward off the storm, only for three javelins to hit the wood at once. The weight of the iron was so great it dragged the shield down, one of them even nailed the palm of his hand, causing him to explode in pain and exposing the man’s face to the fourth javelin took his eye.

No matter how many died, no matter how many fall, how many screamed, be them beasts or men

The javelins did not stop.

They scythed through victim after victim, a relentless, mechanical harvest of men who had been blind to the coming age. The knights had expected a duel of lances and a test of mettle; they were being executed by a force that treated war for the malevolent force that it was.

Unyelding in its passage, unsatisfying in his hunger.

Latio’s eyes searched the carnage for a single white field with three horses. He searched for the boy who wanted to be a knight.

And then Latio saw him.

Of the twenty-eight knights who had stood defiant when the bridge first groaned and died, only six remained in the saddle. They were no longer a vanguard; they were a collection of broken splinters. Latio recognized the heavy, sodden plumes of Noros’s helmet, but his focus was arrested by the three javelin shafts protruding from the boy’s chest and shoulder.

They looked like black branches embedded in a mound of mud.

It was no longer a fight. Even in their final, panicked heartbeats, they must have realized that. The "Old Way" had been unmade.

So why did they still charge? Latio’s mind could find no answer. Why did Noros, a boy who had spent his life chasing the ghost of a knightly ideal, spur his dying horse into the teeth of a storm he could not weather?

He had spent every waking hour since his childhood dreaming of the day a sword would tap his shoulder. He had practiced the high, noble tilt of the chin, the specific way a knight of the South should hold his lance, and the colorful oaths of a "true" protector. He had lived for a world that was already dead, a tragic figure chasing a sunset while the night was already upon him. Who knew , perhaps , in his last moments he realised that?

He didn’t charge for victory. He charged because he didn’t know how to do anything else. He was a creature of a failed era, performing the only ritual he knew before the curtain fell.

The end came with a wet sound, unheard through the whimper of men and dead throttles of horses.

A final javelin, thrown with the bored precision of a Yarzat veteran that had made business of war, struck Noros squarely in the collarbone. The force of the impact lifted him.

Latio watched as the boy’s body was jerked backward, his boots slipping from the stirrups with a desperate, final scrape of leather on steel.

Noros didn’t fall with a cry of "For the Prince!" or a prayer to the Five, he hadn’t got the time for that. He fell in a silent, ungainly heap, his expensive armor, the suit he’d hoped to be knighted in, clattering against the blood-soaked earth like a bag of discarded tin. He hit the ground and did not move. The "three white horses" on his breast were instantly stained a dark, bubbling crimson, obscured by the very mud he had hoped to rise above.

Noros hadn’t given Latio any reason to love or hate him. But somehow in the back of his mind, whispering by something he did not know, he gave one last thought that would ever accompany the dead squire whenever he thought of that day.

He would have made a fine knight.