"Take this wooden cock, you blue-blooded flock!"

Ratto never knew who shouted it.As funny as that was he had other to take care of.

The crude roar was swallowed instantly by a sound that would haunt his dreams until the day he would finally join the dead.

He had delivered death from a saddle for six years, since he was a boy given a javelin and told to ride. He had seen blood in the sands and on the marble, but nothing, not the tallest tale nor the darkest nightmare,had prepared him for what he beheld that day.

That red day.

It was the sound of a world ending in a heartbeat. Hundreds of kilos of muscle and momentum met anchored iron and unyielding ash.

There was a sickening, wet thud, followed by the staccato crack-crack-crack of breaking timber as pikes found the soft chests of the destriers. The air was suddenly thick with the final, shrill screams of the beasts, a high, piercing chorus that sounded like the final whimper of a tragedy before the curtain falls at last.

The last note of the last song.

Then came the rattle. It sounded like a thousand iron pans being hurled onto a stone floor in a kitchen gone mad. Knights were catapulted from their high-backed saddles, their polished plate clattering and clanging as they hit the mire.

Ratto stood frozen in the fifth rank, watching the carnage unfold mere feet away. The front line of the Oizenian charge folded, what mud and sharp iron could not, a row of five pike for meter did.

Horses toppled over wood, their flailing hooves striking the men behind them. Riders were crushed under the weight of their own dying mounts. Flesh, iron, silk, and bone, it all became a single, thrashing heap in the mud, until one could not understand where a man started and another ended.

Their makers looking down in satisfaction and euphoria at the mess they had made.

And it was not over.

"Push!" Rykio’s voice screamed through the din, his hound-helmet howling like a barking dog "Push them back into mud! Don’t let them find their feet!"

And they took heed of that.

They didn’t move cohesively as one line, there was none of the coordination the legions footmen sported, for they were riders, used to the wheeze from high saddle and the roars of horses.

The long pikes, now slick with gore, and mostly broken were let go, the Hounds favoring back their short handed weapons for the familiarty of close-handed killing.

The knights who had survived the impact with their lances unbroken and their horses dead or screaming, finally had to pay attention at the rabble that merely seconds ago they were hoping to trample down.

Ratto reached for the javelin at his back, his hands trembling with a cold, electric heat, as above fear there was the boiling of his blood calling for what soldier did.

He looked at a knight just a few paces away, a man in a mud-washed breastplate trying to crawl out from under a dead sorrel. The man’s visor was open, revealing a face pale with shock and eyes that realized, too late, that perhaps it should have been better to pay his own business instead of taking part in a war that he had no place in.

But regret always comes too late.

This was the last dance of his chivalry when an axe took him in the back of his neck.

In the emerald grass turned black, red, brown and white, the pedigree of a thousand years was being throttled by the calloused hands of men who had once been pickpockets , farmers, sheperds and outcasts.Different men, with different beggings but same end in some ditch or mud.

The golden haired boy turned his head instictvely for the figure in command. Just in time to see Rykio swinging the axe he had inherited from the Butcher of Aracina, the heavy steel whistling through the air as he bellowed a command. A thousand voices roared back.

And among them was Ratto.

"YARZAT!" he screamed, the name tearing from his throat until it felt raw. He lunged forward, following the surging tide of his companions. He loosed his last javelin, watching it arc into the grey sky before it plummeted into the confusion of the Oizenian rear, seeking a throat or a horse’s flank.

He felt a squishy feeling in his guts.He should have take a shat before battle....

Don’t let me die shitting myself, he prayed silently. A man can meet the Father for judgement with a hole in his chest, but not with a mess in his britches.

He drew his mace, the cold iron heavy and comforting in his grip.

He had survived six years of this madness; he intended to see six more.

He stepped over a tangle of broken wood and came upon a knight whose lower half was swallowed by the massive, cooling corpse of a charger while his top tried to crawl away. Hundreds of kilos of dead meat had become the man’s judge and executioner, pinning him to the earth while life still thrashed in his lungs.

"Wait! Wait!" the knight begged. His voice was thin and high, stripped of all the noble baritone he would have likely used in his manor.

He was like a child that realised at last how scary adult could be. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

They weren’t heroic words, but then, there was nothing heroic about being crushed by your own horse in a soup of black mud.

The man’s eyes were wide, screaming at the sheer, ugly injustice of it all. He had come for glory; he had come to swing a sword that was now lost somewhere in the mire, and now he was to die without ever having tasted a single drop of Yarzat blood. But the foundations of war were built on such broken things.

Injustice is but the mother of all evil.

Dreams were shattered here more often than bone, and this man was merely the first to pay the price.

Ratto didn’t hesitate. He brought the weapon down and made a mess of it.

The knight’s head snapped sideways into the muck like a ball kicked against a stone wall. Ratto swung once more for good measure, pinning the man’s face inches deep into the slurry. A spray of mud and bloody water jerked upward as the body finally went still, settling downward into the earth’s cold embrace.

First gone, six thousand more to go.

He straightened, gasping for air he did not know he was yet holding. He did not want to be here, no more than he wanted to die, but still what use were wishes?He was not a man, he stopped being that when he donned that wolf cloak, he was a cog, and cogs did not ask questions, they just did their small part.

The battlefield is beginning to steam, he realised when his feet pressed down on a entrail that could have passed for a bloody sausage.

A foul, warm mist rose from the ground, coming from cooling blood, ruptured guts, and the acrid stench of horses voiding their bowels in their final moments.Warmth pooled on his feet while his top went cold from the wind and the light rain.

Ratto looked around after his first of the day.

The Hounds were moving through the wreckage like wolves in a sheepfold. And from the looks of it his brothers were having fun.

"Oi, look at this one!" Screw-nose shouted, prodding a knight who was struggling to unbuckle his leg that was deep into the horse. "He’s trying to take his boots off! Planning on a bath, are you, my lord?"

"Help him out, then!" Boyle Ass-boil barked, stepping over a headless man.

He slammed his axe into the knight’s visor with a wet crunch. "There. Now he won’t have to worry about the water getting in his eyes."

The Hounds had an easy enough time with the half-dead and the pinned, but the field was not yet won. Not every Oizenian horse had found a pike-point; many in the rear had shied away from the bristling iron or been forced to a halt by the wall of their own fallen brothers.

The slaughter had been swift. Ratto estimated fifty knights had been swallowed by the mud in the first ten seconds of the collision. Those who remained in the saddle were a quarter as useful as they ought to have been, robbed of their momentum and bogged down in the black slurry, their only advantage was the height of their saddles.

But the Hounds still had stings in their tails.

Javelins continued to hiss through the air, seeking the gaps in gorgets and the soft bellies of horses. One such iron-tipped shaft punched deep into the chest of a massive bay stallion.

That looking back had not been a good thing.

Most beasts would have buckled, dying in a heap of shit and tangled reins like their peers, but there are extraordinary souls among horses just as there are among men.

This beast did not die. It maddened at the sight of his blood and the shaft hanging on its breast.

Refusing the sleep, the stallion became a screaming wrecking ball instead. Its rider had no more control over it than a child had over a storm.

Ratto watched as the hulking body smashed two Hounds aside like dried husks, the horse spent its final heartbeats biting, flailing, and lashing out with iron-shod hooves that caved in stomachs and shattered ribs of man and corpses alike.

In those five seconds that horse probably caused more harm and confusion than any other , beast or man had at that point.

The maddened crusade only came to an end when Rykio stepped into the beast’s path. With a grunt of effort, he buried his inherited axe deep into the animal’s chest,swinging away from the horse’s last charge and watching as the weight of the blow finally anchoring the creature to the earth, where it should have belonged all along.

The stallion fell mid-charge, its legs still kicking at the air in a frantic, dying rhythm.

"Pity," Rykio muttered over the beast’s rattling throat.

He wrenched his axe free with a wet shloop and immediately gifted it to the dazed rider who had been thrown into the muck some steps back. The steel lunged between mail and meat, the head of the axe burying itself in the man’s midsection with a sound like a woodchopper’s strike.

Rykio tsked with his tongue , glancing at the horse’s powerful frame one last time as if regretting his previous blow. "Would have made a fine steed, that one."

Then, without another word, he turned back to the harvest, reaping bodies for his Prince with with the same hunger he had inherited alongside his axe from that one man.