He rides to the crest of the hill with the other knights, their stampede sending up a huge dust trail behind them. The enemy, down the hill and across the small creek, know that they are coming. Their archers and infantry have poked a hole in the enemy’s defences, and filled the defensive ditches that ringed the edge of their camp. Now there is nothing but the small creek to guard the camp from the heavy cavalry amassed on the hill above it.
This will be over quickly, he thinks. The enemy’s own cavalry was soundly routed over a week ago and what remains of them will have to come out into the open and charge uphill, if they are going to do anything at all. Most likely the enemy knights have remained dismounted and are dug in with the pikeman inside the camp, sheltering from the near-constant crossbow fire from across the creek.
The horses snort and stamp. The heraldry flags flutter on the end of lances, dwarfed by the huge flag of the nation which leads the formation. He hears a distant shout from the front of the line, and the order to advance is passed back in shouts from his fellow knights.
They begin a slow walk down the incline, a sea of armour clinking with the motion. The walk becomes a trot as they enter the range of the enemy’s longbows halfway down the hill. At this distance, the arrows glance off the steel plates on man and horse alike, or stick in only far enough to scratch the padding underneath.
The knight’s formation continues to advance at an unhurried pace, until they reach the lower part of the hill when they commit to a canter.
His blood tingles with fresh battle lust. The exhilaration of so many men and horses moving in unison, driving right at the enemy with lances held high, ready to be lowered at the final moment. A drop of fear is mixed in there too, as the arrows now begin to stick further in, and any that slip between the joints now will pierce flesh too.
The camp wavers up and down in his view, as his horse, and all the horses around him, speed into a full gallop for the last hundred paces. He sees the figures of hundreds of longbowmen, crouching behind broken palisades and shallow ditches, and the two-rank deep formation of footmen that are attempting to guard the breach.
His mind and body are flooded with a potent cocktail of emotion. A lot of men are about to die. Those footmen haven’t the smallest hope of holding back this much heavy cavalry. Half the numbers here would have done it. He grins behind his face plate.
He tastes copper. The air smells of burning. His head feels pressed, like a thunderstorm is approaching. His eyes widen, as he realises what is about to happen, and knows he can do nothing about it. He can’t even see the mage.
As his horse splashes into the creek, the sunshine of the mid-afternoon turns darker than night, quicker than he can blink. There is a moment of deafness, as if all the sound has been sucked from the world, then an ear-splitting boom as reality begins to rip itself apart.
A colossal, black tear ravages through the material world into existence, suspended above the creek, and instantly begins sucking everything towards it. Leaves, grass, pebbles, and even the water in the creek, fly towards the spectral maw where they disappear into its complete darkness. The roar of the air whipping past almost drowns out the screams of hundreds of horses and men who are being dragged into the air towards the tear.
He feels the straps of his armour strain as the steel is wrenched upwards. Then the eternity of him - armour, man, and horse - is lifted as if scooped up by a giant hand and thrust towards the gullet of absolute dark. He has the briefest moment to glance up at the approaching void. Hardly more than a few heartbeats since this nightmare began, barely enough time to register the insane terror that has paralyzed his whole body.
He is crushed against the mass of bodies flying towards the tear. He hears steel plates crumpled, bones cracked, and the soft squelch of organs compressed.
Tendrils of burning cold envelope him. He gets one last image of the green grasses and blue sky of the world he leaves behind, before he is sucked down with his fellow knights into the incomprehensible void of some fell magic.
If he’d been learned in the ways of magic, at least he might have drawn some final satisfaction that the mage, whoever they were, was probably consumed by the vast forces they had to channel to cast such a spell. They would have died a death that was, inconceivably, far worse than his own.
Paddy Dobson
25th July 2022