The sun was midway through its course, pale and indifferent as it always was when the men below began to die.
Below the Bastion, the League's ranks unspooled in great, desperate maniple of eight men huddling together to carry heavy scaling ladders toward the southern stronghold.
Their first attempt on the main curtain wall had been a massacre of ego; they had marched into the open and were turned into human hedgehogs before a single rung had touched stone. Now, having supposedly learned their lesson, they directed their fury toward the stronghold. It was a more logical target, but logic offered no protection against the malice of people who were fighting to defend their home.
They began to fall and whimper long before they reached the base of the tower. It wasn't the stone, the arrow, or the sword that claimed them first, it was the very earth they trod upon.
As they charged, the attackers held their shields high, their necks craned upward in terror of the rain from above.
