"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.
