Last Stand at Kashazdun Pass
The glare from blazing sun bounced off the snow and stabbed into his eyes. Combined with the gash in his forehead, the blood from which was slowly creeping down his nose and eyebrows, it was all he could do to not just continuously blink, trying to clear his vision. But it was a losing battle.
Damn metaphors. Hopeless. Always hopeless.
Kashazdun Pass had seemed like the perfect place for a last stand. A gloriously heroic last stand. A narrow valley between the third and fourth peaks in the Serpents Spine mountains. The plan was that it would remove the advantage in numbers The Lady of Smiles had. She could only move so many troops into the pass at one time. The high altitude and difficult travel was to restrict her ability to move in supplies. Freezing temperatures and thin air were to ground the fire golems and wyrvens. The heavy snows of the previous months, here above the world, would hamper her first line of forces, the small and viscous goblin mercenaries that The Lady had some how managed to convince to join her on this bloody campaign.
It's not a campaign. It's a purge.
That was the plan at least. But you know what they say about plans.
Fools. All of us fools.
Three days of fighting and this is what was left. The corpses of the army he had darned to lead now filled the valley, although most were now hidden under the heavy snow fall from the night and early morning. Just under the surface of the heavy white powder, thousands of bodies and a field of blood lain, making the snow appear to glow likely of pink and rose and black. Here and there pointed and edged weapons stuck up at odd angles. Torn banners, stained with gore and blackened with char, hung limp in the still air. A few fires still burned - a shattered catapult, the body of large fell beast probably for the northlands.
He let his head drop for a second. The snowed reached to his knees and for all he knew beneath his feet were fallen friends. Between blinks he could see that the snow below him was spotted with deep red, fresh and wet. From him of course. The quickly patched wound he'd taken on the first night of battle had reopened.
Before him, The Lady of Smiles stood, not twenty meters away. This was the moment he had been waiting for, to draw The Lady out so that he could finally strike her down. This was what all the planning had been for. But it was for nought. While he was beaten and bleeding and tired beyond all measure, she stood untouched. Four meters tall and wearing a newly created gown crafted from the skins of the fallen, she looked down at him. And, of course, smiled. Her lips, thin and wide, pulled back from her needle teeth and a sharp giggle crawled up from the back of her throat. And the wisps of black shadow began to open up from her back and shoulders, moving through the morning air, tendrils of smoke and snake and veins.
Thirty meters behind The Lady of Smiles her armies still stood. They had killed so many of them and yet there always seemed to be more.
So damn hopeless.
It was all he could do to hold his right arm up, the pistol in his hand feeling much heavier than it had any right to. His left hand remained in a death grip on the hilt of the sword, the blade hanging low and the end poking into the snow. He considered pulling the trigger, aimming be damned, but he knew that The Lady would find it no more troublesome than a gnat. There was nothing left for him to do but to find whatever energy he had left and to plow through the pain and try to at least die in a way that was not overly embarrassing. Try to die like champion.
And we'll keep fighting tell the end.
No time for losers–
And right then the song cut. Ryan spit blood and lose tooth into the snow. After all this time, this was the moment his iPod finally decided to quit.
"Fuck me."
