"What's happening? Why have they stopped?"
"Did they run out of iron?"
"The charge... the charge is coming now, isn't it?"
The whispers rose from the ranks like a choking fog,choked with a desperate, fragile confusion. Insecurity found fertile ground in the sudden quiet; after the relentless, rhythmic whistling of javelins, the silence felt less like a reprieve and more like a held breath before a scream.
The air was finally devoid of the projectiles' hiss and the Hounds' mocking cheers, but the vacuum was filled by the wounded. The whimpering and low, bubbling moans of the dying damped any relief the survivors might have felt.
Every man there, Latio included, shared the same suffocating reality: Death had not left the field.
