The silence was more deafening than the clash of steel. Under a leaden grey sky, the young boy struggled to push himself up, his iron-gauntleted hands sinking into the muddy, blood-stained earth. Around him, the battlefield was nothing more than an open-air graveyard: dozens of armored knights lay there, mown down like ripe wheat by an invisible, brutal force.
He remembered nothing. Not the charge, nor the massacre.
"What… what have I done?" he whispered, his trembling voice cracking in the cold air.
He stared at his metal gauntlets, looking for any sign of reassurance, but his gaze drifted to the wall of a smoldering ruin just behind him. For a brief moment, the sun pierced through the clouds, casting his shadow against the charred stone. What he saw chilled him to the bone. It wasn't the silhouette of a frightened child projected on the wall, but a titanic form with membranous wings, whose scarlet eyes seemed to burn right through the rock.
For a split second, the shadow seemed to move of its own accord, slowly turning its head toward him, a predatory grin slashing across its face of darkness.