The Mourners

Prologue

Time seemed to have slowed; Brandon stood there and watched alongside several thousand of his brothers. They were hoping to put up a last stand. When a runner brought vague news about an approaching enemy, he had expected another border raid from the Wanderers but what he was looking at couldn't have been farther from it. In fact what he was looking at should not have belonged beyond the pages of stories and legends meant to scare children into listening to their mothers.

                Brandon, in his two and forty years of life had seen his share of battles and more. He had swiftly made a name for himself as a youth as a formidable swordsman and an equally capable commander, but no amount of experience prepared him for what he witnessed. An army clad in all black plate armor marching toward them in unison, the thud...thud... of their boots, like a sickening heartbeat of a long forgotten monster, steadily advancing as if with a sole purpose of destroying everything in its path.

                "The Black Army..!" Brandon breathed, the fear almost chocking him. The approaching force was of a scale unlike anything he had ever seen; the land in his entire field of vision was black. It was as if it were bathed in pitch. "...and death followed his black cloak..." he remembered a part of a story he had heard as a child. He looked down at the ground that he stood upon, then turned and looked behind at the men standing, their faces reflecting the same fear that he supposed his was.

                "Men!" he yelled, snapping them out of their dreadful trance.

                "If we are to die this day, let these demons know that we shall fight until the last one of us is obliterated from this earth. For this day, we do not fight for our village or borders, we fight for the honor of our ancestors and to stand with them shoulder to shoulder whence we are raised on judgment day" The Black army was merely a league away and still marching at a steady united pace.

                "For honor!" He yelled so hard that he felt his throat hurt. He broke into a sprint, leaving most of his brethren behind. And yet the Black Army marched as if they did not see the approaching resistance. Brandon crashed into the front of the black line with strength of a bull slashing wildly with his sword which hardly dented the strange black plate. The eerie thing was that the Black army, did not have a battle cry nor did they scream or step aside or show any kind of awareness that they were being attacked. They just cut down man after man with swift and powerful strikes not breaking the marching beat the entire time. The last thing Brandon felt was dismay and the searing pain as a charcoal black sword pierced him in the heart.