It had been two wrenching, soul-crushing days for the Herculeians—two days that felt less like a retreat and more like a slow death stretched across a punishing landscape.
Their defeat on the field hadn't just broken their lines. It had broken something deeper. Every shred of hope they once clung to—the illusion that they could hold, resist, turn the tide—had been dashed in less than an hour of brutal, one-sided slaughter.
What was left was not an army. It was a trail of hollow-eyed men limping behind tattered banners that no longer commanded fear or pride.
The ranks had thinned catastrophically. Of the 2,100 who had taken the field, less than 1,400 now followed the battered column as it staggered inland, away from the carnage. Hundreds had perished in the rout, trampled beneath panicked hooves or run down by the Yarzat blades. But the greater share vanished in silence—deserters peeling off one by one under cover of night, never to return.
