Under a steaming pile of entrails a body moved. Battered and bloodied, it was all but obscured by the rotting carcasses until it shoved off the refuse of the dead and struggled to stand.
One soldier had escaped the slaughter. Rising, the hired mercenary batted away the buzzards that sought to feast on the dead flesh piled around him. Looking out over the battlefield, the soldier saw naught but stillness; nothing but dust and corpses, capped by shimmering waves of heat on the brown stained sands. A putrid sweetness touched his nostrils. The soldier realized he had been left for dead.
Hired to slay the reptilian Grieve, he had been betrayed by the human commanders that had employed him. It was time for payback. The tall, dark-haired warrior brushed bits of blood and bone from his sweaty brow and turned steel-grey eyes westward toward the setting sun. "You will rue the day you left Eldaraan upon the field," he muttered, his voice low and sinister. He picked up his hand-and-a-half sword along with a discarded enemy axe that went on his belt, and set off to follow the tracks of the horses that had fled the killing fields. Stepping over the bodies of the reptilian enemy that had died in the fight, he left their corpses in the sand and began tracking his new enemy, the humans who had abandoned him.
They were the Midlorians.
They had won a great battle, vanquishing their life-long enemy the Grieve. Yet in doing so, they had unknowingly made an even greater enemy, one whose wrath would equal that of the Gods themselves. The wrath of Eldaraan was about to fall upon them, and they would come to rue the day they had betrayed and abandoned the greatest mercenary of Landsward.
