The Charge
You are Lancelot.
Before you, four-hundred and sum knights, of every sort-- Errants, of the Realm, of the skies-- are mounted before you, a great sea of chivalry.
But not enough.
"Men of Bretonnia. My Brothers in the Lady! These greenskin filth dirty the lands! They have killed the innocent!" You try words.
They aren't enough.
"Charge!" You lower your lance, kick your spurs into your mount's sides. You race down the mountain, followed by the mailled fist of chivalry. Below you, in the valley, Hobgoblins and humans share blows, each cast down and slaughtering the other in great waves of violence. As you watch, Godfrey has an armor-clad hand chopped of with a single blow; and even as it happens, Annick roars then bites through the throat of the Hobgoblin she's fighting before carving a bloody path towards where her husband even still fights.
They are lions.
That won't be enough.
Then you are slamming into the Hobgoblin line like a hammer. They are parted before you like the soil before the plow, the flesh before the blade, the ice before the pick. The green bodies are trampled by into the icy ground, their bodies crushed, their forms shattered. Your lance personally punches through a dozen skulls in the first few minutes alone, even before you draw your sword and start slaying and maiming by both sides, right hand a constant river of blows as limbs are chopped off, heads split, bodies torn- and in your left, your lance remains steadfast as you drive onward and onward.
You don't have enough.
A bolt whistles through the air-- and just like that you are thrown from Bolt, and land with a hard crack, back breaking instantly even as you feel the bone tip sliding further and further in. A wolf appears in your vision, not one of the noble creatures of the Lady either; somehow, with torturous agony, you manage to grab the roof of the thing's mouth even as it snarls and roars and tries to bit through the steel.
Then there's a lightning bolt right fucking next to you. A horn blow-- and the hobgoblins, all the hobgoblins look to see that brassy sound.
You look, too.
They are on one of the snow capped plateaus. Their armor is a mishmash of a dozen eras and styles and forms-- some more ancient than you can imagine, as though they just rode to war with Gilles; others seems as though they could have been purchased from a blacksmith just this morning.
In every case, their tabbards are pure white, and trimmed by gold. Great, flowing plumes descend down from their helmets like bursts of fire; and in their hands, gleaming weapons that are cloaked in magical energies-- some bolts of lightning of every color, bright enough to count each individual strike; others their blades and the air around them leak mists that glow an ephemeral green; a certain ones, an amber glow.
But the most terrible, and the fewest, have weapons of that shine bright, bright, bright. Some seem ensconced in rainbows, others pure white as the snow. In every case, simply to look on them made your eyes weep tears that you would never bear weapons so beautiful.
And their mounts! A thousand beasts of every nature! Some rode pegasi, others hippogryph and griffon, or even dread Tarrasque, long since thought driven to extinction.
And some, the most terrible and most ancient adorned, rode Unicorns. The noble creatures pawed the earth before them, and their wrath for the hobgoblins was great; magics flowed around them like water flows through a river.
Then the horn blew, a second time, and these men charged, gathering might before them.
It is enough.
