The arrow had sunk deep into into my chest, but I didn't feel it. Nor the loss of my arm as I used it to block the ax coming for my head. My maw snapped onto the ax man’s arm so hard I cut right through it, as I used my only remaining arm to open his stomach and spilling out his insides. The bowman struck again as this one ripped into the flesh of my hood drawing more blood than I thought could come from there.
This fight was coasting me to much, but if it got my friends to the camp then it was worth my death. They would secure the freedom of this nation and I could die with my blade in my claw. I, Dragor Starclaw, of the Star Clan, would earn my place among the gods as a Barbarian! With my Rage renewed, I charged the bowman.
I never saw the cavalier as he charged in from my left, but I felt his lance pin me to the stone ground underneath my feet. It punched through my left side, just under my arm, and plunged deep into my chest and ripped out the other. That pain I did feel, burning and blinding me, but I pulled the point from the ground and trudged fourth. I reached out and grasped the bowman's face with my only good claw, and with the last of my strength, I crushed his skull with one, final, rake of the claws.
The cavalier trotted up to me before I fell to my knees and grasped the hilt of his lance. He tried to pull the pike out only to have grab the guard, holding it in my body.
“This is my lance, go get your own,” I growled up at him with a bloody smile. The madness of Rage was slowly lifting as my life blood seeped from my body.
“You are defeated, why do you still fight?” the knight asked upon his mount.
I looked at him for the first time, not as a warrior but as a person. Underneath his helm, his blue eyes searched for his answers to his questions. His armor still gleamed in the dim sunlight as he shifted in his saddle, bouncing of the full plate poldrins and chainmail. A strand of blond hair fell from under the helm as he looked down at me. His features were fair and soft, princelike.
“Why do the leaves fall in the autumn,” I asked in return. Blood was filling my lungs and making it hard to keep this up, I still smiled my crocodile grin.
He look at me in confusion.
“It is not a question of why I fight, but what I fight for,” I coughed out more blood with this. “You fight for king and country, while I fight for Freedom. Your king holds my people in chains, and has refused to speak with me for peace. So, with a heavy heart, I charged his gates and killed his men.”
The cavalier frowned down at me.
“You speak truth, Lizard. Yet I can do nothing to help, you die in vain this day.”
“No not in vain.” Blood dripped down my leg and off my chin as I shifted to face him better.
I winced from the pain that shot through me as I looked up at him and smiled.
“I was the distraction.”
The knight's eyes widened as it sank in, a lone warrior had posed enough of a threat to the crown to warrant the army to move against him. I was that warrior. I had killed his men and put fear into the hearts of his soldiers. I had cut into his forces, leaving bloody trails in and out of his formations. I had cut down near to a hundred men, just to keep the bulk of the force away from the camp they guarded. The same camp where my clan lay in chains, slaving for his king.
The same camp my friends were now raiding.
Smoke rose from the camp as the tents went up in flames. Battle cries, carried up to us by the winds, echoed in our ears. Small forms ran from the camp in all directions as the fire consumed the work camp.
“Now I see why the king fears your people. If you were this cunning, what is your clan capable of?”
At that I laughed, though it was short lived with the pain and blood.
The knight looked down at me in horror. I had sacrificed myself to them for my people, and it had worked. The gods had willed me to fail, and I spit in their eye. My people would return to the desert sands, to the shear cliffs of our home. To the children that they were taken from.
I reached down and grabbed my curved falchion in my good hand. The feel of its weight, its leather wrapped handle was good in my claw. I looked down at it. The runes chisel into the steel of the blade naming it Starcutter. The guard swap down, covering my hand in its depiction of the Starriver it was forged in. The legendary blade of my people, gifted to them by Luna, goddess of the night sky, would find it's way back to them when I passed from this world.
I wanted the last moments of my life to be with that blade. It had taken my far from my home, leading me on this journey. It and Luna had pushed me to find my friends, my companions on this journey, and to find my missing clan mates. I had found them, freed them and now I could die as a hero.
My vision swam as I began to feel light headed. The world spun as I fell to the soft grass beneath me. It felt as if I was flying as I lay there, my body became light and my mind started to fog over as death started to take me. Light filled my vision as the pain of my wounds faded into the background and I felt myself float in the nothingness that had enveloped me.
I floated there for a short time, feeling nothing, when I heard a voice.
“You are not done yet, mortal.” it whispered to me. “I still have need of you, my child.”
I felt grass underneath me once again. Its green filled my vision and the pain came screaming back into my body. I lay there, mind drifting into the darkness of unconsciousness when a yellow hoof filled my vision.
Then the world went black.