The great horns of the wall sounded out once more, which was the call for our retreat from the field of battle. Not one of the enemy remained standing within our controlled area of the pass. Quickly we searched through the littered remains of the battlefield for our own dead and wounded.
The twin gates of Kingdom Pass creaked open and wagons pulled by teams of horses rushed out to help convey both the dead and the wounded, as well as those who were simply to spent of the energy needed to walk back to the city having used it all up in the battle. The flames would only last for perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes, and then they would be out and we would be exposed to the enemy once more without any more tricks to play on them.
The retrieval of the dead and wounded went quickly. I stumbled slightly after having heaved a dead warrior onto one of the last departing wagons. The burning oil was almost at an end. It was time to get back to the relative safety of the wall. That I was tired was putting it mildly. The circular shield formation strategy had taken everything I had in terms of energy.
I stumbled over the bodies of the slain making my way back towards the wall. I made my way across the ditch now filled high with the bodies of horses and men, where we had made our first stand. I sensed that I was being watched and I looked around more closely. I found a pair of eyes in the shadowed darkness of a deeper, less filled section of the ditch, that I was crossing over. I moved slightly toward them and I saw that it was one of our own that had fallen into this deeper section of the ditch. The smell of death was high as I made my way over the bodies down to him.
He was a young blond haired warrior that I remembered seeing briefly. He had been a part of one of the formations that hadn't made it.
Weakly he tried to wave me off, "No sir! They'll be coming soon! I'm not worth your life!"
This young man just out of boyhood had been going to lie here in this dark hole waiting for the end to come and not call out to me for fear of risking another life. Talk about a special brand of courage. I wondered if I would ever posses such courage as that.
"Nonsense your life and what you choose to do with it is every bit as important as my own! Come on we're getting out of here."