The knight collapsed onto the moss that lined forest floor. Steel rattled as he began to undo the straps that held his bent armor about his dying body. He first dropped his helmet enabling him to see more clearly. Still his long dark hair fell about his face in matted, bloody locks. In the background he could hear the ongoing sound of battle. The rumbling of drums. The blast of trumpets. The shrill neighing of warhorses. The crash of steel. The rallying cries of false courage. The screams of suffering souls. The pockets of silence forming on the spaces of the field where death alone had claimed mastery. The sounds were all too familiar, like the tune of a poor minstrel. He had fought unnumbered battles for his land. Now, in a wood of some unknown land, he would be forgotten.

He removed his breast plate. As he did so, a storm of emotions swelled within him. Anger at the greed of his people. Confusion as to what war could ever hope to accomplish. Sorrow for his fallen men. Death was all they had trained for; both how to give and to receive. Despair for the futility of all his fighting. He felt all within, though he felt love for nothing.

The knight cast aside his greaves and gauntlets. His now unguarded limbs rested without their weary weight. Still, the knight held his sword and shield. Though he believed his fight to be thoroughly finished, through compulsion of some sense of ingrained training or imbedded virtue, he held on.

The sun set under a wall of red clouds. Through the trees, the knight watched the battle come to a close. He could not make out a victor. A handful of men could be seen wearily walking in different directions. No one claimed the field.

The knight felt as though he could see a faint light slowly growing in luster behind him. “Perhaps there is something beyond death,” he thought before he fell asleep into a darkness from which he never expected to return. But then, perhaps hours or days or ages later, a gentle hand awakened him.