Thousands of Free Men rampaged across the marbled floors of Great Khairo, the jewel of the western continent, now turned into a butcher's yard.
The dead lay everywhere, sprawled on the tiles, slumped against gilded walls, and piled in heaps at the base of stairways.
Bodies were trampled underfoot, faces frozen in the moment of horror when steel or axe had torn them apart from their feeble life. Marble, once polished to a blinding white, was crimson and wet with blood and strewn with entrails, so that red prints and the drag of torn limbs marked each step to each foot.
The maker of this hellish scenery worthy of Goya trudged upon their own work with prided. Avid hunger warped their faces, glee written into every stroke of their axes as they cut down the hated Azanians they had starved and waited two weeks to reach. Rage and relief blended into a single intoxication: the ecstasy of slaughter, the worst of all drugs.
