A vast field of battle stretched out before me—I was in some foreign country I knew naught of, in a place where the stars in the night sky seemed to wane in strength though no clouds concealed the firmament. Corpses of our countrymen littered the slaughterfield and blood ran in broken streams down the hills before me, leaking from the corpses and trickling through the ground so dark that it did not seem red but rather black and shiny like seasoned cast-iron. I knew that it was blood mainly from the scent and the way it stuck to my boots.
I looked on—and in the mounds of dead men before me, I could not see any trace of the foe who had felled them. I trudged through the mess of broken bodies and broken spears and broken helmets and broken byrnies whose burst rings were wet with blood. I crushed the wrought rings underfoot as I climbed in search of a friendly face. But I could see no faces amongst the dead; they were so broken and drenched in bloody gore that I could not recognize a single man among them.
Still, I pressed on into that forsaken place, hopeful to find the comfort of a friend. But as I trudged further into the field, I saw no one save scavengers whose gnarled fingers rifled through every dead man’s person in search of things burnished and beaten though the things were all browned with rust and drying blood, and when I called out to them, these scavengers, their voices were not the voices of men: they growled and cawed and screeched when I came near, and the mirthless laughter that came from their throats sounded more like the braying of asses than the joys of the hall.
And then I found that I could not speak myself, though still I struggled toward them, until at last I was ready to throttle one of the wretched braying scavengers—I was poised to crush his throat—and then he spoke to me. And though he spoke in a strained bird’s voice, I knew we were of like kin. So I let him go. But when he turned about, his face I saw was my face—and then he was a bird. No longer were we in the field of battle but now in a vast nest, and he an eagle wheeling above me. I saw him swoop down and clutch an egg between his claws until it burst—and from its broken shell swelled forth a storm of blood that burned my lungs as I struggled to breathe and then drowned in a bloody sea.
