The Battle of Osterwald

Every generation the deep forests of the Empire vomit forth a horde of horned savages, and one such eruption gave the frontier province its bloodiest day in The Battle of Osterwald. A great brayherd had gathered in secret beneath the black canopy, drawn together by some braying prophet-beast, and it fell upon the settlements of Ostermark before the beacon-fires could even be lit.

The Beastmen Brayherds came not as an army but as a flood of hatred, minotaurs and gors and screaming ungors pouring from the treeline to gore and trample all in their path. Villages were overrun before their bells finished ringing, and the surviving levies fell back upon the muster of the Elector Count, who had scraped together every halberdier, handgunner and knight the ravaged province could still field. The two hosts met at the forest's edge, where the ordered lines of the Empire of Man faced a chaos of fur and horn that had no line at all.

The fighting was a butcher's work with no room for manoeuvre. Cannon tore lanes through the herd only for the gaps to close in an instant; state troops locked shields and were driven back step by bloody step toward the villages they had come to save. It was faith and gunpowder against fury and numbers, and for hours the issue hung upon which would break first.

At last the brayherd's prophet was slain and the horde's cohesion dissolved into a scattering rout back into the trees. The Empire held Osterwald, but the province was left a graveyard of burned steadings and unburied dead, a victory so costly that men wondered aloud whether defeat could have cost them more.