Sir Franc Kermeen lay on the cold stone floor of the vestibule, clutching his father's longsword in a grip that was slick with his own blood. The weapon shook in his damaged hands, the blade scraping against the flagstones with a thin, grinding sound that set the teeth of everyone in the room on edge.
He was finished, and he knew it.
Three gashes had been torn through his plate armor by the darksteel cleaver. The breastplate was split down the center, the cuirass of polished steel that had cost him more than a year's worth of tithes from Kermeen Village looked like it had been peeled open like the rind of a fruit. His right pauldron was a ruin of twisted metal that dug into the joint of his shoulder with every breath, and the rerebrace on his left arm had been sheared through to the muscle beneath, leaving a wound that bled freely down his forearm and onto the floor.
