The Sacking of Haverlock 7th Tobias' Bounty, 1860
“No quarter for the craven! After them!”
Arn van Art, Battle of Haverlock
A crisp early morning dawned on the 7th, for the air would have been still and quiet if not for the hundreds of voices crying their voices over the engines of war. The sky was clear, save for the dark round shapes that occasionally pierced the cyan color screeching towards their quarry. The walls of Haverlock were under siege.
To the city’s northside lay the Imperial Siege Camp. It bustled as men and women of the Imperial State Army set to the task of tending to their siegeworks. Ditches were dug, latrines made, and armaments tended to, they numbered fourteen thousand and eighty men. Opposite the field were the city walls belonging to the squatters of Haverlock. Atop the battlements crawled the forces of the Coalition, numbering around twelve thousand and eighty men. Hugo van Aert, the Field Marshal of the Imperial Forces cried out and let loose the payload that now slammed into the already crumbling walls of Haverlock.
The symphony of heels introduced with a crescendo of bladesong, rang out in tandem with the beautiful harmonies of armor and a chorus of shouting, singing, and cadence. The men of the Ferrymen Company and the Renatians of the County of Blackvale surged from the Imperial camp and rounded the western flank. There they met fierce resistance from the wall’s defenders as the coalition forces put a valiant and dogged resistance to the hardened mercenaries as they had attempted to scale with ladders and breach into the city. It was then a second bugle cried out from the Imperial Camp. Out came charging the men and women of the Imperial Brigades. Soldiers from New Providence and Archisdorf howled as they sailed upon the northern walls that had been waylaid by the bombardment. Here only a handful of the defenders still stood as most of them had gone after the distracting mercenaries and veterans. Coalition soldiers began to flee into the city panicking that they’d been outflanked from the west. It wasn’t long before the men and women of Blackvale and the Ferrymen had descended into the city after the fleeing craven. Soon the defense on the Northern wall shattered solely due to attrition as the vast brigades had outnumbered the northern defenders, slaughtering all to a man.
Before long, the opposition lay either slain or under the corpses of their own - hiding from their invaders with less integrity than their revered dead. Women wept, sorrow flooding the streets for now fatherless children were to be brought up in the tarnished soils of Haverlock. Yet for all this sensation of melancholy, it was nothing to compare for the beautiful uproar of those victorious. Imperial colors were hosted above the city as it was pillaged and set to the torch.
The squatters had been evicted, the enemies of Oren sent screaming in terror back to their homelands with tens of thousands of dead, and no gains to show for their agression they had enacted upon the Orenian people. Lower Petra has been liberated, and soon the homelands of the coalition will feel the wrath of the dragon.
Ave Oren, Ave Renatus, Ave Humanity!