“Some days, you wish that you never got out of bed at all.” - Old folk saying.

“What the- Ugh… Where… Am I?”

Andromarche Sanvord opened her eyes for the first time in days and found that she was at a place she had not recognized at all, once her vision stopped blurring in and out. She could tell that she was inside some sort of conical tent with a small opening at the top of the cone, the sunlight that woke her up coming from the half-opened flap at the side of the tent.

She was not wearing her armor, nor could she find her weapons anywhere in the vicinity, but considering how she still had her normal clothes beneath the blanket, and how someone treated her wounds, she calmed down after a short moment of panic. Andro winced from the sudden pain on her left arm and sides when she tried to sit up on the bed of animal fur over straw, and gave up her attempts after a while.

The last thing she remembered was the cudgel of a green-skinned brute, which grew ever larger in her sight as she tried to do what she could to fight back against the incoming horde of savages while her liege and the others escaped. The still-painful lump on her head told her that none of it was a dream, the same with the dull ache from her entire left side - especially her left arm - where a large beast ridden by the greenskins had slammed into her and threw her aside prior to that.

Andro considered the way her left arm had been carefully tied to splints and left to rest in a sling to support it, as well as the wrapping of crude bandages she felt under her clothes, and had not taken long to understand that someone must have saved her from the battlefield, though she had no idea who or why. Given how the human army had routed last she could remember, and that she was within an unusual tent, chances are it was the savages that did so, which left her wondering why.

To her surprise, the figure that entered the tent - likely in response to the noise she made waking up - was not that of a hulking greenskin savage, but was a human woman instead, though she was dressed in leathers not unlike the savages. Andro’s mind spun as she considered the implications. Were there humans on the prairie as well? Were they in conflict with the greenskins? Or were they…

“You’re awake, I see,” said the woman in fluent, but oddly accented common to her. Andro had not paid much heed to the accent, as she thought that it was to be expected, though the woman’s other features did catch her eye. Unlike most anyone Andromarche knew of, the woman in leathers had pale skin, and both her eyebrows and hair were a silvery-gray shade, despite the youthful look of her face. “Take it easy now, your injuries aren’t properly healed up yet.”

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“Thank you, miss…?” asked Andromarche with some uncertainty as the other woman unwound and replaced the crude wrapping - she noticed some crushed herbs on the inside of the wrap - around her head. The woman poked the lump on Andro’s head which elicited a slight wince of pain from her, but she refrained from saying anything about it.

“You can call me Aideen. And you are?”

“Andromarche Sanvord, Knight of Lavinja,” said Andro as she introduced herself. As she did so, she thought back at the battle - if it could be called one - where the army she had been part of was demolished and routed by the horde of greenskins. Truthfully, when the greenskins had first loosed that storm of arrows, she knew that there was no winning that fight, not with the sort of army they had.

She recalled seeing her cousin Niko fall dead after the first volley of arrows, several of the projectiles protruding from his torso. She herself had been fortunate to survive that storm, though her steed was not as lucky. Not many of the knights had been lucky as they had been close to the front, intended to exhort the conscripted soldiers in the attack, when the rain of arrows fell.

Many of the knights had been injured or died by those arrows, and by the time Andro peeked out from behind her arrow-riddled shield, she saw barely a few of them left around, with the rest either having routed together with the rest of the army, or had died on the spot instead. She and the few left behind had looked at each other, noticed the growing distance between them and the routed army, and had resolved to buy even a moment of time for their compatriots with their life.

She had no idea that that resolve to sell her life dearly was what earned her the respect of her opponents, as most of the humans they captured during the rout had simply been executed on the spot, with only the very few survivors - all heavily injured - amongst those who dared to fight back being kept alive, other than some people picked out by Aideen for information.

In contrast, the other officers and nobles Aideen had singled out for interrogation amongst the wounded had no such fortune. They woke up in situations similar to what Andromarche found herself in, but soon found themselves dragged out after they told Aideen their stories, to be sacrificed in rituals to honor the ancestors and the dead shortly after.

Only those few survivors who had fought back were left unbothered by the orcs, though they insisted on treating those survivors themselves with their traditional means and left their life and death up to fate rather than have Aideen heal their wounds. Andromarche just happened to be the first to wake up out of the couple dozen survivors.

“Are there… anyone else who survived?” Andro finally asked after she gathered her courage.

“Not many,” said Aideen bluntly and honestly. Andromarche had no idea but it was already nearly a week after the battle on the plains, and the orcs had since routed the remaining humans who made it back to their fort as well, leaving less than five thousand to run back where they came from. “Probably a couple dozen of you at most. The rest had either escaped, or died out there.”

Those words made Andromarche feel as if her world had crashed down.