Marauder Horsemen

Long before a northern host crests the horizon, the Marauder Horsemen have already been and gone: granaries burning, bridges cut, messengers dead in ditches. They fight the way the steppe taught them: at a gallop, in a loose swarm, with javelin, axe, and flail, melting away from any line that forms against them and returning the moment it stops watching. Armies that beat the horde in open battle have starved anyway because of what the horsemen did the week before.

Most are young riders of the Kurgan and the Hung, born to the saddle and hungry for the gods' notice, for every legend in black plate began as somebody's outrider. Raiding is their apprenticeship of damnation: each burned village and lifted herd is an offering, each skirmish a chance to be seen. The wise among them know the gods watch the flanks of a battle as closely as its centre, and that the ladder's first rung is reached at a gallop.