The Retreat of the year 240 became known at the time as the Hunger March. The food supply ended after the first week of the march, when the army was still in the middle of the desert. For a while men survived by eating horses, but many elves refused, preferring to die than to break their religious precepts.
Even thirst became a problem, because Ilehas had the wells and oases poisoned along the way.
But the allied soldiers did not give up. Bravely, gritting their teeth and supporting each other, they continued to advance. Amaya was able to motivate his men, and shared the same labors as his subordinates, rejecting any advantage to which he would be entitled because of his rank. She was the first to get off the horse, when it became necessary to start slaughtering the animals, and she was always the last in line during the distribution of the rations.
But even so, fear crept through the ranks.
Meanwhile, Taleq and his fellow dark magicians monitored with their spells the condition of the army, day after day, waiting for hunger to do what the swords of Neolandia had failed to do.
When Ilehas thought the time was ripe, he had his troops assembled. Taleq, who was present, recounts the speech the Regent gave to the soldiers.
"Ilehas had always been a quiet and jovial man: that day, when he appeared before the troops, at first I did not recognize him, so much he appeared out of himself. He spoke with the kind of voice that only preachers and fools use. He spoke of King Ahling and King Kasef, whom he loved as a son. He said that until now the gods had supported the army of Katolis because they wanted to test Neolandia, but that finally it was time for the reckoning. He spoke of how this time Neolandia could not lose, because justice, the Sun itself, and the sand of the desert would fight beside her. Those words shook the soldiers from their slumber: footmen and knights regained courage, seized their weapons and shouted like one man: Kasef! Ilehas! Neolandia!
I confess that I too let myself be carried away and shouted with the others, like a common plebeian. The Regent's enthusiasm was too strong."
The Regent moved his troops from oasis to oasis. In fact when he gave orders to poison the wells he made sure to leave some intact, whose position was known only to him and his most trusted generals.
Nothing was left to chance: Ilehas waited for the winds to blow against the enemy, then ordered his knights to run in a circle.
The dust raised by the horses' hooves was pushed against the army of Amaya, blinding the soldiers and making it difficult to breathe.
The fight that occurred on that terrible day, the twelfth of August, is known to the chronicles as the Battle of the Sand. But what happened was not an act of war. It was a slaughter.
The Allied soldiers, devastated by thirst and hunger, threw down their weapons as soon as the enemy met them and were massacred. The Durenians, in particular, were practically helpless without their horses. The few remaining elves were wiped out when a dark spell caused a sand dune to collapse, burying them.
Amaya of Katolis, however, did not give up. Keeping faith to her fame, she held on, along with her Standing Battalion veterans.
It must be said in honor of the Regent Ilehas that he tried to stop his men once it was clear that the battle was won. In vain. Too much was the anger accumulated by the Neolandians, too much was hatred.
"Men did not obey orders," writes Taleq. "I myself had to resort to dark magic to prevent the soldiers I commanded from slaughtering prisoners".
This is the terrible power of war: when the spiral of revenge is unleashed, it is no longer possible to stop it. Blood calls blood, death calls death, until neither side remembers why they are fighting, and the very existence of the enemy is enough to justify any atrocity.
The Neolandians attacked the Katoleans three times. Three times their attack was repulsed.
"It was impressive," writes Taleq. "Ours kept raining down on them arrows and spells, but they wouldn't give up. They continued to fight on the bodies of fallen friends, until all that remained of them was a hill formed by their corpses".
It is still unknown who struck the fatal blow that killed Amaya. Legends say it was the same Ilehas, but such a story is not credible. However, whether it was a magician, an archer or a simple foot soldier who killed her, it is certain that the general fell that day: the one who had so often led her men to victory against the Elves, eventually fell at the hands of men. The other commanders of the army suffered the same fate, all but one.
Colonel Gren, in fact, had managed in the chaos of the battle to gather around him a handful of survivors, including a couple of magicians. With their help he managed to fight his way to the desert. He was not pursued: the Neolandians were too busy annihilating their comrades.
For the rest of his life, the Colonel would be tormented by the guilt of abandoning his beloved general and his companions. At that moment, however, there was no time for remorse: whith the help of the little magic that the exhausted magicians were able to practice he led his men to the oasis of Medila, which fortunately was among the few that had not been poisoned.
After another five days of strenuous marching the survivors arrived in sight of the fortress of Vinden, one of those minor castles that Amaya had easily conquered at the beginning of the campaign.
There were two thousand in all, between Katolean, Durenian and Elfi. Later, other groups of survivors reached them, reaching a total of three thousand.
It was all that remained of the twenty-eight thousand six hundred soldiers of the great Allied army.
