For The Flame!

Illustration for 'Requiem for a Nation,' part VII of 'Lynn d'Vadalis' by wherein our spirited eponymous heroine retrieves the sacred banner the Argent Flamme from a grim battlefield and rallies the surviving troops.

Lynn d'Vadalis VII: Requiem for a Nation“STAND FIRM!”
   The Thrane platoon was breaking. In front of her, a young man, isolated from the formation, fell to the sword of one of the reanimated rotting corpses that Karrnath had put into its black-and-red armour, the blade plunging into the man’s chest to the very hilt. “Trust in the Flame!” she yelled over the din, putting a crazy, almost fanatical energy into the words.
   All around her, people scrambling for their horses which they had abandoned to investigate the scene of horror that lay before them pulled together in a defensive circle. She too had dismounted from Fiontán before the ambush. The unicorn was more than capable of keeping the Karrnathi at bay, and Lynn focused on the men and women with her. They stood in the middle of a battlefield, thousands of dead of all nations lying around. Most had fallen without any wounds, and lay there as if they were asleep. What the dead lacked in the goriness of a field after

Extract:

 “The Banner!” she yelled, her face beaming with enthusiasm and triumph. When the Karrnathi troops had surprised them, Lynn's unit had already made it far into what remained of the Thrane lines destroyed during the cataclysm that was already referred to as the Mourning. They had looked in vain for survivors, and for the sacred Argent-Flame, the holy banner that had accompanied the legion into Cyre. It was a relic of the faith. One of the most sacred objects the Thranes had ever possessed. 
   Her own group was wavering already, and looked at her in panic when she suddenly ran forward, scrambling for a thick line of corpses from the battle stopped so abruptly by the unexplained cataclysm. There, covered in dead bodies, she had spotted the silver cloth. 
   Wide-eyed, her troops gave way before the forming Karrnathi formation. Concentrating only on her task, Lynn dug away the corpses, and frantically excavated the silvery cloth, still fixed onto a spear. She tore at the long pole, fighting the weight of the dead off it. Then, just as her troops had started to flee, she lifted the spear, and once again, the banner flew on high. “For the Flame!” she yelled again, her clear voice carrying over the silent battlefield. Waving the banner high, she rushed forward, screaming encouragements at the top of her voice. Above her, in the bleak skies of the Mournland, the cloth unfolded, its gently glowing silver tongues of flame billowing in the rush of her charge.'