I saw pieces of them at first—scattered across the field like discarded toys. Arms reaching for arms that were not there. Legs bent into grotesque positions. Faces contorted in cries, or worse, blank. The homeless. The poor. The forgotten. Those I had starved with. Those I had called brothers.
They were not soldiers. We were not soldiers.
We were the unwanted, redefined for dying. And die we did—by dozens, then hundreds, consumed by the merciless tide of war. I drove over them, stumbling across fragments of lives that had once been meaningful. A shared joke, a late-night story, a pilfered loaf of bread—now a smear in the mud.
Then I saw the generals—their dazzling armor now broken, their hubris poured out with their blood. The men who had ordered us around behind lines, who had called us waste—cannon fodder—believing they were above everything. Now their bodies lay broken alongside ours. War had equalized us in the end. Dead, or about to be.
I'd been fighting—or just making it through, really—for hours. Time didn't matter anymore. The sun, if there was a sun still, didn't speak to me. Just a dull, suffocating sky and the never-ending clanging. Metal against metal. Shouting. Bones snapping. Fire. Constant fire.
I should have died.
I had no idea why I hadn't.
I hadn't used magic. I hadn't even thought about using it. Not even once. Maybe I was afraid of what that would do—afraid that if I touched that kind of power again, I'd lose whatever piece of humanity was left. Or maybe I just didn't feel like I should ever use it again. Not after what I paid. Not after what I'd done.
So I fought with desperation then. With a rusty knife and battered fists. With dumb animal instinct and the kind of stubbornness that isn't heroic, only obstinate.
And still, I lived.
At least, I did… until the ground swallowed me whole.
It wasn't a crack or a hole—it was violence bursting up. An explosion, or a trap, or maybe just fate finally reaching out and catching me. My body sailed out from under me before my brain could catch up with what was occurring. I was floating, as for one absurd moment, I was actually going to fly.
And then I saw them—I mean, the legs.
Severed. Twirling through the air like broken wings.
And I knew.
Before I hit the ground, before the agony rushed in like a tide that would never ebb, I knew.
I didn't scream. Not really. The sound that escaped me was something more primal. Animal. Not a cry born of fear, but of incredulity. It was the sound of a man who still thought he had more time.
When I came, the world was upside down. Sky and ground were swapped. My head was in the mud, still warm with blood that wasn't my own. My hands were clutching at nothing. My lungs fought for air that tasted of smoke and iron.
I didn't feel anything below my waist. Not cold. Not pain. Not even terror.
Just the slow, crawling realization that I'd never walk again—if I survived.
Now I lie here. With the dead. Disappearing into their silence. Their stillness.
The sun is gone. Or never arrived. The clouds above rumble like smoke, dull and uncaring. The wind is gone, and with it, the battle cries. Either the fight is done… or I am too far gone to care anymore.
My blood puddling beneath me, contributing its waters to streams already flowing through broken armor and discarded banners. I smell of decay. I'm infested with flies.
How long has it been?
Minutes?
Hours?
A lifetime?
My thoughts grow slow. Sluggish. My fingers twitch, but nothing else awakens. My heartbeat thuds softly within my ears, the sound of a pipe played far away. Ebbing.
And yet, some whisper in me persists, soft and wheezing:
Not yet.
Not yet.
But even that voice is tired now. Even it is aware of what is to come.
Soon, I will not hear it all.
And I wonder, in these final moments: will I see her again? The girl on whom I laid my first spell? Will I remember her face before the darkness takes me? Will I be called to account for what I have done? For what I have not done?
Will anyone remember me?
Or shall I become yet another faceless corpse on a barren field?