A nameless soldier before the great and tumultuous fall of Meridia.
10:37
Boots—boots—boots—boots—moving up and down again.
There's no discharge in this war...
Seven-six-eleven-five-nine-and-twenty miles today—
Four-eleven-seventeen-thirty-two the day before—
Boots—boots—boots—boots—moving up and down again.
There's no discharge in this war...
Don't—don't—don't—don't look at what's in front of you.
Bullets—bullets—bullets—bullets, shot from all around you.
There's no return from this war.
Think—think—think—think—you can run away again?
They will find you lying a corpse.
War—war—war—war—you can't turn away again.
There's no discharge in this war.
Rain, dirt, mud—pirouetting all around me. I look back at my corps.
Seven-six-eleven-five-nine-and-twenty miles today—
Four-eleven-seventeen-thirty-two...
I can't take it anymore.
"I can't hear the bullets anymore," a man mumbled.
The sky bore a white, monochromatic hue—various tones of grey.
The clouds moved like slow-moving gorges—black and white, like in the films I'd seen.
Grey buildings loomed over us, perhaps just as I—just as us—were caught within a meaningless war.
Men sat around, backs to the dirt and ruin. Rifles idle. Eyes still.
A few chewed tasteless rations, twiddling wrappers between their fingers.
Many too scared to pull their triggers, cringing into cradle-like embraces.
Skin torn, abraded, overcome by cold pallor. Tears dried up long ago.
A war of people left behind—husbands, sons, brothers—forgotten to the cold, to the days gone by.
I looked overhead.
Unflinching to the cold.
All so dissonant to me.
Familiar.
I used to live in this town. Now I contribute to its destruction.
Beyond the cobblestones, the station whispered susurrus tales yet untold.
Steel monoliths loomed ahead, illuminating the way to the tracks—
A single, lonely monster paving its path forward.
The hum of fluorescent lights rang in my ears like tinnitus.
That monster once roared charred flames from its nostrils,
Particulates rising in convection into a black sea of infinity.
Stars we were born to inherit. Born to conquer.
I would hear the occasional owl jeer into it.
The sky wept stalactites, weeping a ballad—the tune the lonely locomotive once had.
Brazen. The bold. The burning. The brightly burning.
Now rusted and dilapidated, coughing up stray particulates—
Its axles worn down, its feet frictionless.
Its eyes like glass jars, barely catching fireflies in their glare.
The lonely train paved its pallor into the tracks. The tracks stretched onward.
And I sat by it. Accompanying it.
Alongside the steady, haphazard drip on its metal roof.
Weeping angels...
Perhaps I'd become just like the lonely train,
Feeling the need to accompany its solitude.
But here I am.
"D'ya know when we'll be headin' back?" my friend asked, voice shaky.
I looked forward, vacant. Then at him.
His eyes held no fireflies. They'd lost their spark long ago.
"Pardon?"
"Don't worry."
I felt guilty I hadn't listened, and started a conversation.
"I used to grow asphodels," I said.
"What for?" my friend muttered gently.
"To sell. Actually, I was good at it. It was more of a hobby, if anything," I whispered.
I peered upward with a flicker of glee—maybe there would be better times after this.
After all:
Hard times make good times.
Hard times make strong men.
Strong men make good times.
Good times make happy men.
Or at least, it went something like that.
Bullets fired again. This time from our men.
"Why do they do that?" I asked.
"It keeps the enemy on edge. I can hardly sleep knowing at any moment someone could just sneak up on me and—you know..."
"The rest is nice though, for a change."
"Make the most of it," he replied.
"It's snowing!?" someone exclaimed.
We both looked at him. Even he himself looked shocked he had shouted.
"Idiot," someone whispered coarsely.
I wasn't shocked. It had been a while since anything happened.
Though it'd been cold, it hardly snowed.
It was childish—yes—but perhaps that's all we needed.
I looked up as the snow floated down.
The snow. It fell soft and quiet. Almost gentle. But as I looked closer—it was black, drifting along silently. It was nature's response to the fallout caused by the use of WMDs. Mankind's recklessness.
And yet—and yet, it still doesn't sit right with me.
"August? Snowing? Yer sure?" another man whispered, looking up.
Like children, they all looked up, sticking out their tongues, ecstatic.
Perhaps hard times do get better.
Perhaps a fleeting hope.
"Snow?" someone murmured, tinged with wonder.
"IT BURNTH!" a man screamed with a lisp, writhing in pain, trying to remove the snow from his tongue.
Buboes popped from his skin, burning his eyes and face, melting it like acid—
His face like rotten tomato skin, his eyes the same texture.
Burning flesh and faith.
Oozing like melted ice cream, red and white sliding from bone, viscous and vile.
Others fell to their knees, agonizing, trying to clear it from their skin.
Their screams rippled through the ranks like an invisible conflagration. And more ran into barbed wire, tugging away at the brambles. And as they did, the wire stuck deeper into their skin—coiling around their arms restricting their movement. And there they were:
Blistering.
Burning.
Bristling.
My eyes darted upward.
The skies tore open like burst pillows—only, these feathers were of white phosphorus, storm and ash, sharp and choking as they spiraled down.
Not a nuclear bomb.
Not a simple white phosphorus attack.
I heard screaming, and next to me a man the same age as I. Lived like I. Killed like I. Had a mother, father like I. Enlisted like I. Only I was lucky to have cover from the 'Snow'. And then silence, save for the distant wail of the dying.
The screaming ceased. Bleeding from the heavens, a figure emerged with inconceivable beauty. It held an immenseness. Heavy and suffocating.
There it was.
Seven holy bullets wrung from the sky,
Light refracting through the haze—
A grotesque distortion of unnatural order with natural purpose.
For a second, the bullets stopped.
I heard no shots.
Only screams and cries.
For a few seconds,
I remembered what hell was like—empty.
Because hell was on Earth.
Fire and brimstone. And as I looked forth—
Cross-like scaffolds emerged from the bodies of the dead.
A pale head emerged from the sky—huge, still, and cold. Not yet touched with light.
Seven wings unfurled, like that of an archangel.
The angel of death would spread her wings on the blast.
Awakening from deep slumber, absolving her wings outward, shining from the heavens with an iridescent glow.
Light refracted from her like the gospel, scorching the earth, sending the shadows running.
A white pale naked woman descended from the sky.
And the leaves would wither and wane, while her holy light shone brighter—
And she held her head high in reverence, descending downwards with four wings.
And the crows would burn and fall over.
It descended further and further, like a mother reaching out to embrace her child.
Deep red clumps—clumps of bones, of eyes, of wet, cold, crimson ropes—elongated out, dripping from a metallic, rusted rebar protruding from a gray, dilapidated building.
Sloughing off the rebar in clumps of unfiltered raspberry jam. Slipping toward my shoe.
A singular eye stared at me. No semblance of being.
My mouth tasted sour with bile.
I was just a soldier. I—a husband. A son. A brother. A father. A priest.
The soles of my shoes were melting, becoming hot, gooey plastic, searing my skin, blistering it.
Sticking to it. Abrading it, causing black and yellow buboes at my feet to cauterize closed.
I staggered and stumbled along fields of 'snow.'
Not a hair on the heads of men remained, nor blades of grass—only a vast gaping precipice in the ground.
A thick veil hung over it. I felt hell had truly descended upon us.
"Why had He forsaken us…"
I turned from the crater.
Lo, behold—eight children sat amid the white phosphorus, unscathed. Their eyes, hollow and glassy—ghosts of a burning world.
One cradled a woman in his arms. Another held a gun in his hand.
The rest turned to look at me.
Staring a thousand yards into the great abyss...
And I felt something shift.
A great change in the order of things. As if they were chosen for a purpose.
Like the world had ended and no one knew why.
But the world kept spinning.