Only desolation. Skies brown with the warm of burnpit fumes. Cold dawn, choking on dead air, vulture-air. Next day, as yesterday and the day before, we man equipment regulations say is meant to be handled by three and the reality says better operated by five to seven. The exhaustion of waiting, the tiredness prevailing. I stand watch while the ground pulses in an arrhythmic sea of snores in a texture akin to maggots writhing under the skin of another sparrow found drowned or poisoned, cointoss on which death and everyone too tired and hungry to care, in the water-well.
Wake, shit, shower, shave, dress sometime in all of that in week-dirty clothes pressed through folding and placing under the mattress before you sleep. Mess, serve people, eat, stand around looking busy, get told to take a truck down the road, wait until sundown, take it back because nobody gave orders on what to do. Wish you could bring cards, but know that even if you could, the moment you'd take them out would invariably be the times you'd actually receive orders. And it would be a bad look anyway, your sergeant would say, as though anything you do in this unit looks good or okay. Whom are we appealing to? you'd ask yourself in this cards-conversation, because you’d wisely keep your mouth shut. The unit must look good for the sake of the unit. Or maybe for the hawks in the sky, though you haven’t seen any since your unit shot most of them out of boredom and the rest flew away. The other army doesn’t have that problem — just keep sending in fresh bodies to kill until something changes. The advantage of homeland. But for your side, out here in the middle of nowhere? No new people in months. No news of why. Maybe the war’s over and nobody’s told you. All you know is that nobody’s coming and nobody’s going home — not until one side surrenders or dies.
Standing in the middle of nowhere. Knee-high grass rippling in the wind like a shallow green sea dotted by islands of acacia trees. A scalding blue sky. Where is your squad? When did you get here? Tighten your grip on your weapon, because if you drop it you'll be scolded. It's not the worst that could happen, but it's something, at least. You fear insubordination more than death right now. Where are you? The jungle is hot. The mosquitoes are getting louder. Mangroves towering, matrixing you in an endless infinity castle construct — you are in the understory, not on the ground, balanced on a branch and bracketed by bromeliads wider than you are tall. Thick, omnipresent leaves larger than your torso, clustering in, a million shades of oppressive, sweltering green — no, no, you are in a desert, endless horizons, baking sun, moisture-sucking air, reflective white sand, scorching mirages and flat craggy ground and sagebrush for miles sunbleached both under and overside, the few scant wisps clouds not yet burnt away casting the only shadows the eye can see—
No. You are right here where you are now. Mud, riparian birches, wetland marsh, reeds and short grasses and lilypads and wet boulders furry with moss. Wobble, woozy, dizzy, and vertigo sends you to your butt, your rucksack the thing that props you up and your muscles are liquid, nothing able to tense and desperately hope you don't waste your pants—
Wake, shit, shower, shave. Mess. You're serving eggs today. Scrambled and rubbery and unseasoned. Not even hot sauce available. Cold the moment they hit the plate, despite the steam rising from the tin pans.
It’s a quiet morning. Quiet morning, you say to one of the people in line, because of course you do, and it’s the end of the Q-word when the whispering starts. You try your best to ignore it, cheeks flaming. Continue working.
Scoop the eggs. Dump the eggs. Scoop the eggs. Tip a little back. Dump the eggs. Scoop.
The rumors start slow, then pick up speed — it’s a wildfire slowly sweeping the tent. Crowded, smoky, air too thick and humid from the sweat of four hundred guys, girls, and others stuffed under a beige-painted tarp with no ventilation and breathing, farting, and reeking of body odour in one zipped-up space until the hour is up. Then it’ll be dry heat to bake in until everyone’s eyeballs start to wrinkle.
You plop another pile of eggs onto a soldier’s tray. This person chose rice for their starch. That’s a mistake — it glistens off-yellow under the heating lamps. Bacillus Cereus risk. And then above it all you hear someone shout far too loudly—
A Mage of Rela?!
The din that follows is palpable.
And all’s silent, for a moment. And the moment stretches. It’s so long that you don’t quite feel bored, but your heartrate goes down. No gunfire, no tank motors, just the wind and the grass, and the sky is so blue that you think you hear the sea. And then you think you smell it, too, heady kelp and salt and smooth-scraped stone. You can’t move. You can feel your legs, so you didn’t just have a massive spinal issue or something. There’s that. Still wonder how you got here. Wonder why you can’t move. Wonder, am I having a stroke?
Cicadas on the wind. The sun is bright, shining straight into your eyes. The grass sings in the breeze and a hair flies into your eye, and you can’t get it out. You blink reflexively, though, so there’s that. Hurray for small mercies. And then the wind comes again, the hair leaves, and you relax inside, though not with your body, since that’s already paralyzed. Wonder what is going on. Find that thought drifting. You’re finding it a little difficult to breathe, but that’s okay.
It’s very blue, and very bright.
You’re just starting to relax in your helplessness when the air is split by a crack that makes you think gunshot and then reminds you whip and—
Shade, blissful shade. Sunspots that you can’t blink away. Your eyes adjust sluggishly.
There's a monster standing over you.
Metal trays clattering, utensils scraping, and an intolerable din rising to shouting — Mage?! echoes from different mouths through the room, and it rises like a storm. You’re getting a headache from the noise already, even through your hearing damage. Exhale behind your mask. Put another glob of egg onto another person’s platter when the din cuts to a low murmur all at once — someone is standing up, has made themselves the center of attention. Normally a mistake, calling that much attention to yourself, but—
Yes, a Mage! he clarifies in a bellowing shout. He’s someone clearly more informed than eighty percent of people in the room — you think you might recognize him. Johnson, maybe? You don't know him well, but you think he’s the guy who once stole the platoon's whole shared supply of comic books. It makes sense, now, because that was a foolish idea, sharing them — it would take just one person to ruin it for everyone.
Really?! says some voice from the crowd.
That's what I heard, confirms the might-be-called Johnson, because soldiers are all old wives. You could run old wives out of business if you got together and tried not doing war for a living (moving boxes and caravans and standing around and boot-licking and ego-comforting). But you know your place.
Someone says something you don’t catch that turns into a rolling rumble through the crowd — something about explaining, someone else asking how he knows and it culminates, scrambled eggs wobbling on your serving spoon as someone in the back throws a carrot and jeers, Yeah right, Johnson! so you’ve got that right, at least, but he’s a crowd-pleaser: Johnson waves his arms to grab attention and when he has it he says, Really, really! with calming motions with his hands, like he’s patting down the waves from an invisible waist-high sea. If there was one, you’d all be drowning. Listen, my tent is pitched right next to the officer’s mess, and so I hear everything anyway. So I’m getting dressed, pulling my undies on — someone says, sure you were! Everyone knows you go about loose-willied! and he throws back, nah, you’re just jealous you don’t got a long one! and he laughs and your face grows a little warm, because he has a good laugh, and he continues, —so I’m pulling my undies on, and they’re having a meeting set to wake up the whole battalion as usual. But then they get all quiet so I do too, and it’s a good thing I do ‘cos I hear them say Mage of Rela, all quiet-like. So all of a sudden I’m interested in this meeting for the first time in my life, right, and quiet myself even more and go press my ear to the tent wall — and wouldn’t you know it, the tarp got loose last night so the whole cover just slides over and I’m able to lean a good foot into the space between the tents, and once the tarp stops deafening me with the rattling and flapping I hear them say something and then one of ‘em goes, We ordered one two weeks ago, so they should be here today.
Everyone’s silent, bated breath. He’s caught his audience and knows it; he puffs out his chest, proud on the table, grinning wide and genuine. And you know what that means! he says. They can’t be talking about supplies, because they won’t order more ammunition if our lives depend on it and food won’t be arriving for another three months, so that leaves only one option: we’ve got a Mage of Rela coming! This war’ll be over by nightfall.
He bows comedically and steps down. Some laughter, a few bewildered looks probably from those who don’t travel universes often or aren’t fully aware of the significance of a fully-fledged Mage of Rela outside of career options for bioengineers. You aren’t entirely sure, yourself. The crowd waits until he’s integrated back, making sure the story’s over, and then—
Shouts, joyous laughter, cries and ruckus. Some soldiers hug, most cheer. A whoop, another. You’re not unaffected by the joy, grinning ear to ear, staring at Johnson through the crowd. Even if it’s not true, it’s hope, and that’s as sorely needed as salt and pepper to put on the godawful eggs you’d forgotten you were serving — rubbery, flavourless, might not actually be eggs at all. Bring your own hot sauce. There’s a tap from a probably dirty finger at your serving spoon — imagine contamination, the dirt — and shovel a load of eggs — too much, next person in line’ll get less — onto someone’s tray. Another person comes along. Keep the serving spoon moving.
Johnson’s usually honest, more than anyone else is — which isn’t saying much, but still — and if you remember right, he is the person assigned to guard fuel barrels with you today. Over the din of cheering and chattering and someone saying something about the eggs that’s probably a direct replication of your own thoughts towards them, you think to yourself: I’ll ask him about it then.
Its body is long. Its head is covered by a thick drape of black oily hair, braided on one end, and its torso is huge, thick and wide, and it takes you a moment tracing the outline to realize that that’s not its back, those are its wings, like some freak monstrosity of a hummingbird, translucent at the tips even while folded. Like some perverted Angel of Death, your mind offers, and in an unprompted blink it pivots left, watching something you can’t turn your neck to see, raises an arm and makes a sign with its hand—
—and there’s a thick, heavy rumble, an after-shock, a roar of power, and some part of the world that you’ve been tuning out since you woke up today goes silent.
Your heart sits frozen in your chest. Now, finally, you know what you are looking at.
There is a long, thick sash belted around its middle. A memory burbles up: some physics article offhandedly mentioning that the colours have meaning, but the sun is in your eyes and you can’t remember and you can barely see the monster itself anyway, let alone its clothing. Some catch of light reflects off its hazy, mirage-shimmery surface and it’s hard to see through it, but after a moment’s staring you are sure: there’s something horribly wrong with its skin.
Do you need to go to the hospital? you breathe, and your lips are soft, blubbery, your throat so lax you can barely breathe, head swimming with the exertion and oxygen loss from having used precious air to speak, and it sounded more like douuy’h nee-hhh ghoospiddul? but the monster looks at you and bares its teeth in a facsimile of a smile, like an ape grimacing. Is this an enemy? asks your delirious brain, and you don’t know.
“All units have been isolated from each other,” it says. Slow, precise, said like separate sounds strung together, notes on a violin with the bow lifted in-between. It doesn’t know this language, you realize. You don’t know any other languages either. I’m fucked.
You can’t move. Your body is horribly relaxed, a direct contradiction of everything your mind wants to be.
“Answer yes or no. Are you at war against France?”
You’re with Johnson, standing around and kicking dirt and looking busy in front of the fuel barrels. A tiny mountain of tin and gasoline on the side of the road a little ways from base in case it all explodes or catches fire. Johnson told you that he was telling the truth about what he heard this morning, but hasn’t said anything more about that, said that’s all he caught before he had to leave, else he’d be late for mess. That sounded right, so you let it be.
How do you know so much about them, you ask later. He’s on his fourth cigarette, but your father had died from those, so.
I’m the second of four siblings, he says through a drag, probably thinking he looks cool, and you kick yourself for holding your derision inside when you could do it out loud later, but then again, you’ve always loved pressure-cooking emotions inside until they come out later in an explosion. That’s why you joined the Army. All of them are girls, he continues, and this doesn’t surprise you because he’s told you this backstory before. You set yourself up for some exhausting prelude, because he loves preludes, about something involving a sleepover or spin the bottle, something that’ll spiral into talking about college or parties or his life before the army. But then—
My older sister joined the Academy when I was nine. And your eyes boggle and you forget to breathe, because that’s horrifying but also your memories of his stories make sense now, you almost forgot he had three siblings — one of them just never seemed to show up in his stories. He seems to sense your realization, side-eyes you and he really does think he looks cool, doesn’t he. A cargo truck goes by just as you remember to breathe again and you choke on the lack of air, the concentration of dust that coats the insides of your lungs. Before you can recover, he continues—
Choke on your own spit. Remember your training, suppress the coughs until you have rattled off your unit, your ID, your name, date of birth. Inhale wetly, gag, hack soft and limp in the loose pliability of your muscles. Almost vomit lying in the exact position you’ve been in for minutes now, nausea boiling, eyes rolling. Inhale weakly, half-drowning. Trapped in a dumb animal body, a wet suit of meat that’s rendered helpless when someone else can mould it without touching, paralyze it without injecting, kill it without knives or bullets or bombs. A person who can kill or maim or torture with nothing but a thought. Agony. Try to shut your weak mouth, but it flops open again. Your head lolls.
The Mage stares at you. Its eyes are liquid pools, colourless contraptions that you fall straight inside once your pupils connect. Its brow scrunches — an oddly human gesture. It checks a piece of paper from its pocket. A god needing a reference guide. You feel weak.
“Tell me,” it says through enunciated syllables, “who is French.”
What? you breathe.
Its face furrows. It raises a hand. Your heart thumps hot and wet in your throat. And then you can’t see at all, and then you can.
It’s your entire platoon, then it zooms in. Faces flash before you one after another — blink, blink, blink, a snap of black between each, a rush of different landscapes. Each one lies sprawled in a different compromised position, stumbled-out and fallen-down like you on the ground, in the grass, in the dirt. A group of them — flash-flash-flash — seem to be together in a tiny muddy river, facedown, not breathing, and you catch the names on their shirts before you can think to look away and then it’s the next person, the next — more, more, more, an endless series and there are so many, and sprinkled in and then in a rush of succession are people you don’t know, people you don’t recognize, different uniforms, the enemy — unchangeably more, more, an uncountable number of them, are there more of them than there are of you? And you are dizzy, something rising, no no no—
Vomit. It gurgles up in your throat like a geyser and then it’s dribbling out from the sides of your lax and open mouth. You can’t breathe, you can’t breathe, and the images are over but your vision is still skewed, and then your sight is moving and you’re watching as your body is pulled from your rucksack and laid onto its side, and the vision looks down and a complicated hand-gesture is made and the world goes black and red like a darkroom from the mid-19th century. Your throat goes dry and blessedly clear, and you feel and watch your body take a thin, reedy breath that smells and tastes like ethyl alcohol as the vomit collects outside your body, floating there in a shockingly small ball, and once it’s done collecting from your mouth but not the ground your body is lying in, it’s batted aside by the same thin long bony knobbly hand and the vomit-ball sprays across the trees like buckshot from a sawed-off shotgun. The vision blinks black, red, black; you reel, dizzy, uncertain, and you are back in your body.
What just happened? But it’s clear. You are nothing but a puppet to it.
“Sorry,” it states. An easy word to learn across languages, a near-universal, but the sound comes to you dim, far away. It sits by your side, careless of the rifle on the ground, black tip an inch from its thigh in the grass. You try to twitch your finger onto the trigger. Nothing.
It has taken out a book. A translation guide? A moment passes, and then it sighs, tucks that away — where are the pockets it is keeping these things in? — narrows its eyes, snaps its fingers, and there’s that muffled sonic boom again, and this time something explodes in the sky far, far away. It blinks, seems to refocus, then turns and bows its head for a moment, facing nothing. You watch all of this, dazzled like a child before the sun.
It seems to think for a moment. Reaches a hand into a pocket, pulls out a small, thin sheet of metal — the shiny side flashes towards you briefly, and you see that it is inscribed with complicated symbols like a calculus board mixed with an art project. What is that? you want to ask, but the dread is so heavy and your lungs don’t seem to be working. It doesn’t seem to be observing you right now, anyway — it taps the corner a few times, presses with a bone-white finger, and the air fills with a thin, tinnitus-high whining. Nausea rising again, even though there’s nothing inside. It’s still not facing you—
But then it does, and the atmosphere changes. “There is an unprecedented language barrier,” it says without preamble, and there’s a near-immediate headache piercing the left side of your skull. This time, it’s not careful enunciation of syllables it doesn’t understand — it speaks fluidly, clearly, musically, but in a language you don’t understand — the words are indistinct, syllables nonsense on your ears. Is that a language it is speaking, or is it gibberish? But you can understand it barely, faintly, don’t even have a choice in it — it gives you a splitting headache — and you know you need to do something, so you try to comprehend.
It is impassive to your struggle. The vomit that wasn’t collected from the grass is soaking into your skin. It continues, “I do not know who is in charge. I cannot find them. I was not told how to identify them.
“I was hired to help the French. I cannot tell which side is the French. I was not told how to identify them.
“I tried to guess based on my drop position which side I was hired to help. Both armies were away from their bases when I arrived. You were near me and away from everyone else, so I assumed that you were in charge.”
The speech is taking a toll on your brain. Thinking is a slog through mud. The bliss of unconsciousness would be yours if the Mage would stop talking for all of one second. But through the sewage of your mind you hear, dangerously—
“I will assume that you are sided with the French. I will look among the armies I captured and remove those whose uniforms do not match yours. In doing so, I will have completed my objective as ordered.” The Mage shrugs, stands, stretches. Its wings blot out the sun. It returns to you.
“I wish the best for your future. I want this to be over more than you do.” Your skin is falling off. Your eyes are rolling in your skull, and then—
It folds away the metal and stows it. The tinnitus drops from the air instantly, the atmosphere clears, your vision lightens — a great weight drops off of you and you are floating inside your body, skin hollow and bottomless. It has turned away from you. Its skin looks wrong, smothered in inky black and blue lines, and you are crying, drooling, and can smell that you have a nosebleed all at the same time. You want to curl up and sob and pretend the world is okay. You lie there, limp and relaxed. The world is wrong, a dream.
It smiles that same ape-cruel smile at you. “Good luck,” it pronounces evenly, joyously, clearly from memorization. Oh god, what is going to happen. You hope this is all a terrible nightmare. Please wake up. But it’s all too awful to be fake. The world is spinning. The Mage disappears in a gunshot-whipcrack-thunderbolt of air slamming together. You are alone. And then—
She came back to visit just as I started college. I didn’t recognize her, not really. She wasn’t there to visit me, in the end — turns out she needed our parents to sign some documents about her education, and for them to sign a waiver in case she died. She’d decided to do a second course of education there — I didn’t realize until she left after my graduation ceremony was over that that was the day she was supposed to come home. Like, for good. She’d decided she liked it, I guess. Her work at the Academy. I don’t remember much of what she was like, but Mom was really unhappy, packed up her room into a bunch of boxes. She hadn’t done that the first time. She kept ranting about how smart Zacharia was and how she couldn’t believe she was throwing her life away, but…
I think she was projecting, Johnson says in a rare moment of wisdom, after a pause that’s massive to you and nothing to him.
Another truck rolls by, filled with soldiers. They’re cheering, laughing, but there’s something empty about it. You think you’ve seen them laughing and cheering every time they go out — that particular group, in fact. Maybe it’s some sort of ritual. Let’s all laugh before we go out and might die. At least we’ll have smiled sometime before we’re gone.
— ast time I saw her, though, Johnson is saying, it was a few months after I’d graduated college, right before I was scheduled to leave for good. I had my bags packed by the door and everything. I don’t think Mom ever knew she even visited. And, like he always does, Johnson pauses to do a bit of prequel as he always does and says, Let me paint the picture…
But this time, you are enraptured.
You are standing, vertigo and headrush sending you reeling, sending your vision dark. Your muscles buzz, pins and needles and cramps but there’s something residual leaking from your muscles, keeping you rooted for the time being. Your vision comes back in as your body acclimates, and for a time you don’t understand what you are seeing, and then after that time passes, you do.
…The war is over. You won. You never even had to raise your gun.
The landscape is a gory splatter from horizon to horizon. Red and black and pink and brown, an artist’s palette of meat. Already you can smell the flies. And you just stand there, shoulder-to-shoulder with your comrades. It’s so loud, but there’s nothing to hear. The cicadas are screaming. The wind is dead. The buzzing in your ears is obscene.
Johnson’s somewhere among you all, you think hazily. Remember that he wasn’t among those facedown in the creek. You wonder if he saw the mage as you did. If he recognized her.
Nobody moves. Stand in a perfect line, exactly where you were placed, no thought for friendship or unit or order. Dolls placed in a row by a blind child.
The wind picks up. It smells. The mosquitoes are singing, getting louder. The corpses aren’t breathing. The blood is staining the pale grey dirt black. The sky is brown with smoke. Someone should check the burn pits.
The horizon is full of bodies. The war is over.
Desolation.
It’s the middle of the night. Mom’s asleep. Dad is out of the house, either drinking or working overtime at the office, cointoss. Ashley and Bardugo are over at their friend’s. I’m not quite asleep, but it’s a close thing. I’m just drifting off, and then there’s this cracking sound, so loud like a thunderclap—
Another truck rolls by. The soldiers inside are bleak, atmosphere dismal.
—standing in front of me, right there, and only then do I realize just how long it’s been since I last saw her, the years it’s been. She’s taller than I remember her being and wearing this thick purple sash belted around her waist. Her face has changed — she’s gaunt now, severe, and the lights aren’t on but she snaps her fingers and instantly the air is full of these star-shaped things like hanging LED bulbs. I’ve always loved those, and I think I remember — later, she told me she made that one to remember me by, and—
Dust cloud. Truck. Soldiers inside. There probably aren’t many left at the base.
Pull yourself together. He’s a mixture of ecstatic and the most sorrowful you’ve ever seen in any person. —sits down with me on my bed, I accept, and the world’s gone, and we’re sitting in this massive cathedral. These people with robes and wings and skin that’s like hers but even more, so covered in tattoos it’s more ink than skin but there’s this separation, see, of people who have lots of tattoos like you see in the army but their tattoos tend to blend together at a certain point, but no matter who I was looking at their tattoos were crisp and clean, like they’d only just been applied. And their skin was all lumpy and weird too and glittered with light—
Dust. Another truck roars by, swallowing words and air. Stinging wind in its wake.
—magical. But she told me that she wasn’t coming back. Oh, he’s crying. Sidle up to him and wrap an arm over his armoured shoulder. He’s warm, even through the fabric.
I hadn’t really had an opportunity to miss her before then. Busy with school, and losing her at nine years old meant I didn’t grow up with her much — she was the oldest, so we didn’t interact much anyway. But I think I really felt it then, just how much I’d have loved to get to know her. Even in that one night, she was so strong and smart, and she had this presence of joy and power — I think that one came from the Academy, but I think it was an innate part of her too, just strengthened there — I remember she was like that when she left, too. Headstrong.
He is fond of her as siblings often forget they are. Or no — he’s fond of her as one whose sibling has died or gone to war remembers them to be.
She hadn’t really explained to me then, why she wasn’t coming home — why she wasn’t getting out while she still could. But she— did I mention she was speaking, no I didn’t, in— so, my household speaks Spanish and English, but she kept mixing up her words. It was the thing that really stuck out to me — I still think about it — more than her goodbyes and her skin. It just didn’t make sense to me. She was always the one to translate for our parents — she was better than any of the rest of us, but she was stumbling through even English, let alone Spanish, like she’d never—
I’ve heard college kids who’ve taken a quarter’s classes of Spanish, and she sounded like that. She said she was doing an accelerated language learning program there that would teach her a bunch of—
There’s a heavy whine in your ears, sharpening quickly. You shift on the cinderblock pile, wobbling when it tips towards the barrels and untensing when it doesn’t fall after all. Your legs are buzzing — low blood pressure? Orient yourself, vision swaying ominously — another truck rolls by, tan and heavyset. Not all the seats filled — must be the last few. Where are they all going? A cold dizzy feeling runs through you and the whine turns into a sharp ringing, blotting out all sound — wince, turn to face Johnson to pretend you can hear him, but evidently, seconds later—
—ou listening? Johnson asks through the dimming whiteout.
You’re shaking. Try to quell it. Find that you can’t. There’s something like antifreeze in your bloodstream — too long near the burn pits, maybe. You’ll get metastatic lung cancer at this point. Maybe it’s already developed. You’re sweating bullets — full, heavy droplets are beading on your forehead, rolling down your neck, slicing rivulets through one eyebrow, not both, they chose their favourite. It’s hot, but you are freezing. Another truck goes by. Frank? asks Johnson. Are you okay?
…Are we supposed to be somewhere? you ask. Where’s everyone going? Your heart hammers. Your fingers are vibrating so hard you can barely feel them, like after staying jacked on awake pills for too long, or holding down the trigger on a machinegun and losing feeling through the vibration and kickback of the death machine. Or your father’s ancient wood-drill, and there’s something there that that’s the last memory that comes to mind, not the first.
Where would we need to go? Johnson had asked a minute, two minutes, five minutes ago. You blink. He’s gone. Been gone. Look around, find him — he’s far down the road and sprinting after the last vehicle, a dusty Jeep.
Oh god, you realize aloud, but you don’t move. The schedule. Today you were meant to go to the front. Look back at base. Look down the road, miles and miles stretching into the distance. See the last vehicle growing small already. Did Johnson catch up? You can’t tell through the kicked-up dust cloud.
The big push. It was today.
You missed it.
But you didn’t miss it. You were pulled into it just like everyone else.
Back to camp by foot. Nobody knows where the trucks have gone. You can’t bring it in yourself to care.
Pack down the tents. Don’t bother to hose off — smear thick black arterial blood from your armour where it hasn’t caked in yet onto the tarp and canvas, paint the useless beige camouflage red. Red like it should be — red like a warning: We’ve got a god on our side. They should have warned you.
It’s disarray. Dissolution. A sea of faces, everyone forming up once the camp is more or less packed down and hoisted on backs, the rest that can’t be carried carried anyway between several soldiers because someone told them to, halfheartedly hidden behind boulders and pretended not to be seen by those doing checks, or left plainly and uncaringly out in the open like the last dead chicken of a henhouse murdered by a fat fox. Grey faces, dusty faces, sun-blind faces. A sea of soldiers, people, who never needed to be here in the first place. You stand in your formation.
It’s just like at mess this morning. Just like that, exactly as loud with questions and playful stupid arguments and cheering and jeering — but all opposite, all negative. Not like mess at all. A badly warped mirror. Everyone and everything is silent. The questions are said aloud by everyone’s minds, everyone’s postures, everything all at once, one unified voice: Why are we even here? What was the point of all of this?
Did we even win? Did any of this even matter?
Forward march, comes the order. Who’s doing the ordering? Everyone higher up on the chain of command is dead — their uniforms were too different, found two in the sea of bodies and called it a day. Everyone marches anyway, because the planes are scheduled to arrive at the airstrip in several hours and there’s nothing left to do but to go there. To go home, wherever home is.
You wonder if you’ll ever see a mage again. You hope you don’t. You hope that by the end of all of this, after two more years and after hopefully-paid-for therapy and rehabilitation, you can carry on. Hope that you can carry on with your life, hope you can pretend that none of this ever happened.
The landscape behind you is a wasteland, a desolation. It could have been the other side that won. Nothing would have needed to change — all they would have had to do was buy a mage before your side did.
You hadn’t even been aware that either of your nations had the funds for one. But it didn’t matter that you hadn’t known. They did.
This war meant nothing. All it did was show who would win in a coinflip.
Close your eyes, keep marching by knowledge of where your feet will land and the sounds of everyone in line beside, in front, behind you. Take comfort in that — pretend you don’t see the sea of bodies on the backs of your eyelids. See it, don’t see it. Pretend that none of this ever happened. Pretend you never woke up this morning.
It’s too much for you to imagine anything with that much power.
Written mostly in one sitting after getting a super strong idea (the idea of soldiers seeing a mage do war for them) while swimming at the pool. I dashed out as quickly as I could and probably would have left early anyway, since my elbow was giving me trouble again since I overextended my extensors during aerial silks the weekend prior. An absolute delight this was to make, though I am still uncertain about the full story told in chunks from Johnson on the cinderblocks.