The rising sun cast a leprous yellow light atop the smoldering battlefield. The enemy, a dark and bloodied mass of bodies, was streaked in crimson stains that glistened through soaking gray robes. Faint waters lapped at the border of the plain from an ocean too distant to wash death away.
The Emorian victory had befallen the previous night, frozen under starlight, blown away by the chill of night.
Logan’s comrades doused themselves in liquor, thumping one another across their plated armor. Cheering raucously. Logan could only spend so much time within the jittery confines of their huddled bodies.
He slipped away, moving closer to the edge of the hilltop, overlooking last night’s battlefield.
He grunted, heaved off his plated chest armor, ripping the underlayer of corded leather that connected his large chest plates to the clinking scales that wrapped around his shoulders.
His eyes stung with the ache of sleeplessness. The roar of his fellow soldiers, the men he had fought with— killed beside, grew less imminent, but never dulling.
It was a frenzy of blood lusting. Logan and his fellow fighting men would be given epaulets for their labors next to the Beaches of Eden. Within their castle walls, it would be said that they’d fought valiantly at the site where mankind had once swum to Shores of Earth to become humankind. They’d murdered the foreign invaders. Created a new beginning for the Kingdom of Humans.
They would be heralded as the saviors of a new homeland. They’d paved the way. They’d be rewarded with gold, mansions by the Forlorn Coast, women and the coveted lands of a new world they’d purchased with the blood of fallen men whose corpses basked under the morning sun.
Logan felt his knees buckle, falling on them.
He’d achieved what he’d wanted. Attained the status he’d been told a glorious man of his nation should achieve. A lowly peasant boy like himself had done what he’d been told he couldn’t— wouldn’t.
He’d made it this far. And now, the moment he’d waited for tasted bitter, bile.
His eyes were glued to the scene below the hillside.
Charred earth, the trenches of ruptured soil where broken remains— shards of wood and cracked slabs of cement lay interspersed around the corpses, like the work of a blacksmith from the Underworld.
His work. The work of Logan and his fellow soldiers. They’d arrived at this plain, pillaging the foreign invaders.
Invaders.
Who were the real invaders? The fallen men in robes or him?
Rats caught in metal traps deep in the cellar of the Keep.
Some of those rats were the boys he’d grown alongside with in the Poverty Fields.
He’d seen them. Men, shadows of the boys he’d once befriended, turned to killers just like him.
“Logan!” voices had called to him. Pleading. Or were they decrying? Was it disgust? Fear? Logan couldn’t tell in the murderous frenzy. Nor could he now as he dwelled on his memory.
Old companions. Were they responsible for the massacre at Holy Mountain?
Or were they just poor men of the Southern Reaches placed in the wrong place at the wrong time? Was it their misfortune to be labelled under the same banner as the marauders of the Southern Reaches? To the Emorian dispatch, there was no difference.
A patch of clouds brushed past the bottom of the rising sun, creating an explosion of golden light, tinted by orange, spilling out of the sky. The gray peal of the morning heavens had turned to a seashell blue. The sun’s aura tinged the reflecting seawater, rippling like embers of a fireplace, the waves folding like crumbling wood.
Logan’s dismantled armor plates teetered at the slope of the hill, tumbling down, their thuds echoing across their welded metal surfaces.
The vertigo and weight of exhaustion made his body limp— shivering, nonetheless. As he fell forward, his torso tipping over, he could see gray wisps rising like steam from the damp corpses.
His head crashed on the sloped grass, sending him to an unconsciousness of dreams haunted by risen ghosts.
G.R. Nanda 