A burst of voice tore through the silence like a blade probing a raw wound—a powerful laugh, brutally loud, almost obscene in this deathly atmosphere. This incongruous sound wrenched Flavius from the icy grip of his thoughts, from this maelstrom of nightmares that had been swirling in his skull since the drums of war had fallen silent. The joyful cacophony resonated like an insult amidst the extinguished gazes and broken bodies collapsing around him, ghosts of men no longer truly alive but not yet dead.
He slowly turned his head, each movement reviving the throbbing pain that radiated from his neck to his shoulder blades. A familiar pain, almost comforting in its constancy. His eyes, reddened by smoke and unshed tears, searched for the origin of this dissonant noise.
He saw them.
Them.
Those who had never breathed the death-saturated air of the front, those whose hands remained immaculate while his bore the indelible mark of dried blood under the nails. The officers and non-commissioned officers, comfortably settled in safety on the hills overlooking the field of carnage, like spectators at a particularly entertaining theatrical performance. Their indifference to the massacre they had orchestrated radiated from their silhouettes gilded by the flickering light of torches.
Their laughter echoed, fat and mocking, tinged with an obscene joviality that had no place in this open-air ossuary. Fragments of their jokes floated to him, carried by the night breeze that still carried the acrid smell of gunpowder and entrails. "Blood shed," "men of iron," "the glory of the empire"—words thrown with criminal nonchalance as they sipped wine from silver goblets, the purple liquid shimmering like the blood that had poured in torrents just hours earlier.
Their voices poisoned the already suffocating atmosphere, making it even more unbearable. An auditory miasma that seeped into Flavius's ears, adding a layer of abject contempt to the ocean of misery that threatened to engulf him. Each burst of laughter seemed like a desecration, a violation of the souls just torn from their fleshly shells.
They had stayed behind, carefully protected, at a respectful distance from the whistling of blades that split the air and flesh, from the explosions that tore apart the earth and men, from the bodies collapsing into mud turned purple, sticky with blood and viscera.
Their immaculate uniforms bore no stigmata of battle—no crimson splashes, no tears, no halos of sweat mixed with terror. Their faces were not hollowed out by horror, their eyes did not reflect that unfathomable abyss that Flavius now glimpsed every time he met his own gaze in a puddle of water.
It was not they who had seen the pupils of a comrade's eyes slowly extinguish, that light that flickers and then disappears like a candle blown out by an ill wind. Not they who had felt the icy breath of death brush their neck with every heartbeat, turning each breath into a stolen privilege. It was not their bodies that had been lacerated, crushed, disfigured beyond recognition, mere anonymous pieces of flesh in the immense butchery.
And yet, it was to them that the honors would be given.
They laughed. They mocked this bloody day as if it were a refined entertainment, a juicy anecdote to share between sips of wine. Their behavior was a stinging slap, a festering insult spat in the face of those who had shed their blood, exhaled their last breath, abandoned the scattered fragments of their humanity on this cursed battlefield where the crows were already feasting.
Flavius tried to ignore their voices, striving not to dwell on the incandescent rage that bubbled in his guts like molten lead. He took his meager meal with a trembling hand—a stale crust of bread, a piece of jerky as tough as leather—and each bite left a taste of ashes on his tongue, a bitter reminder of the carnage he had survived without understanding why him and not the others.
Isolating himself away from the circle of light cast by the campfire, he sought refuge in a solitude that seemed preferable to the absurd and indecent joviality of the officers. Listening to them any longer risked breaking him definitively, unleashing this primitive fury that he barely kept at bay—a burning ember that consumed his guts, threatening to explode into an uncontrollable blaze.
But a new burst of laughter rang out, shrill like the cry of a bird of prey swooping on its victim. A non-commissioned officer turned in his direction, a sneering smile distorting his face with fine, aristocratic features that the war had never truly touched. His white teeth gleamed in the darkness, contrasting with the grime that covered Flavius's.
"So, soldier, how was it, playing the hero at the front?" he asked in a tone laced with deliberate cruelty, each syllable carefully calibrated to wound, to provoke, to break this soldier with the haunted gaze who dared to distance himself from the group as if his presence sullied them.
The non-commissioned officer's eyes, icy blue, scrutinized Flavius with a mix of contempt and morbid curiosity. A gaze that saw in him only a wounded animal, a pathetic curiosity, a worn-out tool that could soon be discarded. This gaze seemed to wait, almost hope, for a sign of weakness, a collapse, a silent plea for recognition that would never come.
Flavius clenched his teeth until he felt his jaw crack, turning his gaze away to avoid biting the poisoned hook offered to him. His right hand involuntarily tightened around the handle of his dagger, the knuckles whitening under the tension. A gesture almost imperceptible that the non-commissioned officer nevertheless noticed, his smile widening further.
The question stabbed him deeply, burrowing under his skin to reach his bruised soul. What kind of hero was he really? A soldier who had survived by the most absurd of chances when so many better men had perished? A mere pawn on the merciless chessboard of a war whose stakes he did not even understand, crushed by a mechanism too vast to be grasped? Or perhaps he was just another victim, already consumed from within by a system that manipulated them all in its macabre dance?
He fixed his gaze on the dancing flames before him, their perpetual and hypnotic movement, feeling an overwhelming fatigue settle on his shoulders like a leaden shroud. Every muscle in his body screamed in pain, every thought seemed to have to pass through a thick fog before reaching his consciousness. Perhaps, he told himself in a desperate burst of self-persuasion, perhaps in a few hours, all this would fade like a particularly vivid nightmare from which he would finally awaken.
But deep down, buried under layers of denial and exhaustion, he knew. He was trapped, like all of them, in this dehumanizing reality where the boundaries between executioners and victims blurred until they disappeared. A world where survival required much more than skill in wielding weapons or insolent luck—it demanded a form of cold resignation, a gradual abandonment of everything that had once made him human.
And as the officers' laughter continued to echo in the night, Flavius felt something break definitively within him, a fragment of his soul detaching to join the countless ghosts that now haunted his conscience. This war would never truly end for him, he now understood. It would continue to rage in the depths of his being, long after the battlefields had been washed clean by the rain and the chroniclers had recorded these bloody days in their immaculate registers.
Flavius moved away from the circle of fire like a soul fleeing the flames of hell, his legs dragging beneath him, as heavy as the chains of the tormented. Each step became a personal battle, an almost insurmountable effort wrested from a body that was now nothing more than a cathedral of suffering, a monument to pain erected on the altar of this senseless war. The dying light of the flames danced on the frozen ground, casting phantasmagorical shadows that seemed to mock him, spectral creatures born from the carnage of the day.
This feeble light barely illuminated his path to what they dared to call his bed—a miserable pallet thrown carelessly on the bare earth, barely covered by a rough scrap of fabric that irritated the skin more than it protected it. The "luxury" they had promised at enlistment, a cruel mockery that might have wrung a bitter laugh from his lips if the weight of tragedy were not crushing him to the marrow. In another world, a world before, he might have had the strength to rebel against this imposture, but not tonight. Not when every fiber of his being cried out in agony.
He collapsed onto the pallet like a centuries-old oak felled by lightning, a raw groan escaping his parched throat—his first and only night song. His body instinctively curled up, a mass of bruised flesh seeking to protect its vulnerable points, to contain the throbbing pain that radiated from his wounds. His eyelids lowered once, twice, like lead curtains, but the chaos swirling in his skull stubbornly refused to grant him the respite of sleep.
Behind his closed eyes, all was fire and blood. Each explosion of the day continued to resonate in his head with terrifying precision. Each cry of agony still tore through the silence of his consciousness. Each drop of blood spilled was imprinted on his retina like indelible ink, sharp claws ceaselessly plowing the fragile fabric of his memory. War, he now understood with terrible lucidity, never truly stopped at dusk—it insidiously infiltrated the silence of the nights, the exhaustion of his trembling muscles, the acrid sweat and dried blood that clung to his skin like a second fleshly shell.
The voices of the men in the camp, their sparse and artificial laughter—desperate attempts to forget the horror—drifted to him in snippets, carried by the night breeze. But Flavius deliberately detached himself from them, seeking to isolate himself in a bubble of nothingness, aspiring to a dreamless sleep, a sleep that would not be haunted by the anxiety of tomorrow. A luxury he had not known for weeks, perhaps months—time had lost all meaning in this earthly purgatory.
Yet, despite his efforts, his thoughts inexorably brought him back to the inevitable: the battles that awaited him at dawn, the impossible choices he would have to make in the fury of combat, the familiar faces he might lose before the sun set again. This war devoured men like an insatiable monster, leaving behind only empty carcasses or mutilated souls.
Lying on his back, arms outstretched in a cross like a martyr sacrificed on the altar of a voracious deity, he pushed away with a brusque gesture the irritating sheet that offered only a semblance of comfort. He preferred the biting cold of the ground seeping through the pallet, a frank and honest pain, preferable to the lies of promises of protection. Fatigue finally engulfed him, a slow but inexorable tidal wave, submerging the defenses of his consciousness.
Falling asleep had become a vital necessity—without this respite, however imperfect, the next day would break him irreparably. But even in this state of semi-unconsciousness, anxiety continued to gnaw at him like a tenacious parasite, an insidious whisper that seeped into the cracks of his mental armor. He had survived today, by miracle or by curse, he no longer knew. But how many more days would his luck hold? How many comrades would fall before this madness ended? How many bodies would be added to the charnel house before the powerful decided that enough blood had been shed?
The dead of the day haunted his twilight thoughts—faces frozen in an expression of ultimate incomprehension, broken bodies that he refused to look at for too long, for fear that the sight would tip him definitively into the abyss. He knew them all, had shared their bread, their wine, their stories. Now, they were nothing more than broken silhouettes, fragments of humanity scattered on a battlefield indifferent to their fate.
All was emptiness within him—a inner chasm that widened day by day, hour by hour, an insatiable void that threatened to swallow him at every moment. War had carved within him an abyss that nothing seemed able to fill, not even the exhaustion that gradually numbed his limbs.
Tomorrow, he would have to rise in the icy mist of dawn, don this armor that weighed heavier on his soul than on his shoulders, grasp these weapons that had become monstrous extensions of his hands. He would have to fight again, advance against the human tide, against his own nature—perhaps survive one more day, perhaps finally join those he had seen fall. War offered him only this derisory choice, this brutal and implacable dichotomy that left no room for dreams or regrets, only this forced impulse towards an uncertain future.
Sleep finally took him, not as a liberation but as another form of unconsciousness, a liminal state where his tormented mind found only a semblance of peace. A dreamless sleep—the last mercy granted to him by his exhausted body—rocked only by the rhythm of his heavy and regular breath, but terribly fragile, a tenuous thread vibrating in the discordant symphony of this night of war.
In the darkness of the camp, his face relaxed imperceptibly, the furrows carved by suffering softening slightly. For a few hours stolen from horror, Flavius was no longer a soldier, no longer a killer, no longer a victim—just a broken man desperately trying to piece together the scattered fragments of his humanity before the relentless dawn called him back to his condition as cannon fodder, a bloody cog in the inexorable machinery of destruction.
The strident sound of trumpets tore through the dawn like a blade gutting a belly, wrenching Flavius from the fragile embrace of a restless sleep. This metallic cry cut through the darkness before the horizon was even tinged with the first bloody hues of the day. His bones seemed cast in lead, every muscle in his body transformed into a rope braided with pain by the fatigue of a night too brief, too haunted. He opened his eyes to a world that had not changed, an earthly purgatory where each awakening was a small death.
Flavius stretched with painful slowness, an animal groan escaping his parched throat as his joints cracked like dead wood, his back screaming under the violet stigmata of the previous day. His body, this betrayed carcass that he still dragged along, resisted every movement, begged for rest that he could not afford. The luxury of sleep no longer belonged to his world. Slowly, like a premature old man, he rose, his eyes veiled by a tenacious fog of exhaustion, and put on his dented armor, this second skin of metal that bore the imprints of all those who had tried to bring him down.
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His fingers, strangers to gentleness, fumbled with the straps with mechanical precision, checking each piece, each joint with a mistrust born of this insolent luck that had carried him this far when others had tipped into oblivion. Around him, other soldiers emerged in sepulchral silence, their gaunt faces sculpted by the shadows of war—no word was exchanged, no spark of life shone in their gazes, just hollowed-out silhouettes preparing their bodies for another ordeal in this long procession towards their own end.
A cracked bell rang out, a lugubrious signal they all awaited without truly desiring it—the hour of provisions, this grotesque parody of a meal that was thrown to them like starving beasts. Flavius dragged himself towards the center of the camp, joining the silent line of soldiers with empty gazes, all these ghosts in uniform who clinked their metal mess tins in a funereal rhythm. The field kitchens, enveloped in a grayish haze of acrid smoke, spewed out indefinable odors—a nauseating mix of rancid fat and dried herbs supposed to mask the spoilage of the provisions.
The line advanced in ceremonial slowness, each man taking his place in this daily ritual devoid of all joy. Cooks with aprons stained with indecipherable marks threw a handful of grayish porridge into his mess tin, a shapeless and glutinous mass punctuated with blackish shards that he preferred not to identify. A piece of bread as hard as stone fell beside it, so compact it could have served as an improvised weapon. To complete this miserable feast, a ladle of cloudy herbal tea crashed against the metal, splashing his fingers with a fleeting warmth that cruelly reminded him he was still capable of feeling.
The line moved forward in ceremonial slowness, each man taking his place in this daily ritual devoid of all joy. Cooks with aprons stained with indecipherable marks threw a handful of grayish porridge into his mess tin, a shapeless and glutinous mass punctuated with blackish shards that he preferred not to identify. A piece of bread as hard as stone fell beside it, so compact it could have served as an improvised weapon. To complete this miserable feast, a ladle of cloudy herbal tea crashed against the metal, splashing his fingers with a fleeting warmth that cruelly reminded him he was still capable of feeling.
Flavius moved away, seeking an isolated corner where he could swallow this sustenance without having to meet other gazes. He squatted against a tent, his mess tin resting on his trembling knees, and began to mechanically ingest each bite without chewing, without tasting. The porridge slid down his throat like damp plaster, clinging to his palate, leaving a metallic aftertaste on his tongue. The bread resisted his tired teeth—he had to dip it in the steaming liquid to soften it enough, turning it all into a bland paste that he swallowed out of pure necessity.
This was not food—it was fuel, a crude combustible to power doomed bodies. Around him, other men ate with the same absence, stuffing this sustenance into their mouths as if fulfilling an additional military duty. Some stared into the void, others contemplated their mess tins with morbid fascination, as if their contents held some dire prophecy.
A sip of the tea burned his throat—a brew of excessive bitterness, a crude decoction of herbs picked from the corpses of ravaged fields, whose sole virtue was to warm the entrails when cold and fear froze them. He felt the liquid descend into his empty stomach, immediately awakening a dull pain that reminded him he had not eaten since the day before—or was it the day before that? The days blurred together in this forced march towards annihilation.
A crow landed nearby, its glossy black plumage obscenely contrasting with the omnipresent mud. The bird watched him with its bright, maliciously intelligent eyes, patient, knowing full well that all these men who were eating in silence were nothing but flesh on borrowed time, walking corpses that would soon join the feast that the scavengers awaited. Flavius met its gaze for a moment, recognizing in those black pupils a form of primitive wisdom—this bird was perhaps the only sincere being in this theater of absurdity, the only one not lying to itself about what awaited them all.
He scraped the last remnants from his mess tin, making sure nothing was wasted out of habit rather than appetite. This revolting food had become precious in its very scarcity—a day would come, he knew, when he would miss this vile porridge when famine struck them as it always did in the protracted campaigns. Eating had become a purely animal act, stripped of all pleasure, reduced to its most primitive function—surviving one more day, prolonging the agony of an existence that might no longer be worth it.
He swallowed the last mouthful of the cooled liquid, feeling a wave of nausea rise within him—not so much because of the vile taste but because of the existential disgust that had lodged in his entrails like a voracious parasite. The heavy foods weighed in his stomach like stones, an inert mass that reminded him he was still alive, that he would have to face this day and perhaps the next, bearing the burden of a life he had not chosen.
With a mechanical gesture, he cleaned his mess tin with a handful of dirt, rubbing the metal until it regained its dull uniformity, then stowed the utensil in his haversack with ritualistic precision. This small, dented object had become one of his most precious possessions—without it, even this vile sustenance would be denied him. Men who lost their mess tins were condemned to beg for scraps or dig through the mud of the trenches to unearth forgotten roots. He had seen soldiers fight to the blood over a metal utensil, ultimate proof of their collective degradation.
Flavius stood up painfully, his joints protesting under the effort like those of an old man, though he was not yet thirty. This war stole youth more surely than bullets took lives—it devoured the very essence of what made them men, leaving only walking shells with extinguished gazes. The meal, far from giving him strength, seemed to have weighed him down further, as if each calorie absorbed only served to sink him deeper into the mire that threatened to swallow them all.
No battles today, he had been told. No blades whistling through the air to slice flesh, no explosions tearing eardrums and scattering entrails—a deceptive truce that only masked another form of horror. The general, comfortably ensconced in his tent adorned with tapestries looted from conquered villages, had decreed with a stroke of his pen: another legion would take the front that day, while their unit, decimated and relegated to the rear like a worn-out tool, would bear a different but no less crushing burden. No hollow glory, no empty honor to report—just an ingrate task reserved for temporary survivors: gathering the dead like collecting garbage, transporting the wounded who still screamed, trying to preserve the last shreds of what had once been lives.
They were handed makeshift stretchers—rough assemblies of barely squared raw wood, sheets already stained with unnamed fluids, frayed ropes that bit into the palms—crude tools for a macabre harvest. These rudimentary instruments would be the extensions of their arms for the coming day, the receptacles of a grim reaping. They would retrieve the bodies, gather the human debris of a battle that would leave only columns of numbers in the registers of the powerful, cold statistics soon forgotten.
Flavius followed the others towards the previous day's battlefield, their heavy steps echoing in an oppressive silence more stifling than all the cries of the dying. The earth, gorged with nightly rain and coagulated blood, clung to his boots as if trying to pull him down into the depths, to keep him among the dead. The fresh morning air was saturated with a pungent odor that clung to his nostrils like an invisible plague—the unique and indescribable scent of decomposing flesh, exposed entrails, urine and excrement released by the ultimate relaxation of sphincters. A smell that no soldier ever forgot, an olfactory ghost that would haunt him until his own end.
The spectacle that unfolded before his eyes in the first light of dawn was a sea of carnage stretching to the misty horizon. Bodies littered the waterlogged ground like dislocated puppets, some torn into barely recognizable human pieces, others frozen in grotesque postures, limbs twisted at impossible angles, eyes wide open on the void, forever trapped in the agony of their last breath. Flavius recognized faces—comrades with whom he had shared bread and wine the day before, exchanged nervous jokes or whispered confidences—and others, anonymous, whose names, dreams, or fears he would never know.
They were nothing now, reduced to carcasses dragged without ceremony, piled like vulgar refuse awaiting mass graves or collective pyres. The task was mechanical, one gesture after another, a constant effort to stifle his soul under the weight of brute necessity. In this work of improvised gravedigger, there was no room for tears, no space to preserve the dignity of the dead—only the brutal urgency of evacuating the corpses before disease spread.
A few still lived among this carpet of cold flesh, their moans rising like specters in the morning mist—raw murmurs, guttural complaints barely human that pierced him more sharply than the definitive silence of the dead. These inarticulate pleas, these calls for help that would come too late, resonated in his ears like a permanent accusation. Surviving had become a form of betrayal towards those who were succumbing.
Flavius loaded the stretchers with precise but detached gestures, his arms trembling under the weight of the wounded whose broken bodies swayed with each laborious step towards the camp. The blood of the dying seeped through the coarse sheets, dripping onto his hands, his forearms, tracing vermilion furrows that quickly dried into brownish crusts. The doctors, these butchers in stained aprons, would do what they could with their rudimentary tools and limited knowledge, but he knew, as did all the others: many of these men they carried would never see the next dawn. War did not choose its victims with discernment; it mowed them down with the blind indifference of a natural force.
His comrades in this grim task worked in monastic silence, their faces closed like sealed books, carefully avoiding any eye contact that might break the thin membrane of detachment they struggled to maintain. They shared the same unspoken thoughts, the same widening inner fracture. Survivors of the previous day, they were now the silent witnesses of a hell they could not escape, condemned to contemplate the mirror of their own probable future.
The sun gradually rose in the sky, its increasing heat intensifying the odors of death and putrefaction. Sweat now trickled down his back, mingling with splashes of blood and mud. With each trip between the battlefield and the camp, Flavius felt his strength waning, his muscles burning under the constant effort. The hours passed in a morbid monotony, an endless procession of mutilated bodies that he transported mechanically, his mind striving to detach itself from the horror he handled.
At noon, as the sun reached its zenith in a sky strangely blue, almost obscene in its serenity, a brief pause was granted to the gatherers of the dead. A meager meal was distributed to them—hard bread and dried meat that he chewed without tasting, swallowing mechanically to maintain his strength. The sounds of the ongoing battle reached them—distant rumblings, cries stifled by distance—constant reminder that others were dying while they ate.
Then the work resumed, relentless, the afternoon heat making the task even more grueling. The bodies discovered later, those that had lain since the day before under the sun, already showed the first signs of decomposition—swollen bellies, more putrid odors, skins that detached at the touch. But it was not this physical degradation that marked him most deeply—it was a more insidious ugliness, an abomination that chilled his blood.
Some soldiers, his own comrades-in-arms, had thrown themselves on the bodies like starving scavengers after weeks of famine. Not to recover usable weapons or vital provisions, no—they looted with obscene meticulousness, rummaging through the dead with an avidity that twisted their features into grotesque masks, tearing rings, medallions, gold coins from clenched fingers or burst pockets. Worse still, some finished off the wounded who still clung to a breath of life, a sword or dagger blow delivered with cold efficiency, slitting throats or piercing the chests of the dying too weak to defend themselves or call for help. A gold coin, an insignificant jewel torn from a still-warm corpse—that was what determined the value of a life in this hell that men had created with their own hands.
Flavius saw them, frozen in stunned immobility, a violent surge of nausea rising in his throat like a toxic tide as a man a few steps away methodically slit the throat of a wounded man with pleading eyes, his hand then plunging into the collar of his tunic to steal a bloodstained gold chain. The wet gurgle that escaped the severed throat echoed in his skull like an accusation.
This methodical savagery struck him harder than all the explosions or blades he had faced. War dehumanized, he had always known as an abstract truth, but seeing these men transformed into predators, into calculating predators ready to finish off their own brothers-in-arms for a handful of shiny metal, surpassed everything he had been able to imagine in his darkest nightmares. It was not just the brutal loss of lives or the unleashed violence of the battles that defined true horror—it was this progressive destruction of the human soul, this systematic erosion of morality crushed under the weight of a perverted survival that no longer deserved that name.
These abject acts revealed a truth that Flavius would have preferred never to contemplate: war did not content itself with killing bodies; it corrupted the very essence of humanity, it gnawed at the moral foundations until nothing authentically human remained behind the empty eyes that continued to observe the world.
His hands trembled violently as he carried a moaning wounded man towards an empty stretcher, the contact with this cold and sticky flesh suddenly revolting him as if this collective ignominy could contaminate him by mere proximity. He said nothing, did nothing to intervene. Confronted with these human vultures, he contented himself with ignoring, lowering his eyes, continuing his task in a heavy silence of passive complicity. What could he do, alone against this tide of corruption? To challenge them openly was to risk his own skin for a justice that no one would claim in this universe abandoned by the gods. But this complicit silence already haunted him, a tacit admission of his own moral degradation that he could never erase.
When twilight began to stretch its purple fingers over the battlefield, the task was not yet completed, but exhaustion made their work slower, more imprecise. The shadows lengthened, transforming the devastated landscape into a lugubrious tableau with blurred contours. The last wounded transported moaned more weakly, their strength waning with the fading light.
He thought of the others, those who, like him, were still fighting day after day, hoping simply to survive one more twilight. But these unworthy acts he had observed throughout this endless day, these sacrilegious pillages carried out with surgical precision, reminded him cruelly how far they were all inexorably moving away from what they had been before the war transformed them. This was not a war for noble ideals or coveted lands—it was a war waged against their own human nature, a struggle where humanity itself disintegrated before his powerless eyes.
Perhaps, tomorrow or the day after, he too would make a similar choice, driven by the devouring hunger or the visceral fear that gnawed at his entrails. For now, a deep nausea, a malaise that went beyond the physical to reach the deepest layers of his consciousness, took root in him like an incurable infection, a dark stain that no rest, no absolution could ever completely erase.
As the last glimmers of the day faded on the horizon, Flavius cast a final glance over the devastated field, now half emptied of its dead. The birds of prey circled in the darkening sky, impatient to claim their share of the feast as soon as the men had withdrawn. Nature itself seemed to want to erase the traces of this human folly, to cover with a merciful veil of darkness the extent of their barbarity.
Flavius made his way back to the camp with a staggering step, each movement a torture for his overworked muscles. His entire body was now nothing but a silent complaint, a plea for rest that would not truly come. For even lying on his pallet in a few hours, the abomination he had seen that day would remain etched in his memory with the cruel precision of a red-hot iron—a wound invisible but infinitely deeper than all those that marked his bruised body.
And as he moved away from this field of shame, he wondered what part of his soul would survive this war, if indeed there was anything left to save. For beyond the physical scars and nightly nightmares, perhaps this was the true tragedy of every conflict: not the deaths that could be counted, but these little inner deaths that no register would ever record.
