While Kamel and Ali were dying on the imperial road—while their small patrol was being erased behind the curve—the same work was being done elsewhere, all along the frontier.
Dozens of forward scouting elements, six men here, fifteen men there, fanned out ahead of the columns like feelers. They were meant to taste the ground before the main body arrived, to report villages intact, roads clear, bridges usable—small facts that kept an army from walking blind.
Instead, they vanished.
Not in a battle. Not with banners and volleys and a proper enemy line. They vanished the way a man vanishes when he steps too far out onto ice and the lake decides it is done holding him.
In the abandoned villages the scouts did what scouts always did. They dismounted. They spread. They moved through alleys and courtyards with rifles low and bayonets loose, calling to each other in short voices, trying not to sound afraid. They pushed open doors. They climbed stairs. They kicked in shutters and swept rooms where dust lay thick enough to show no footprints.
And then, one by one, they stopped coming back out.
A man would enter a house to "secure it" and the doorway would swallow him. His partner would follow after a heartbeat—irritated, then uneasy—and the house would take him too. Sometimes the only sign was a faint scrape upstairs, a muffled thud, a chair leg shifting. Sometimes there was nothing at all until the last scout, left outside with the horses, began to turn slowly in the street and realize he could no longer hear his own unit breathing.
The Moss Men did not fight them in the open unless they had to. In villages they hid in plain sight—in piles of thatch, behind hanging rugs, beneath collapsed roofs, inside stables under manure and straw. They let the scouts pass. Let their eyes slide off them. Let the men relax by half a degree.
Then they rose.
A shape that had been a wall became a man. A bundle of brush became a blade. Knives flashed once, twice—low under the ribs, tight into the throat, clean enough that a shout died inside the mouth before it could leave. Outside, another Moss Man would drift up behind a rider like a shadow stepping out of shadow and open him across the back of the neck, then lower him gently as if laying him down to sleep.
No warnings. No speeches. No mercy.
Up north, where the land thickened into darker hills and heavy pine, the traps were made by men who understood forests the way sailors understood sea.
Paths were strung with thin wire that could not be seen until it was too late—tied between trees at chest height, or at the exact height to take a man from a saddle. The first rider would hit it and jerk back like he'd been hooked. The horse would scream and rear. The line behind would bunch instinctively—every cavalryman on earth trained to close up when the lead hesitated—until the entire file became a single tight target that could not maneuver.
Then the ground itself opened.
A horse would vanish straight down into a pit masked with leaves and twigs—so perfectly laid that even a careful eye saw only a normal patch of forest floor. There would be a sudden snapping crack of breaking legs, a wet impact, a roar of pain. The pit would be lined with sharpened stakes so old and dark they looked like roots—until they rose through flesh.
Men would rush forward to pull their comrades out, and their boots would slide on hidden cords. A second pit would open. Another horse would fall. Another scream would tear through the trees and be swallowed instantly by pine and distance.
That was the moment the Moss Men came.
Not charging. Not shouting. Rising.
From hollows. From brush piles. From the moss itself. They had been there the whole time, still as stones, watching the scouts walk into the kill box they had built like a craftsman building a coffin.
They moved with knives first. Fast hands. Close work. No wasted motion. A throat opened, a belly opened, a man went down trying to scream and found only blood. The forest floor drank it and did not care. Bodies were left where they fell, turned into warnings that no one would see until the next patrol stepped into the same trap and realized the "tree stump" ahead was a dead man with his eyes eaten by insects.
Down south the land changed, and the Moss Men changed with it.
The ground there was soft and wet, cut by rivers, marshes, reeds and brackish channels that fed the sea. Bridges had been broken—some burned, some blown, some simply collapsed at the right moment—and cavalry could not leap water that had no bank.
So the scouts dismounted and led their horses into the shallows, cursing the mud, stepping carefully, feeling for firm ground with their toes.
And the water punished them for it.
Stakes had been planted beneath the surface—sharpened sticks set at angles, hidden in murk where a man could not see his own ankles. A foot would press down and meet wood.
The stake would punch through the sole.
Through flesh.
Sometimes up between the bones.
A man would jerk, trying to pull free, and the pain would flare white-hot, instantly locking his whole body rigid. His horse would pull and panic and twist, making the wound worse. Another man would rush in to help and step into his own stake, and suddenly the crossing became a cluster of immobilized bodies—men half-submerged, unable to move, trying not to scream and failing.
That's when the quiet pops began.
Not volleys. Not thunder. Just small, soft sounds—like a man snapping twigs between his fingers.
Silenced rifles.
The first shot would take a scout in the face. He would fall forward into the water without a sound, mouth open, eyes wide, the river swallowing his blood. Another shot would hit a man in the throat and he would collapse into the reeds, hands clutching at nothing. Horses would rear and splash and churn the shallows into red-brown foam.
And the Moss Men—always unseen until it was too late—would drift along the banks and through the reeds, picking targets with calm patience, letting the marsh do the holding for them.
Everywhere along the line the work was the same: quick, efficient, mostly silent.
The only mercy given was to the horses.
Some were cut loose. Some broke free. Some bolted on their own—wild-eyed, foam flecking their mouths, tearing back the way they had come with empty saddles flapping and reins trailing like severed tongues. They ran until lungs burned and legs failed, carrying no messages, no words—only the raw truth written into their panic.
Something was wrong ahead.
Normally, that truth arrived the old way: a rider pounding back with dust in his teeth, a hoarse shout, the distant rattle of gunfire swelling into a skirmish any competent officer could read like weather. Forward patrols existed to touch the enemy first—to spring the trap, draw the opening shots, force an ambush to expose itself. Once revealed, the scout company would ride in, form, dismount, and crush whatever had been foolish enough to strike.
And if that was not enough, the answer came heavier.
A battalion would follow—a thousand men in ordered ranks. Then another. Then artillery would be brought up, guns emplaced, ground measured and erased. Anything that revealed itself was meant to be buried under weight.
That was the logic.
That was the method.
Captain Cemal Nuri Bey had used it a dozen times.
So when the silence began to swallow his forward eyes, he felt it before he could name it.
Two kilometres behind the point, his scout company advanced along the imperial road in a tight, disciplined block—two ranks deep, hooves striking packed earth and old stone in steady rhythm. Cemal kept them close because this was 1913: command was sight and voice. Spread too wide and you stopped being a unit; you became scattered men in the same landscape, each one a separate death waiting to happen. A rider could fall behind a rise, out of earshot, and vanish without anyone even knowing which direction his body lay.
Cemal rode at the head on purpose. He wanted to see first, hear first, feel the road and the air ahead of his men. An officer who lingered in the middle of the column learned the truth after it had already done its work.
The countryside looked harmless—open fields, harvested wheat, scrub, low trees. Good ground. The kind of ground generals trusted because it did not look like it could hide anything.
And yet the quiet had teeth.
A moment ago—just a moment—Cemal would have sworn by Allah he'd heard it: sharp, distant cracks, muddled by wind and distance. A brief flare of shouting—men or horses, he couldn't tell—and then… nothing. It hadn't been a rolling exchange. Not the drawn-out chatter of rifles answered by rifles. Not the messy, human noise of an ambush turning into a fight.
It had been too short.
Seconds, not minutes.
More like the start of a scream cut clean in half.
Now the road lay silent again, as if the sound had never existed. Only his own company filled the world: hooves, tack, breathing, the faint creak of leather. Even that felt too loud—too exposed—as if the land were listening and refusing to answer back.
Cemal's posture tightened in the saddle.
His mind ran through possibilities with a veteran's speed. Hasan's forward patrol—Kamel, Ali, the men riding point—should have been firing back. They should have been making noise, drawing the enemy out, buying time. Even a surprised patrol made something: scattered shots, panicked cries, the long ragged chaos of men trying to live.
This was not that.
This was contact without a fight.
This was removal.
A cold weight settled in his gut—the same instinct that had kept him alive in the First Balkan War, on punitive marches, in rebel country where every window could hide a rifle. He knew what ambushes sounded like.
And he knew what they did not sound like.
Cemal swallowed. His mouth tasted dry.
He told himself it could be nothing. A misheard shot. A branch snapping. Distance playing tricks. But the unease did not leave. It pressed harder, insisting.
He began to turn in the saddle, lifting his arm to send two riders forward—just a probe, just a quick look, enough to confirm before committing the whole company. That was how you did it. You confirmed. You reacted.
His breath drew in to give the order—
—and the ground in front of him moved.
Not movement the way men moved. Not figures stepping out, not a rush, not a break from cover. The roadside itself seemed to rise, as if the earth had decided to stand upright.
Two shapes lifted from the verge.
For a split second Cemal's mind refused it outright.
That hadn't been there.
A heartbeat earlier there had been only grass, ditch-shadow, the lazy unevenness of ground worn flat by carts and hooves. Now there were… figures. Draped in hanging green and brown, their outlines so broken they barely separated from the landscape. They did not appear so much as resolve, like an image finally snapping into focus.
What in Allah's—
His thought never finished.
His eyes slid down, trying to make sense of the shapes, and then he saw it.
Metal.
Dark, straight lines cutting through the camouflage. Long barrels braced low and steady, lifting up to point at his cavalry column. Not light rifles raised by nervous hands.
No, these were something heavier.
Something deadlier.
And then, Understanding hit him all at once—sharp, complete.
Oh no—
His hand moved on instinct, fingers reaching for his sidearm as his voice rose.
"Ambush—!"
The word never finished becoming sound.
The guns opened fire.
There was no crack, no pause, no stutter—only a single, tearing roar that crushed everything else out of existence. It wasn't sound so much as pressure, as if the air itself had turned solid and slammed into them.
Cemal felt it as a blow.
Then another.
Then another—hammering into him so fast his body couldn't decide where to feel it first. His chest took the brunt of it, a savage punch that drove the breath clean out of him. Not pain. Not yet. Just impact—dense, absolute, final.
Something sharp clipped his face. A tearing heat flashed along his cheek, like a blade snapping past, close enough to feel its wake. His head snapped sideways. The world lurched.
His horse screamed and reared, struck almost at the same instant, its body jolting violently beneath him. The saddle rose, twisted—then vanished. Cemal's hand opened without permission. The pistol slipped free. His fingers closed on empty air.
And suddenly he was falling.
Not thrown—released.
Weightless, loose, as if the rules that held men upright had been quietly withdrawn. The ground tilted. The sky slid sideways. Time stretched thin and elastic.
Behind him, his company died.
Not one by one.
Together.
The front rank didn't break—it folded inward. Horses dropped mid-stride as if the earth itself had kicked their legs away. Riders were flung sideways and backward, bodies snapping loose from saddles in wet, violent arcs. Men fell so fast it looked unreal, like a field of wheat crushed flat by a single, brutal gust.
No one fired back.
No one even finished turning.
They were simply erased.
The road vanished beneath dust and blood. Screams began and ended in the same breath. A man to Cemal's right disappeared behind his own collapsing horse. Another reached for his reins—and by the time his hand closed, there was nothing left to hold.
Then Cemal hit the ground.
The impact drove the rest of the world loose. Dust packed into his mouth. His teeth clicked together. The sky spun once—washed pale—and began to narrow, the edges dimming as if someone were drawing a curtain closed.
Above him, the roar continued for a few heartbeats—steady, counted, almost restrained—then thinned and fell away, as if the men firing had already tallied the cost and decided no more rounds were worth spending.
Then even that began to fade.
His thoughts scattered, losing shape. Bandits. Rebels. Ambush. His mind searched desperately for something familiar to name what had happened—something that fit the wars he understood.
Nothing did.
His last clear thought was not fear.
It was disbelief.
I didn't even see them.
And then—softly, impossibly—the pain let go.
The road, the blood, the screaming—all of it slipped away like a heavy cloak finally shrugged from tired shoulders. A breeze brushed his skin, warm as spring, light as silk. There was no noise now but the gentle sound of water moving somewhere nearby, and a scent—clean and sweet—like crushed figs, rose oil, and the first rain falling on warm dust.
Memories came in a rush.
His birth.
His childhood.
His life, laid out end to end in a single breath.
Then he opened his eyes.
Before him rose the Gates of Jannah.
Not imagined. Not dreamed. Real.
They towered in gold and light, vast beyond measure, their surface alive with a low, harmonious hum—voices without mouths, sound without source. He had heard them described a hundred times by old imams in mosques and courtyards, in sermons stitched together from scripture and promise. He had listened politely. He had believed just enough.
Now there was no doubt.
The gates stood open for him.
Beyond them stretched a garden without end. Date palms bowed under the weight of fruit. Rivers ran clear and bright—milk, honey, sweetness without decay. Cool grass spread beneath shaded canopies. Cushions of silk rested where the earth itself invited rest. Gold goblets brimmed. Tables were laid with food that filled the eye without burdening the body.
Plenty, without hunger.
Rest, without fatigue.
And there were people.
His people.
He knew them at once.
His father stepped forward first—whole again. The man who had marched north and never returned, swallowed by the great war of seventy-seven, the war spoken of with bitterness in mosques and homes. Bulgaria lost. Lands torn away. Blood spilled for nothing.
Yet here his father stood, young, unscarred, eyes bright with pride.
Behind him came his grandfather. Older in memory, younger in form. The man who had gone south against the rebellious Egyptians, come home wounded, and then been sent again—this time to the Balkans, to put down Christian rebels who had risen against the Sultan. He had died far from home, nameless in foreign soil.
Now his back was straight. His hands were steady. His face was calm.
No wounds marked them. No limp. No weight of years. They wore white garments that shimmered softly, as if woven from light itself. They smiled—not with sorrow, not with regret—but with certainty.
"Peace be upon you," they said.
The words settled into his chest like warmth, like a breath he had been holding his entire life finally released.
He stepped toward them, and for the first time he felt no doubt at all.
Strength flowed through him—quiet, effortless. The pain in his chest was gone. The questions that had gnawed at him in life—of empire and loyalty, of who truly commanded and why—dissolved like salt in water.
He had not run.
He had not begged.
He had died facing the enemy.
That was enough.
Angels moved through the garden like breath itself—never fully seen, always present. Their touch was cool and gentle, washing dust from his soul. The weight of blood, sweat, and fear was lifted from him piece by piece until nothing remained but lightness.
Then he saw her.
His wife stood before him, young again, just as she had been on the day they were wed. No lines of worry touched her face now. No fatigue. No bitterness born of hardship. She smiled as she had not smiled in years and kissed his brow, softly, without fear or demand.
Then, with calm dignity, she stepped aside.
Beyond her waited others.
They moved like wind and water—women robed in silks that shimmered as though woven from dawn itself. Their beauty was not uniform, but harmonious: each face different, each complete. Dark eyes lowered in modesty. Laughter carried like distant bells. Their presence did not provoke jealousy or effort.
It simply was.
They looked upon him with welcome alone.
No anger.
No defiance.
No weariness.
Here, women were as the holy men had always promised—gentle, content, unburdened by struggle or refusal. Obedience flowed as naturally as breath, not from fear, but from design.
A gift.
Not a contest.
The words of the preachers returned to him then, spoken in mosques thick with incense and fervor:
You shall be given companions beyond counting.
They shall never age, never deny, never turn away.
And you shall be granted strength without end,
so that joy itself shall not exhaust you.
He understood.
Warmth filled his limbs—not the fever of desire, but the certainty of power restored. He felt whole. Honored. Rewarded. The compromises and frustrations of life no longer clung to him.
Allah was pleased.
Tears filled his eyes—not of sorrow, but of relief so deep it erased every doubt he had ever carried. Barefoot, he stepped onto the grass, knowing without question that he belonged.
He was home.
—
In the world he had left behind, Captain Cemal Nuri Bey lay motionless on the imperial road. His blood darkened the dust beneath him. His hand rested on his side clutching at empty air.
His eyes stared at a sky he could no longer see.
Yet a faint, strange smile remained on his lips—like a man who, in his final heartbeat, believed he had been welcomed.
Not ten paces away, half-buried in grass and roadside scrub, a squat, boxy backpack stirred.
A faint beep cut through the quiet.
Then another.
A Moss Man, still draped in field-green and mud, crouched beside it without urgency. He lifted the handset, shielding it with his palm, and spoke in a low, steady voice—almost bored.
"Bravo Two to Central."
A pause. Static hissed softly.
"Bravo Two to Central. Imperial road—Ambush Point Two cleared."
The radio crackled.
For a moment there was only wind and distant insects—then a voice emerged, flattened by distance and interference.
"Copy."
Another burst of static.
"All units proceed with Third Phase immediately."
The Moss Man listened, eyes still on the road, on the bodies cooling where they had fallen.
A final transmission whispered through the speaker, barely more than breath:
"Message received."
Static.
"Springing the trap."
The Moss Man replaced the handset.
The radio went silent.
Behind him, the grass swallowed his outline as he melted back into the land, leaving only corpses, spent casings, and a smiling dead officer who believed he had crossed into paradise—
while the war moved on, precise and unseen, tightening its jaws farther down the road.