I could not understand why the earth trembled beneath my feet this way, but I knew I had to keep moving no matter what happened.
The bag I carried weighed on me as if it held every fear I had hidden since the moment I began running through the lines of battle.
I clutched it with my small hands as though my life hung from it and perhaps it truly did.
I tried to count my breaths, but even the air resisted me. The smell of smoke mixed with the bitterness of iron, and the world around me no longer felt like a place meant for a child to exist in.
All I could see ahead was a row of soldiers rising and falling in a rhythm that never ended, their dirty white armor resembling fragments of light that had fallen to the ground light drowned in mud then stained by blood.
I lifted my head slightly and saw what lay above me.
The sky was not a sky at all but layers of ash shifting like a living creature. Red flashes erupted in the heights then vanished then returned.
The echoes of catapults struck my shoulders like distant explosions.
For a moment I felt that this world was far greater than I could ever comprehend. greater than anything I was made to understand.
But still I ran.
I ran because a battalion was waiting for the bag of potions.
They told me their lives might depend on it.
They said it in a voice I did not fully understand… yet it was enough to make my legs move even while my heart trembled.
I hid behind something large that no longer moved. I did not want to think about what it was… nor why it had stopped. I closed my eyes for a heartbeat then continued forward.
The sounds of monsters ahead grew louder. Many legs striking the ground a scraping noise that made my back shiver with cold despite the heat clinging to me.
I heard soldiers shouting and mages uttering words I could not grasp yet I felt the bursts of light rising from them… light that vanished faster than it appeared.
I whispered to myself that I must not stop that I had done this dozens of times that fear changed nothing. But my chest tightened and my hands trembled and a faint quiver ran through my legs each time I drew closer to the front line.
Perhaps I had grown used to war as a child… but I had not grown used to being inside it.
I saw the battalion. It was not far. If I ran… if I only ran a little more… I would reach them.
I pushed myself forward again trying to ignore the pain in my feet the cry of a soldier as he fell trying not to hear the sound of the creature pouncing upon him and tearing him apart.
Then one thing happened… only one… yet enough to reset everything to zero.
A strike.
Not strong enough to kill me… but stronger than my small head could bear.
I rolled and felt dizziness and nausea swirl inside me.
I tried to reach for the ground but it slipped away.
Then I hit something… and silence followed.
Warmth slid down my forehead. I touched it and knew what it was.
I tried to breathe but nothing entered. I opened my eyes to the sky and saw it shifting entirely as if it too were staring back at me.
Tears fell without my permission. They mixed with what dripped from my head… and I could not tell which tasted more bitter.
I murmured to myself in a voice barely audible.
"I do not deserve this".
Perhaps no one does… but I was a child.
A child whose dreams were all far away from here.
A child who thought courage was enough… yet courage does not always suffice.
I tried to lift my body but it refused to move.
I saw the shattered potions beside me and the world seemed to mock me.
I reached toward one… but it was far.
Everything had become far all at once.
I closed my eyes.
Not out of escape… but because exhaustion felt heavier than my head.
…
The sky still hovered above me moving with a slow suffocating weight a gray darkness unlike anything I had seen before… or perhaps I had seen it once in another life that I did not know how it entered my mind.
I blinked once… twice… and something strange surged inside me like a door opening without my consent.
They were not my memories.
Yet I felt as though they belonged to me.
A man… I saw him from within… I did not see his face but I felt his name before hearing it.
Reis.
He lived in a place nothing like this world. Narrow streets old buildings smoke too… but not the smoke of war. Smoke of a weary life.
I watched pieces of his childhood fall like scattered paper. Walking alone carrying a torn bag entering a school stripped of color.
No one waited for him at the door. No one smiled at him. Nights passed with him alone. Days passed with him studying.
I breathed with difficulty the burning air inside my head mixing with a distant whistling sound as though it came from a city that was not mine.
The memories poured into me and I watched Reese grow older.
He became a thin man with short black hair living in a small room. A single bed… a faint yellow light… a cramped kitchen… a door that opened only for the landlord demanding rent.
No family. No woman to love him. No one who did.
His life moved as mine did now… always forward because he could not stop.
Work from dawn to dusk. Factory dust clinging to his lungs. Silence eating his chest like a sickness.
Night after night… too many to count… he spent them with one book reading it as though the only world he had left was pressed between its pages.
Artheria: the promised land.
The name glimmered inside my head.
Even here stumbling through a battlefield I heard it more clearly than the soldiers screaming around me.
I saw Reis cough blood for the first time.
And I tasted iron in my mouth the same instant.
I touched my head and felt my own blood… the scenes merging until I no longer knew which of us was bleeding more.
The doctor shocked him when he announced the cancer.
The factory where he worked had devoured his lungs as easily as these monsters devoured soldiers before me.
I saw Reis in his room refusing treatment ignoring calls from the clinic turning off his phone returning to his novels… as if stories were the only air he could breathe without pain.
His eyes grew dim. His body became a skeleton.
And on a black night… everything fell and darkened.
I felt him die and felt his final breath.
…
I opened my eyes.
The war still blazed before me and the sky boiled.
My body was cold and my wound still bled.
But I no longer felt like only a child… I felt like two beings at once an empty small figure drowned in mud… and a man who had endured too much silence and pain.
I breathed… and inside my chest was a voice I did not recognize.
I lifted my head toward the blackened sky and whispered with a rasping tremor.
"I just want to rest".
And it seemed to me that the sky for the first time understood what those words meant.