Victor sat in his room, silent, lost in thought. His shoulders, once wide and full of power, were slumped. His hair, once a beautiful mess of oak brown curls, started to become grey. His cheeks turned papery and brittle, accentuating his dark eyeshadow that had came from the stress and pain in war. Now insomnia worsened his look, making him, a once proud and strong young man seem old and broken. With every movement his muscles ached and his bones protested profoundly. His youthful vigor disappeared during war. with sad empty eyes, he was looking at the old, rugged carpet. It had long lost its color, and its fibers were unwound. It had once been a gift from his late girlfriend, she died before even he enlisted. Long ago, just after the war had concluded, he had to harvest the carpet for the golden fibers that were threaded into the, at the time, dark green work of art, just to buy food to survive. Back then, it pained him, but now he could not be bothered to waste his time mourning over this materialistic loss. He was different back then, eager to serve his country, eager to defeat and conquer the enemy whose name he could not even remember. Nothing mattered anymore. The barracks he lived in slowly deteriorated, and the entire roof had already collapsed under the rain that had fallen since the end of the war. With the rain, the last colors drained from this world. Even the old candle standing on the only piece of furniture left in his room, a lonely grayish stool, burned with a sickening hollow orange tone. The once blue mattress he sat upon was now gray from mold, and the feathers inside were snapped and dusty. Though it was his only respite from this world, he did not care to replace or clean it; attempts to do so would have been futile anyway since factories and production had collapsed seven years ago, the waters were filled with disease, and the smell of the dead and every bit of energy he wasted toward anything but sitting, eating, and sleeping was wasted effort.
He gave up his last hope two years ago. He had finally stopped searching for supplies and materials to rebuild the sad room he resided in. Time had made everything rot into dust and nothingness. The city's highest point, on which the now broken down star-fortress stood, a sign of might and power a long time ago, was the place where the barracks he had lived in for the past 17 years were based. It stood in the middle of the ruins and scraps that he once considered his motherland, a grey and wet speck of solitude in an ocean of mold and rusted structures that extended their beams and broken walls towards him, as if accusing him of forgetting, forgetting what they had once stood for. Thus there was nothing left for him to rebuild.
He believed that he would grow old, have grandchildren, and reminisce about the time he spent with his comrades. However, the only thing remaining in his mind was their lifeless bodies, broken and mangled by gunfire and shrapnel. Their dried brown blood stained the uniforms they wore with pride and honor until then. They died, stripped of their ideals, having long lost the patriotism that had made their hearts burn. Nothing more remained of the memories he had of them. Their Names were obscured by the pure hatred he had felt at the time, the hatred and anger that had driven him to survive. He fought like a madman, caring little for his well-being. This had grabbed the attention of a handful of higher-ranking officials, and he was promptly and unceremoniously promoted to lieutenant, despite never having attended military school. After the fifth year of the war, his platoon was almost wiped of the battlefield and suffered 23 casualties under heavy artillery fire from the enemy backlines.
23 Young men wiped from this world. 20 could not even usher their last words. Before his eyes, they were ripped to shreds, pierced, burned and mangled. The remaining three were still alive, coughing blood screaming, and in pain. It sounded so broken, as if screaming into a rusty bucket combined with a wet gurgling emerging from their esophagus. A symphony of brutality and cruelty. A cold horror gripped his heart, extinguishing the flames he bore inside of it. He froze and a cold sweat broke from his pores. He could not help but remain still. He revered in the silence that followed the bombardment, only broken by the screams of the men before him. He raised his dirty revolver. He remembered not feeling anything as the world screeched to a halt. As he pulled the trigger, he saw the eyes of the soldiers writhing in pain in front of him. Their expressions were full of fear and pain, with tears running from their eyes. They were so young, 18 at best, since the reserves and the country ran out of the resource they needed most: people to fight. Thus he executed them. He mercilessly euthanized children who did not know the world outside of war. He knew he had done the right thing, to free them of their suffering, to free them of the war. Except, what did freedom mean anymore? In the seconds he took their lives, something left him, never to return and maybe, just maybe, he told himself, they could have lived. The gunshot's ringing in his ears subsided.
Then silence.
A veil of dust and fire settled on the battlefield. At that moment, he finally took the time to take everything in–the smell of powder, the heat of the burning earth, the sweat and blood on the dead grass, and finally, the smell of the dead reverberating like a heavy mass of silent screams and pain. Suddenly, he was pulled back into reality by the dampened sounds of the next barrage fired at their trenches, and he was pulled back by his subordinates, out of enemy infantry fire raining upon him, which he had ignored as he was captivated by the moment of sadness.
Regaining troops from his motherland to compensate for the loss of his men, he he kept fighting. The next years of war went by in a daze, it had felt meaningless and morale dropped day by day. Three years after the incident, the offensive came to a screeching halt, completely restricting the advance of his regiment. From then on out both armies were like two wheels, grinding each other, killing and dying, no winner in sight. It took two years to break the morale of all sides. Due to supply shortages, the last days were brutal close-combat fights, with all tactics and training forgotten. In the end, no one cared to fight anymore. Morale had finally died and everything worth fighting for had been destroyed long ago. The ones that were left, dropped their weapons and started making their way back home, hoping to see their family once more, hoping to look them in the eyes and tell them of the love and longing they felt for those at home. But what was left was merely death and destruction. Thus, the feeling of anger flared up again, anger at the ones that waged the war, the politicians and governments that sought to conquer the lands, the lands that had now become so meaningless. However, all of them died in the last year of the war, slain by the women and children that had remained. Killed in despair, in an attempt at stopping the war, in a bloody civil war that consumed the nations from the inside. Unbeknownst to the poor souls fighting at the front, all that was left for them at home was ruins and their dead children, starved and beaten.
And thus, the ten-year-long war that spanned the globe ended and with it, hope finally died.