They said the world was changing. Who they was remained ever a mystery, but it was becoming a truth too difficult to ignore for Charlie. Steam had made machines that would never have been possible even with the myriad power of the shadows of the Gods. Great machines that could build things of steel like they were as malleable as butter. Printing presses that could make paper at a thousand times the speed as any chosen or lost could ever hope for. Even large wagons that could move on their own were said to be in production.
Of course, with change comes progress, and with progress, war.
“Line up you soft-headed nert fucks!” The commander shouted. His shout always sent a wave of shock through her, but Charlie had slowly become used to it. Messengers weren't worth training time, so she hadn't been fortunate enough to have been placed under a proper drill sergeant. She supposed it would be something like this, though she imagined the shouting might be a bit more bearable if she thought it was for the purpose of teaching her. That might just be a pleasant thought, though.
“This message needs to get to the captain of the fifth, and by all the Gods it will! Even if every single one of you nert-licking bastards ends up with no arms and half a leg, the Captain WILL see this message!” He shouted again, causing Charlie to flinch. Everyone seemed to be shouting here. it was like it was an unwritten requirement to shout everything at everyone.
That was what a battle was, she guessed.
“On the count of three, messengers one through five will run to the east side toward third company. Messengers six through ten will head to west side toward twelfth company. You two,” He said, pointing at her and the only other messenger that had the bad luck to be lost. “Will head northside, toward lost company,” he said with a malicious grin.
The lieutenant often had that grin when he spoke to her and the lost boy. She didn't need to wonder why. Their orders alone were all that was needed to make it clear exactly what he intended for the two of them. The lost company had been assigned as the vanguard for the leading push against the enemy, and they were facing them head on.
The enemy chosen were all in position to defend against the push of lost company, and there was little hope of them being anything but walking shields for the flanks of the army. Third and twelfth company would be the heroes of the day. Lost company was just going to be the bodies that littered the ground and nothing more. She doubted they would even be buried in a mass grave. Numbers on a ledger. That was all they would be by days end. She among them, if she were to place a guess.
Charlie and her 'friend' would be heading right into that meatgrinder as well. Nothing more than an extra attempt at reaching the captain of the fifth - they were a redundancy. A redundancy that was meant to fail.
“Three!” the lieutenant shouted.
Charlie got herself into position to run through the field. They were covered well enough in headquarters, but they would be open to enemy fire as soon as they left the safety of the command tent. The enemy knew of the value of a dead messenger. They would be lucky if any three of them were to make it to the captain of the fifth.
“Two!” a second shout from the lieutenant. He grinned all the wile, nearly salivating as he watched the messengers get in running position. The other messengers, the chosen of their group, at least had some sort of help for the run. Two of them were chosen of lesser wind Gods, and the rest had some sort of stealth apostles. They had a decent shot of making it. Assuming they weren't taken out by a stray apostle or arrow, that was. Maybe even one of the experimental weapons she had been hearing about. That would be an experience, at least.
“One!” The final count. It would be go next, and that might be the very last word Charlie would ever hear. That would be a joke alright. Dying at the final call of a countdown. At least it was poetic.
“GO GO GO!” Three shouts; the call to run. It was the only official training that any of them had ever received in warfare. The rest amounted to what they could learn from the older runners or what they managed to sneak from the hushed whispers of the elite runners. Though it was of little help, in the end.
Pushing out of the tent in a frenzy among the other messengers was perhaps the most frightened Charlie had ever been in her short life. In nineteen years she had never experienced the sickening nausea and fear that plagued her at that very moment. Every sound was torture, and each step was filled with the anticipation of being her very last step on this wretched soil.
Her blood would nourish the ground, and from it, plants would grow. That would be the totality of her existence. A patch of nourished grass in a battle forgotten to time. That was what Charlie Anise would amount to, and nothing more.
Fear was what pushed her forward. She was marked as a messenger by the blue ribbon tied to her hair, despite what common sense would dictate. It stopped friendly fire, they had told her, and she had no reason to doubt it. The enemy wouldn't miss a sprinting maniac in the middle of a battle field in any case, so it mattered little. She was a runner. A runner without an apostle and with an arm too destroyed by factory work to be of any use. She was expendable, and that thought drove her.
Fear had become everything as she left headquarters. She had lost the rest of the runners to their own positions already, with the singular exception of the boy at her side. He was huffing and puffing already, before even reaching the battle line. He was destined to become nert shit then, same as her. At least she wouldn't be the only lost messenger to die that day. She would be in good company when meeting her ancestors.
Looking out into the battle line was an experience she didn't think she would forget in what remained of her short life. Apostles crashed into infantry formations, sending men flying with screams of rage and pain. Whole swaths of men were cut down in single volleys by ranged chosen, falling into lines of lost like the felling of grain. Men died wordlessly, their deaths too abrupt to be made aware of. They died without ever knowing what had killed them.
Others were cut into and apart by weapons of every kind. Long red scythes were a favorite, the apostles of the war Gods, second only to the swords that were the standard issue from the lesser God of soldiers. Each attack cleaved men in two, leaving limbs scattering about the field of battle. Organs of all colors were sprinkled about, and med and women alike held their insides as best they could. Many tried shoving things back into place or holding onto lost limbs, but in truth it was a death sentence.
The grass had become muddied with all of the marching and blood that had soaked the earth. Comparing it to the field of only days past was futile. A connection in her mind to what it was and what it had been simply refused to be made. There was no reconciling what was in front of her and what she had seen only three says ago, filled with hope to her survival., and the sight currently before her.
The smell of war had arrived even to the edge of headquarters. The smell of mud, blood and shit. They were the smell of dead men and women, and they would be the only smell that Charlie was ever likely to have again.
That thought stung more than she had imagined it would.
The battle line of the lost company was the center of carnage. Rank on rank of bodies were sent to fill the gaps left when their comrades died, where they would meet the same attacks that had felled their friends. Some chosen were cut down, only to be replaced by more in a heartbeat. They were less men at arms and more waves of an ocean of death. Each tide being drawn back and forth with the movement and reinforcement of men replacing the dead.
The lost company was less a wave and more a waterfall. Men were sent to the edge to fall and die, only to be replaced by the never ending torrent that was the lost. The Enemy chosen were more a tide at a beach. Where each small movement was brought back and forth by the gentle waves of reinforcement.
It was mesmerizing, in a way. Seeing the faces of the men as they met their end was less so.
Charlie was cut out of her reverie when a severed hand landed not thrity span away, leaving a thin and dotted trail of blood in its wake. The lost boy, looking onward, turned a shade of pale that left his already white skin a gaunt grey. Charlie imagined she looked the same.
“Where to?” He asked, his voice sounding more calm than she might ever have imagined. “Where else but the center?” She replied in the same way. She had become too frightened to even sound frightened. How novel.
The boy gulped at that, and she followed suit. There was no other way than the center for this advance, and she knew it. Going around the company was only going to mark them as runners, where they would certainly be targets for the more specialist members of the enemy ranks. Not only bone and earth, but stone as well. Better to blend in with the enlisted men. They would be another face in the crowd then. Another body in the tide.
She could only hope the blue ribbon would not be spotted until she had made it to the safety of fifth company.
She broke out into a sprint to clear the second company in front, who were serving as the rearguard. They were a neat, orderly line compared to the chaos of the rest of the battle. Men stood bored as they waited and watched for an enemy flanking action. They would probably be deployed sooner or later to reinforce some area of the battle or other, but frankly, it didn't matter to Charlie or her comrade in arm. They would be dead by then.
She pushed through the lines of men, holding onto her message satchel all the while. enlisted men were prone to taking things that might hold value, and the satchel of a messenger usually held all they had to their name. It was a treasure trove of goods for the common soldier. After all, if a messenger lost their stachel, they were dead either way.
Her lost friend was following in her path, using the small gaps she had made in the line of men to his advantage as he followed her into the company line. He was breathing very hard already. She figured she would have to leave him behind, sooner or later.
Pushing to the front of the formation, past all of the hard looks the rest of the men had shot at her, she saw up close the battle. It was as she had seen before, only worse. The blood seemed more vivid up close. More red, more vibrant. It was almost beautiful. The smell of iron and shit cut that out of her mind rather quickly, and the carnage resumed. Ethereal beauty was not at home on a battle field, she learned. It was a place of carnage and death. Nothing more.
Her comrade broke through the line of men next, and they shared only a small look before heading right to the front lines. They were a few hundred span from lost company, so the run was a short one, but this would be one of the most dangerous.
The grass of the field was muddy, and she felt her feet fall in with each and every step. The suction of the mud caused her to stumble a few steps, where an arrow whizzed by her skull and crashed into the ground at her feet. Charlie didn't even stumble at that. She ran onward as if she hadn't survived death by only a mere few inches. Death was already coming for her. A few more steps was all she would manage.
Crossing the first hundred span was almost peaceful. Her eyes on the backs of lost company was her only goal, with the sound of her and her companions breathing the only focusing anchor she could keep to. Apostles fell near her a few times, but missed in every case.
She was terrified. Her breathing was not the simple in and out that had been her sole saving grace as a runner, but haggard and rough. She felt more exhausted than she ever thought possible. The distant back of lost company was a receding and distant thing, something she would never reach. Each and every step instilled a deeper and more real sense of danger than the one before. The closer to the front she and her companion went the more real everything had become. The distant screams began to take on a weight greater than those before.
Eventually the first corpses began appearing. The bodies that had been flung furthest by the attacks of apostles, she figured. They were among the most ragged and torn apart of the battle, she had heard, and the sight confirmed it. She struggled to see any of them as the men or women they had been. They were uniforms in the mud, with reddened masses that might once have been limbs or heads. Broken was all they were now, and a number was all they would become. Fuel for the empire. Bodies for the king. Nourishment for their own patch of grass.
The attacks became more and more frequent with each step as they moved closer to lost company. She felt the fletching of an arrow graze the sleeve of her uniform, only to see a small tear down the side and a bleeding cut on her arm. It was her useless arm, so she barely felt it. Looking at the blood that ran from her arm without the sensation of pain built a distance for her. A sort of unreality.
The body of a lost that was flung next to her broke her out of that as well. She thought it was an arm and a torso. It might have been a leg instead. She ran past it with her comrade, panting but keeping in step beside her.
Lost company was beginning to get closer and closer. The shouts were nearly deafening, and the clanging of steel and iron nearly deafened her to the sounds of her own breathing. Everything was consumed by the battle in front of her. With that, the sounds of death grew as well.
She could see up close the destruction of her fellow lost. An attack from the apostle of a chosen of war swept through a line of them like butter, and eight men fell. At least they used to be men. Or perhaps women as well. Now they were bodies. No longer men but corpses. One second they were walking, talking and filled with hopes dreams and aspirations, and in an instant they were corpses.
It was with a quiet disconnect that she realised she would take that place soon enough. How novel.
Finally they reached the chaos of the back lines of lost company. She couldn't make out any sergeants to talk to about their options. They would have been cut down by the specialist chosen of the enemy rather quickly, she imagined. the regular enlisted men wouldn't have any idea about the whole of the battle, focused as they were on surviving their upcoming situation. That left only her and her comrade, who was now sporting a gash on his thigh and a severe burn across his face that had taken his right eye and most of the skin on that side of his forehead. He wouldn't survive the day.
“Where to next,” He asked with a wince. Charlie admitted to herself that he was a lot tougher than he looked. If only that mattered.
“We need to make it to the captain of the fifth!” She shouted at him. It was the only way she would be heard in all of this mess. She was happy that she had been right about that at the very least.
A crashing explosion from an apostle proved that point further, as some of the men around them were scattered about in various states of destruction. She saw a few of the survivors begin to crawl away, and distantly noted that they would die soon enough. Their wounds were too grievous to make it out alive. One of them held onto a charred leg in their mouth; their own, she figured. The taste must have been foul, she idly thought.
“And where is that!” Her comrade shouted back. It was a place for shouting, after all.
“He should be to the east, Just in front of third company!” She shouted to him. That was where fifth company was meant to be. They would lead the flank on the east side and cut off the retreat for the enemy while third company protected and reinforced their rear. They hoped it would be an encircling maneuver, but it was just as likely to become a failure if the captain didn't receive the message in her and every other runner's satchel. They were all redundancies. All they needed was one runner lucky or skilled enough to make it and all would be well.
Her comrade nodded to her and they both headed in the direction of third company. There were divots left behind from the attacks of some of the stronger chosen. They were filled with pools of blood and guts by now, but they were safe enough from enemy fire for the two of them to wade into.
Their navy blue uniforms became stained with red and brown from the mud and blood of the battlefield. There were attacks from all around her now. The enemy had finally seen the two blue ribbons that she and her companion carried, and they were focusing their attacks on the rear line of lost company. Some of the men began to form a defence around them, as was the duty of the enlisted men, but they were cut down with each volley of attacks. They looked resentful as they died, and Charlie wasn't sure as to who it was directed at. Her? the enemy? The command? who knew.
Crawling through each bloody divot, becoming showered in mud and blood with each attack, Charlie grew absent from the battle. She would die soon. The attacks were constant. It would happen any moment now. She was sure of it. It was as if a frozen hand was reaching into her chest with each movement she made. Maybe that was just the cold from the mud on her uniform and boots.
And with that thought, an arrow took her in the chest, and all went black.