PROLOGUE

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The Empire of Patria was on its last legs. Once the beacon of civilization and technological prowess, it now suffered the ravages of war and destruction as the rest of the world worked to dismantle their prey bit by city-sized bit. The empire and its people awoke to a bleak, new day, a shell of their former prideful selves, pushed back to their capital with the shattered remnants of their military in a desperate fight for a dying nation.

Far away from the front lines, however, two soldiers hobbled their way over to a quaint little farmhouse atop a gently-sloped hill, an injured man resting an arm across the shoulders of a uniformed young woman, both wearing the telltale shades of grey so favoured by the Patrian Ground Forces. They were filthy, exhausted, with blank looks in their hazel eyes as they stopped before the rotting corpses of a small family a few metres away from their home.

The frazzled black hair on their heads was enough to tell them that these people were Vardian, so they did not turn the bodies over to check for the blue irises so common to their enemies’ people. Besides, decay had probably gotten to the poor family’s eyes by now, and the two did not intend to expose themselves to horrible sights any more than they already had.

“We didn’t do this, did we?” asked the woman, the insignia on her clothing marking her a junior officer in the ground forces. She grimaced at the sight of flies buzzing around the bodies, which she tried to swat away in futility.

“We… we likely did, ma’am,” replied the man — tall, worn, and unhealthy as only an experienced grunt would be. He had on his clothing nothing to betray his rank, wearing only a loose-fitting pair of trousers, a stained white undershirt, and a leather belt strapped around one leg like a tourniquet. His gaze refused to settle on the lifeless family, instead looking to the farmhouse beyond. “We can bury them. Just… just put me down at that porch there, I’ll patch myself up.”

The woman flashed him a weak and weathered smile before they resumed their ungainly march. He knew she would want to give these people an honourable burial, their Vardian heritage notwithstanding. That was reflective of the reason he made the irrational choice to try and protect her in the first place, and it was all he could do to enable her naive kindness even amidst the darkness of this gods-forsaken war.

He clutched his rifle until his knuckles turned white as he thought back on all that he had lost in vain. He thought about the horrible decisions he had been forced to make, the terrible atrocities he had become a part of. His nation’s crimes were many and inexcusable, with untold millions lost, ruined, and forever changed. The brotherhood that had once given him a sense of identity, a sense of purpose, was miles away in a siege that they could never break, one they could only lose. There was no hope to be had for his fatherland nor his comrades, but he found himself hoping for something, anything, anyway.

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The woman, however, was a different case. As she set him down on the floor of the farmhouse’s wooden porch, tending to him with every fibre of her attention she could muster, he could not find a trace of detachment in her eyes. There, he found nothing but her presence in the here and now, none of the meandering regrets that so pervasively plagued his own thoughts. It was puzzling, and he could not tell whether that meant that she was strong or that he was weak. He did not want to be weak, to lag behind his fellows in any sense of the phrase, for it went against everything he had ever known. Such was the dedication to unity and fellowship fostered amongst the Patrian people, and its excess became their undoing in a world of factional infighting.

He shrugged to himself as he unfastened the makeshift tourniquet tightly bound to his upper knee, causing a trickle of blood to exit the piercing wounds in the muscle of his calf. It hurt, a lot, but his pride would never let it show as anything more than a pained grunt. He nodded to the woman, guiding her attention back to the corpses they’d left behind before fastening new bandages onto his injuries. She gave him another weak smile before walking off to give the dead family their last rites.

She buried their bodies as close as she could to their home, her face scrunching up every time she had to place their bloated corpses into the graves. They were stiff and cold where the rot had yet to run its course, soft and mushy where wounds and scrapes still festered. She tried to avoid looking too closely at their faces, never quite managing to become accustomed to the depressing visages of the dead. After fashioning simple gravestones out of large rocks and pebbles she could find nearby, she muttered a silent prayer wishing them peace in their next lives.

The injured man watched on from the porch as he tightened the leather belt above his knee. The sun was rising now, bathing the fields in warm, orange light. He’d grown used to hearing the voices of those who died beside him, their shrill cries still haunting his every thought. Faint sounds of gunfire would still echo from battles raging near and far. In this moment, though, there was none of that.

There was only silence, and there was only her, praying over the bodies of a people she should have considered her enemy, in an expansive field of grain far, far away from home. The sun bathed the scene in the light of dawn, its warmth seeping through the cracks of even his cold, jaded heart. He watched on in horror at the depravity of everything he had ever done, as if a veil of resignation had been lifted from his eyes, giving way to a sickening acceptance of all that ever was. The world and everything in it just seemed so ugly in comparison.

For the first time in his life, he let tears fall from his eyes without restraint.

For the first time in his life, he would allow himself to be weak.