Fires burned bright, challenging the night and artic cold as men huddled close, dozing as they sat on pine boughs, many of them glancing at the man who walked the rampart of the stockade as he studied the night.

Corporal Anders worried about the Major, wanting to stand at this side as they waited for the morning battle, but Robert had made his desire for privacy clear. He paused on his way to the wall long enough to gratefully accept tobacco and a pipe from a soldier.

Many of them had seen this kind of behavior from their officers on the eve of a battle; it was the mark of an officer tormented by the cost of his orders. Another in the list of reasons the men willingly followed the Major. The iron of orders in battle came from the character of the man giving the order. A thousand men in a battalion could rid themselves of their officers with ease, but no man could sacrifice an outstanding officer, not willingly.

As he stood on the wall, Robert thought not of the coming battle. He remembered his home and family guessing this would be the last time given peace to drift into his imagination. Years of heart break did not dull the pain; it only became manageable.

Maria and his home were gone. The children and mother killed at the hands of Union irregulars out of Iowa, men deemed unacceptable for induction into the Army of the Potomac. Men who drank and thought burning the homes of Confederate citizens was proper behavior. Traveling home from the battle of the Wilderness with a healing bullet hole in his arm, Robert found only ruins and graves.

The people of town had suffered as well, old men and boys shot by northerners to prevent their joining Bobby Lee and the Army of Virginia. Houses burned, livestock slaughtered, war brought to the step of the townspeople’s door, then into their houses. What met Robert were people destined to die of poverty and starvation at the hands of drunks who considered themselves tasked with the righteousness of bringing punishment to the south.

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It was something Robert did not talk about often, but in his dreams, Maria and the children were still vibrant and alive. He feared there would come a time when he would retreat to his dreams never to come out.

This island was the forge that burned away the dross of his past until only the dreams that had kept him sane during the worse of the fighting remained. Yet dreams did not sustain a man. Human contact kept life intact. His man had become his family, the Army of Virginia, his home.

What became of a man who could only exist as a creation of war? Did he become a finely honed blade, or did he go insane? Robert suspected this might be the genuine question of Coal Island and its events, perhaps even the true reason the Robber King sought him out as an adversary. While it was honest to suggest all men who fought war were insane to varying degrees, it was a dangerous man who, while sane, could conceive and orchestrate the insanity of war. Was he a loyal creature of war?

Who was the actual monster on Coal Island?

Was he the same as the men who became ancient skeletons in a cave, so old that they become part of the bedrock of the island?

Were they all victims of creatures that delighted in the suffering of man?

Was it time to end the dominion of such creatures? Of one thing Robert was certain; they knew fear thus they could die, and all Robert needed was the opportunity to bring their fear to life.

Once more the northern lights danced in the night sky, a riot of colors that shone overhead as an eldritch energy barely restrained from lashing an unprotected world.

It was by the lights of God that Robert reconciled his past with the agony of the present and, in the forging, became the weapon once again.