In the twilight hour, Sister Rose tended to the flowers in the temple's walled garden. Though small, this tranquil space brought her peace amid the turmoil gripping her coastal city.
The delicate buds were on the cusp of blossoming into vibrant blooms. Rose smiled, plucking a ripe red teardrop-shaped petal and savoring its sweet flavor.
"Why do you waste time with that garden?" her blank eyed assistant said, scraping the mud clean from a hoe. "Why do you let yourself be attached to this garden? They will take that away too. Anything that we find joy and fun, they take it away. For good. Might as well cut them all and be done with it. What's the good of clinging to something you're bound to lose? If those invaders pay for the property when they damage or steal, that would be something, but they won't. They'll take this garden and destroy the last uncontaminated water well and that's the end of it."
Rose said nothing, watching a group of neighborhood children dart between the wavering tree shadows. Over the high hills, above the minaret, the evening star shone piercing clear.
It must have sparked something in another person, who had mistaken their conversation.
"This land was never theirs to take. Why can't you see that?" another man spat, words edged with bitterness. He traced the faded outlines of their homeland etched into the courtyard's ancient flagstones - a sprawling territory now divided vertically in the center into West and East.
His finger circled the small coastal city, the only region that wasn’t crossed out in the western half. The enemy’s land was over 60 times their size.
A dull rumble rippled through the earth, drawing gasps from the children, not thunder, but distant explosions.
“They set their evil heart on taking over this land. And once it falls, more violence will be directed towards our brothers and sisters in the West. We must not let this city go!"
“When the time comes, we may have to abandon the city." a man with a defeated look said. He bent to meet the child who came running on little, bare, white feet across the rough ground, and gathered her up in her arms. As he turned, he bent his head to kiss the child's hair, which was black; but his own hair, in the fire’s flicker, was fair.
The setting sun ushered in the night's chill, but Sister Rose felt a different kind of cold seeping into her bones. She knelt before the obsidian statue of the Fire Elemental, the eternal flame in its outstretched palm flickering.
A distant rumble, like far-off thunder, made the children tense. But the sky overhead remained a brilliant golden orange and majestic feathery clouds.
Another explosion rocked the temple, this one closer, louder. Plaster rained from the vaulted ceiling as the ground trembled beneath her knees.
Sister Rose scrambled to her feet, robes whipping around her calves as she raced through the arched doorway and into the courtyard beyond. A massive plume of oily black smoke billowed above the city's eastern quarter, lit from beneath by an angry orange glare.
"Come home, Children! Come home!"
The man stood outside, his own feet bare and cold on the ground, the sky darkening above him. His face in the dusk was full of grief, a dull, heavy, angry grief that he would never find the words to say. At last he shrugged, and followed his wife into the firelit room that rang with children's voices.
Shouts and screams echoed through the temple halls as civilians fled from their temporary shelters, barefoot or in sandals, eyes wide with panic. A young woman clutched a wailing infant to her chest, stumbling blindly until Rose caught her arm.
"This way!" She pulled the woman toward a narrow doorway, escorting her and a stream of other refugees into the relative safety of the reinforced cellar. "Stay here until—"
An ear-splitting blast detonated nearby, hurling Rose from her feet. She struck the stone floor in a haze of ringing ears and blurred vision. Someone screamed her name, but the sound was swallowed by a high-pitched ringing.
Dazed, she squinted against the clouds of burning white phosphorus billowing through the open doorway. The courtyard wall was gone, reduced to a pile of rubble. Beyond it...horror.
Bodies littered the once-serene garden plaza, broken and motionless amid the craters and spilled blood. An overturned cart spilled crates of vegetables, blasted into an unrecognizable pulp.
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A child's doll, once lovingly cradled, now lay eviscerated in a streak of crimson. Rose clamped a hand over her mouth, fighting back the surge of bile.
The silence that followed was shaken only by a cadence of boots. Through cracks in the roof of the temple, gaps between columns where a whole section of masonry and tile had collapsed, unsteady sunlight shone aslant.
It was an hour after sunset. The air was still and cold. Dead leaves of weeds that had forced up between marble pavement-tiles were outlined with blood, and crackled, catching on the long black robes.
And there, beyond that scorched pit of destruction, the soldiers marched in ruthless precision toward the temple. Riot gears concealed their features, but the Double Prism emblem blazoned on their green uniforms marked them as the enemy's soldiers.
Cradling the woman and her child against her with one arm, Rose reached with a trembling hand to retrieve her fallen cane. She braced it beneath her, using it to lever herself upright, broken chunks of masonry crunching beneath the hem of her robes.
"Stop, I beg you!" she cried.
One of the soldiers raised his arm, a cruel-looking rifle clutched in his gloved grip. No voice spoke, no eyes watched besides her own. Red scoring along the barrel's length glowed like a branding iron.
"Don't—" Rose tried to call out, but her voice cracked to a strangled whisper.
Too late. The soldier's finger tightened on the trigger, and a blinding lance of crimson energy lanced from the weapon's muzzle. It struck one of the wounded refugees—a man missing both legs, his tattered pants leaking blood from ragged stumps—and engulfed him in roaring flames.
His agonized screams filled the air, a soul-searing wail that seemed to stretch on for an eternity before mercifully fading as his charred remains crumbled to ash.
Rose flinched as bullets whipped past, instinctively shielding the young mother and her child, bile burning her throat as the young mother sobbed against her shoulder.
Through a haze of stinging tears, she met the gaze of the soldier who had fired the fatal shot. He cocked his head almost quizzically, as if studying an insect pinned to a board. Then he raised his rifle again, taking aim at another survivor struggling among the rubble.
A tremor raced through Rose's frame, not of fear but of rage. These people—her friends, her flock—cowered in terror as the soldiers casually, callously extinguished their lives.
Gathering the last of her strength, Rose straightened her spine and leveled the soldier with a look of pure, undisguised loathing. "You will go no further, murderers!" she shouted, her words ringing with conviction. "Not one more step into these sacred grounds!"
The soldier froze, rifle drooping slightly as his helmeted head swiveled toward her. Then, as one, the column pivoted in her direction and raised their weapons.
Rifles barked, unleashing torrents of tracer fire that kicked up fist-sized craters in the rubble-strewn earth. Rose flinched, instinctively shielding the woman and child as shrapnel whipped past her face.
A pair of wiry arms encircled her from behind, dragging her backwards into the sheltered alcove.
Rose thrashed against the iron grip, feet scrabbling for purchase. "I won't abandon them! Let me go!"
"We have to get you out of here!" It was Fatin, one of the younger acolytes. Terror shone in his dust-streaked face. His thin face was streaked with dust and tears. "They'll kill us all if we don't run!"
"I won't run and leave them to slaughter the innocent!" Rose snarled, slamming an elbow into Fatin’s sternum. He wheezed, doubling over as she wrenched free and stumbled back toward the open courtyard.
A piercing shriek split the air, so unbearable that Rose instinctively clapped her hands over her ears. One of the soldier's projectiles had punched through the stone archway in a spray of debris, missing her head by a hair's breadth. Muzzle flashes flickered like dragonfire behind the rippling haze of heat distortion.
"Sister Rose!" Fatin shouted, voice barely audible over the din. He lunged for her, straining to drag her away from the hail of bullets chewing through the crumbling masonry around them.
"We can't—"
A brilliant lance of crimson plasma seared through the smoke and dust, striking him square in the chest. The young man's eyes went impossibly wide, mouth frozen in a silent scream as the fire consumed him from within.
For an endless second, Rose saw Fatin's skull burn against the blinding flare. Then with a horrible rush of heat, he disintegrated to ashes as his remains scattered on the wind.
"No!" She lashed out at the swirling smoke and debris, torn between the urge to scream and collapse into hopeless weeping. How many more would die this day?
Her hands clenched into white-knuckled fists. Through bleary eyes, she sought the form of the murderer who had immolated Fatin. There—a darker silhouette at the vanguard of the column against the billowing smoke, rifle already realigning.
As if sensing her gaze, the trooper swiveled to face her, raising his weapon to present another shot.
In that frozen moment of clarity, the two locked eyes from across the shattered ruin of the courtyard. Rose saw the glint of the soldier's dark visor, the merciless lines of his faceplate and double-prism insignia. She bared her teeth in a feral snarl, letting all the anguish and hatred roaring through her soul blaze in her eyes.
The rifle blazed again, but Rose had already pivoted into the smoke-shrouded shadows. Let them come. Her foot squelched in a pool of blood as she fled deeper into the ruined temple.
Next time, she will destroy them, and not care for their lives and not see the terrors in their eyes.
Blistering tears blurred her vision. Fatin’s broken body was swallowed behind her, along with the screams of the dying and the charnel reek of scorched flesh
She promised that when the time came for retaliation, she would not spare a shred of mercy.
Her foot squelched in a puddle of blood, and Rose bared her teeth in a savage grin. They would regret this day, regret coming to shed innocent blood on these consecrated grounds.
She would make sure of it.