A pig was brought out to be butchered, and Zelsys was once more put to task as organic heavy machinery, this time in killing the creature. Remembering the captive-piston tool used by many modern butchers, she turned to the pig’s owner, who was holding the fat thing in place alongside several other men.
“You don’t need the skull intact, right?”
“Of course not.”
With that, she simply pressed her fist against the beast’s forehead, drew it back a few centimeters, and with a motion too fast for mortal sight she caved its head in. In a spray of brain matter, it was dead on the spot. She realized she could’ve just killed it with a shock through the brain, but the uproarious reception proved to her that this was the better option. It didn’t matter to the pig anyway, its death instantly either way. Her work wasn’t over yet, as she helped foist the carcass onto a hook, but after that, the men of the village took over with their long butchering knives. The butchery was accompanied by so-called “Slaughter Rolls”, a type of pastry filled with fruit preserves. In this case, that filling was blueberry jam scooped straight out of the pot.
There came up, of course, the question of the statue and the weirdly familiar barrier, to which Zef’s father, Franz, elucidated with a description of a weirdly familiar cultivator.
Both Zel and Zef found the whole affair to be slightly surreal, and so did the original Zefaris, who jokingly chastised Zef: “My name?! Weren’t my lunches enough?”
They looked nothing alike - Zefaris Eberlin was a short, thickly built woman with hazel eyes, freckles, and screamingly-bright orange hair.
“Looks like you’ve done well for yourself despite Stephan’s rejection back then…” Eberlin continued, looking Zelsys up and down. “But I really expected you to go for some huge military officer when you said you’d find someone a head taller than him.”
Zef’s eye went wide as an old memory came to the surface, and she muttered: “I had forgotten I ever said that.”
“Well, you always did go for the tall ones. It just took you a while to find a tall one that went for you.”
“It’s not my fault nearly all the boys my age were barely taller than me.”
The modest feast went on for some time, and the duo remained well past that point, only departing late into the night. Zef had quietly left behind some minor gifts that would’ve been refused had she tried to give them over openly, but before they could leave, Franz followed them with a strange bundle in hand.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Some two years after you left, I met a leshy in the woods. It had these three small little antlers on its head, and when it saw me, it just tore the middle one straight off and gave it to me. I… I think you were supposed to have it. Take it. Have scales for that gun of yours made from it or somesuch, whatever you cultivators do with this kind of thing. Remember us by it.”
Zefaris briefly considered suggesting moving to her parents, but she killed that thought and simply took the gift, bidding her father one last goodbye. She knew that they would refuse and that the obscurity of Arthal made them safer here than anywhere within a hundred kilometers of Willowdale.
The two of them went on to reunite with Victor, Jorfr, and Lydia at Fort 57. From there, the journey back to Willowdale went more or less without incident, save for a heretofore unplanned detour of Zef’s suggestion. She had suggested it right after her and Zelsys left Arthal - a stop at a particular battlefield. It wasn’t widely known, or a lucrative target for scavengers.
“It’s just… Just the place I rightly should’ve died is all. I knew I would die if I obeyed the command, so I pulled the stunt that landed us in the Exclusion Zone. I figure I ought to pay my proper respects to the poor fools who did end up meeting their ends atop that hill. At least a full third of all badge-carrying doppelsoldaten met their deaths there, as far as I know.”
And so, their last stop before entering Willowdale’s territory was that battlefield,
Between Fort 57 and that place, however, was still Arches. Their visit to the small city went utterly without incident. If anything, the duchy was doing better than before. The Duma School, too, was doing well. Victor’s brief appearance had his former classmates and instructors taken aback, Duma most of all. The old man called him inside, and they spoke in privacy for the better part of half an hour. He spoke nothing of what they had discussed, but both his and Duma’s moods seemed to have improved.
From Arches, it was straight to that battlefield. It was well away from any major road, away from any significant strategic target like a city. They reached the edge of it, and from there, Zefaris walked out on her own.
“I have to do this myself,” she said, and none among them disputed her words.
----------------------------------------
Here she was. The field upon which she should’ve died. One where the bones of thousands yet lay, their bodies buried not just by mud, but by a sprawling field of flowers - Burial Lilies, a cultivar dating back to to the height of Ankhezia. Each flower was a single thin, forearm-length stalk crowned by a flower of eight pointed petals with a purple stripe going halfway down the middle. There, in that field, a handful of yet taller blossoms stood, pointing up on stalks as thick as fingers and with flowers of six split-ended, purple petals. Zefaris knew those flowers, their value, their killing poison.
She wasn’t here for them.
She was there to honor the dead, those by whose side she should have rightly fallen. There, atop that hill, they still stood and knelt and laid, in the broken ruins of what had once been a small lookout fort. Wrecks of early one-man tanks dotted the land around the ruins, and inside them, more fallen were to be found. Doppelsoldaten to a man.