Captain Vinn Roland was both confused and concerned as he looked down on his wounded patient. Earlier that day, a strange group of great eagle riders, decorated with unknown patches left their commander in his care. They had flown off leaving one bird with red-dyed feathers in the hospital’s stable yard.
The commander himself was noted as Lieutenant Colonel Virgil Brook. He seemed restless, with a level of pain tolerance that was unbelievable. A broken arm and ribs would affect a normal man, but Brook was something else. He sat upright as Vinn dressed and stabilized his arm. In his left hand he was scratching out pages upon pages of notes.
When Vinn was finished, Brook clapped his book shut. Before he could comprehend it, his patient was already standing up and getting ready to leave. Brook wiggled back into his bloodied and torn coat, draping it over his shoulders and latching the brooch so it wouldn’t fall off.
“Thank you Captain,” he said, opening the door.
Vinn watched in horror as his patient made his slow escape.
“Sir, you still need to see the surgeon! There could be internal bleeding!”
“I don’t have time for that. I must be low on the triage if you didn’t do that first,” Brook complained. He glared back at Vinn, who placed a hand on his shoulder. “Are you trying to stop me?”
Vinn picked his words carefully. “You are not considering everything. Stay a day longer and the surgery will be done. In fact, I will call a surgeon right now.”
Brook ignored him and continued out into the hall. There was a rush of chaos in the hospital following the battle outside the city. Many of the ground troops were facing losses. The casualties filled the halls with red pain and death.
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“I don’t need my other arm to fly. The left one is good enough. I’ve considered the necessities of all that before, and unfortunately, this scrappy injury could not compare,” Brook sighed, fixing his cap. “My duty is beyond death.”
Indeed, Brook was a dead man walking.
Not much further, the colonel began coughing. He wiped the blood onto his coat. Things only got worse from there. Brook’s steps carried on drunkenly until he froze. Vinn saw all the signs, dashing to him before he could fall and settling him onto the tile floor. Vinn called on the other officers and they rushed to get a stretcher and some IVs.
Brook’s eyes sprung open and he tried to stand again. Vinn helped him to lean against the wall, but did not let him up.
“Get this information to Major Jones,” Brook ordered. “It’s the only way for everyone to survive.”
As a team of medical officers took Brook away on a stretcher, he flung the bloodied book out from his coat. Vinn picked it up off the floor with his gloved hand. Covertly, he took it into the bathroom to read. Behind the stall, under the florescent lights he saw the book in it’s entirety.
It looked like an ordinary novel, titled “Tales of a Dead Man.” The cover was orange leather with a red phoenix traced behind the title. Inside, there were letters filed in as bookmarks. Their postage marks had them going all over the country. The pages under them were poems written in the colonel’s hand, turning sharp and crooked at the last entries. Each poem was dated and signed: "From the Phoenix Commander, to the Crimson Elite…"
Vinn skimmed over the poems, gaining an insight into a common theme. In every single poem the commander, or the artistic representations of him, were killed.
“The cock crowed at the last sun. Blue dog left chasing birds…. The commander fell down, down, down, to sleep in the ground. In death, peace…. Birds sing from the trees. Blue dog and Orange cat chase the sun, up over the trees. Light blind the bee’s sting…”
It was all so convoluted. Vinn was not sure he could trust the colonel. He knew that pain could mess with people’s mind. Still, he did his best to read further into what the man wrote with his left hand.
The last line of every poem was: “win, or die again.” It all must have been some kind of code. Vinn was never much of a reader, but he hoped that the major Brook spoke of would understand.
As soon as his shift concluded he was going straight to the stable yard.