My leaden head leaned against the cold stone of the cave we had turned into a defensive encampment, watching down the slopes as the first snows fell. It was my turn to keep vigil, so I pressed myself to the wall of the cave mouth and stared out, eyes almost glassy as they watched for an enemy assault. Or at least, that was what I was supposed to be looking for.

Instead, I observed the snowflakes: one after the next and the next. They fell perfect, white, self-contained worlds that knew nothing of the suffering they melted against. The stones here stood scarred by blasts and small arms fire, the ground beyond our cave more like the surface of the moon than a normal mountainside. With winter coming to the valley, there was little green growth for the frost to claim that napalm and firebombs had not already destroyed.

That was their solution: to bombard us for hours upon hours, hoping to break us. What had we done? Hidden in our holes and then, as they reloaded and their planes coursed away, returned fire with the few shots we had. Others had volunteered to sabotage enemy armor and never returned, dying in hellish flame that took the tanks with them.

It was like the same day, lived over and over, for a thousand lives. The only difference was the little inch of ground won or lost. At least, until the reports trickled in.

They are leaving, our scouts reported. All of them are pulling out.

The others were celebrating behind me over scraps of bread and a bottle of some rotgut liberated from the corpse of an enemy. I shivered in the cold night air away from the fire, nestling deeper into my field jacket and the three layers of stolen shirts I wore underneath it. I carried my piece of bread like a talisman in my coat pocket, picking it apart tiny crumb by tiny crumb over the course of the week. I ate like a songbird. Survival, even victory, sweet as it was, meant there were no more rations to pilfer.

I heard rocks scatter lower down the approach and turned to look, bringing my sights up to my eye. I still used iron sights and an older model of rifle, even with the new weapons we'd captured. Mine was more reliable, required less cleaning, and suited me fine. It could kill. That was all I wanted.

A small group of people trudged up the path, but the cloth they held up was our flag. That didn't ‌mean it was safe, however. We had ambushed enough groups to know how such a game was played. I grabbed my radio, barely more secure than a child's walkie-talkie. "Identify yourselves."

The radio crackled as it came to life. "We're Telenni Section, ZDF."

"Who is leading your section?" My questions came as crisp and clear as the winter wind.

"Semele Kontos."

I straightened up. That was Ioudas's sister, which meant she had survived the war so far. It had been months since they had last spoken. Which meant...which meant... "Why are you here at our position?" I asked, feeling suddenly faint.

A familiar voice came on the radio. "We are your relief," Semele said.

Those words made no sense. It took me a moment to process, sluggish in my thought even though the muscle reflexes of my aim were still strong and quick. "I thought you were fighting on the southern edge of the valley."

"They pulled out there two weeks ago. It's been all quiet, enough for us to redeploy. You're supposed to rotate back home."

I sat down hard, every ache and weakness of the flesh for the past six months hitting me in an instant. I remember making a noise, a little sob that stirred my comrades out of their celebration. As much as my body gave in, however, my mind couldn't understand what Semele was saying.

Home? We were going home? We the dead, who had manned our posts without relief for more than six months? We the dead, whose supplies came scavenged from the bodies of our foes? We who had lost toes and fingers to frostbite, we whose ribs jutted like the ridges on a washboard, we who had done everything we could, fought everything we could, with nothing for so long that we could not remember what it was like to have something? No, no, no. That was impossible.

I touched my little square of bread for comfort as Ioudas approached, offering no resistance as he took the radio from my hand. His joy at hearing his sister's voice was a flicker across my emptiness, sunlight falling into void. I stood up, as would a marionette worked by twitching fingers, and immediately made my way to Lydia and the others as Ioudas started shouting his relief and welcome to the four winds.

"What's wrong, Karsa?" Lydia asked, looking up at me.

We shared a pain, both of us missing a family like a limb that left only a phantom pain in its absence. At least she knew hers was dead. My Endeis's fate, my parents' fates, were utterly unknown. I told myself not to hold onto hope, that I was only torturing myself more, but I wanted so desperately to believe that they were alive somewhere, that I was not alone.

But that is the truth, isn't it? That we are all alone.

"We are being relieved," I said gently. "They want us to go back to the villages."

None of us really believed it except Ioudas, not until the unit stepped in. They were a little rough around the edges, wearing mismatched clothes that could hardly be considered a uniform except for their armbands or sashes of indigo, but they were ruddy-cheeked and fed. The bombardments that had destroyed our supply lines had apparently been far less frequent in the south.

Semele's face went white when she saw us, with our hollow eyes and hollow cheeks, dressed like scarecrows, battered and bruised from concussion or bloodied from shrapnel. The enemy withdrew with plenty of parting shots. They wanted no pursuit, perhaps presuming we were stronger than we were, just because we had fought them like demons.

The moment she snapped back to herself, she started issuing orders, so much older than last time I had seen her. I felt like I had seen centuries go by me, one inch at a time. The first medic to come near me, I pointed to Lydia. I came back to myself for a moment, fixated on making certain that everyone in my team received the aid they needed.

"Karsa, you look like a ghost," Semele said when it was finally my turn.

I looked up at her with the eyes of the grave as they tended the bloody scrapes on my hands. Feeding me was a more troublesome matter. It had been so long that it forced them to start with soup. I fought them desperately when they found the bread in my pocket and tried to take it away so that they could give me a fresh piece, until Mnason grabbed me from behind and held me still in the circle of his arms the way I had held him when they yanked metal slivers from his foot and calf.

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Some part of my mind would never leave Vlástisí, even as my body did. I was an ant caught in amber, helplessly trapped in that endless cycle of trench to trench, barrage to barrage, moment to moment. The lessons of it follow me still, inked permanently to my soul in blood. We all knew that the best of us would never come home.

It was the next day that reality started to set in, as we rode in the truck home. I wore clean clothes for the first time in weeks, though it was honestly a waste given that I hadn't bathed. We were all caked in grime and blood, ours and others'.

Lydia sat across from me in the back as we rattled down the road. It had been so damaged near our overlook that we had walked ten miles just to make it to a stretch traversable by truck. We were all packed in together like crates as we drove south, down out of the mountains and into the valley, the roads slowly growing smoother and smoother. I peeked through the slats once I heard the sound of people. The buildings bore scars of bombardment here too, but they had been patched and rebuilt. The ugly mismatches of fresh concrete and old stone were covered in places by paintings: floral designs and mandalas, things that were beautiful for the sake of reminding us that beautiful things still could exist.

What had once been a collection of little villages was now a city in its own right, full of refugees and fighters alike, though the line between the two has always blurred in Zelen. It sprawled as interconnected roads and a roughly made aqueduct spanned endless garden plots and farms. Every inch of arable space was under cultivation, though coming to its end in the mountain winter. Goats bleated and sheep parted way for the trucks at the honk of a horn.

I heard a smattering of languages here, not just our own. There were foreigners in the city, some of them overseeing the unloading of crates of munitions, while others were expanding a clinic to deal with the soldiers being pulled off the northern front.

Once the truck ground to a halt, I found I didn't want to leave it. I didn't want to step out and show myself as I was, broken and battered. When I looked over, I saw it on Mnason's face too. The ever-certain, ever-hardened warrior of a young man, even he could not bring himself to open the door.

I moved to the gap and pulled myself up to my full height, not the slouch of the dying. "We won," I told them, hardening my resolve. "Act like it."

"We just survived," Ioudas said quietly. I knew he was thinking of those who would never come home.

I reached out, catching his chin in my hand and lifting it. "We endured what no one else could have," I said with a ferocity I had almost forgotten when I wilted like a lily in the mountain cold. "They wouldn't want us to be ashamed."

Mnason nodded, rising to his feet behind me. "You call this a welcome home, Karsa? Not one gun is pointed at us. How am I supposed to feel at home?"

His bone-dry humor shattered the tension in the truck in the best of ways. I saw Lydia's shoulders relax, Ioudas's lips turn up at the corners. "Can't you just enjoy things?" Acantha demanded, trying to suppress her smile as I opened the door into the bright, beautiful world of Zelen.

"I'm just saying, how do you throw a party without artillery?"

"You're impossible," our medic muttered as she stalked past him down the planks they'd set up for us to walk out of the truck, thinking that would be easier for us than stairs. It was a gradual ramp, easy on our frail forms.

I don't remember how many people greeted us on our return, but I know they surrounded us, putting hands on our wasted flesh and jutting bones, filling the air with prayers of gratitude. People that I had never met caught my hand and squeezed it slightly, others patted my back or the top of my head. Some even wept openly, putting arms around us and kissing our foreheads. It didn't matter how filthy and monstrous-looking we were: Zelen welcomed its sons and daughters back with a love that defies description.

I was immediately tired, immediately overwhelmed. I slipped through the crowd, mingling with the untidiness of other units that had come off trucks just as we had. The militia here in the city gently herded us into medical tents, catching even me in their net.

Soon I had a bowl of soup, carefully measured to be something more than I had been getting, but not more than my body could take. I was barely hungry any longer, but I forced myself to eat. Food is life, a lesson I would never forget, and the gift of it as part of being welcomed home made tears well in my eyes.

"Karsa?"

I will forever remember the sound of Thaïs's voice in that moment, like the sweetest note played on the harps in heaven. I turned to face her, hands cupped around my precious food. She stood in the doorway, frozen in place as she looked at me. In my darkest moments at the front, I had reminded myself over and over of Thaïs. I had to keep going, because the alternative meant failing Sostrate and losing Thaïs. I had to keep going, because I owed her a poem. I had to keep going, so she could remind me how to feel again.

There are not words in moments like that.

She sat down beside me and pulled me into a hug so tight it hurt, her arms linked around my neck. I felt droplets against my collarbone as she buried her face in my shoulder. "I knew you would come back to me," she whispered, every syllable blessed with relief.

I set the soup down and held her close, ignoring the fact that my muscles ached and I was getting dirt all over her clothes and flawless put-together persona. "I had to come back or you would have had to come find me."

She laughed, heart fluttering like a bird's against mine. I felt it as though not even my cracked ribs separated me from her. "Damn right." She tried to let go before I was ready and realized quickly that my hold was strong enough to keep her. "Karsa, your soup will get cold."

"So I'll eat cold soup," I whispered. I didn't know how to tell her that just the warmth of her laughter made me feel better than the hot sustenance of even the most perfect soup. I pressed our foreheads together, closing my eyes so she wouldn't see the gaze of the dead.

Her fingers hovered over my cheek for a moment before gently coming to rest there. "Karsa, look at me."

I opened my eyes and saw my gratitude and sudden hope reflected back at me, but even then I couldn't quite hold her gaze. I didn't want her to see the change, to treat me differently. "Your clothes are ruined," I mumbled, looking down at the front of her blouse. I'd left bold dirt prints and streaks across her clothing.

"They'll wash." She tugged at my sleeve. "So should you, when you finish your soup. I think Grandmother finally figured out what was happening with the water pump."

It didn't matter where on the face of the earth I was, so long as Thaïs was there, I would be home. I pulled my battered Arete out of my jacket pocket, the little volume on the verge of disintegration. "I wrote you something."

Thaïs stilled and peace flowed around us like gentle waters. She tucked a curl of hair back behind one of her ears and cocked her head slightly.

"Roses are red, violets are bl—"

She slapped my shoulder, careful to keep the movement very gentle. "Don't tease me, Karsa."

My face ached. It took me a long moment to realize why: I was smiling too widely, or perhaps just too much. "I suppose you want the real thing, then."

"Very much so. Read it to me."

I cleared my throat and opened the book. I had used the last few pages, blank except for little copyright notes, to scratch my feelings into pitiful little letters. They paled in comparison to the philosophy and emotion of Arete herself and her Variations on a Rose.

"I do not think of you as poets do,

With letters gilded on a flawless page.

Instead, you are the breath within me,

The spark that animates all hope;

A great arc in the unseen that moves me

Towards heaven when hell is all around."

Her fingers closed around mine, pressing tight. For a moment, Thaïs was just quiet with her eyes closed, as if she was breathing deeply the words I had just given to the air. Finally, she smiled and opened her eyes. "That is the second most beautiful gift I've ever been given."

"It's not that good," I mumbled, picking up my soup so I didn't have to meet her eyes.

Thaïs smiled at me. "Karsa, ask me what the most beautiful gift I've ever been given was."

"What was it?"

She leaned into me again, wrapping her arms around me, and whispered the answer gently against my ear. "When the universe gave me you."