09-19-2024, 01:44 AM
"Today, I went on retrieval duty.
Smog dusts the bleak landscape and overhead the fury of Atrellya's Imperfect roils on in the form of clouds, unyielding even days after their maker had been reduced to nothing more than the ash that blows like snowfall. Even the best words do little to fill one in on the true extent of the agony that is war, and even I cannot muster them.
The carnage is stomached with the grit of having seen worse, though as usual, it comes with the concession that one cannot truly stomach it; only pretend. This, then, is an expected horror, and one I had deliberately chose to expose to myself. Yet something out there in those ashen plains went beyond that idea of horror- it was more than I'd bargained for. Looking back on it, I should have known.
For what I didn't expect was how hard identifying them would be.
An errant limb catches my eye, bent in more than one place and coated in muck, yet identifiable by the five fingers that still in death clutch tight to its weapon. Grasping ahold of it, I find half of a torso and little else, burnt so black there is naught but charcoal- whatever material I could possibly use to discern who it once belonged to having been scattered with the ash. This is no isolated incident. I now find it lucky if I am able to put a name to a body.
To you others: You were, perhaps, a son, a daughter, a spouse, a parent, and a soldier. You now leave behind many thousands of estranged people, missing something. They will wonder where you went, but I can not tell them, not truly.
You become a number on my list. And I am helpless to change that."
~ Tandava, Knight-Captain
Smog dusts the bleak landscape and overhead the fury of Atrellya's Imperfect roils on in the form of clouds, unyielding even days after their maker had been reduced to nothing more than the ash that blows like snowfall. Even the best words do little to fill one in on the true extent of the agony that is war, and even I cannot muster them.
The carnage is stomached with the grit of having seen worse, though as usual, it comes with the concession that one cannot truly stomach it; only pretend. This, then, is an expected horror, and one I had deliberately chose to expose to myself. Yet something out there in those ashen plains went beyond that idea of horror- it was more than I'd bargained for. Looking back on it, I should have known.
For what I didn't expect was how hard identifying them would be.
An errant limb catches my eye, bent in more than one place and coated in muck, yet identifiable by the five fingers that still in death clutch tight to its weapon. Grasping ahold of it, I find half of a torso and little else, burnt so black there is naught but charcoal- whatever material I could possibly use to discern who it once belonged to having been scattered with the ash. This is no isolated incident. I now find it lucky if I am able to put a name to a body.
To you others: You were, perhaps, a son, a daughter, a spouse, a parent, and a soldier. You now leave behind many thousands of estranged people, missing something. They will wonder where you went, but I can not tell them, not truly.
You become a number on my list. And I am helpless to change that."
~ Tandava, Knight-Captain