He did not remember the exact day the war began.
It was not a single moment in his life, not something that split everything into before and after the way people like to describe it. It was more subtle than that.
He was sitting in a classroom, half listening, thinking about exams, about college applications.
Someone mentioned it in the class group chat, then a teacher confirmed it, then screens filled with speeches and words that sounded important but never really settled into he could really understand.
By the time it reached him, it felt like something that belonged to a larger world he was not part of.
At home, it became real.
His father had already lost his job by then.
The economy had been shrinking for months, slowly enough that people kept pretending it would correct itself.
It didn't. Work disappeared. Prices climbed. The house grew sombre day by day. His father stopped talking as much, spending long stretches just sitting, as if waiting for something to change.
It never did. His younger brother tried to act older than he was, cutting back without being asked, never complaining. His sister was too young to understand any of it.
She kept asking questions no one answered properly, still expecting things to make sense.
There was a point where staying began to feel worse than leaving.
The war offered money. Not much, but enough. Enough that his brother would not have to think about food every day, enough that his sister might not notice how bad things had become.
That was all it took. There was no sense of duty for him, no belief in whatever cause they were fighting for.
He enlisted because it solved a problem, or at least made it smaller.
Training passed in a blur. Nothing in it felt real either. The reality of it only set in once he was deployed, once the noise stopped being something distant and became his personal hell.
War was not what they said it was.
There were no ideals on the ground, no clear sense of right or wrong. They gave him a weapon, told him where to go, and that was enough.
The reasons stayed somewhere far away, in places where people had time to talk about them. Down there, everything reduced itself to movement and reaction. You moved, you shot, you survived. That was all that mattered.
The first time he killed someone, he hesitated. He remembered that clearly. The second time came easier. By the third, it had already begun to lose shape. Faces blurred. Screams overlapped. It stopped being a decision and became something closer to instinct.
There were things he could not forget, no matter how much everything else blended together.
The constant ringing in his ears that never quite went away, like silence had been taken from him entirely. The smell was the worst part. It stayed. It clung to everything.
And then there were moments that should not have existed at all.
He remembered an elephant. It made no sense even then. It was thin, panicked, caught in the middle of something it could not understand. It did not belong there. None of it did. It was loud, distressed, drawing attention.
Orders were given.
He followed them.
He remembered lifting his gun, stepping closer, the way the animal stilled for a brief second as if it recognized something in him. He did not think about it. Thinking would have made it wierd. He pressed the barrel forward and pulled the trigger.
After that, something inside him shifted in a way he could not quite define. It was a part of him stepping back, letting everything else continue without interference.
He stopped asking what the war was about.
At some point, the answer stopped mattering.
It was somewhere in the middle of all of that that he met her. There was nothing remarkable about the moment itself.
Just two people assigned to the same place at the same time, both too tired to pretend they were anything other than what the war had made them.
She was direct, impatient with things that did not matter. There was something worn about her, something that suggested she had already gone through more than this war alone.
They did not talk about their pasts much. It did not feel necessary. Whatever they had been before had already been stripped down.
What they had was not love it was just two people who understood what the other carried without needing it explained. Conversations happened in fragments, in the space between movement and orders, in moments where neither of them had the energy to pretend they were fine.
There was no talk of a future. Not in any real sense. Just the unspoken understanding that as long as they were both still there, that was enough.
For a while, it was.
He started remembering things again because of her.
His brother's voice. His sister's laughter. The idea that there was something beyond this, something waiting if he made it back.
Hope.
He never said it out loud. Neither did she. It did not need to be said.
Then she was gone.
It was a bombing. It was just a report, passed along like it was nothing more than a piece of information.There was no funeral for him to attend.
He sat with it for a long time after he heard. He thought he should have died too.Not because it would have been meaningful but because it would have made more sense.
After that, the things that had started to matter again… stopped.
He kept moving. Kept following orders. Kept doing what was expected.
But inside, it all flattened out.
The only things that remained were simple. His brother. His sister. The fact that they needed him to keep going, even if they did not know it.
He did not talk to them. Not because he did not want to, but because there was never time that felt real enough for it. When there was, he did not know what to say. Anything he said would have been a lie, or worse, something they would not understand.
His sister was too young. His brother would have been too busy holding things together. His father would still be struggling in the same way he always had.
So he carried them in his head instead.
That was enough.
War became automatic after that.Being a soldier was simple enough.
He became good at it.
There was no hesitation left. No second thought. People stopped being people. They were just part of the environment, things that existed between him and whatever direction he needed to move in.
He knew what he was becoming.
He just did not stop.
At some point, the realization settled in anyway. He was not protecting anything. He was just something that moved, killed, and survived because that was what it had been told to do.
An animal would have been simpler.
An animal does not need reasons.
He had them, once.
He lost them somewhere along the way and kept going anyway.
And then one day, it ended for him, not the war itself, just his place in it.
It was nothing heroic.
There was no moment worth remembering. Just a misstep, a blast too close, the ground disappearing under him and something tearing through his leg with enough force that his body shut down before his mind could catch up. When he woke up, it was already gone.
They told him he was lucky to be alive.
He did not feel lucky. He did not feel anything at all, except for the dull, constant awareness of absence where something used to be. The phantom of it stayed longer than the pain, an echo of movement that would never come again.
He tried, once, to stand without thinking, and the way his body failed him in that moment felt more final than anything the battlefield had ever shown him.
The frontlines had taken everything from him and then decided he was no longer worth keeping.
The war, at least, had been honest in what it demanded. It had reduced everything to something simple. Move. Kill. Survive.
There was no place for him in anything more complicated than that anymore.
But he was sent back anyway.
The journey home passed in fragments. Stations, voices, faces that blurred into one another. People who spoke to him like he was fragile, something to be handled carefully. He did not respond much.
There was nothing to say that would make sense outside of the war, and even there, it had barely made sense to begin with.
He held onto one thing through all of it.
A house.
Just the idea of it. His brother sitting somewhere. His sister running around without a care in the world.
That was enough to keep moving toward.
He did not let himself think beyond that. Thinking had never helped him before.
When he finally arrived, it took him a moment to understand what he was looking at.
The streets were still there, technically. The same layout, the same turns, the same distances between places he used to know.
But everything else had been stripped away and replaced with something hollow. Buildings stood broken, or not at all. Walls opened up to nothing.
The air felt heavier, like it carried something that refused to settle.
It looked different from the war.
But not enough.
There were people, but they moved without direction, the same way soldiers did when orders stopped making sense but they kept walking anyway. No one looked at each other for too long.
He moved through it slowly, his body adjusting to the uneven ground, to the imbalance that no amount of time would fully correct.
The closer he got, the weirder everything became.
He did not rush. There was no urgency left in him to rush for anything.
When he reached where his house should have been, he stopped.
There was nothing. Just ruins in the way the rest of the city had them.
No one had told him.
Not in the reports, not in the briefings. No one had thought it necessary, or maybe no one had known.
For a long time, he just stood there.
He tried, distantly, to place them somewhere else. To imagine that they had left before this happened, that they had found somewhere safer, that the ruins in front of him did not mean what it obviously did.
But his mind did not hold onto the thought for long.
It slipped away, the same way everything else had.
What remained was simpler.
There was no house. No voices. No one waiting.
The one thing he had carried through everything, the one thing that had given shape to all the violence, all the movement, all the survival, was gone, just as completely as everything else the war had touched.
He lowered himself slowly to the ground, more out of necessity than choice, his body no longer willing to hold him up without reason.
For the first time since he had left, he had nothing to move toward.
War had taken him, stripped him, hollowed him out, and when it was done, it had sent him back to a place that no longer existed and called it mercy.
He sat there for a long time, staring at nothing, with no thoughts left that felt solid enough to hold onto.
If there had never been anything waiting for him at the end of it,
then what, exactly, had he been surviving for?
He laid down because there was nothing left to stand for.
The ground was cold and uneven beneath him, but he did not adjust. He had spent too long correcting discomfort, surviving through instinct, forcing his body forward no matter what it felt. This time, he let it be.
The sky above him was dull and empty. He watched it for a while, then stopped really seeing it.
Time passed.
Hunger came.
At first, it was familiar. A dull ache, easy to ignore. He had felt worse before, had gone longer without food on the frontlines. His body knew how to endure.
But he did not feel like satiating this hunger.
There was no reason to hold on just a little longer.
The hunger sharpened, then deepened, pulling at him from the inside. His body pushed back, reminding him in small, persistent ways that he was still alive.
He did nothing.
There was food somewhere. Water too. He knew that without thinking about it.
He just did not move.
Time passed. He could not tell how much. The light shifted, then dimmed, then returned again.
The city made distant sounds that no longer reached him in any meaningful way.
His body weakened.
His limbs grew heavy, then unresponsive. The strength that had carried him through war, through loss, through everything, began to drain without resistance. Even breathing started to feel like something his body was doing on its own, without asking him.
Memories came over his mind.
His sister's voice. His brother's face. Fragments, incomplete. They surfaced, hovered for a moment, then slipped away before they could become anything solid.
He did not hold onto them.
There was no point.
The hunger faded after a while.
Not because it was satisfied, but because his body stopped asking.
That was when it became quiet.
Truly quiet.
No urgency. No pain sharp enough to matter. Just a slow, steady dimming of everything that had once kept him moving.
He turned his head slightly, just enough to see the ruins one last time.
There was no reaction to it, this is what was left.
His eyes stayed there for a moment, then drifted away without intention.
Breathing slowed.
The space between each breath stretched longer than the last, until even that began to feel unnecessary.
He had spent so long surviving because he was supposed to.
Now, there was nothing left asking that of him.
So he let it happen let his body collapse till there was nothing.
...
Support this work with powerstones and write a review or two.