The Alps tore into us like a thousand jagged knives. I'm Mario Rossi, twenty-two, with the olive groves of Veneto still somehow alive on my tongue even up here where nothing grew but rock and ice, marching with the rest of my division through passes narrow enough that two men couldn't walk shoulder to shoulder without one of them risking the drop. Boots slipped constantly on frozen stone and loose scree, every step sending small private avalanches rattling down the slopes below us. Snow dusted the peaks. The wind came down through the valleys with a sound that genuinely seemed to want every one of us dead specifically, rather than simply being weather that didn't care either way. Our breath steamed in air too thin to fully satisfy a man's lungs, rifles heavy on shoulders gone numb hours ago, packs cutting grooves into backs that had stopped complaining because complaining took energy we didn't have to spare.
We were pushing toward Cordina, deep in Germano-Hungry's mountain territory, a city where most of the people still spoke Italian, still prayed in Italian churches, and hated the Austrians sitting over them with the particular bitterness of people who remember belonging somewhere else. One more push, the officers kept shouting over the wind, and the city would rise to meet us. Italy would take back what was ours.
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We stopped at dusk in a wide, bowl-shaped valley between two sheer ridges, tents going up fast in the failing light, fires crackling, men boiling snow into something that only generously deserved the name coffee. I was sharpening my bayonet on a whetstone, the scrape of it loud and steady in the thin mountain quiet, when the sky changed colour in a way that had nothing to do with the sunset.
They came without warning — Empire mages on their glowing constructs, wings of arcane light cutting through the dimming air like blades that had caught fire. Six of them, diving fast and low the way hawks drop when they've already decided the hunt is over before it's started.
The first round took the supply tent directly. Canvas went up in a single violent flowering of flame, and the six men sheltering inside it were simply gone in the same instant — limbs and pieces of men thrown clear of the blast, intestines uncoiling across the trampled snow in steaming pink lengths that I made myself look away from a half-second too late to spare myself the image.
A second round found a group still huddled around their fire. One man's head came apart entirely in a red cloud of bone and softer matter, his body managing two more staggering steps on pure reflex before it understood there was nothing left coordinating it and folded into the snow. Another took the blast low in the stomach and went down clutching at intestines already sliding free between his own fingers, screaming and trying, with hands that wouldn't stop shaking, to push them back into a body that had stopped being interested in keeping them.
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I dove behind the nearest boulder, heart slamming hard enough against my ribs that I genuinely thought, for one absurd second, that it might actually crack something. Rounds cracked against the rock just above my skull, showering me with stone splinters sharp enough to cut my cheek open in a thin stinging line.
One mage swooped lower than the others, and I swear I heard laughter on the wind, faint and entirely without malice, the way a man laughs at something he finds simply satisfying rather than cruel. His shot detonated directly in front of a squad trying to form up into some kind of defensive line. They went down together — one man's legs gone at the hip in a fountain of blood that the cold air turned to steam almost immediately, another's face simply melting under the blast's heat into something blackened and bubbling that I will not try to describe further, a third whose lower half was shredded entirely while his upper body kept flopping in the snow, spine showing pale and white through the ruin like something a butcher had left exposed by accident.
I pressed my face into frozen ground and prayed to every saint my mother had ever taught me the name of. The mages circled once more, trailing light through the darkening sky, then banked away toward their own lines, leaving us in a smoking, screaming wreck of a camp that had been, an hour earlier, six hundred men settling in for the night.
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"Re-form! Count the dead later — we move tonight!"
My battalion, down now to perhaps three hundred from six, was patched back together in the dark by officers whose voices had gone ragged with the effort of sounding like men still in control of something. The wounded who couldn't walk were left where they lay, moaning into snow that was already freezing the blood beneath them. We buried no one. There wasn't time, and there wasn't, by that point, much spirit left for ceremony. We shouldered packs, fixed bayonets with hands that wouldn't stop shaking, and marched on toward Cordina, stepping over the mangled remains of men who'd shared our fire an hour before.
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Halfway there, the sky turned on us again.
Planes this time — Italian and Commonwealth biplanes roaring low along the ridgelines, engines snarling like something angry and mechanical. Bombs fell in long whistling strings, and the mountains themselves began coming apart under them. Whole cliff faces sheared away in thunderous collapses, tons of rock and snow sliding down onto the trail in white crushing waves that swallowed entire sections of the column without distinguishing between the men in it.
I watched a soldier caught at the edge of one slide, crushed from the waist down beneath a boulder the size of a small house, his upper half still screaming — clearly, articulately, for what felt like a full unbearable minute — while everything below his ribs had already been reduced to something that no longer resembled the lower half of a man at all.
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Then the Germano-Hungry guns opened up from both sides of the pass at once — ours on the lower slopes returning fire, theirs from higher ground raking down into everything that moved in the narrow valley between. Bullets crossed the gap in a deadly weave that didn't discriminate between uniforms, catching Italians and Austrians both in places the crossfire simply happened to find them.
Men dropped mid-stride all around me. Chests punched open in wet red bursts. Faces torn away in sprays of blood and shattered teeth. Spines giving out entirely so that men folded sideways like puppets with every string cut simultaneously. More bombs fell, more avalanches buried whole sections of platoon under snow and broken rock, and the ground itself never seemed to stop shaking for more than a few seconds at a time. Bodies lay scattered everywhere I looked — some half-buried with an arm still twitching above the snow line, others sprawled in slowly spreading red patches, steam rising faintly off wounds still warm enough to fight the mountain cold for a few more minutes.
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The worst order came through the chaos, barely audible over everything else: "Charge the hill! Take that ridge or we all die here!"
We went up screaming, bayonets fixed, boots losing purchase on ice gone slick and dark with blood. The Germano-Hungry guns above cut us down in waves as we climbed. Men fell by the dozen on either side of me — rounds tearing through stomachs, spines, throats, the specific anatomy of each death registering only in the half-second before the next one demanded my attention instead. A soldier directly beside me took a burst across the face and spun away mid-stride, half his head simply gone in a spray of bone and softer tissue, and I had no time to grieve him before my own feet had carried me three steps further up the slope.
I saw Luca take three rounds across the chest. He spun with the impact, coughed up a thick gout of frothy red, and went down like something with all its weight suddenly returned to it at once, no grace left in the fall at all, just collapse. I didn't stop. There was nothing stopping would have bought him.
I kept climbing, firing from the hip, boots pounding ice and frozen mud. Rounds cracked past close enough to feel the disturbance. I caught an Austrian leaning out from cover to aim and put a round through his eye that exited the back of his skull in a fine red-grey spray, and he was gone from the fight before he'd finished the motion of pulling his own trigger.
Somehow I reached the ridge alive, lungs burning past the point where breathing felt voluntary, bayonet already dripping from somewhere along the climb I didn't fully remember.
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The Germano-Hungry soldiers were right there waiting, faces twisted with the same desperate fury I assumed was on my own. I drove into the first one bodily, bayonet going up under his ribs, and he gasped as hot blood came over my hands in rhythmic pulses timed to a heart that had only a few beats left to give, his own intestines sliding free in slippery loops as I withdrew the blade.
Another swung his rifle butt at my skull. I ducked under it and put my bayonet into his throat instead, felt the steel grate against bone before I wrenched it free in a short fountain of arterial blood that painted a fresh red arc across snow already too red to properly register one more colour.
The ridge dissolved into close, ugly, total combat — men stabbing, clubbing, screaming, dying in snow that had stopped being white sometime in the last hour and would, by the time this fight finally burned itself out, have forgotten it had ever been anything else.