Page 1 of The Last War We Ever Fought

One poppy

Mankind had fought. Since birth, it was all it had done. Fought to breathe. Fought to survive. Fought to feed. Fought to learn. It was between those lines that Elijah had turned from merely a servant of man to a God. Fights had turned to conflicts. Conflicts had turned to war. And a samaritan had turned into the most ruthless deity to exist.

He’d lived many lifetimes no man would ever outlive. But he’d finally lived one where soon, there would be no more war to live through.

Man had almost won over man in the small realm of Tisiania. A realm made of only one large stretch of earth and inhabited by two nations who’d been at one’s peril since the beginning of its existence. The Gobresh and the Mugril. The north and the south.

Humankind was about to fight its very last war on Tisiania.

All because of her.

Because of what he was seeing.

Because of what he’d never seen before.

He stood at the feet of the last battle, rain pattering against this dark armour and hissing into mist at the contact. The soil freshly bloodied. The bodies not yet cold. It was empty of most human life and the invisible hounds of Death were already prowling over the spirits and leading them towards the path of the afterlife. Most human life belonging to the Mugril was gone to celebrate their win. Jolly voices, clicks of metal cups filled to the brim with liquor and odes to battle being sung. Most life seeked life. Gathered around it to celebrate another day they’d been spared. Gone to celebrate their crimes against their own kind. Gone to celebrate their desire to see the Gobresh extinct.

Most. Not all.

One life remained. A half-life rather.

Elijah couldn’t figure out why the human was moving when he felt so little life from her. Perhaps she’d been injured. But then, it couldn’t be that.

The woman had shed most of her armour and weapons, her dark brown braided hair no longer contained to the bind, curls soaking in the thin drizzle that had just begun to taint the already cold evening. Elijah couldn’t tell her features behind all the blood and grime that had clung to her face. The only thing he could make out were her eyes. A vivid green. The coldest green he’d ever seen. Inanimate. Distant. Almost resembling a corpse.

She dug her dozenth too shallow of a hole and pulled another body into it before lowering at the edge and murmuring what Elijah could only guess was a prayer.

He had watched her for the past couple hours repeat over the same thing. Burying bodies he’d seen her soldiers kill, burying bodies she herself had ordered to be killed. None belonging to her side of war.

Elijah had remained there, still unsure of what he was seeing. Or whom.

By the time skies were giving out on their pity on the human pane and their desire to see, the woman had cleared almost half of the battlefield. She dragged her tired limbs to the last grave, her knees dropping with a thud in the mud, too exhausted to obey her orders.

Her cold eyes drew shut and her body gave up entirely, letting her collapse on top of the corpses piling inside the last shallow grave she’d made.

“Rowan,” someone called through the chilling night air. The boy was young, but just old enough to belong in a battlefield. He rushed to her, pulling her limp, half lifeless body out of the grave and then retching his stomach open from the stench of rotting and blood that had clung to her.

She laid in the mud, her bloodied and chaffed fingers twitching against the soft surface. Barely able to peel and pull herself up, Rowan patted a hand to the boy’s back, soothing him. “Why aren’t you resting already?” she asked, her voice hoarse and sunken to a depth Elijah couldn’t figure how deep it was just yet.

He heaved, tears clinging to his eyes when he realised she was not dead. “The other generals were looking for you,” he said, almost sobbing.

“Thought they’d be drunk to stupor by now and forgot about me.”

“They drank in your honour all afternoon. We won because of you and you weren’t even there.”

Her head lowered, shoulders shaking as she laughed or cried. There were tears in her eyes, but she was wearing the wildest grin Elijah had ever seen. She laughed. And laughed. Cried, too. Once she was sated, she planted a palm on the mud and pushed herself up to stand, struggling and testing her legs before fully trusting them to hold her body up.

“We won?” she asked him, pushing his helping hand away from her as if it had burned her. “Where? Show me where.”

The boy tried to hide his frown and held back his words by pressing his mouth shut.

The two looked like old friends. From the way they spoke and understood each other with only simple stares and easy gestures, perhaps even more.

“You should join them, Rowan,” he said, just as she made her way towards the tents their party had erected by the battlefield. “The war will soon be over, and they will have no need for us unless we make them think they do.”

“If I cared to be useful to this war, Daniel, I would have killed myself a long time ago.”

“You’re their weapon. Like it or not. You won this battle, and you will help them win this war.”