"The war is really a shitty thing, don'tcha think ?"
The man turns around to look who just talked in the eyes. She is looking at him back. Fierceness in the red eyes, blonde hair tied in a bun, her pointed ears trembling under the cold wind of winter. Winter 184.
They're looking over what must have been a splendid natural landscape and is now the remains od a disaster.
His silence doesn't seem to let the woman shut up."
"They didn't even have the time to clean all of the remains of the dragons. I pity those creatures."
"You should never pity dragons."
An ironic laugh rips through the pale lips of the woman. Fangs glisten in the nightlight, shining under the moon.
Vampires have always been livelier at night, he thinks.
"And how do you know. Were you one ?"
"I could have been. If I had been there. A lot of people could have done something, if they were there."
"But they weren't, and it happened. Why beat youself for it ?"
Slowly, he starts to descend over the former battlefield. Traces of dried blood break under his feet, a single insign left there by someone who will not use it anymore shines under the moonlight. Every step he takes lifts dust and ash that probably were people, once. He has no way ok knowing.
He only know the crack of dead leaves under his feet, the snow caressing his jet-black hair, and the silence.
The woman follows him, a little quicker. She's shorter on her feet, slowed down by a wound earned during a fight that was not this one. Her own fight, her own running away from a city that didn't accept her.
She still is trying to talk to him. He has no intention to let her catch up, but doesn't quicken his pace, either.
Each step he takes is imbued with the pain of the dead he could have saved. Like he could have saved so many.
A panting voice cuts him in his track, now more annoyed than ever.
"Come on now ! You know I am wounded !"
"Then why- aren't you- slowing- FUCK !"
A swear word. An invisible root on the ground, made visible by the ravages of War. A sudden loss of balance and the ground growing closer, closer, closer-
A few inches before her nose plunges in the dirt of the dead, a hand stops her from falling, laid under her abdomen.
He is unreadable when he pulls her up, helps her on her feet, starts to walk again. But she, she can only smile.
He wasn't ever much of a friend, but his gentle nature has never subdued to what she can only guess is grief. Even after all these years.
"Well, I want to thank you. Don't be a sore bitch."
He sighs. Stops, somewhere on the battlefield where he can only see ash and bones.
"Stop talking like my sister."
She raises an eyebrow. An information about him, that is rare.
"Your sister ? Where is she now ?"
"Dead. Like everyone that was lucky."
He turns around, and finally for the first time since they walked upon the Night of Tears's remains, she can see his clod blue eyes. Circled by dark, marked by sadness, weightened by grief.
"Do you know where the dead go, Lucrezia ?"
"Uh. No. At Serdnol, there's a saying that Night takes us all, but she doesn't exist, doesn't she ? And the Gaikamshigthai always are gushing about the Hall of Glory, those daysucker assholes..."
A spit on the ground, and then curiosity.
"No. And I don't think I ever will. Death doesn't seem to like me much."
An abandoned firearm shines under the blood and dust. He slowly picks it up, his eyes running over the barrel, and something breezes throigh his face when his finger tighten on the trigger. Then, nothing.
He never was trained in firearms. Never needed to.
"There is an old saying, too, in my country. That when you tie your soul to a god, it now belongs to this god altogether."
"So a god could give or take the soul of his faithful. ?"
"Only the ones that bind them to themselves. Which are not a lot. But it doesn't matter. I never was able to prove this theory."
His fist tighten, over an empty knife holster. Intricate, ornated, with pale blonde hair tied to it.
"I never had the chance. I had to give it up to someone luckier than me."
"You don't strike me as the type to give up."
"Not at the expense of someone, indeed. I wanted the Plagues. He found the most hidden one, the tenth, the most powerful. I couldn't take it from him without sending him back to his god."
She pouts a little, unconvinced.
"After all you saw, you tell me you were skittish of killing someone for your goal ?"
"I am no Popyn Hillar, Lu. And I am not Faloi Frosilaen. Never understood why she liked him so much. Probably because she was already slipping away when she met him."
She has never heard him talk this much. In all those years she knew him, since he saved her from Ink where a shooting send all of her old university friends and teachers to death, since she could escape through the help of a creature no one had never seen before, except at the Night of Tears. He always has been silent. Secretive. Alone.
"I won't take a life for a life, especially one unguaranteed. That's what makes me different from you."
"Don't judge me. You don't know what I've seen."
"No. Neither do you. I bore witness to three wars before this one, I've seen sieges, destruction, death, and no hope to carry on. I searched so long for a way to counter Death before I had to give up and see another war. Do you think you could understand me living more than two centuries ?"
"Hey, asshole, I am a vampire. I will live a fucking long life, don't talk to me as I was short-lived."
"Stop having an answer to everything."
"Oh, I don't. I still don't know the answer to one question."
And, not pronounced, it hangs in the air like a death sentence. One it is impossible to find the answer to, lost in the Great War and the biggest amount of bodies fallen since further than even the Civil War. Probably not ever, but who can know the past without having lived it.
