#violaden

Violet makes her way down the long concrete walkway in what has become her signature hobble, trying not to put too much weight on her left leg. The tingling is intermittent, but she can handle that – it’s the electric pains that shoot into the very marrow of her bones that she is trying to avoid. She knows the folding cane gifted to her by Rhiannon is waiting in her luggage, begging her to use it, but she hasn’t so much as removed the plastic wrapping on it. 

Really, the pain is the way she reminds herself that she survived.

The Empyrean Sea looms ahead of her, sandwiching the pier from the left with another similarly-sized cruise ship on the right. An enormous, swirling font marks her name on her side like a brand. The sight of it takes her breath away; it’s all sleek, white hull and glassy windows glittering with the reflection of the ocean beyond. The ship looks more like an oceanic skyscraper than a boat as it towers above, casting a much-needed shadow on the throng of people suffering in the tropical heat. 

Violet is early, with boarding having only just begun, hundreds of people anxiously mingling on the pier, dressed to the nines in their best vacation attire and matching luggage sets. It’s interesting, the way that if she focuses hard enough, she can imagine this is a world where they haven’t just come out of a devastating war. Where she hasn’t lost everything.

478,567 Navarrian casualties. How many in the crowd had lost someone? How many are trying to escape reality, just like her?

It’s questions like that that manifest in her thoughts as she works her way through the edge of the crowd, the wide brim of her hat allowing her eyes to flit from one face to the next in relative privacy. 

But the expressions they adorned are worlds away from the hollow, traumatized ones she had spent three years staring into on the front lines. 

Violet closes her door with a click, leaning against it gratefully. The pressure on her leg dissipates instantly into a mild pulse. Her thigh nearly burns from the weight of the pill bottle in her pocket, and she shakily unscrews it, popping a white, oval-shaped tablet in her mouth and swallowing it dry. 

The relief, she knows, is all in her head. The meds won’t kick in for another twenty minutes, so anything she feels between now and then is placebo. A symptom of her addiction. 

The room she’s booked is pristine. A bed fit for two takes up the vast majority of the space with a dresser and television directly across from it. Perfect, in case she wants to make any bad decisions in the future. A lamp on each nightstand throws soft lighting against the wall. The desk fits snugly in the corner, partially overlooking the glass sliding doors, droplets of the ocean spray gently trickling down to the concrete of the balcony. 

Violet maneuvers through the tightly-packed room, heaving her suitcase up onto the plush bedding. Unlatching it, she removes a leather-bound notebook and a pen from within a side pocket. It’s blank – its pages are to serve as her company for the duration of the cruise, or however long she gives herself.

The motion of sitting at the desk, crossing one ankle over the other (the bad over the good, of course, to keep it from numbing), and clicking her pen to life is one that is so familiar it takes her breath away. It’s hard not to imagine being in a dusty fortress in enemy territory, dutifully transcribing every non-classified meeting her credentials could get her into, every word that hung in the air from the chapped, bloodstained lips of a wounded soldier in the infirmary. Pen scrawling furiously so she couldn’t miss a single beat, a single labored breath as their hearts gave out.

But she isn’t there. It’s been six months since those days, and she’s on a boat, far away from the horrors of the front lines. Violet knows that, she knows on the surface that it’s over and she doesn’t have to wake up fretting about who isn’t going to come back from battle. There aren’t drones or snipers or planted bombs waiting to go off under the wheels of the Humvee and there are certainly no more battles to be fought. 

But that knowledge doesn’t stop the tightness in her chest, the shakiness of her hands as the pen connects to paper. 

Violet curls the fingernails of her other hand into her palm, the bite of them stinging as she wills the pen to cease its quaking. 

And when it finally does, she writes in her typically neat handwriting script:

Twenty-Eight Days.

My name is Violet Sorrengail, front line reporter for the Navarrian News Network. 

It has been 1,098 days since my brother, Colonel Brennan Sorrengail, was reported missing in action in northeast Poromiel.

It has been 347 days since the bombing of Fort Resson that claimed the lives of 210 military personnel, including my mother, General Lilith Sorrengail, and sister, Lieutenant Colonel Mira Sorrengail.

It has been 186 days since the ceasefire and subsequent signing of the Continental Peace Accords, the document that formally marks the ending of the Navarrian-Poromish War.

It has been 172 days since my father, Asher Sorrengail, killed himself in our family home.

And in 28 days, I will no longer be here. 

This is not a cry for help. This is a log. I have dedicated the vast majority of my life to discerning truth from the supposed facts. Words – the truth of them – have weight; I am no longer sure if this is still true, but it is the only thing I have left. 

On the front lines, countdowns were comforting. They were a visible marker of the only changes we could predict, the only changes in our control.

X days until contact. X days until squad rotation. X days until someone you love may not come back. 

These twenty-eight days are my countdown to peace.

I hadn’t planned to leave a record… but something about the ocean insists on being witnessed. It moves, even when I don’t. Can’t. And maybe that is worth recording. 

One entry every day. My story, for twenty-eight days. And then, nothing.

Consider this day one.