Chương 52: 51 – A Reason for Rage

Mitoras was a ruin. It took effort for me to pick out the vestiges of a place I'd visited many times. Wood planks were scattered where they weren't burned. The charred husks of buildings and torn-down structures left me feeling sick inside.

"This could've been Pemolar," I whispered. I'd been a fool. This whole thing… even after the attack and the fight with the goblins on the beach. The general and the army taking our food? Even after being drafted, I'd somehow deluded myself into thinking this would all blow over any day now. Nations went to war all the time. They squabbled, their various militaries duked it out, but that always happened far away. Until this moment, I'd been treating the war that way. The rift break? A distant thing. The attack?

Just an isolated incident. The Eschal invasion was a misunderstanding that would eventually be ironed out. The food was a temporary hardship. I felt guilty suddenly. My naivety had insulated me from the true breadth of the war. Eschal wasn't coming; they were here. People, hell, entire towns had died. Some might never recover. I gritted my teeth, suddenly sympathizing a bit with the soldiers who'd been quick to pin the blame on the first convenient target. I wasn't condoning it.

Pretyr was a good man, and it had been stupid to accuse him just because of where he came from. But I understood a bit more now. The overwhelming desire to use this fire magic Mom had taught me to burn something swept over me. Reluctance and fear faded in the face of this fucking nightmare. Suddenly, I was glad I'd been drafted. I wanted to kill some fucking trolls. I was still happy that I was with the central army, facing rift monsters. Enemy soldiers or not, I didn't think I was ready to hurt other people.

I was quite ready to hate them, though. What had Eschal needed so badly? Had these past twenty years not felt good? Was this somehow preferable? The place smelled as bad as the carts did. Soldiers were gathering dead bodies and doing their best to treat them with as much respect as they could. Burial was likely going to be quick and dirty but it seemed that the general had something of a heart. I was beginning to think my Mother's assessment of him had been wrong.

He hadn't hurt anyone in Pemolar, beyond punching the Mayor, and who didn't want to punch Oppa in the face every now and then? He hadn't spoken to me, but he had clearly recognized me. If he did hate Mom for some reason, he was keeping that contained to her and her alone. So far, anyway. Mom never told me what she had done to him. I wasn't sure why she was so adamant about keeping it a secret from me. Perhaps she was ashamed?

A hand suddenly fell on my shoulder, and I turned to see Dad looking over the devastation with horror in his eyes. No rage. No fire. I didn't understand. Why wasn't he angry? We had friends who lived here. Friends we hadn't heard from since the attacks. Instead, he just seemed sad.

"It… it was always like this?" I asked.

"Before the rift?"

"No. No, it wasn't like this. The rift may have led to a long peace, but before it came, there were still men and women fighting. Not monsters. Which nation owned the land rarely mattered to those of us who worked it. One spring, during the fourth border war, the village I was born in changed ownership between Rechin and Tacuria three different times. We were stripped of our harvest over and over again, but not one villager died from either army directly. It didn't affect us. Not like the rift did."

He paused, gathering words. I had a feeling he'd been wanting to say something about the rift for a while now. Dad was a gentle soul. The fact that he'd been able and willing to lift his scythe against the rift monsters as he had… it wasn't normal for him.

"To the nations, the Summer of Bone was a true atrocity because of the wide-scale destruction rift monsters caused. The horrible famine afterwards only made it worse. I hate the rift, Mera. The rift is the reason I've seen this before." He paused and drew the scythe off his back.

"I wasn't afraid when I brought this down on them, Mera. I was glad. I was only afraid afterwards when I realized just how terrible it could be." Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere. All this time, I'd been thinking of the rift as somewhat of a net gain. It had stopped the wars. It had brought peace. Mutual need to defend, rather than squabble amongst ourselves. The Summer of Bone was like April's World War Two.

Horrible, and scary, and so long ago that it hardly felt real sometimes. I swallowed, but turned and hugged my Dad. When I pulled away from him, I made sure to light the tiny bulb of flame within my palm that would empty my mana pool and get me one step closer to learning mana regeneration. I should've been doing that for the entire walk. I probably would need to do it for the rest of my life. I had a feeling I was going to need it. We continued walking through the ruined husk of a town.

There was the Patenteer's home, smashed to pieces. I saw little trinkets that I was sure had been in Irima's Inn strewn all about the town, but the building itself had been burned to the ground. There were skeletons, most of them covered with bite marks. Thankfully, none of them were intact enough to identify as people. I could delude myself into thinking they were just cow or deer remains. At least until I saw a skull, and had to wonder if that was a friend, an acquaintance, or someone I once knew.

I spent a lot more time in Potato Gully, even though it was further than Mitoras. They had a shoemaker after all, and I constantly needed new shoes, but that didn't mean I'd never been here. I'd stayed in Irima's inn, and spoken to the people in their bar. Even told a few stories there. It wasn't nearly as good as Pemolar's, but any port in a storm. The rift monsters ate people, and the crows feasted on the remains.

It heartened me to see that the number of human skulls seemed commensurate to the number of trolls and goblins who lay dead. At least Mitoras gave as good as it got. I heard a few soldiers vomit up their breakfast, and I was a little surprised that I wasn't among them. These soldiers had been just as isolated from the war as we had been. The attack hadn't come for the central army after all. I heard a sudden bugle call that distracted me from the wreckage.

A man jumped up on top of one of the wagons playing the horn while a stern sergeant stood beside him. It was going to take some getting used to, watching people casually jump up ten feet. In a break between the bugle call, the sergeant engaged some sort of talent.

"All new recruits gather here! If you enlisted in Pemolar's Hill, Potato Gully, Tornet's Reach, or Fenland, gather around me!" Slowly, we gathered. The noise was audible to the far reaches of the army so anyone who was at the outskirts began steadily making their way towards the man on top of the wagon. Before long almost a hundred people had gathered around the wagon, most of them near my age.

The Sergeant watched us all gather with an impatient scowl on his face and the trumpeter gave a few more calls before the Sergeant was satisfied.

"My name is Sergeant Baywint, and I am your direct commander, and will remain so until training is completed. Training is done on an individual basis and complete when I give my approval. Over the next few weeks, I will get to know each and every one of you, and you will come to know more about me than you'd ever care to." There had been no formal induction or anything really beyond "Watch that wagon" and "Wear this," so far. I was glad there would be at least some form of training.

Thus far, I had not been impressed.

"Scenes like these are why you've joined us. Scenes like these are why we need you. It's with a heavy heart that we lay camp here. I would've preferred to have you join at sixteen. Prepare you for what you'll face. These are the times we live in. Many of you, especially those from close places like Pemolar's Hill, likely had friends here. Maybe even family. What I need from you is for you to look around. Look at what has happened to our beautiful towns, our people, and our country.

And, my fellow members of our great Tacurian Army… I want your anger." We didn't really say anything, and I almost expected him to ask us to shout in unison with a "yes, sir!" Or something like that.

"I want you to see what's become of the town around you and imagine that happening to your family. In your town. Your home. Your babies slain in the streets and your family made into a feast for the rats and the birds," he said lowly. I didn't have any trouble picturing what he demanded. I saw my home being destroyed and felt fire burning in my chest to match the tiny flame dancing hidden inside the palm of my hand. I turned to my fellow soldiers and saw Reid's hand drifting toward his bow as he nodded approvingly.

Oxana pumped her fist, and a few others did the same, finding a mirror of their own conviction within her. I wasn't exactly swept away, but I wanted to be. Dad, probably the oldest in the crowd, seemed entirely unmoved. For once, I wanted to be taken in by the propaganda.

"Training will begin this evening. You've all walked most of the night, and the effects of the drinks you've been given will be wearing off soon. As such, we will set up camp now. Every soldier must know how to set up a tent, and tents here in this wagon will be yours to carry. Training begins at five hours past midday, and we strike camp three hours after that. The faster you get your tents set up, the more sleep you get."

True to form, most of the veterans were picking places and already setting about building their own little tents. Some were personal and some were larger, based on rank, but low or high, everyone carried their own tent.

"Why do we march at night!?" one soldier asked, but I already knew the answer to that. If the sergeant was annoyed by the question in the middle of his speech, he didn't show it.

"Our eyes are better than those of rift monsters at night. They come from a world where light never ceases, and so they are unprepared for the darkness." There were a few surprised exclamations at that, but I'd made it a priority to find out everything I could about the rift after the troll attack. That was pretty common knowledge any veteran knew.

"For now, you will all retire. Collect a tent here and learn to build them. Use each other to aid you. No one sleeps unless it's in their own tent, and it is crafted to my satisfaction." We lined up and began to get tents. All the while, a fire burned in my chest that hadn't been there before. I was looking forward to training in the evening. Nothing would bring me closer together with the people here, and I needed free points, fast. I had trolls to kill.