A note from the author afore he grew...I wrote this a couple of years ago, and with regret I put it here. Excitement flowed through my veins when I had the thought that, "I can tell a story and not get in trouble!" Well...It wasn't so much trouble, but I look back with regret and say it's unfortunate that I ended this on a rather unsuitable note. In fact, I'm completely re-writing the whole thing. As for the summary, well...I'd ignore it if I were the reader. It's unreliable for now because I really don't have the stories and the stories are never born from summaries, as I've learned in 2-3, maybe 4 years of experience. I'm still a novice at this and hope that it'll go somewhere in the future!
What the Child Said[]
(Edited again by Yugon, and will be a process over a course of time, if I can stay focused long enough...)
It's agony walking over the dead, stumbling and tripping over their extended arms or their bulky chest, plated with heavy chainmail. I would then stumbled into holes just beside the dead, which would strain my ankle and leave me vulnerable. I would not be vulnerable. I got up and walked besides the pain, and still carried on.
The crows cawed and cackled, laughing horridly at poor, pathetic me. My left eye was sealed shut with dried up blood that leaked downwards from the top of my head, my hands calloused and scarred. I reached up to touch the part of my head that was bleeding. The sword barely cut to the skull. I looked down with my right eye at my foot, cloven and strangled in my beaten iron boots. My feet ached and screamed with pain, shooting up my leg in incredible bursts. I looked up and barely did I see what I thought may have been a tent. It could be the aid we called for, the battalion from the West. I grew weary, swaying here to there as I continued to stumble over the dead. I hear a faint voice, my ears all mucked up. I fell and succumbed to sleep. What the hell...
***
"Name and rank, soldier."
Silence. "Think maybe he's dead?"
"I'm here." I wheezed. "Lieutenant Iriodel, sir."
"Good, let's get you up."
My eyes felt like they were glued shut and I started to panick. Then I remember I was bleeding from the top of my head, so I just need to rub the crusty blood out of my eyes. I felt a hankerchief in my hand and a small pool of water beside me, so I'm suggesting they probably knew I would want to clean up. I probably looked like hell.
I dipped the hankerchief in the water, soaked in plenty of water, and retracted out of the pool. I then applied it to my eyes and began rubbing viciously at the blood, scrapping off all these clots and cleaning up my forehead in the process. It was my left eye that saw first where I was, and it wasn't the battlefield anymore. I couldn't relax, though, because it wasn't the comfort of an Army Hospital. I still felt deaf, but I was sure they cleaned up all of the blood out of my ears, or what they could anyways. Then my right eye was cleared up, and I could see for the first time what was going on.
It was a cell. I gave a kick to the large iron door blocking my way out, and nothing else happened. All the comforts of a lieutenant stripped away in a heartbeat, leaving me breathless and stolen. How best to treat a veteran of the old Porras-French War, survivor of a massacre of innocents in the Highlands, and the war against Pagandom, than by tossing him into a cell?
No use raging against it, it'd kill me and I wouldn't get out of here.