We were ageless despite our youth, governments sending the gifted to battle soulless monsters coming from the South. A failed Drovinian experiment brought the masses of walking dead Northward. When we veteran knights reach the bottom of our stamina, the memories return, the dazed smile of shell shock our companions. In this downpour of sorrow, a dash of memory curls up with the steam of tea, and I remember my days at the front with Aderastos.
The warrior-healer had finished healing another hurt in the sea of dying faces; we were all barely human by then. We hung onto a mutual thread of an end; all stories had endings, didn’t they? We pleaded with each slice of sword, ‘let this be the end’. I had smashed my ribs in the last battle, but waited my turn until Aderastos had healed others, or given them a peaceful death.
"Why're we doing this? Why can’t we just leave?" The grime had become an eerie mix of mud and blood, and clean water was the ultimate currency. It had begun to rain, and Aderastos knelt his seven foot frame down and took my fourteen years in his paternal arms.
"Gwendolyne, we live and we die, and if we're lucky the powers of the worlds will leave us be. The mortals are like that. They've been blessed in their inadequacies, and we can never fault them for living a pleasant life. The powers have not been so generous with us, but we can only stand on our giant's legs and roar. Whether we live or die matters only if we fear to lose something we haven’t got. Let it go, little one, and learn to live with the knowledge that we giants defend that innocence. So be content, and do not think that you are entitled to ruin their paradise, just as they are not entitled to throw you into the ground with their laughter. There is evil, and it must be overcome. I will give my life gladly to know that my children will not be troubled. Come, let us find some water. We both need a drink."
Aderastos was dead in three days. A massive Drovinian monster came through the crumbling ranks, making him look like a child, but I knew his secret. He was a giant. His battle cries rang in our ears like church bells calling us home. He beat the monster back, and just as his life was leaving him conducted one more healing and returned to me my legs. I heard screaming – my screaming – as two knights clad in bloody armour towed me away. Our armies defeated the last Drovinian less than seven hours after Aderastos finally fell defeated, Hyperion in Apollo’s wake.
Tears poured, curling my grief upwards with the smoke of Aderastos’ funeral pyre. My cup crashes to the floorboards, the rain has come. That same fickle rain again. Clumsy feet stumble out into the murk of the mountainside. The valley is overgrown with green now. No graves for the fallen. No memorials but men.