Her breath formed thick little clouds before her eyes as she walked along the highway. It was still cold. It was always cold in March. Marie-Claire was used to the frosty weather. After eight years she'd gotten used to many things. Things she never thought possible in Gaul. But Gaul was in the past. Marie-Claire didn't dream of it and didn't long to go back. She missed her family, though. But her present was the Coal Mining Region. And it would be her future, too. She learned to love that place and its people. She was a stranger, but she never felt like one in their midst. Marie-Claire couldn't say the same about her own nation. So far as she was concerned, she was more a Coal Miner than a Gaul.
Marie-Claire even learned to love winter. Except for thaw. She preferred to struggle through piles of snow as tall as she was than to splash into muddy pools. The worst was the melting snow, though. Since that morning, she slipped three times. The last time was quite traumatic. She'd strained the muscles in her left foot, making her limp. On top of that, her jeans were wet and due to the weather wouldn't dry any time soon. But she didn't have any choice than to keep walking.
She was up early that morning. She had to be. Vucha was one day by travel from the Coal Mining Region. She wanted to be there on time. Her friend agreed to bring her to where the Scythian troops were stationed, but refused to go any further, fearing a Nazi ambush alongside the main road leading to Vucha. Marie-Claire didn't mind walking the remaining miles. She understood his fear, although there was nothing to be afraid of. The day before, Scythian troops liberated Vucha from the Nazis and made the town safe to pass through.
They had problems enough in the Coal Mining Region. Marie-Claire had lots of work to do documenting witness accounts of victims from Nazi brutality and bombings by the Borderland Army. After the start of the Scythian Special Military Operation the strikes became more frequent. But even before its start, during the eight years she'd spent living and working in the Coal Mining Region, there were many cases of shelling and other types of terrorism executed both by the Borderland Army and the Nazi battalions. Nevertheless, she knew she had to go to Vucha and find out what was going on there, ignoring the danger and risk.
After the liberation of Vucha, Marie-Claire logged in to the secret Western journalist chat. All Western reporters inside Borderland were subscribed to it. But its activity wasn't as heroic and significant as those reporters wanted to believe. To her they were just a pathetic little gathering of puppets paid by the Gomorians. Daily, they received instructions where and when they had to appear with their cameras to make exclusive and heartbreaking pictures of the atrocities committed by the Scythes when, in reality, the Borderlanders were responsible for the many civilian deaths and destruction of the infrastructure. When there were no dead bodies at hand, the Western reporters made sure to set up performances. They paid some locals to act like victims of war who lost their houses, family members, or body parts. The most famous war victim was the pregnant Borderland woman. Many of her epic pictures circulated in the Western media. They depicted how she was trying to give birth in a destroyed hospital, how the White Casks evacuated her from that building, and of how she got transported on a stretcher and carried away into the sunset. Sometime later, that woman was spotted and photographed receiving humanitarian help from the Scythian Army. The Scythes arrested her, and she admitted to being a fraud. It turned out the woman had never given birth in her life.
That fraudulent reporting had only one main goal: discrediting the Scythian Army and flaring up hate and violence against the Scythes all over the world. Unfortunately, they succeeded in their efforts because the gullible Western public believed sincerely in the false information they were fed by their governments and their media about the Borderland conflict. And reporters were more than willing to work for that slander campaign. Marie-Claire didn't want to believe that all her former colleagues were collaborating scumbags who would write anything for money and spit on journalist ethics. Some were just afraid of losing their job or being persecuted for going against their superiors and the mainstream trend. They simply didn't want to end up like Marie-Claire.
She was ashamed to admit that once she called those people her friends. She loved her job and genuinely believed she was doing something useful. She never questioned her boss and the subjects she had to write about.
Her specialty was the wars in Musulman countries. She wrote about Musulmans and their ways with so much Western contempt one would really believe the Musulmans were all terrorists. In truth, Marie-Claire never had visited any of those countries she so ferociously slandered. Like so many other Gauls she was convinced women in Musulman countries were not considered as people and therefore treated badly. That's why she, the uncompromising and professional journalist she thought she was, wasn't so keen to travel anywhere that far. Until eight years ago when the Scythe Empire decided to take their grounds back and returned the Taurica peninsula to its historical borders.
"Scythes are uncivilised but at least a little bit better than Musulmans. Go take some interviews and pictures of disgruntled people in Taurica," her boss said one day.
And so, she went. She was surprised when the people over there acted hostile whenever she came up to them and asked if they condemned the imperialistic behaviour of Vladimir the Lucent. They replied that they were grateful to Vladimir for taking them back and protecting them from degradation and starvation under the criminal Borderland government. At first, like most Westerners, she thought the people were brainwashed. She was convinced that no one in their right mind would defend the Scythes and their leader. She decided that there was no reasoning with them in Taurica. So, she travelled further to the Coal Mining Region. The place that sometimes was mentioned in the Western media, calling the people living in that place separatists.
And then a bomb struck the guest house she was staying at.
Marie-Claire remembered only short moments after the attack. She opened her eyes in the dusk and saw black and white roses on a cupboard door hanging above her and the smell of burning wood. She was trapped between stones and wooden beams forming a narrow shaft. But she wasn't alone in that shaft. Before the bomb hit them, she and her cameraman Louis were standing in the kitchen drinking coffee. He was there beside her, with a metal pipe protruding from his throat. He looked at her with eyes wide open, filled with agonising fear. The horrifying sight made Marie-Claire lose her consciousness. The next moment she opened her eyes Louis was already dead, his empty eyes staring at her. She turned her face away from him and tried to push up the cupboard door above her, but her efforts were in vain. The door was blocked by something heavy on top of it. She was pestered by a persistent ringing sound in her left ear. That intense noise made her pass out and the next time she woke up she heard voices coming from above. She screamed at the top of her lungs for the people to hear her, thinking that help was on its way.
But her misery wasn't over yet. The men who removed all the obstacles and found her, were from the Nazi battalion Valkyries. She had heard stories about them. They weren't as notorious as the Aces, but it was better to avoid them. She always ignored those talks, saying it was typical Scythian propaganda. But when she saw their animal eyes gazing at her from above, she wasn't so sure about her previous convictions. She knew a little Pan-Slavic and explained to them that they were bombed, that she was a journalist from Gaul, and that her colleague was dead. But the Nazis weren't moved by her story. They didn't care and they weren't planning on getting her out of there.
"What were you doing in a separatist's house in the first place, Gaul whore?" asked one of them. He took out a gun and aimed at her. Before she could say something in her defence, the bastard had pulled the trigger.
People told her that when they found her, they didn't think she would make it. Luckily, the bullet missed her vital organs, but she had lost a lot of blood. On top of that, a fragment of the bomb hit her in the head and badly severed her ear. The entire left auricle had to be removed.
They took her deeper into the Coal Mining Region, closer to the border with the Scythe Empire. It took her almost two months to fully recover. She lost hearing in her left ear. Before the attack she used to wear her hair in a ponytail but after her ear got removed, she wore it loose, covering her scars. When it was windy, she wore a beanie to keep her hair in place, so her acquired deformity wouldn't get exposed. She soon learned to live with it. But overcoming the mental damage was the most difficult thing to do.
Injustice.
That word kept echoing in her head every now and then. At first, she thought she subconsciously kept repeating that word trying to deal with her trauma. But that wasn't true, and she knew that. She wasn't of the kind that suffered from self-pity. She despised these kinds of people. That was her conscience reminding her of the great injustice she committed against the people of the Coal Mining Region. She stubbornly refused to acknowledge the horror they went through. She was conditioned to distrust them for the simple reason that they were Scythes, because according to the West Scythes never told the truth. She was convinced of her own righteousness, supported only by a blind belief in the Western superiority.
The Coal Miners told her about their life during those eight years of war with Borderland. The people noticed the disturbing tendency of indoctrinating Nazi ideology in schools, scientific and cultural institutions, and the shameless rewriting of their history. The Coal Miners didn't like what their government was trying to achieve. The people refused to honour the memory of collaborators and betrayers. They refused to cancel the Scythian culture. They refused to ban Pan-Slavic from schools and replace it by Borderlandish.
They refused too many times for Gomorian taste.
Gomora had experience dealing with extremely stubborn nations. They ordered Borderland to suppress the popular revolt, using whatever means necessary to submit the Coal Miners. From that point on, Borderland started the genocide of the Coal Mining Region and continued killing them for eight years straight.
The Scythes and Coal Miners weren't the only ones Marie-Claire wronged. At least the Scythes fought back, and the victory would be theirs; she was convinced of that. But the Musulmans had no Scythes to come to their aid. They had no Vladimir the Lucent to lead them forward. Every time the United States of Gomora dropped bombs on their villages, killing thousands of people, Marie-Claire and her colleagues wrote praising articles about the so-called bravery of the Gomorian soldier who was risking his life for the chimeric freedom the Western world so frantically held onto. No one mentioned, no one even thought about the terror the Musulmans went through; about their unbearable pain, their unspeakable fear, and their unmeasurable losses. No one cared. But she just continued to work for the Gomorian government, writing misleading articles for them. She was also responsible for their misery. And that apprehension tore her heart apart, driving her almost mad.
For a long time, she was submerged in apathy, afraid to leave the house, shying away from human interaction, eating little, and constantly reminding herself of how misinformed and ignorant she was. But life in the Coal Mining Region and its brave men and women didn't let her drown in depression. At a certain point she finally realised how lucky she was to be still alive, to be free, and having her loved ones living in safety. And those wonderful people who found her, who took her in, and saved her were the real heroes. Their life was a daily battle going on for years, with only the Scythes as their allies while the other half of the world was against them. They carried on with their lives no matter their losses, no matter the destruction. They buried their dead and built up their houses. And continued to fight for their freedom. They were the great Scythes from the Coal Mining Region, with their unbreakable will and legendary courage.
It took her to lose an ear to finally listen and hear the truth and after getting a second chance at life she didn't want to waste it on spreading lies and following someone's agenda. She decided to stay there and help them in their fight the only way she could. She documented their witness accounts, took pictures, recorded the bombings and the devastations they caused. Every week she sent her reports with all the visual evidence she gathered to her editor in Gaul by electronic mail. She wanted for the world to know what was going on in the Coal Mining Region and who was responsible for the escalation of the conflict. But all her great efforts didn't have the desired result.
At first, she was considered a national hero in Gaul. For weeks, her story occupied the first pages of all Gaul newspapers, magazines, and tabloids. Marie-Claire became the new symbol of the Western battle for freedom of speech, who in the course of that noble fight lost an ear and got shot. But soon the love and admiration got replaced by hatred and mockery. Her editor wasn't all too happy with the material his employee sent him because it was in conflict with all the propaganda they previously forced upon their audience. He expressed his concern and disapproval of her sudden conversion and loyalty to the Scythes. But she didn't listen and continued sending him files with the inconvenient truth. He even threatened to fire her. Marie-Claire didn't care. The last drop was when her former colleagues organised an online video conference with her, expecting to hear Marie-Claire criticise the Scythes but instead they got to hear appraisal and gratitude. She showed them evidence of the crimes committed by the Nazi Borderland regime. To save face on live TV they disconnected from the video conference with her and blamed it on a bad Internet connection with Borderland.
Hence started the ruination of Marie-Claire's career. First, she got fired like her boss promised her. The official reason was a violation of journalist ethics, which also meant she wouldn't receive any severance pay. Next, she got slandered by those newspapers, magazines, and tabloids that just some weeks ago celebrated her as the new Jeanne d'Arc. Some claimed she turned insane after the bombing, others said she was a spy working for the Scythe Empire and received donations directly from Vladimir the Lucent. But the most outrageous punishment was when the Gomorians demanded financial sanctions on every journalist who expressed another point of view on the Borderland conflict, contradicting the Western propaganda. That meant that her bank account got frozen. She couldn't draw money from cash machines, she couldn't pay online, she couldn't receive cash in a bank. In other words, she didn't have any rights on the money she had saved. She didn't really mind that. Her credit card was invalid in the Coal Mining Region because they were also under financial sanctions imposed on them by the West. She was supported by the Coal Miners and had everything she needed to lead a normal life. But still, her savings could've been used by her old parents living in Gaul. But the bank didn't allow them access to her deposit.
She wasn't the only foreign journalist betrayed by her own people and whose life was endangered. There was a young guy from Latium, a friendly lady from the Low Lands, and even a man from Albion and many others.
No one needed them in the West.
No one wanted to hear the truth in the West.
That's why it was so important for Marie-Claire to be on time in Vucha and document whatever there was before the others came. She knew there would be some kind of provocation. Why else did the admin of the secret chat leave an ambiguous message saying that there will be a great sensation in Vucha right after its liberation by the Scythian Army? A concerning fact was also that the Scythian Army had left that town, leaving it without reinforcements.
It was quiet in Vucha when she finally reached it. She avoided open roads and used smaller entryways and back alleys. She spotted people outside, most of them older men and women, carrying white bags with humanitarian help they received from the Scythian Army the day before. Marie-Claire found a good hiding spot, between rubbish containers, which allowed her to oversee the main road leading to the Borderland capital. Somehow, she knew that whatever was about to happen, it would come from there.
Her intuition didn't fail her. Soon, she saw five armoured vehicles coming from the direction of the capital. Those vehicles were the type of the Osiris terrorists used in Assyria, Tripolitania, Mesopotamia, and all those other destroyed Musulman countries. She recognised them from back when she wrote articles about the wars in those regions. The Osiris terrorists got supplied with those cars by the United States of Gomora.
They were nearing fast. She saw gunmen taking out automatic rifles and aiming them at the unsuspecting pedestrians. She wanted to warn them but that meant she had to come out of her hiding place and most likely she wouldn't live to tell what happened in Vucha. Marie-Claire froze as she perceived the manslaughter.
The people got shot in their backs as they were running away and hiding from their persecutors, but the bullets always hit their targets. Two cars disappeared in a side street. The gunfire in the distance announced that more innocent people had lost their lives. The other three automobiles parked dangerously close to where Marie-Claire was hiding behind the containers. The drivers and passengers were Nazis from the Aces battalion and Western reporters.
The Aces gave the journalists instructions in Anglo-Saxon on how to take pictures of the Scythian attack. One of the reporters, an Almain, remarked that their photographs would be more striking if there were more victims. The Nazi looked out over the few scattered bodies on the road and agreed with his observation. He called his colleague and explained the situation.
Meanwhile, Marie-Claire was taking pictures and recording video and audio evidence on her iPhone. She waited for them to be at a safe distance from her so they couldn't hear her using her camera with the mechanical shutter. The Aces agreed that a few of them would act like dead bodies to add up to the scale of the massacre.
As their backs were turned on her, she crawled on her hands and knees away from the containers, closer to the main road, where she had a better view of them. She took out her camera and zoomed in her lens on their shameful actions. She made some scandalous shots, with the dead bodies rising and setting themselves in more favourable, dramatic poses, while receiving advice from the journalists on how to do it better.
Marie-Claire had gathered enough of proof to destroy Borderland's next hoax and turn it into a huge scandal. But her photo shoot ended abruptly when the Almain caught sight of her. Never in her life she heard a man scream so hysterically from surprise. She instantly jumped to her feet and the last thing she saw of the treacherous company were their devastated faces and two Aces giving chase to catch her.
Basically, there was nowhere to run. Outside of Vucha there were miles of abandoned, empty roads. Her only means of escape were the apartment blocks. If she managed to find a basement or even a sewer to hide in for some time, she could call for help or wait for the Scythian Army to return. She didn't stand a chance alone against so many Nazis. Despite her lead from before they caught up with her quickly. She heard their heavy military boots tramping the ground, coming closer. She managed to avoid them catching sight of her every time turning around a corner. Eventually, there were no corners left, and she ended up running through a long, open alleyway. She heard one of them scream in Borderlandish for her to stop, threatening to shoot her.
She stopped. He demanded for her to turn around.
She did as was told.
There was only one of them, but she was sure the others would soon appear. She didn't want to think of what they would do to her. The Coal Miner women told her of their encounters with the Nazis. If they managed to survive and tell it of course.
The Ace asked her who she was and what she was doing there. She told him she was Monique Bisset, a freelance news reporter from Gaul. She got the message from the admin telling her there would be some sensation in Vucha, so she decided to check it out herself without joining a guided group. Her made-up story sounded plausible; she wasn't the only nosy journalist from the West the Nazis often caught red-handed.
For an instant she felt like he believed her and would let her go with a warning but suddenly he aimed his gun at her and told her to take her hat off.
She froze.
He repeated his demand.
She took off her beanie trying to keep her hair in place, but the wind blew it out of her neck. She saw his facial expression change from cautious to amused.
"Hey! You're not Monique Bisset. You're that Gaul bitch without an ear working for the Scythes! The guys won't believe this!"
He tried to contact someone through the transceiver, not taking his eyes off her, holding her at gunpoint.
"Mikola, come quick! You should see this!" but Mikola didn't answer, and the Ace decided not to wait for him.
"You know, our boss says that Westerners who are siding with the Scythes are to be eliminated at the spot. We get paid twice as much for that …"
He tightened the grip on his gun. Marie-Claire closed her eyes.
There were no tears left. She depleted her source of tears after watching many people die during the time she lived with the Coal Miners.
There were no pleas she could think of to spare her life. A human life, especially that of a Coal Miner, had no value for the Nazis. Right after he would kill her, he would take her camera and phone and delete all the evidence she gathered. If someone found her body, they wouldn't know what really happened that day in Vucha and that she had seen it.
Mentally, she said goodbye to her loved ones and her friends, waiting for the Ace to shoot her. But he didn't. Instead, she heard a strange thud, as if something hit the asphalt. She cautiously opened her eyes and saw him sagging on his knees with a red dot between his skewed eyes. A bloody drop ran down his nose, and the Nazi fell down.
Marie-Claire was shocked and couldn't bring herself to move. Slowly, it got through to her that she was saved. But who was her hero? She looked around but didn't see anyone. She suspected it was a sniper, hiding in one of the buildings.
She had heard stories of a brave Yugoslavian sniper who fought at the side of the Coal Miners since the beginning of the war eight years ago. When he heard his Scythian brothers and sisters were in danger, he left his comfortable life in Yugoslavia and joined the People's Army. Since then, he grew into a living legend whose courage, tactics, and wit were extraordinary. Once he got caught by the Nazis and managed to get out of captivity by convincing his guards he was a tourist from Gaul who happened to take a stroll in the forest wearing a combat uniform.
It had to be him. She wanted to thank him but realised that the best way to do that was getting away from there. Again, she got another chance at life, and it was her responsibility to stay alive and bring all the evidence of the Borderland crimes to the Leaders of the Coal Mining Region and the Scythe Empire. It was her duty to inform them of another fraud, eviler and more gruesome than all the others before. So, she ran. When she couldn't run, she walked. But she didn't stop until she met a Scythian patrol and collapsed, completely exhausted, at their feet.