After the final battles ended, he walked home. Beaten and battered, he, having suffered ten years of war, all for nothing. He had around fourteen hundred miles of walking before him until he would cross the old borders of his motherland.
The road back home was just as depressing as the last days of war themselves, with rotting and burning corpses lining the ditches of the broken roads that they had once proudly captured.
Walking down these muddy, mostly unpaved paths was as if treading the tears shed by those waiting home, the wet dirt clinging to his old boots like the hands of the damned trying desperately to emerge from the soil that they now called their graves.
Never would they come back home, never would they hug their sons and daughters, and never would they tell anyone of their stories.
After the first week, Victor's food ran out, and he resorted to hunting the birds that fed on the corpses that lay scattered on the fields and bridges, the corpses that filled the waters and bridges leading to the front.
The rubberlike texture of their meat was discouraging, but the birds hadn't eaten anything but corpses, as that was the last source of nourishment left. The fields were burned, and all forests had been reduced to ashes, and so the natural resources that the animals of this world needed were buried in gunpowder bodies and fire.
As he crossed the old border, his heart sank even deeper into despair. Cities lay empty, burning, and broken. All the marble and beauty that had once stood proudly was now reduced to rubble, littering the roadside just like the corpses had before. And once in a while he saw a soldier just like him, staring at the things left, eyes filled with sorrow and despair.
Most had gone home before him, and so he arrived at his post in the city, expecting to see his old friends from enlistment, hoping to tell them his stories from the war, hoping to see relief in sharing his pain. So the sight he arrived to hit him harder than any bullet had. Scattered men, lying half dead and drunken in the courtyard of the fortress.
Unrecognizable and disfigured by combat, they did not resemble any of the people he once knew.
He couldn't stay and stand looking at these hollow men for too long; feeling that they had given up felt like a dagger to his cold heart, about to shatter what was left of it. Slowly walking down the main road, he could see the street as it was before, like a ghostly remedy that lingered in his mind, full of people, children laughing and playing at the curb, busy vendors in the roadside stalls yelling and praising their products, sad factory workers commuting to work clad in oily overalls and faces smeared with slag and dirt, a beautiful artwork of normality, a mundane composition of the ordinary daily commute he had been a part of back then.
A silent tear ran down his cheek, a last effort of his heart to let his feelings out, trying to emerge from the waves of depression that ravaged inside it. He stood there for a long time, trying to take in every last bit of memory, trying to conserve it, but the world before his eyes was a slap to the face, keeping him in reality.
He let his eyes slowly wander over the picture in his mind before it slipped through his memory like sand in an hourglass.
He still felt the need to tell his story, to excuse himself for what had happened.
He believed that this would lighten his heart and free the feelings that had been buried in his heart. He tried telling the last survivors he found on the empty streets, but most were drunk and spat before his feet, cursing the war and everything he had fought for.
For the next months, he hoped to find someone, anyone, to hear his story, anyone to give him relief for what he experienced. But that person never came; all he faced was hate and curses spat at him. After those months he returned to the fortress.
Sickened by the ungratefulness of those that had survived, he started drinking like them. The bottles he took from the unconscious in the courtyard tasted like vinegar and sour regret, finally burying his emotions under an ocean of sorrow and loneliness.
But anything better was impossible to find, and so he drank from morning to evening, embracing the numbness that made him forget the aching pain he felt and made his thoughts slowly disappear.
After the alcohol ran dry, he frantically searched for more, and that was the point where he sold the threads of his carpet for a box of booze from a decrepit deadbeat man who had found a stash in the bowels of a ruined brewery.
He was lucky the man was confused and lost in a dazed state, as gold had lost any and all value after the war. Thus, he started drinking daily, time becoming just as blurry as the memories.
He slept in fragments, not being able to discern if he was awake at any time. With every pause between bottles, he felt shaky, and daylight made his eyes burn, so much so that he stayed inside his old, decrepit room entirely.
But even that stash had its limits. And suddenly the bottle he held in his hands was empty. He turned it over, slowly looking down the bottleneck. And just as the last drop exited its glassy confines, just as he caught it with his tongue, the rain started again.
Slow at first, almost tranquil, then, like an explosion, the sky broke above him, and he felt the cold splashes that hit him through the rotten roof. He shot a blurred glance at the decaying box where the bottles resided within, but it was empty.
He stood up lightly shaking, lazily scanning the room for more liquor, but to no avail. So he donned his coat and stepped out into the pouring rain. He first looked around the courtyard, but all he could discern with his irritated eyes was dirt and rubble with no trace of bottles whatsoever. He started frantically searching in the rain.
Like a madman he ran and stumbled through the street, searching in the ruins and ditches, telling himself, "Just one more, just one more drop, one more, and I will forget." When the last rays of light disappeared, he knew he had to return. He realized that this was his first clear thought in a while, and so he stopped.
Stumbling back into his room, he sat on the mattress, not knowing what to do next.
He just sat for a long time, settling his thoughts. Slowly his hands started trembling, subtly, like when the rain had started. He felt a cold sweat running down his spine, like the drops of the rain.
And like the melody of the rain, his heart started pounding, irregular like drops hitting a metal plate but tranquil and light, like the wind that blew through the cracks in the wall.
He thought nothing of it at first and made the decision to sleep, as tomorrow he would go out looking for booze again. He tried closing his eyes, but sleep wouldn't come. He felt his muscles aching, and as he tried sitting up, a nauseous feeling overwhelmed him.
Rubbing his temple with his hands, he felt his jaw tighten and his throat dry up. As he tried closing his eyes again, he could see them again. The three. The ones he had to mercilessly put down.
They looked at him as if accusing him, silently screaming, cursing him like the others did. He startled; he wanted to stand up, but his knees gave out, and so he just sat again, his eyes wide from shock. He knew he wouldn't sleep this night.
And as the first rays of the morning hit the cracks in his wall, he was still awake, his heart beating discordantly in his chest. Now his room felt even smaller, like a prison of rot and decay he couldn't escape from. His trembling hands got worse, shaking uncontrollably, as if trying to detach from his arms.
The patter of the rain against the roof distorted in his mind, bringing back memories of the artillery. And as the wind violently blew into his room, he could hear it again.
The incoming barrage, crossing the battlefield, like howling angels of death, delivering destruction. And as he looked up, he stood there again, revolver in hand, his breath going wild. He saw his subordinates getting ripped apart again, and he smelled the familiar stench of gunpowder again.
And there they were, lying on the ground again. He could hear it again, the gurgling, this unholy symphony of inhumane screams ripping through the air, like a knife cutting the strings of a guitar.
This time he could see their faces again, clear as day. Poor Frederick, the blonde hair on his head was smeared with his own blood and dirt. He was only sixteen, always talking about how much he loved the shepherds pie his mother always made.
He was like sunshine in the trenches, bringing a little warmth into these cold and dirty holes of death. And the young Nath, what a promising young man, seventeen years of age. He could have studied at a renowned university but ultimately had to enlist. The last one was second lieutenant Adrian, a brilliant tactician.
He remembered it now. Adrian tried to pull back the two. He raised his revolver again, a ray of sunlight breaking through the thick smog and smoke of the battle, making his gun shimmer and shine like a weapon of holy judgement, declaring these poor men dead, sending them to their wet graves.
Calmly he pressed the trigger again. Three times. Every shot hitting its mark. He didn't remember shooting this well, making his precision like a cruel mockery, laughing in the face of the writhing men lying at his feet.
He closed his eyes again, listening to the sounds of combat fading. The gurgling that had disappeared after the shots reemerged, but he could discern its origin now. As he opened his eyes again, he sat in his room, water draining through the floor, gurgling and flowing to the room beneath.
The headache slowly subsided. He stood up and instantly threw up into the corner of his room. Sitting down on his mattress again, he watched the former contents of his stomach getting washed away by the rain.