Trailing screens of smoke drifting upwards with ghostly leering faces. Filling the air. Choking. Silent. Twisting, writhing, treacherous. Fires gently flickering in the background. Biting the grass. Unpredictable. Scorching. Razing. Heat. Helpless anger, wanton destruction. Buildings reduced to a grey smoldering rubble as fires wrack them. Plasma scorches blasted all over the cement face. Black. Crusty. Ozone. Etching away, eventually through the base of another building. The huge building collapses, but Streem hears nothing. He looks around. Death. Bodies lie strewn about. Some Human, some Covenant. Littering the choked earth. Suffocating the gentle lands. Heaping piles. Rotting. Flies. Death. The bodies are mangled. Like meat ripped apart by the carnivorous Kig-Yar. Holes adorn their bodies. Burns. Blood.
Death.
Over here is some sort of vehicle. It has treads and a long barrel sticking from a rectangular head attached to a rectangular body. Its head is ripped open. Smoke swirls around its silent and still bulk. Fire. An explosion has left a crater. Bodies lie scattered around it. One drapes out the head, a leg five feet away, staining the dirt.
A Wraith tank lays, immobile, half imbedded in a building. It is tipped over, the plasma mortar crushed, exploding, plasma flashing. More fire. The plasma eats away metal, etching a spray pattern in the tank. The building falls over onto a pile of bodies, burying them forever under a pile of ash and dust and mortar. An ATV-like vehicle, what the humans call a Warthog, is upside-down, crushing Sangheili and Humans both. Death. Death does not care who it must kill to win. It does not discriminate between races. It always wins.
The stench of decay washes over Streem, causing him to gag. He coughs, tries to get it out, but it stays. It is the hurting, biting, horrible reality of what has passed. It shocks with utter unforgiving. It tears the heart out. It laughs now at the hopelessness you feel. The sadness. The feeling that something inside you has been lost forever. That someone close to you is gone.
Death.
Tears run down your face, stinging your dry skin as you sink to your knees in pain. You feel slow and sluggish. Everything begins to blur. Smear. Slide together down your vision. You wretch, choke, throw up. Blood comes up, but you swallow it back down. The hate burns inside you for it. Why was this done? What has it won?
Death.
You look across the landscape. It goes on like this for miles. So this is what has become of your glorious war? Your passion. Your hope. Your dream. What you have devoted yourself to all of your life. This is the outcome. Your friends, teammates, leaders, heroes, brothers all lay on the battlefield of the largest ground war in the history of the universe. The entire world lies like this. The thought makes you fall down on your face with dread.
So this is the end.
You thought that you could win. You would conquer and subdue the race. Exterminate them. Kill them and be glorified as a god for what you had done. Odd. Being praised for helping to destroy a way of life. A people. But you never really believed that that would happen. You guess nobody else did either. But they all died nonetheless.
You could loot the corpses. Loot whatever buildings were left. You could walk around the world for the rest of your life, gathering riches. But it wouldn't matter. There is no-one left to share it with. No-one to care. You are alone.
How could this happen?
You realize in an instant.
Death.
It laughs somewhere in the background as it is about to claim its final victory. But you think there is no-one left to kill. But you realize that there is one.
It is yourself.
You look down at the wound in your belly. It was made by a rifle shot. It has been bleeding all day, but you couldn't feel the pain. But it is still there, making you weaker every second. Blue blood seeps out slowly, dripping into an ever-growing puddle. You angrily swipe a hoof at it, smearing it into the dirt. You will not let Death take you itself. If it must have you, it will have you by your own hand, not by its own.
You pick up a plasma grenade that had fallen from your dead brother lying next to you. You activate it. Death laughs mockingly.
Goodbye.