A horse screamed in pain and panic. A man's last words were cut off in a gargle of blood. The sound of ringing steel and of metal slamming against metal cut the air. Battle cries from both sides were near deafening. The yells from my commanding officer were drowned out by moans of pain, the clash of sword hitting axe, the twang of bowstrings, the crack of thunder, the stomping of booted feet, the clanking of plates of armor banging against each other, the crunch of bone. Warriors were fighting to the right and left and fore and rear to the point where I would not be able to tell which way was down were it not for the solid ground beneath my feet. Blood was splattered across my clothes and skin. A horseman charged by, lance in hand.
Almost every young child plays at the game of war sometime or another. I was no exception, even though I had never been terribly interested or particularly good at it. A game of battle was wonderful, a distraction before going home to Mother and Father breathless and content, ready to play again the next day.
I was clueless then. Fighting is not fun. Battle is not glamorous. And war is certainly not a game.
The realization of such hit me like a slap across the face, although I have never been hit with such force in my life. Here I was, standing in the middle of a battlefield, and I honestly felt more awful than I ever have before.
War was so much different from the games I used to play. In play, "dead" people stand back up afterwards, ready to play again. Here, the person a few feet to my left had a sword wound that had nearly ripped his head off. He would not be getting up. The whole thing was chaos. I was dimly conscious of a wound to my shoulder that was bleeding freely, streamlets of crimson snaking down my arm and sticking my fingers together. My hands were clutched so tightly into fists that my knuckles were white as bone, and even as such I felt like my grip on my tome of magic was too loose, too precarious. I could drop it in a heartbeat.
And a heartbeat was all it took. A pegasus knight fell to the ground, a barrage of arrows killing her mount before she had a chance to react. An enemy mage was suddenly boasting a gaping hole in his chest where a lance now lay instead of his heart. A swordsman lost an arm to an axe swing. A foot soldier slipped in a puddle of blood and went down, trampled by one of her own side's knights. This was not glory. There was no honor in this style of fighting, and all those childhood games and dreams and hopes of battle had been crushed as surely as a swordswoman's skull, the beliefs of it seeping out from between interlaced fingers like the blood from a horseman's stomach wound.
I took one look at the charred and unrecognizable corpse before me, one that had been incinerated by one of my own fire spells, and I nearly lost my footing. The sky, which suddenly seemed to be the scarlet of flying blood and the sparks that came from striking swords, spun in my vision, as if my eyes were not working. I was sure that I was going to collapse, yet I did not. Apparently, my brain was so frozen that the order to stop functioning had gotten caught up before it even reached my legs.
A dying pegasus stumbled into me, bearing my body to the ground under its own. If I had been even slightly coherent, I might have thanked St. Elimine for making those winged horses hollow-boned and light enough to fly. As it was, I was too distracted and confused to even register the fact that I was in the blood-soaked dirt, and now the sky seemed below me and the earth above me.
The clash of metal continued. The yelling continued. The death and killing and fighting continued. The pegasus could very well have been a sword-armed enemy and I could very well be lying dead where I was, and no one would have stopped anything. It was a disturbing thought. Killing me would mean nothing now. My death would mean nothing now. No one would notice or care until their brutal and deadly game was over and the enemy beaten. Only then would they stop to take account of the wounded and the dead. And all that would become of me would be a quick prayer, if that, before I was forever interred into a mass grave along with a hundred other nameless faces and casualties.
My eyes shut of seemingly their own accord. I could not bear to watch the death and dying all around me any more, could not bear to continue seeing warriors on both sides fighting and killing and dying. I could do nothing for my ears. I could still hear the hoarse shouts of captains and officers, could still hear the splintering of bone, the thundering of hooves, the crackling of fire spells, the beats of great feathered and leathery wings, the roars of the wyverns and the whinnies of pegasi, the chanting of spellcasters and the prayers of the clerics and monks. A spear, knocked out of a fighter's hand, rolled to a stop when it bumped against my head. Its wielder was most probably in no condition to use it; the dead cannot use weapons. Someone scooped it up and continued with no regard to the mage that might still be living.
Was I alive? Was I dead? Was I awake? Was I asleep? It would be so easy to pass this all off as some horrible nightmare. It would be so easy to pretend that all this was happening to someone else and that I would wake up to find myself safe in my warm and soft bed, where war was no more than a game played by children and where death did not leer around every corner, waiting for the chance to ruin one's luck the same way a set of snake eyes did. Dice, war, chess, sword, checker, blood. They ran together, much like how my own blood mixed with the pegasus's, the dirt, the blood of however many others fell and died and bled in this spot.
I was alive, I thought, but what was life when a stray arrow might end it in a second? What was life when I was forced to take another's or perhaps lose my own? What was life if it would only end in death? What was death if life was nothing to begin with? Life and death were tied up much as swing and clash and parry and dodge were tied up, much like stab and sidestep and riposte and block were tied up. Everything was the fight and yet the fight was nothing at all if death meant nothing because life was meaningless because death was always there because life had started because of another's death because of another's birth. It could be avoided no more than a spear to the back or an arrow whistling towards one's heart. It was all as mixed up with itself and everything else as the bloody ground above me and the crimson sky below me and the fighting in me and the thinking out of me.
It was then the swirl of blood and chaos that suddenly screeched to a halt, the swords ceasing their clashing and the bows ceasing their firing. Someone had won and someone had lost, and the whole game was ended and finished. Yet the dead were still dead and the earth was still soaked with blood and a thousand retellings of the game would do no more than create more of it. This was all as permanent as the earth and sky and eternal nature, and none of it could be erased.
Yet it was over. I was alive, somehow. The fury and panic and pain and chaos and death were all over for the moment, and I could stop and live and breathe in that precious moment. At least, I could if I was alive. Was I? Was I really alive?
Someone laid a finger to my neck, a motion which I did not comprehend before the weight that lay over my legs and chest was miraculously removed. I groggily opened my eyes, before I was pulled to my feet by someone. Their face was too blurry and bloodied for me to make out; that, or they were just another of the countless hundreds that had died or would die, a face in the crowd, another of the countless that no one would miss when that arrow or sword or fireball came.
My legs finally got that unspoken command to stop working, and my knees buckled. That someone caught me by the arms, picked me up, and carried me away from the death and blood and fight.
"You did a good job out there," my rescuer rumbled. I finally realized that he was speaking, speaking to someone. Speaking to me?
"I…I did?" I murmured.
"Yeah. I saw how you took down that enemy axman back there. Great job!" he continued.
Axman? Was there an axman? Ah, yes… That burnt and faceless corpse, one of dozens out there, that was the one he meant.
"Great…job?" I echoed. I felt sick to my stomach.
"Well, sure. You did well out there."
"Y-Yeah…" I mumbled, noticing that my hands were shaking uncontrollably and that my magic tome had been all but lost. It didn't matter much. I did not think I had done well at all; I had killed one—two? Three? Four? I had no real memory of it—enemy soldiers before I had been incapacitated. As far as I saw it, I had been next to useless. I had not killed many, and that was all that mattered in the fight, right? Killing and surviving, life and death and all of that over and over and over?
I was shaken up. I was practically in shock, actually. It was all so stunning and mind-numbing. I had killed before, sure. I had slain men and fought in fights before. But for the most part, those had been quick skirmishes with brigands, brawls with mercenaries. There was not the same horrific awe in those as there was in the army-on-army fight I had just partaken in. There was not the same terrible sense of confusion and fragility as there was in that fight. This was war, and my petty scuffles with bandits seemed terribly insignificant compared that that.
He deposited me on a cot in the medical tent, calling for a healer in his booming voice. I didn't get it. How could he be so calm, so—dare I say it?—happy after that killing, vicious fight, while we still stood on the blood-soaked earth, while his comrades took care of the many dead on both sides. How could he be so calm? Why wasn't he in tears? Why wasn't I?
Maybe it was because I knew the game wasn't over. The game would continue later, and the life and death and killing would keep it up, and I would be nothing more than one of the millions of players in the game, never knowing if it would be my last chance to play or not, never knowing if I would live or die. But as long as the game of life and death continued, I could not quit without breaking the rules. The game was still going on, and I was enmeshed in the web of fate as surely as over. And until that game ended, for me, at least, I could not help but play, kill or be killed…