14: forged in triviality.
When it's quiet, I can hear them weeping.
The shrill tears of abused machinery, dripping in far-away clanks of rusted apertures and the muted clanging of metal arms locked in battle. I am not plagued by the cries of dying men or the pleas of wounded prisoners; my lullaby is no more than that cold avant-garde industrial rhythm. Other soldiers dream of bloodshed; my dreams are blanketed in black oil. I am a pilot.
I am the best pilot OZ has ever seen.
I am alone now.
I've spent my newfound free time wandering like the ronin of old, but I can't decide if I'm a disbanded warrior or just a disowned pet. I can't decide much of anything yet, and that is why my uncertain footsteps take me nowhere particular; nowhere I'd really care to be. What I have lost is my master, not my proverbial sword; I've lost the convenient food bowl set out for me at predictable intervals.
Pet, then.
The cruel fangs of winter are descending now, and that leanest of seasons - however artificially produced it may be - like the feral predecessor of whatever domesticated breed I am that still roams wild, threatens soon to devour the last of my personal reserves. I've been moving on pure adrenaline, these recent days; obeying the fever in my blood that causes even a dog like me to yearn to be unleashed. Ah, but it's mere delusion, it's feverdreams, just that seductive tingling in the veins- should I be confronted with a real wolfpack, they would tear me to pieces, and leave my corpse to be buried in white.
The snow will fall any day now. I can see our simulated atmosphere brimming with it. How I wish it were not snow, but the last of the worst empires of war ready to fall. How I wish it were the hearts and minds of our bedraggled people to brim with this hope.
Instead, it will all be white. Purifying in the sense that nothing after can be distinguished; that all becomes trivial when frozen. It amuses me, in a sickened way, that my concerns have become so mundane of late. The dog trained for attack wonders where to find his next meal, ha.
I am wounded by the cold.
Winter is the untamed indigenous mongrel of the seasons that reminds all the rest just how mild and controlled they've become, toiling for years alongside the subversive hand of man. Winter is when even the attack dogs cower from its unruly fangs of white.
It is through these white fangs that natural balance is restored; violently, aggressively, with unforgiving chaos that decimates the ersatz order of man's devising, the cause of his complacency. And complacency, or even worse, clinical purpose and precision, in the name of warfare - that dangerous art for which I have been so trained and made into the dog that I am - is a horrifying condition for mankind. It makes the wilderness of chaos seem innocent from the misfortune it may happen to cause, and the uncertainty of coping with it seem most humane.
After all, is that not the endgame of man's evolution out of accident and into design? To build a safe haven of reason out of the way of chance? To give the roaming dogs a place to come home to, where killing for food is unnecessary?
It is when we same dogs are harnessed for our killing prowess, not for the purposes of that very nature from which we have been plucked and made to disobey, but for the purposes of obedience to a new master with intentions of suffering on his mind, that man's calculations become far more unjust than the simple, arbitrary equations of nature.
It is one thing to contend with the calamity of blizzards; that is the balance of chance against reason; you build a warm fire. It is wholly another thing for man to concoct blizzards of his own and hurl them at himself.
That is when the time comes for winter to reclaim herself. That is when we attack dogs return to being wolves.
The houses of men are no longer safe when man is responsible for making weapons of us all. Treize knew this. What terrified him the most, I remember, was the idea of removing the anatomy of nature from war entirely, so that not even the inherent forces of the world could remain at work to steady our bloodlusts. Mobile dolls completely disallow the one thing, that one insurmountable truth of our world, to reign us in: death. If we mastered death in the same way we mastered dogs-
He put a stop to that, though. He didn't let humanity get too out of control, but the problem is that Treize, with all his continued war games, is still in control. He has surpassed the boundaries of nature and sent the world to slaughter.
And I, his faithful dog, made the massacres.
No longer.
Still, he is not alone in his crimes. I will take the one thing away from him that burdens him most- responsibility. Treize, my beautiful, horrible master, is not solely responsible for the state of the world. He simply rose from the ranks of the ravenous and the injust for being better at it. More exacting in his ravenings, more precise with his injustice. He is the very embodied concept of man's stranglehold of enforced order.
It's time for chaos to rise up and meet the challenge, to restore balance and, therefore, peace to humankind. But Treize, in his brilliance, has reached the extreme- he has created the end of the spectrum. He fights the war to end all wars, but he fights it.
I am going to end it for him.
If this is the will of the cycle of nature, if Treize had to become this mad caricature of evil to prove what evil really is, then I too must go to the extreme.
I have been to the edge of space, where all of time stands still and even the mighty reach of man's prerogative falters. As a pilot, as a battle-hungry attack dog starved by his master, I traversed that blackness.
Now, I must run to the edge of reason, where madmen are made. I must go wild.
Treize, you have been the devil of this world, and incited angels to meet you, to stave off your conquest... but they are losing. There is one factor in all your battles of good and evil that not even great tacticians notice: the battleground. Treize the sinner, and Relena, my lost sister the saint, you are both the apotheoses of order. You have forgotten that chaos is the law of the land on which you host your war for the souls of our kind, and in this forgetting have rendered us soulless.
I will remind you.
You both, the keys to twin halves of my severed heart, have entangled yourselves too deep in this senselessness. After all, ancient civilisations called for ceasefire during the harshness of winter, for no man can find reason for killing when the white blanket of disorder descends, and the wolves bare their fangs. I will make you distrust all dogs bred for violence; the way our heathen counterparts behave.
With whiteness and fangs, I will put you back in your places. You are men, not deities or prophets or masters or minstrels; just men, and the world is cruel enough without your petty disagreements.
With whiteness and fangs, I will show you what you should be fighting, and it is not a fight you can win with bullets and bombs. It is a fight you can only win with each other, together.
I love you, Treize. Relena, you haunt the empty halls of my memory where a good man once lived, but he has gone from there and can never return. You will finally see my face, and it will be my face; not a concealing helmet of impartial steel, but you will not love it. It will not be the bloodhound of OZ, nor the docile companion of the peaceful Sanq; it will be the face of a wolf you cannot fathom, and the trivial effects of winter and wildness will forge a new era for humankind.
I love you, Treize, but I am coming for you.