Hello to everyone reading this, if you've decided to spare some of your time to click on my little humble story then I thank you will all my heart and ask you to continue on. As a quick forward, save for a cameo, that this entire cast of characters is original though the actions of the ones we already know greatly affect their lives. This fic has been in the works for the better part of the last year, born from a terrible fever I suffered during the infamous quarantine, and the idea has been living rent-free in my mind. On and off I have been writing this, with hiatus and procrastination making this screech to a halt. I even thought that I would never ever get around to releasing it but many difficult nights on the keyboard finally got me to this point. To say this is a passion project is an understatement and this always felt on some level personal to me but never really knew. As I write this foreword I realize now why it resonated so much with me: it's about small people in a big world trying to make a meaningful mark. I guess this is my attempt to I would like to thank once more anyone who has decided to read this.

Really, thank you. It means a lot to me.

I had the same dream again. The one that comes to me when I close my eyes and get a moment of rest. The one where I see the church burning, fires bursting out of the window like licking tongues, and their frames sloughing off in molten iron tears. The one where even stone hundreds of years in age cannot bear it for long as it crumbles into ash.

I don't know why but every time I am there I run towards its doors and desperately try to open them. I burn my hands on the red-hot handles and despite the intense pain, I refuse to let go. A terrible bell somewhere is ringing a funeral beat so loud that it shakes me. Eventually, after what seems like an eternity of agony, I manage to nudge a gap big enough to slip through. The inside is like an infernal furnace.

The smoke drives me to tears and the intense heat from the inferno sears my lungs badly. I can't breathe. But still dive inside despite every inch of my body. I still don't know why.

And always I die.

I am cold despite the blaze all around me, enough to shiver, and when I look down there is a flower of blood blossoming from where the heart should be. Gravity shifts sideways as I fall. I see the great roof shudder and then collapse in an avalanche of wreckage.

And always I get the feeling this is not the last time I will be here.

And always, before I hit the ground, I wake up.

"Wake up."

"Hmmm?"

"Get up."

"What?" He peeked open a sliver and saw a pair of vivid emerald-tinted eyes looking down at him, belonging to a rather annoyed face.

"One more minute," He rolled over to the other side, shutting his tired eyes tight.

"Verdant, get up onto your two feet or I'll use my knife here to make you a woman," Her boot found its home in the small of his back.

"Ah! Brother curse you!" He yelped out as he jumped up. "Couldn't bother to give me just a second more rest?"

"No. Now you gonna get up now or start deciding which dress you're gonna wear?" She sneered.

Groaning, he got to his feet and shook out the feeling of pins and needles in his joints. He brushed off some leaves and plucked splinters that had fallen from the old oak tree he had decided to bed next. The long yellow-green grass around them had made damp patches on his dark gray overcoat. A cold breeze was sweeping the grass around in ripples. He looked up. The sky above was overcast, a canvas of grey only and black occasionally pockmarked by a little blue, and it looked like it was about to burst.

Dressed in a beige bombardier jacket, she was a good head taller than him, though that wasn't much to say given his mediocre height. Her pump shotgun was strapped on her back with her compact grenade launcher hanging off the webbing on the inside of her jacket. On the top of her short brown hair, she wore a red beret with a bronze shield in the center and a pair of flight goggles she had picked up just before they had left base. Though, given her nature perhaps the term 'borrowed without intent of returning its owner' was more apt.

"What is it, Arras?" He reached down and picked up his rifle, a standard-issue autoloading Galesburg model with a sturdy wood stock, and slung his leather kit satchel over his shoulder, letting it rest over his right breast.

"We've both drawn the short straw. We got night sentry duty down at the line." She began to walk down to the camp.

"Dang," Verdant said as he picked up his steel bowl-shaped helm he had left dangling on a low-hanging branch. He straightened out his equipment webbing and made sure his leather jackboots were tied, before catching up with Arras.

"You think they'll have us on wire laying duty tonight?"

"Hopefully not," The ground under their feet started to transform from sickly grassland to a well-trodden mire. "I know we've only been on this section of the line for a week but we haven't seen a lick of action. The Grimm haven't attacked us yet, not even the scouts have reported any sightings. They're throwing everything they have at Lower Cairn and are paying the price of it. I heard from some rotating troops that the valley is choked with fire and their corpses. Blasted Archenemy simply doesn't have the numbers to launch even raids here for a month, much less tonight."

"Course you would think something like that. Sorry to tell you that the moment you said that, lady luck decided to pull down her pants and take a nice fat dump over your dreams."

"There you go again. Ever the cynic."

"Ever the truther." She smiled back.

"That's not even a proper word."

The pair stopped by a wooden post at a crossroads to let a convoy pass by. Most of them were hay carts carrying munitions that had their sides reinforced by thin corrugated steel panels that looked like they had been just ripped off a roof. They were being drawn by teams of workhorses, ten to each cart. They were so thin that their ribs were showing through the side and stank of sickness and feces as they whinnied and snorted along, every step a struggle. The drivers didn't look any better, wrapping themselves in thick rags that were ridden with lice and smeared with mud.

Verdant cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted as loud as he could, "Keep the fight going, lads! Show those damn beasts what we Valean's can do!"

None of them even seemed to notice him, just continuing to beat the backs of their horses with sticks to hurry them along, adding more wounds to a dozen other festering ones.

"You think if I cut you open you'd be bleeding green, black, and gold with all that misplaced nationalism in you?" Arras remarked sarcastically.

Eventually, there was a break between carts and they quickly passed through. He lagged a few steps behind the stroke the muzzle of one of the poor beasts. It leaned into his hand and stopped for a moment.

"Get out the way!" One of the drivers barked. He raised his crop and tried to strike Verdant with it. "Out of the way, runt!"

Arras grabbed Verdant by the collar and dragged him out the way, not particularly caring that she was choking him.

"Sod off, you sorry excuse for a wanker!" She yelled back and showed the driver a sign with her hand that lacked her other four digits. "Come on, let's get going before I decide to commit a blue on blue. It'll be certainly worth the charge."

Arras overheard him murmuring as he glanced back. "I wish we could spare more just to fill their bellies. Just ain't right..."

She sighed. "Yeah, can't blame you. Wish we had more grub to go around for everyone. Me in particular."

Verdant heard a low rumble. He thought it was another procession of carts passing again. But the road behind them was empty. He looked back at Arras who was looking away and pulling her jacket together around her stomach as if that would stop the growling. Verdant rummaged the pockets of his greatcoat and pulled out something wrapped in a red checkerboard handkerchief. He offered it to Arras. "Here you go."

She cautiously took it and unwrapped it. It was some half-eaten ham and cheese sandwich. It didn't look appealing in any sense of the word but out here she looked at it greedily as if it was the greatest treasure in the world. "Where did you get this?"

"Lunch. Burial duty in the morning pretty much wiped out any appetite I had." He shivered as he remembered hundreds of cold white faces with glazed-over eyes, all staring right at him as he shoveled more dirt into the pit. Just the indignity… at least they were buried in the first place. Most of the time they were left out in the open, feasts for the carrion and the vermin.

"There's a catch, ain't there? Always one. What do I owe you for this?"

Verdant frowned. "There's no catch with this one."

She stared at the open hand with suspicion.

"Really there isn't one so just take it." He paused. "Not everything's got to benefit you in some way. I just want to be decent here."

"Your loss, two-shoes." She shrugged and began ruthlessly taking chunks out of it like some animal.

The first sign that they were getting close to the forward operating base was the putrid, rank, and sick smell of burning fat and the acidic scent of the dust-fueled generators belching out black smoke through their exhaust chimneys. Washing lines were stretched out with drenched and dripping uniforms hanging off them with scattered washing bins around them filled with filthy-looking greywater.

The pathways had been churned under so many feet that they had become rutted mires and it sucked at Verdant's boots, trying to steal them away with their grasping claws. Every step was a struggle.

Unorderly rows of tents passed them by that were sodden and flooded by groundwater. Many of them had huge scabs of mold and fungus caking the limp surfaces of their torn canvases. Channels of open sewage flowed exposed outside the tents, coming from the overflowing latrines.

"Before I forget," Arras reached in her musette bag, "Mail came in when you were napping."

"Shoot. It was today? Thought it was tomorrow."

"No, it was today but I don't blame you. It's easy to lose count of the days in this place. Anyway, Arc noticed you were gone and he wanted me to pass this along to you." She took a small red envelope and gave it to him. "Consider this your favour paid back right now. Nothing more I despise than owning someone something, even if they say otherwise."

"Oh, it's from mom." His mood shifted from somber to something brighter Eagerly, he drew his bayonet from its scabbard at his belt. Its silver blade was seventy centimeters from tip to guard with a serrated edge designed to tear apart flesh. It was more of a short sword than the traditional image of a dagger and therefore a little unwieldy to use as a letter opener. "Last time she sent sweets."

"I did enjoy those." She remarked.

"I didn't share any."

"Hmmm? What did she write?"

His eyes quickly scanned through the familiar terrible handwriting, his face filling with warmth as a smile grew. The boy was practically just one step from bouncing up and down. "She says that life is going on back in Vale as normal, the crops coming on good and she's doing fine without me. Marigold's got the flu though."

"Marigold. Always hear you talking about her. She your sweetheart?"

"My horse." He said. "Been with my ma even before she found me."

"Still could be your sweetheart." She laughed. He didn't. "Come on, it's a good joke… innit?"

The look he gave her told her all she needed to know. He returned to reading the letter.

"She's telling me to come home safe. Don't be so stupid. Some passive-aggressiveness about why I enlisted. Tells me to just keep my head down in the meantime. Typical mother stuff." Suddenly his eyes lit up and he reached into the envelope. "Oh! Oh! And she found another card."

"Card?" Arras raised an eyebrow.

"Huntsman Cards." He explained. "I've been collecting them since I was young. We used to trade them back on the schoolyards. She sometimes finds some and sends them my way. Here, you can take a look at it." He handed her the card. It was like one of those cigarette cards Arras sometimes found when she smoked old packs. A rather pale stern looking woman with braided snow-white hair was looking back at her. She didn't seem the particularly photogenic type.

"Who's this?"

Verdant looked over Arras' shoulder. "That's Specialist Winter Schnee of Atlas! Looks like it's a first edition. Apparently, she wasn't exactly too pleased when they were taking her photo. Did you know that three years ago she was at the Eleventh Battle of the Flatbourgh River? They say she held the Dorsack crossing for three days straight, alone, without sleep or food! When it was over, the river ran black with the blood of the Archenemy, and the dams were clogged with their bodies."

"That sounds like a big steaming load of hogwash. For one, don't they, like, evaporate after you cap them in the skull? How can the rivers both run black and be clogged? If you're going to believe that, at least be brainwashed by something convincing." She flipped the card over to the other side where there was a short description of the person depicted. "You said she was a Schnee…"

"They're amongst one of the greatest noble families of Atlas. The most honorable Schnee's have supported the war effort ever since the first of their family set foot on Mantle."

"Most honorable indeed." Arras spat with unusual contempt, even for her. "Bunch of war profiteers that would love to see nothing more than this scuffle to go on for another thousand years."

Verdant frowned. "Without their dust mines and dilution plants, most of the world would grind to a halt. The reason we've made so much progress after the Great War is because of the innovation of their scientists."

"And who told you that? Schnee Cable Central News? Their Ministers in the Atlesian Congress, which I will remind you is granted only to districts, not corporations? Supposed to anyway." She rolled her eyes and gave back the card. "What's one of their own doing on the frontline? Thought their robber baron of a patriarch, was too much of a coward to send any of his blood to get a small boo-boo or actually work for once."

"Well, from what I've heard she could have chosen an easy life of plenty as the heiress but she still decided to go through Alsius Academy and enlisted in the Guard afterward as a common grunt like you and me. But she worked hard and has had an illustrious career as a Specialist." He paused for a moment as he looked off into the distance. "She's an inspiration, really. One of the reasons that the moment I turned sixteen, I joined the Guard the next week."

"An inspiration?" She gestured widely to the scenes of humanity and feces all around them. "If this is who you consider an inspiration then I'm sorry to say you've got pretty shit inspirations."

Arras continued taking occasional bites of the meal as she and Verdant made some inane conversation, strangely about the taste of snakes and the art of preparing them for dinner which even more strangely both of them had experience in. Columns of fresh troops with clean clothes and well-maintained rifles marched to and fro in the camp as their platoon leaders began to assign details and billets for the night. Many of the soldiers, straight fresh from basic, were rather shocked by the appalling conditions.

Turning by a long white medical tent, they heard a loud commotion coming from inside. Both of them stopped right in their tracks. A repulsive concoction of blood and yellow pus was leaking right out of the entrance in front of them. The smell was absolutely disgusting, so metallic, so organic, so sick. People were yelling from inside. Outside corpsmen, dressed in black fatigues and leather aprons, were desperately trying to boil pots of water to disinfect them.

Verdant caught a glimpse of a casualty being rushed into the tent. His face… his face. The man had no face, just a churning mass of melted flesh where it should be. He fought the urge to gag badly, telling himself it wasn't the first time he had seen something like this. It worked, barely. He glanced at Arras who just flicked what was left of the ration away, she had lost her appetite. He didn't blame her.

Resting on a lamppost by the entrance, Staff Sergeant-Medic Harrier was reading a report on a steel clipboard. He had his lupine ears and fiery red hair wrapped up in a net. With wire-glasses sitting on top of the sharp nose that was often attributed to Valean city-folk, he looked every bit the intellectual.

"Sir," Verdant stepped over the stream of bodily fluids, pinching the bridge of his nose to shut out the smell. "What's going on here."

"Damn Grimm just used their Stink Bug constructs down at Sumire barely half an hour ago." When he spoke his accent was chipped and rapid-fire. "They came in during the dark, some were caught and the alarm sounded but the rest slipped through and burrowed deep into the soil. But when the Grenadier teams came in to purge them, they found no traces. We assumed that the Stink Bugs were all either killed or retreated. Turns out the little bastards burrowed into the ground and waited until the alert was called off and our reserve troops returned to their positions. I tell you, they're getting smarter."

"Is it that bad that the facilities at Sumire can't handle it?" Verdant asked grimly. The wind blew a small gust that lifted up one of the entrance flaps of the tent. What the boy saw inside would stay with him for the rest of his life.

Harrier rubbed the back of his ear. "It could have been worse, Volkov, if it wasn't for the fact that the Grenadiers were still in the nearby area, we would be having to draft tens of thousands of black-letters."

No mother on Remnant dreaded anything more than the black envelopes. Not bandits, not thieves, not even the Archenemy itself. Just the thought of momma getting one had kept him up a few nights before, not that the dreams were helping.

"Plunged right into that black hell and dragged the wounded out and killed the damn bugs before they spread further."

"Praise be to the Brother for the small things… I guess." Verdant shrugged his shoulders. "Look, if there's any way I can help..."

Harrier smiled softly. "While the offer is greatly appreciated, I'm afraid without proper medical training you'll do more harm than good."

He expected just as much. "Really. I can do anything if you want me to. I used to watch a lot of"

The chief-medic made a delicate laugh that wasn't mocking. "Well, if you're so eager to help. Promise me when things get hot - and they will, trust me on that - you keep your head cool and help your fellows when you can. It'll help more than all the scalpels, diplomas, and drugs in the world."

"In all honesty, sir, that sounds like a children's Saturday morning cartoon."

"I much rather see you as another beaming face in a victory parade than another mangled corpse I have to tag." A horse-drawn wagon with a mud smeared red medical cross on its side suddenly pulled in and the driver was yelling that they had new arrivals. Medical orderlies ran out of the tent to bring out its occupants on stretcher-bearers. "You better get going. Best of luck on sentry duty, trooper."

"What was all of that about?" Arras asked impatiently as they quickly strode away.

"It wasn't nothing," Verdant said. "Just asked if I could help in any way."

"There you go being goody-two-shoes again." She teased. The woman loved doing that too much but Verdant had long become numb to it. "Volkov, you're a nice enough guy but you've got to learn that you can't always save everyone."

"Of course someone like you would think that. It didn't matter that I couldn't help them, it mattered that I bloody well tried. At least it was more than you've ever done."

"Well, what was the point of offering your help when you didn't want to do it or could do it? You're not even just lying to the poor bastards, giving them false hope, you're also lying to yourself. Trust me. If you want to help someone, help yourself first."

Verdant was preparing a retort when he suddenly heard the clanking of hooves and armour. A formation of Carbine-Hussars was galloping down the main road snaking through the middle of a camp. Certainly a sight to behold on their powerful noble steeds encased in segmented steel armour, standing two meters tall and each easily weighing a tonne with muscles as thick and corded as old oak. Their flaring nostrils gusted mist into the cold air with every one of their breaths. Even more majestic were their proud riders, the cream of the Calvary crop, hailing all the way from the scorching deserts of Vacuo. The Hussars were dressed in dark blue trousers with high jackboots and silken black tunics over which they wore kevlar breastplates. They donned tall dragoon helms that each had a unique plume of feather. Sitting upright and haughty, eyes front, they wielded lever-action riding carbines in both their hands. A pair of riders at both the front and back were holding lances with fluttering bannerols, chronicling the proud history of their unit.

Verdant caught a glimpse of their battle honours etched in gold weaving: Mount Glenn, Gossan, Kenyte, Schist, and many other engagements spanning the last eight decades. Some were losses, total defeat in any definition a total, but it didn't matter. They were all still marks of dogged and spiteful resistance against the enemy.

Soldiers gathered at the side of the road to watch, cheering and waving handkerchiefs and headwear as they went by.

"Now I don't consider myself a horse riding gal but shouldn't they have reigns?" Arras remarked as she watched them go by.

"They don't need them. They're Empath-Cav." Verdant explained.

"Empath-Cav. Think I heard of them before."

"The horses possess an Aura field. It makes them stronger, faster, and able to shrug off even direct blows. More often than not they just crush the enemy under their hooves. The rider and horse are emphatically linked through Aura so that they are basically one and the same. All the Hussar needs to do is think of the direction he wants his horse to go and it'll do it at once."

"You know a surprising lot about those lads."

"Actually when I was younger, a Hussar, he was part of the Shock Corps if I remember correctly, visited my school for a talk, to get us all thinking about joining up when we were old enough. As you can see, it clearly worked. I dreamed of being a Hussar when I was younger… be like the old knights of yore..."

"Then reality hit you."

"Hit me like a damn freight train." A sigh. "That's how I ended up in the dusting infantry."

Over a hundred Hussars moved on, leaving behind only droplets of dung. Soldiers quickly ran onto the road to retrieve them, some breaking out into fights with each other. The dung was seen as a lucky charm that gave its owner protection from shellfire and sold well enough on the black market.

Meanwhile, Arras and Verdant continued strolling through the camp. They passed men hauling supplies to and from the frontline, on their backs or in wagons. Those that had brought the wounded up from Sumire were gathered around water pumps, trying to wash out the stinging sensation in their eyes but it wouldn't go away.

The ground beneath them gradually sloped deeper down and the rows of sandbags they walked between rose in height until they were swallowed up by the earth and slowly changed into dirt walls that were shored up by wooden planks with strings of electrical lights running down the carefully reinforced walls. The passageway zig-zagged every few steps with traverses of sandbags or rock gabions so that a single blast wouldn't sweep the entire length and butcher dozens. Duckboards emerged wherever flooding was most common while teams of Pioneer's operated the bilge pumps to prevent any spread. The offensive ozone stink coming from the hard-light shield generators set over the munition dumps was burning his sinuses.

The sky, at last, broke with the resounding crash of thunder. It was so loud that it rattled the bones of Verdant and was so alarming that it almost sent him jumping out of his boots. Another clap. Then another. Yet another one.

Verdant realized that it wasn't thunder.

Those were the booming reports of a battery of super rail-guns, utterly monstrous engines of war forged by the best engineers that Remnant could offer. Such was their scale, their sheer power, that the simple force of firing would shatter the glass of windows for a dozen kilometers all around and could be heard for another hundred. They could hurl shells fifty tons in weight across sub-continents and with pure volatile fire-dust as their explosive filling. The propaganda proclaiming them as city-killers wasn't as far-fetched as some skeptics would say.

He had never seen them before, only heard them. The week he had spent listening to them constantly fire had lit a match under the furnace of his imagination. When they launched their scheduled barrage in the evenings and he felt the ground under him rumble, he allowed himself to imagine them as giant fire-breathing creatures, like the giant dragons of old fairy tales but made of cold unfeeling steel. Sometimes he would leave the safety of the dugout at night for a few moments just to look north at the horizon. Even that far away, the light flashes would be painful and immense, like grounded stars being switched on and off in the dark. It made him feel small like he was just a speck or just a small cog in a grand machine. It made the words of Pastor Green seem so impossible. How could he possibly make a difference in the largest army that had ever graced Remnant with its existence if he was so tiny?

He had stopped going out now to hide from his dragons but sometimes the silt falling from the roof of the dugout would remind him that they were out there, waiting and watching for him.

"Hey!" Fingers snapped just under Verdant's nose. "You heard me?"

"What? Sorry, I wasn't paying attention."

"Gees, nevermind. Too much time with your head in the clouds than on the ground. You'll find yourself floating off one day, and there'll be no one to bring out back down."

"That's what my mother keeps saying…" He muttered under his breath.