Eine Grausam aberSchone Welt (Teil Drei)

It was dark.

Darker than night.

She could see nothing before her, not even her hands. Still, she walked. She could feel the coldness in her feet, spreading through her entire body. Her feet were bare, and the dark cold rain pelted against her skin. It was raining. Exactly like on the night that he… The girl known as Liesel Eichenlicht couldn't think about him now. His face haunted her dreams, even though now his name could no longer pass her lips. Her entire mind, scarred and ravaged by war, agony, and loss, would be completely destroyed if she did. His tears, thick and warm against the rain pelting on his face, echoed in her dreams as well.

She would always dream of that night. She would have to relive every moment of the time that she shot her most precious person. He, who had been born mere minutes before her, who had shared every moment of their eighteen years together, her zwilling…had died. Liesel had said nothing of what happened that spring night. She hadn't known what had even happened to her brother's body. She had blacked out shortly after screaming Fried – his name. Liesel had awoken to find herself on a thin cot with a tall officer above her with a solemn expression on his face. Without looking into her empty eyes, he had told her carefully that he had been debriefed on what had occurred on the other night. Liesel's exhausted expression conveyed nothing as he told her that she had been given a medal for her work of bravery.

"Stopped the feige schwein from becoming a fool that did nothing for the nation," he continued to reply as Liesel stared dully at nothing before her. She said nothing as her bruder was called a coward pig, something that he would have... "We need more soldiers," the officer intoned as a misty look overtook his expression. "When the war began eight years ago, no one thought it would this deadly. More than half of the world's population lost by the fifth year…infrastructure destroyed to nothing but rubble…the colors of the world all but lost…and feiglinge und shweine who forsaken their families behind in death and horror."

The officer was not aware of Liesel suddenly shaking and digging her nails into the brown dirt-colored cut at his words. "Feigling!" she shouted at him as his desperate eyes echoed in her head. Her breath caught in her throat. "Those schwächlinge know nothing of bravery…not like you…Eichenlicht." His eyes tilted toward her face, which was turned away from him as she dry-heaved, pain radiating from her chest. "We need more soldiers like you, who did not fear and do not long and who do not care if they live or die the next day." This time he smiled. She could see it from where she was lying, her lungs desperately trying not to cry out. "Thank you for your service, Unteroffizier Eichenlicht." He raised his hand in a salute. Softly, he set the cool medal on her outstretched palm.

She didn't respond. Nor did he care. As the door closed shut behind her, thick and unbidden tears that leaked into her open, gaping mouth fell from her eyes. A whimper escaped as sobs wanted to scream out of her throat. Her nails scratched her skin as they kept digging deeper into the flesh, the clear liquid coating the hands as she thought about what had just happened. She had been given a rank of unteroffizier, a considerably low rank in the German military, but much higher than the rank she and many of the others condemned to the world of death and hell had for the three years since becoming soldiers. And for what? A medal that had once been given for bravery and self-sacrifice lay heavy in her outstretched palm. Tears continued to ceaselessly fall as she gripped the medal in her hands.

Blood was leaking from a cut, but Liesel wasn't aware. "Tapferkeit?" She whispered hoarsely. A weak smile appeared on her lips, cracking the hard lines and making them bleed. How long…? "Schwächlinge?" A small bubble of laughter escaped from her lips. "Krieg?Hölle?Traurigkeit?"The laughter increased until echoed against the walls. As blood leaked from her lips and from the slight cut on her palm, she was aware of the hysteria her broken was in. She thought of her brother. And then stopped.

"Warum haben...ich es tun?" She whispered as emptiness coursed through her. The night's memories refused to disappear into the dark recess of her mind."Warum bist dunichthier bei mir? Bruder...?" A sharp, hollow cry tore through her as racking sobs voilently shook her body. Her eyes squeezed shut, trying in vain to mar the pain inside. "Es tut mir leid..." Liesel whispered feverently as his desperate eyes and pleading, child-like voice tore through her once again."Es tut mirso leid.Bitte...komm zurück zu mir..." How could it be possible to feel as if you were dying if there was no festering wound? "Ich kann nichtallein sein." Her voice rose to a scream. "Ich kann nichtallein sein!" The world collapsed around her as she became only aware of the violent gaping hole in her heart.

The memory dissipated as she walked along in the darkness. The pain was real. It always was. No matter how much time had passed, it was always there. Liesel had not cried since then. Her tears had ceased to exist hours after the second half of her life had withered away until nothing remained. She had been responsible for that. The ones that had been born in war and now were fighting it were frightened of her. More deathly afraid than of the battlefield where so many of the broken and dead lied in their own blood. She never smiled. Never spoke.

Her emotionless and empty gaze more than likely haunted their dreams as her brother's dead face did in hers. Since the spring, the fighting had been more desperate with the Russian Republic barely breathing. Liesel had heard whispers of how the civilian population was almost extinct with only a few thousand soldiers, mostly boys in their early teens, were defending the border between Russia and Germany. The sounds of the guns and shrapnel and the screams of the bombs as they fell truly became a lullaby for Liesel. Her memory was blank of how many times she had gone to the front. Of how many times she had almost died. And how she didn't care anymore. Now as she slept in the land of her dreams, her blue eyes suddenly widened at the scene in front of her eyes.

Fire and flames were engulfing the city. The buildings were cracking, falling apart, and screams and gunshots whispered in the air compared to the sounds of violence. Suddenly, a man with a bloodied uniform and matted hair stepped on an overturned car, yelling and screaming in a language that she didn't understanding. The blood-soaked fingers gripped a head, its dark green eyes vacant and glassy, and its mouth open for flies to come in. The blond hair was unmistakable. The president of the United States of America had been assassinated. Washington had fallen…

She looked closer at the figure. The decapitated head of the American president started to distort. The blond hair darkened, becoming a dark color that mirrored Liesel's own hair. The dull hazel eyes become blue, and the face become smoother….gaunter…and paler. Tears were leaking from the eyes.

Her brother's decapitated head was before her, the blood leaking onto her hands.

She gasped.

"Hey, Eichenlicht, are you awake?" Her eyes snapped open.

Liesel sat up, gasping for breath as she tried to focus on the scenes around her. Soldiers were gathering around the door, lips in a thin line and their faces grim. The soldier that had woken her simply shrugged at Liesel's emotional state and picked up his gun. Liesel took a deep breath as she took off the worn sheet used as a blanket, and stood away from the cot. The bunk beds that she and the others soldiers had slept on had been burned for firewood when the forest surrounding the barracks had been extinguished three weeks ago. The cot was thin and didn't give much warmth in the winter, and she remembered past days of when she and her family would have hot coca imported from America.

Isabel had not yet been born, and Liesel remembered snuggling against her mother and father as her grandmother cooked soup in the kitchen while yelling at their grandfather to not eat the cookies. "Diesecookiessindfür diekinder, arschloch!" Liesel remembered of how a giggle escaped from her as she heard her oma's coarse words to her opa as he murmured a quiet apology. Her soft downy hair was caressed in her father's long hands as her mother hummed softly. He was there too. How could she forget? Giggling just like her, a smile in his eyes as he looked at his best friend. No, Liesel thought as she firmly pushed those thoughts away. I can't think about it anymore.

There is a war to win. The dream that she had was directly from the report that both America and England had fallen. They were not attacked by any foreign enemy or succumbed to terrorist attacks common a century earlier. Their societies had simply collapsed. The American president and the English prime minister had been assassinated within hours of each other, and whoever had lived through the eight years of horror eventually died from the mass hysteria that resulted in multiple massacres. Weeks passed before the entire population of the descendants of one of the largest empires and the land of dreams and hope completely died out.

As such, Germany was the last standing country to stand and fight the falling Russian Republic. There was no one left. Every other country had fallen into death or had been annexed to the enemy. The echo of war would cease, but Liesel wondered if too much had been lost. His words rang into her ears. What does it matter if we lose or if we die? She thought as the song was whispered on her lips. I…do not care anymore if I live or die. Is that all we are? Just humans…waiting to be eaten by war and death and the horror that is life? She felt her hand being raised above her head as she saluted the officer before her. Then…why do I want to live…in my heart of hearts? As she and the others turned to the doorway to march one last time, she thought, Do you have an answer…mein lieber die hälfte?

My dear half?

It was raining. The rain was cold and hard, almost like ice. Liesel's dark hair lay damp against her forehead, her bangs leaning into her eyes. She couldn't think of anything else of now besides of the frantic beating of her heart and of the coldness of her breath. She couldn't think of him now. Not yet.

Not until she was dead as he had been on that night.

"It was an honor serving with you all, sons and daughters of Deutschland. Now it is time for us to make our last stand." The words echoed in her ears. She held her breath.

Then…

A roar escaped from both ragged armies as they charged at each other. Liesel saw the soldiers slip and fall onto the snow and become nothing but carcasses as they were crushed. Her gun by her side, she ran towards the nearest soldier. Somehow her body had forgotten that she was supposed her gun, and screamed an inhuman battle cry as she collided with a human body. She felt a growl at the back of her throat as she aimed her fist at his neck. It was countered. Instead she found herself flipped over on her side, and felt the fists against her stomach and chest. Jolts of pain and gasps coming from her throat as her flesh started to bruise and bleed caused her in vain to wrestle away, but it ended up a failure as Liesel continued to feel the agony throughout her stomach grow.

A silent howl escaped from her mouth as she felt a crack. The pain was agonizing, burning, but it did not stop her from escaping from his grasp and using her legs to immobilize him. She screamed in pure rage as she used her hands to injure him as much as she could. The agony of breath and the stagnancy of the sharp pain through her chest did nothing to deter her. His face came in flashes as she hit him again and again. Auburn hair. Bloodied face. Green eyes. Blood across her knuckles, the pain intensifying as Liesel continued her torment. His fingers, caked with mud and grime. Her breath, gasping out of her aching lungs as her fists collided with his cheek.

Suddenly she felt her knees overturn, and felt a crack as a fist was punched to her face. Liesel landed on the snow, the whiteness slightly blinding her as she fought. He almost tripped her with his foot, but she managed to evade that move in time. A slight sting against her face and the coolness of the knife made her realize how close she had been to dead. She too took out her blade, and wiping away the snow from her eyelids, and evaded his blade again as he aimed at her neck this time. They collided again and rolled in the mud, punching each other's face and wherever they could reach.

For a brief moment, the two enemies were simply fighting each other, none of them reaching the destined spot for them to live another day. Then, Liesel was agile enough to sneak behind him. She took his neck in her hands and used his body weight against him as he collided on the cold hard ground. Screaming as the blood rushed to her mind and as the shocked and then frightened eyes so familiar to her now stared into her own, Liesel aimed her knife down. The blood came fast. It stained against her palms, against her fingers. The slight struggle below her caused blood to soak into the snow.

Red.

Red.

That was what she saw. The knife was slick against her palm, and warm as the blood dripped onto her uniform. She could see his face. Green eyes, looking up at the sky as she stood above him. Dark red blood was pooling underneath his head, soaking the snow into a light red. He looked young. Even younger than she. His pale face was cold to her touch. She looked at him briefly, the nameless Russian boy who would never live to see his family again. The battle still raged. She got up from the person she had ended the life of and started the cycle over again, until nothing of sanity was left.

The hand-to-hand combat wasn't used to kill many soldiers in the beginning years of the war. Her father had described all the training exercises he and their uncle and to do during their two-week training period, but hand-to-hand combat wasn't one of them. Neither was knowing how to battle with knives. As the war become more deadly with its weapons and the death toll rose, especially in numerous buildings where weapons were made, fewer and fewer people by the time Liesel reached the age of fifteen were willing to work in those buildings, fearful that they would be killed.

By the sixth year of the war, the death toll combined with the reluctance of the civilian populace caused the military of each surviving country to make a drastic decision. The weapons that once had been the death of numerous enemies in the wars of the past would have to be forsaken for traditional methods. The death of the one you shot or stabbed or strangled would haunt the mind of each individual soldier forever. They would have to face each enemy individually, kill people as they were killed more than one thousand years ago.

That what was caused him and so many other soldiers to defect and allow their families to die. Liesel didn't know how she wanted to live after individually killing her first at age of seventeen. She didn't know how. She had listened to him sob every night and scream, and she wondered how she remained sane. She didn't know how many people she killed. The blood stained on her hands would never fade away. But what made her sane? She could hear the words now, but couldn't speak. The words were dead to her now.

"Tränen…Ärger...Mitleid...Grausamkeit
Frieden...Chaos...Glaube...Verrat
Wir werden gegen...unser Schicksal ankämpfen
Wir dürfen uns nicht...in unser Schicksal ergeben..."

Singing. Every night now she sang those words that she once hated so much. Now they were simply her only bond with the past. With her past self. Her squad had forced her to sing one time before they had died. The slight smile on Edmund's face and the laughter of the others as he smiled and stated that she was like their father had been the fondest memory she had of the squad. Nothing had remained after their deaths, but still she sang the words as if they were with her right now. Eventually the other soldiers screamed at her to shut up when singing into the night, singing the same verses over again. Liesel sang the silently to herself then, the calm within her as she thought about the memories attached to it. But then he had died. The words had died. The moment her brother had died was the moment when her sanity had ceased. The song, despite echoing in her mind, had not stopped the insanity or the numbness wither away, like all the other times. The human inside her was now dead.

"Auch der stärksterückgang, bruder," she had whispered.

"Even the strongest fall, brother," she had told him fearfully in his arms while touching his wound dangerously close to his heart. He had almost been killed. It had been their first time out on the battlefield, and Liesel hadn't been able to see him. Miraculously, she had ended up unharmed as he was almost fatally shot saving a comrade. She had been right, but also wrong. She had been taking about physical death. About a death that would cause a hole in the heart that had killed her grandparents. About the death that now caused her to be who she was. She hadn't been talking about the death of the spirit. Liesel hadn't thought about the feeling of wanting to die, knowing that you're going to die, and not caring anymore. Who would have thought that she would have ended up this way?

If she wasn't human anymore, with a broken spirit and no sanity to hold onto, then what was she?

A monster.

I'm not human anymore…am I? Since I…shot him. No, she thought. I was never human. Not since I joined this war. And now there is nothing to keep me sane. I…just keep on living. Living uselessly…until I'm dead.