April 2nd, 1800
...
There is no one to help them.
Days turned to weeks and weeks become months, and they're still here lying on the streets. Dozens of wrapped bodies awaiting burial... The scent is unbearable, though not as much as listening to hundreds of children weep in mournful grief every day. They won't stop as the bodies keep coming and every single day, I pull the cart and I happen to find a new body in a worse state of rot than the previous ones I've seen. It is by far the least disgusting part of my job, to deal with bodies. They don't talk, they don't scream and I'd rather see a friend's body than unrecognizable pieces of what once belonged to a whole person.
It's horrifying. Truly horrifying, and yet, they fought like wild beasts. I saw children throwing stones against the enemy and women piercing through their flesh with knives, spears, anything they could find around was used as a weapon, even their claws and teeth. Did they succeed? Well... History says we did not, but I believe what I saw. If it were not for these brave souls, who knows, more lives could have been lost. I'm not a doctor or a magician to treat the injured, I just collect corpses and put them down the earth.
Some of them are fortunate enough to afford a place within the graveyard. Most of the bodies do get a proper burial, the family gets to visit them and they're covered by flowers and dirt soon afterwards. As for the pieces... We burn them. On the incinerator. Cremate, I mean. It feels less brutal and more respectful to the deceased when we say we are about to cremate them one after another. We can't afford to waste space in the graveyard to bury a single hand, or a finger, a leg, a head or someone's torso. There's not enough space for all of them and it's up to the family to decide, and so far, they all agreed to cremation when there is nothing but pieces of a body or when they can't tell who that person was before the invasion.
The court pays me and a few others to do this, though I won't be doing it forever. I can't do it forever, but it feels like an endless task. There's so many of them... writers, artists, merchants, soldiers, artists, milkmaids, seamstresses, toddlers, infants... So many people I never saw before, people I have not met for a long time, people who were forbidden to follow their dreams or even growing up to decide whether they would live here or somewhere else. Somewhere safe, maybe. Somewhere other than the ground beneath my feet.
It's the worst and most unfair thing you can imagine in a war... Not only people are killed outside the conflict, but they're also denied any opportunity to become better people to make the world a better, if not tolerable, place for us to live in.