Aegis
It took the Fire Nation a week to begin what I had thought from the end of that first night to be an obvious inevitability.
What was obvious to me, however, seemed not to be so for the command structure of the Fire Nation, or perhaps the delay was one of preparation, of laying the groundwork of what was needed to continue.
It made little difference at the end of the day. One way or another, the Fire Nation had waited a week, and in that week, people died.
By day, infantry and armored inched forward to establish barricades, foxholes, and command posts at points deemed defendable by the night prior's patrols, then, by the following night, the patrols would go out again, fewer in number each time, starting first with escorted tanks, of which I had been a part, then later tanks sans escorts, and even after, as those began to reach short supply, horsemen.
Each night, red emergency flares would light the sky telling us where the Earth Kingdom was. When morning came, our iron wall would creep forward, bending and flexing to encompass that which had been deemed 'secure,' Fire Nation earthbenders probing each square yard for guerillas who may yet be hiding beneath the surface.
And then they would rinse and repeat for six more days to come, and the Shanzi would be stuck on the sidelines, able only to watch, the damage she had taken and the death toll her crew had witnessed grounds for R&R, but there was nothing restful about it.
That red of a flare-lit sky still burned at the back of my brain even through shut eyelids, the shut hatch of Shanzi's turret the only thing capable of keeping it at bay.
There were men dying by the dozen, and there was nothing I could do, nothing the Fire Nation could do, even as the evidence mounted. We knew what strategy the enemy was following, what tactics they were employing, and where the enemy was operating out of. There should have been nothing stopping us.
"Command bureaucracy," Boss coined the week of waiting on evening as we were being towed from one reserve position to another by a Fire Nation army truck.
Zek had its own name for it–"the command tent circle jerk," but the logic behind it came down to the same phenomena–generals putting forth plans that would win themselves glory while vying against and contesting the plans of others who also simply wished to win glory for themselves.
Granted, such was the term ascribed to the previous commands Zek, Hizo, and Boss had found themselves under. When I'd pressed one night if the losses over this last week were on account of the same phenomena, they'd hesitated.
"Were it anyone else in command," Boss said, "I'd say so."
"But?"
"But the Dragon of the West isn't one to throw away lives without reason."
"So what is the reason?"
He chuckled. "If I was capable of answering that, I'd be in the 'command tent circle jerk.' Not here."
I wanted to take Boss's word for it. After all, I'd met the Dragon of the West before, albeit only for a short time. Not as much as I'd interacted with his son, however. The two of them, they didn't have the look of those who took the lives of their men for granted. Not like Deming, whose missteps had cost the lives of tens of thousands of men.
But the nights dragged on, and I saw the horse-drawn medical carriages race through our lines to bring the lucky survivors to the rear for medical attention, symbolic of the lives that our creeping advance was costing us, and still failed to see what it was all worth.
We were in range of the forests. Our artillery could have started bombarding it at any moment, we could have began deploying troops to cut them off whenever we pleased, but still we neglected to do so. I tried to force my mind to come up with a reason, to think as our general might, but even as I did so, no answer came to me.
Were we out of range?
No, far from it. Though our artillery perhaps from here would not have been able to strike the epicenter of the forest, nor would it have been able to do so from any position we took. But to strike at the edges, let the fire creep inwards, it would accomplish the same effect-root the enemy out from their hidey-holes, deprive them of a hidden base of operations, and cease their attacks from the shadows.
Were we afraid that if we started now, the enemy would launch an organized retreat?
That couldn't have been the case. Even from our current position, creeping slowly forward as it was, we could have deployed the same cavalry we were wasting on patrols to intercept retreating units.
Were we conserving ammunition?
Conserving it for what? What took precedence over cutting out the tumor in our sides? Even if we were conserving shells and other munitions for the Earth Kingdom trench line that rested across the riverbed to out north, seizing it would mean damn nigh on nothing if the Earth Kingdom guerillas could eat at our supply lines, cut us off, reclaim the wall behind us and leave us trapped within.
And so even as I thought and thought as the days went by, I came to no conclusion that satisfied me.
Then the seventh day had come, and the news had spread through the camp like wildfire–an Earth Kingdom army corps had crossed the river to our north, coming south to reinforce their allies. The threat we faced had, in the span of a single lost night, grown by over ten thousand.
And that very same moment, the sound of artillery had rocked our line.
The first shells fired had not been trained for the forests, but instead, directly towards the enemy lines.
On that sunny morning, miles away as we were, we could still see the smoke that rose from the Earth Kingdom's position, at the mercy of our guns, pounding not at their frontline, not at their reserves, but something far more critical–the bridges to their backs–their way back across the river.
By afternoon of that same day, a new scouting report had come–The Earth Kingdom was trapped, and so the second wave of our attack began, right as a wind from the Serpent's lake had come north, flowed over our walls, and turned the weather to our side with a northward breeze.
Our artillery shifted directions, firing at the perimeter of the forest, and so too were catapults brought to the front, not sharing a target, not firing flaming boulders to begin the fire, but rather, armed with gliders.
I was on the front when it'd happened, Zek insisting to Boss that by merit of knowing Mano, we could get a front-row seat of what was to come. We hadn't known at the time what we were getting a front row seat to, all we knew being that today was a day of artillery, smoke billowing to the north, and to the northwest, a new front about to open.
Gliders disappeared in the distance, further than even our furthest cannon could fire, over the forest, the wind carrying them as far as the very center, and then, I could only assume they dropped.
And following that, inferno.
You could have told me a dragon had reawakened in the heart of the forest and I would have believed you. It spread like a virus across the treetops, entrapping all beneath to a hell on earth, a practical paradise driven to insanity and chaos in only the span of moments, and we watched from our line, the awe we felt at the sight even stronger than a desire to cheer, our inclination to breathe out in relief stifled by the fact that we were all still breathless.
We hadn't even been aware when night had come, the light of the slow-burning forest enough to act as a second sun as lives were lost within by the hundreds, lives that otherwise would have been our own, that had been our own for the week prior.
But as I watched that fire rage, I understood. We had let the enemy grow confident with their strategy, let them believe that they could whittle away at our lines for days, weeks, months, to perhaps the end of this war in fact. We had let them invest their resources, invest their lives, all the while we had prepared, built up stockpiles of gliders, of shells, and when the time had come to deal the most damage to our enemy, we had struck.
And now they paid the price, but we weren't done yet.
It must have been around midnight when the crew of the Shanzi had finally decided to call it a night, the lot of us wondering just how easy it would be to sleep with a new sun burning at our doorstep. Awaiting at our campsite, however, were new orders–a final penance to be paid by the Earth Kingdom.
Our order was simple–prevent the Earth Kingdom from retreating, and cut down all those who tried.
I couldn't speak for the crew of the Shanzi, but within the chamber of Shanzi's turret that night, I slept one of the best nights I had in a long while.
It was time to return the favor.
Danev
Earth burns.
The enemy strikes from the shadows, and hides within the confines and safety of a terrain that is theirs–one that shelters, shrouds, enables.
The terrain is not ours. We do not know it, it does not serve us. It serves the enemy. There is only one conclusion on how to proceed.
Earth burns.
The Fire Nation advances.
The decision was one that was made only recently, about a week following the disaster that'd been our initial attempts of making gains into Earth Kingdom territory. And it was one made without any of our knowing.
For the last week, our line had inched forward along the path of least resistance as scouted out by the casualties of the night prior, a flexible arrangement of infantry, cavalry, and armor seizing whatever gap could be found, the men of the 114th excluded, however, from any such movements.
This naturally came as a relief to a number of the men, but none more than Rulaan, who since that first night had begun to keep a tighter leash on his company lest any get in their heads a similar idea to volunteer their services to the nights' scouting parties. That wasn't to say our men were lining up to volunteer the same way they had that first night, but still, I understood Rulaan's concern, even if it did leave me wondering just how he would take the return to duty when it did come.
But after our service at the wall and the auxiliary line, that was unlikely to be for some time more, and so we held fast behind the line, unaware of the fact that one morning soon, we would be waking to an earth that had been lit ablaze.
And then that day had come. When the light of the morning sun had failed to shine through the tarpaulin of our tents, we'd thought nothing more than an overcast day had awaited us, but upon seeing that it hid not behind a sky of clouds, but rather, a shroud of smoke that engulfed the sky, we knew that something far different had begun.
Our orders were different that days, as were the orders of the entire host by the look of it: armored units were moving out in force on intercept, cavalry was taking positions on the forest perimeter, and infantry, we were marching. In truth this time. Gone was the strategy of filling the gaps deemed safe by night patrols, but rather, the whole of our strength, from western riverbank to eastern, was marching north.
Under the shadow of smoke, bombs, and firegliders, the Dragon of the West sent his forces forward, our ultimate objective determined from the start–the Earth Kingdom line, just south of the intersection between the eastern and western rivers, the enemy now trapped here same as us after our artillery had destroyed their only way out.
So too had it cut off our own access out of this artificial peninsula as created by the rivers, but between the Earth Kingdom and us, with the rest of the world to our backs, and a supply train that led all the way back to the Fire Nation home islands, I was beginning to feel more confident in our standing than I was with theirs, and so too did this seem to be the case with the enemy.
They were scared. Trapped between a burning forest and a river's who's current still rushed with the melting water of a concluded winter, attacks on our patrols and our line had all but stopped, the number one priority of all Earth Kingdom soldiers plain and simple–to get to the other side of the river before we caught up with them. It was as much a matter of fear and terror as it was strategy, their effort a desperate one to preserve as much manpower as they could before this entire peninsula became a Fire Nation forward operating base.
But, of course, the Earth Kingdom's only recourse had been obvious from the start, and so our response was equally determined. Be it our cavalry who waited on the forest outskirts, or our armored tanks ready to dart into combat on intercept operations at the first sign of Earth Kingdom soldiers attempting to escape, we were determined that this peninsula would also serve as the graves for hundreds if not thousands of Earth Kingdom citizens.
"Think Fluke is out there?" Shozi had asked me one day as we'd marched to catch up with the frontline, a solid mile ahead of us, the lack of fighting indicative that it had been, once more, another mile given to us without a fight.
I wanted to believe he wasn't, but I wasn't so foolish as to actually convince myself of it. Between the logistical fact that the Fire Nation was using almost, if not every tank at their disposal for intercept duties and the grim reality that Fluke would be out there even if every order going all the way up to the Fire Lord had told him to stay put, I knew there was a damn good chance he was, and likewise, a sorry good chance he was enjoying it.
Perhaps he wasn't enjoying it as the way a neglected child might enjoy burning an ant under a looking glass, but enjoying it to the extent that he'd come to enjoy less and less over this last year, and the one place he was beginning to see himself having a purpose was on a battlefield. It was too busy to begin worrying what would happen after this war was over, especially when it was still in critical flux whether we'd made it that far in the first place.
But if we somehow managed to get out of this in one piece, it was a discussion that would need to be had, but one that would be harder and harder to have with Fluke the more he dug himself into the hole that was soldiery. That wasn't to say we weren't all soldiers. We were, those of us in the 114th, by my own biased tongue, of course, some of the best this nation had ever produced. But whether it was Reesu wanting to open a top-tier restaurant in Yu Dao, Mano having grand plans on how to redesign the Earth Kingdom palace once we burned it to the ground, or Shozi wanting to become a huntsman on the frontier, the men of the 114th were fighting for tomorrow. Fluke, with all that I had seen of him in the last year, especially these last few months, he was fighting for today.
Maybe there was some logic in there that I needed to appreciate, and certainly, I could see the merits, but the more that I saw Fluke fight for nothing more than the present, the more I saw him become lost in it, and the more I feared that he would lose the future as well as his past, if he hadn't already.
Aegis
I'd never been a hunter before.
Not as long as you don't count the rats that I'd needed to survive off of in Taisho. However, even then, it was less hunting as much as it was trapping, and even still, was it really trapping, was it really hunting when the creature you were catching for dinner was just as starved and beleaguered as you?
Maybe not, but if so, is what I'm doing now all too different?
I reckoned that it wasn't at the end of the day, but a hunt it still was. Fair, it never needed to be.
It was day three of watching the earth burn.
The fires had spread, and were beginning to burn in patches, critical areas of the forest now left dead to the touch, primarily around the perimeter. Over the last three days, Earth Kingdom soldiers had tried to escape through the inferno, desperate for any manner of ways by which to leave the hell we'd made for them, but that was what we were here for.
If they tried to escape, we would watch as they scrambled through the burning trees and underbrush to make their way out, most caught in the blaze, a fraction of their deserting men lucky enough to make it out. If they did, however, and we were quick enough to see, then we would run them down, force them right back into those burning woods, even less likely to survive the return journey as the way out. If we were late, we would catch them no more than half a mile away from the woods, all in varying states of retreat.
Some we caught trying to form a camp, tend to their wounds, their burns, their comrades. Some we caught trying to reunite with other Earth Kingdom soldiers who'd made their way out. And some, we'd caught them still burning, not wanting to stop for a minute even to put out the flames that raged at their bodies. But no matter the differences between them, we burned them and cut them down all the same.
That was the job after all. They were the enemy. We didn't have the capacity to take prisoners, not with a single tank as we were. If the division command wanted to change the rules of engagement once their infantry caught up, they were welcome to do so, but until they were in range to begin accepting mass surrenders, there was only one job–to prevent any Earth Kingdom survivors from returning to the enemy to reinforce their ranks.
And so, as far as I was concerned, we'd become hunters–a welcome change from just over a week ago.
As the fire had burned itself out from the perimeters of the forest, creeping closer inwards to where small clusters of fires raged by merit of our firegliders, the woods had become nothing more than a hollowed, burned-out shadow of what they once were, but even in death, serviced the enemy, provided some marginal cover, away from the fire, away from us. On the third day, our orders were updated, as was the range of our hunting grounds.
Bark broke against the Shanzi's hull like wheat against a scythe, a once mighty forest now no more than a petty obstacle between us and our prey.
It became more clear to me in those days how, deep down, at their core, all people were one and the same. This isn't a soliloquy of how maybe we're not so different from the enemy after all, but rather, how little difference there really was between a starved slumdog scared out of his mind and a professional, well-trained, uniform soldier when both were at the end of their rope.
I remembered the Hornet-Rat war, how we would behave whenever the tides of war shifted, how Hornets would press their advantage as Rats would go running for their sewers, and if they couldn't make it, any nook and cranny that could hide them long enough until the danger passed, and how us Hornets would do the same when the tides had shifted in the opposite direction.
I remember how we always expected the enemy to be more clever, to be better-hidden, but how little that would prove to be the case, cunning and ingenuity no longer one's primary drive, but rather, fear and desperation.
Some would hide in foxholes shrouded in only the loosest coverings of brush and shrubbery. Some would hide beneath piles of charred wood and ash, hoping perhaps they might blend in with the scorched earth that surrounded them. Some would even simply create mounds of dirt to hide beneath, but for all of them, their fate would be the same–we would deprive the enemy of one of their few remaining resources.
The days went by, each more or less indistinguishable from the last as we hunted by day and returned to our line, always a few miles ahead of where it'd been the morning prior, and rested as the night hunters took our place, but sometimes, that role would fall to us.
And sometimes without so much as a day's notice.
It was the sixth day of our controlled burn, and the sixth day of our hunt. The count was 23 for the day, lower than our average, but still higher than the day before, which'd only been 17, preceded the days before by 26, 43, 39, and 54.
Our frontline had advanced significantly since the morning, now midway past the burning woods that sat to the west. The division hadn't even bothered to dig trenches, knowing full well that they would be moving again come morning, another day closer to the main enemy line.
"Assault's gotta be coming soon then, ya think?" Zek asked as we drove towards the rear beneath a sky made orange by the sun against the smoke film that covered the world.
"Can't be more than a couple of days," I commented. "Artillery's already been focusing again on their line, and not a lot of the forest left for the Earth Kingdom to hide in."
"It'll be soon," Boss confirmed. "Division'll want to hit 'em before they can properly reorganize, or, much worse, find another way across the river."
That wouldn't happen, I'd thought to myself. We wouldn't let it.
We had reached the campsite for the 44th armored company and were looking for a clearing to settle down in for the night when a clang against our hull had told us one of two things: we were under attack, or somebody wished to speak to us. Clear in friendly territory as we were, it was safe enough to assume the latter, but still, I confirmed by training my turret on the Fire Nation soldier running alongside us, slamming his fist against our hull, before giving Boss the go-ahead that it was clear.
Transferring the controls to Danev, he opened his hatch to greet the man.
"You Fox company?" the soldier asked, slowing to a walk as Danev slowed the Shanzi to make it easier for the man.
"Yeah!" Boss answered. "Why?"
"Sorry to be the bearer of bad news," the soldier replied, handing a paper to Boss. "But you boys're pulling a double shift tonight!"
"Fuck's sake," Hizo grumbled from the maintenance bay.
"What's wrong, Hizo?" Zek chuckled from the front. "Weren't you just complainin' 'bout how few we caught today?"
"Fox's turn today, huh?" Boss asked from the front.
"'Fraid so. Would've gotten the word to you sooner, but organization's been a mess lately with armored units being reallocated for 'you know what.'"
"Happening soon, then, huh?"
The soldier nodded.
"We'll get to it then."
With that, Boss had shut the hatch, and returned to the Shanzi's controls. A quick U-turn later, and we were headed right back to where we'd come from, the way ahead lit by a fire that even after 6 days, still burned brighter than ever from the heart of the forest.
We were tired, some more than others, but the choice to disobey orders and just stay home wasn't really an option, and if it was, not one we would have taken. It was the way of things. The shit job and double shift had to go to somebody, and tonight was our turn, as it'd been 5 different armored companies before us.
Hizo had thrown a fit from the maintenance bay for a reason, but even with as tired as we were, none of us could deny that it was a hell of a sight.
We were entering the forest from the southwest, close to the western river where the fires still burned, more recent on account of the Earth Kingdom having used the river to put out our first few attempts.
But as their numbers had grown more thin and their attention placed more on retreating than saving their position, they'd given up on preserving the forests, so as the center regions of the woods sat desolate, the outer layers still burned.
We pushed our way through, a rainfall of ash and cinder coming down atop us, a lightshow of flames dancing across the leaves and branches of the trees above. Hizo and Zek caught some shuteye while they could, before we reached the point at which we would expect the enemy, but I didn't sleep. Boss had given me the go-ahead to do so for the moment, but I'd declined, and not simply to keep the fires off of us should they come too close, but because it in it of itself was a sight to behold.
In Citadel, on the rare occasion that performers would pass through, I would overhear the hopes of other performances that would come through–firebender performers who created grand displays with their abilities alone. Some of the kids had claimed to have seen them before, that they'd passed through when they were younger, but such claims were often discounted as the bullshit it was, half the people making them younger than those they made the claims to in the first place. Others too claimed they were from outside of the city and so had seen such performances as far and wide as in Yu Dao, Ba Sing Se, Agna Qel'a, or even Caldera. Bullshit too, but still, it'd painted a pretty picture, one I imagined looked a lot like what I saw now.
I could feel the flames that jumped from the branch of one tree to another, could feel the life that burned within as they fed on the air of an open night sky above the burning canopy, could feel an energy that almost struck me as joy in some strange way.
And so too did I feel the embers of spent flames that floated to the ground, extinguishing against our hull, and reached out occasionally to let them dance as they made their descent, extensions of this fire, of this war, now made extensions of myself.
It didn't last forever, of course, and soon enough, we'd put the flames behind us.
"Wake up," Boss called across the Shanzi, shaking Zek awake with a free hand as Hizo slowly stirred back up from the rear. "Eyes open; we're in their territory now."
"Mm; pretty," Zek commented, still waking but able at least to make out the dead land before us.
We rode for a while from there through a silent world, devoid of the choir of flickering flames and even the songs of chittering insects.
If one thing could be said about the Earth Kingdom and their comprehension of their situation, it was that they understood the futility in trying to defend a dying position, but they had learned the hard way.
As we rode, we stumbled past the remains of prior enemy attempts to hold this ground, and similarly-fated attempts at retreat. Bodies could be found strewn across the terrain, distant from one another, testament to the many different horrors and defeats that had befallen these men over the last week.
And soon to be joined by more if we do our jobs right.
It would be a quiet night, but that did not mean it would be a bloodless one.
The first had been a pair of Earth Kingdom soldiers seeming to be burying a stash of weapons, perhaps for future use. We killed the two of them, and burned the weapons, continuing on our way.
There had been a straggler who seemed lost, seeming to believe us an animal rather than a machine of war, and so had stopped dead in his tracks like a deer in torchlight, watching, perhaps thinking stillness would be his salvation. It wasn't.
So too had there been the drunkard's tent, the sleeping archer, the naive fighter, and many more besides, all dead at our hands.
In the distance, past the trees I could see the faint glow of distant slaughter, the rest of Fox company performing their duties just as we did.
It must have been somewhere around 0300 the day after, maybe later, maybe earlier, when an all-too-familiar sight caught my eye.
"Stop," I said, feeling as, on my command by merit of my role as spotter, the Shanzi screeched to a halt.
I turned my sights to our left, where I'd noticed the details out of place, and saw it still–a makeshift shelter of wid, constructed by hand, and huddled beneath it, two men, one in bandages, lying on the ground, darker-skinned with a head of curly hair, and another kneeling beside him in an Earth Kingdom soldier's uniform, hands moving slowly in the air in front of him, blinded by the headlights of our tank that now shone on him and the injured man he attended to.
"Wounded and medic," I said to the crew, focusing my attention to let the buildup of energy start to build in anticipation of what had to be done. "I'll make this quick."
"No," Boss said, much to my surprise. "Stop."
"What?" I asked, my attention still trained on the man, the workings of a flame already conjuring from the energy I'd built up. "Why?"
"He's wounded," Boss said. "No point. He's more of a strain on the Earth Kingdom as a casualty they need to attend to than a body they need to bury."
The man was still knelt there, hands in front of his face, and the other, bandages around his face, he just now began to open his uncovered eyes, finally adjusting to the lights of our beams, enough so that I could make out the green in them, horrified, waiting for a death that, unbeknownst to him, would not come.
Because Boss was right.
Right?
They were running, running somewhere, likely to a larger contingent of Earth Kingdom soldiers. The injured would slow them down, each wounded they brought just another delay to their lines, more expended resources, more burdens.
And if he recovers?
He won't, I had to remind myself.
They're all stuck on this side of the river. None are making it any further than that.
Then why not finish it now?
Because we can use their sympathy and compassion against them.
By the time I had finished convincing myself of Boss's reasoning, the flame I had fueled had died out, and the moment had passed. The soldier did not test his luck, instead returning to his comrade's side to place his hands around his shoulders and pull him away, out of the beams of our tank, and deeper into the woods, lost to us, but in benefit to our aims, I had to tell myself.
I had to trust Boss.
I had to finish my job.
And we did that night, mostly quiet from that point on, the total tally of the day by sunrise having risen to 29.
We moved opposite the direction of the frontline that morning beneath an orange sky, witnessing as they marched the whole of our division towards the target they had finally reached–the enemy's final holdout this side of the river.
Hizo and Zek slept, Boss drove, but I watched, a part of me almost jealous, knowing they were about to have all the fun without me. Another part of me, however, wondered about the curly-haired, green-eyed soldier, the enemy. I wondered how many allies he would slow down today, if he would be another casualty of the battle ahead, or if maybe he would wind up in a Fire Nation prisoner of war camp rather than a mass grave to be dug this coming evening.
Frankly, I didn't know which I preferred. All I knew was that I was tired, and as I felt the Shanzi finally begin to slow, my thoughts went to Danev, wondering if he would be part of the action to come today, and wondering many more things too.
Danev
A week of hell had passed, and the Fire Nation had finally made its move.
It was one anticipated by both sides for some time now, the only mystery left when it would come, but on the seventh day of our fire, on the fourteenth day since the capture of the auxiliary line, it came.
And it would not include the 114th Company, nor any soldiers of the 119th Battalion for that matter, because in some tent sitting atop the closest hill of the highest altitude, commanders from across the Division had crunched their numbers and made their decisions, that being that the 91st Brigade had gone through enough as is, and we had 3 more active brigades for a reason.
As such, we would not be around for the fighting that came that afternoon. Some amongst us were relieved, some were anxious, believing that even on the reserve, guarding the rear as they were, the fighting would still come our way, past the brigades ahead of us, past our front, and right back to us where the fighting always seemed to wind up one way or another. And then there were those itching for a fight, who believed their place with Colonel Arok and the 217th Brigade, facing the brunt of the enemy. I wasn't sure for them if it was some misguided sense of pride, a blind bloodlust, or perhaps something else, but one way or another, they would be disappointed.
As for me? I saw little point in trying to fight what was. Did I perhaps believe I would have been more use out there to the Fire Nation, fighting? Did I perhaps believe that, out there, I could have helped to save at least some of the hundreds of Fire Nation lives that would be lost in a single evening? Maybe, but my place hadn't been there. My place was with my men, those of the 114th, and I went where they went, be it all two-hundred of them, or a mere four, and as all heads were accounted for, there was nowhere else I was meant to be.
And so all we could do was listen, was watch the smoke that billowed from the southern riverbed, wondering in which way the tides of the conflict shifted, knowing that as the day went by, we would only know by whether or not we were called in–the reinforcements whose arrival told of the failures of those that came before.
However, no such call for reinforcements would arrive, and when night finally came, the fires of the battle had burned themselves out.
The Fire Nation had won.
The battle had been determined from the start from what I'd heard. Hell, the fate of the Earth Kingdom forces on this side of the river had been determined for a week, since first we set fire to their lands.
Be it our bombardments of their lines, the destruction of their one way out, or the burden of their casualties from the woods, the Earth Kingdom's fate was sealed from the get go, but still, they had put up a fight.
Be them ditches to slow the advance of armored units, kill holes to trap infantry, skirmishers to delay encirclements, and a final last stand with their backs to the river, the Earth Kingdom had held out until the last man.
Defeat, however, was rarely so elegant as a heroic last stand. Fear had taken its time to set in, but it had set in nonetheless. The Fire Nation to their fronts and river to their backs, the Earth Kingdom soldiers, with nowhere else to go, had attempted to flee into the rushing waters of an unforgiving river while others had taken their chances with the Fire Nation, but from what we had heard, in the heat of battle as it was, few prisoners would be taken, but far less would be taken by the river.
It was said that at least a thousand and a half enemy soldiers met their end beneath its waters in an effort to escape to no avail, and that a thousand more had perished to the fires of our advance. I saw the escort of prisoners as they were taken back behind our lines, no more than a 20th of what the Earth Kingdom had had this morning.
It was a victory that would be sung about, and sure enough, by sundown, I could already hear at least three different compositions telling of the day's events across our lines as we settled into our new frontline: songs of the victorious, songs of the heroic, and songs of the dead too. Carrying these songs in the wind was the gentle breeze of the flowing river, carrying with it music, a cool spring breeze, and the scent of a mountain river's current–pleasant to the senses in almost every way. Almost.
Because with that aroma too, hiding beneath, was something more–the underlying stench of the bodies of over one thousand that drifted now with the current to the south. In time, they would sink to the bottom, carried down by the weight of their armor or that of their waterlogged corpses, but dead all the same.
And this was the victory we sang about–the cold reality we faced. There was no victory without death, and there was no war without death. All I could do as a soldier, as a commander, was to make sure as many of those deaths belonged to the enemy as opposed to my men. We'd escaped from the war today, for these last few weeks in fact, but it wouldn't last forever. Our turn was coming soon, I knew, and all I could do now as I waited for that moment was to pray–to pray that when it came, the songs sung did not have to be those of our fallen, but rather those of a bloodless victory.
But very often did I pray for the things I knew were never to come.
Long Feng
The sky of the morning was orange.
To the south from beyond the horizon, gray smoke billowed into the sky, at such a distance that it was impossible for me to tell if it came from the battlefields contested by the Fire Nation and our armies, or from the slums at our own front doorstep.
At this point, anything was possible, and no answer was better than the other.
Over the last year and then some, everything I'd done, every move I'd made had been to try and keep Ba Sing Se alive, and seeing the burning sky as I did now, how the hell could I convince myself that I was succeeding. The outer wall had been breached, our farmlands were being trampled upon by foreign boots, and even within our own proper city, our citizens were killing one another just as much as they were trying to kill us, their government, their king, starving them out in the hopes they would squeeze the life out of one another before they could us.
This was the mark of my work, and every decision I'd made along the way had damned me. There was no way of looking at one I'd done in a way that didn't stack sufficient points against me to land me in the darkest hell that awaited after this life, but when I thought back on it, I knew I would do it all over again.
Had I not, I knew this city would've burned to the ground by now, be it by the hands of the Fire Nation, or hell, even our own. And just as I would do it all over again, I knew I would continue to do exactly what I had until the job was done or I found a knife in my back.
I was still gauging which was more likely. Sometimes it was better not to think about it.
I looked down where my hands rested on the rail of the royal palace balcony, and found that they were shaking.
I chuckled. And to think I'd come out for fresh air, I thought, looking back up at the smoke that shrouded the souther horizon, myself having quite literally stepped out of the frying pan and into the fired.
I'd momentarily stepped out of a council meeting regarding the composition of security forces in the middle and upper districts, some parties not having taken too well to me allowing Hondu and a large chunk of our army's forces to go to the field where they belonged rather than fighting a losing battle in a slum we no longer could control.
It was all politics, no actual questions being asked, but I knew what the outcome would be ahead of time. Honang, How, Kuei, they had no other choice. The military was engaged in battle with the enemy, we didn't have enough able-bodied conscripts to put together a new police force. My Dai Li was all they had left, and so no matter how often they bickered, they all would end up acquiescing to the choice that meant they wouldn't wake one morning with a starving slumdog's shiv to their neck.
And then the move would be mine, mine to determine how to to quell the revolution within our walls, mine to figure out how to assuage the petty rivalries of our noble families, mine to decide how to silence those who would sell out their nation's future for a promise of wealth and power. Mine to figure out how to save this city.
And spirits knew there was work to be done. A damn well lot of it.