War in an Alien Country

With the scream of metal and magic flying through the air, the blinding, broiling blaze of the mage-fires, the reek of chemicals and charred, twisted bodies, men dying everywhere... With the chaos and carnage and hopelessness of this new kind of war, there's nothing to do except cry out to the blackened heavens, "Oh gods, oh gods, please save us, gods!"

You stop and shriek to drown out the sea of traumas surrounding you, flooding your mind, forcing your sanity out through every opening in your body. You vomit in your body's efforts to purge itself of your confusion and you welcome the death that'll make it stop, end the noise and the sights and the world-shattering explosions and watching your boys all die like weeping, screaming, bleeding dogs and knowing that your family and remaining friends are all going to be left behind to soon share your gruesome fate... Death would make all that go away...

And then it stops, suddenly, and all you're left with is the cries of wounded men and the rushing sound of the raging fires, and it all registers at once: Your hand on the hilt of a dagger on its way to your throat, and it's your dagger. And your senses all come rushing back in a dizzying mess and you realize, wretchedly, that out on that battlefield some of your men need that knife more than you.

And you do the job you're given by the perverse grace of the gods, and you can't be sure while you're doing it that you don't envy the ones you're putting down. But at the end of the day, you put the knife back in its sheath, cleaned of your brothers' blood, and wait for the next round.

Every day, over and over. I'll be damned if we could put a bloody dent in their numbers and they kept on coming like that day after day after god-damned day, and it always ended the same way. Someday, someone's gonna look back on this war and call it a bloody stupid waste, and all of our losses will have been for nothing.

A bloody witch in someone's bloody garden. Lords, boys, we've done ourselves a job.