writing adventure 37- Through a Stranger's Lands (part 1)

     The scream that echoed through the small sleeping town woke no one; they assumed in their dreams that it was a wolf or something equally as frightening, and so they allowed it to pass undisturbed through Troxia.
     It was no wolf. It was, in fact, a citizen of Troxia, aged seven years, being snatched from the desperate arms of his mother.
     If Troxia had woken up, had realized the crime that just occurred mere feet from their own children, they would have also heard the mother's crazed sobs for Kander–whether she meant her dead husband or kidnapped son she herself did not know. Once her mind realized both husband and son were gone, she sobbed for another boy–the one off to war, probably also dead and taken from her.
     "Brear," she cried, her hands wringing her dress. "Please come back, Brear. Please don't leave your old mother alone."

~

     Brear woke suddenly, alone in the dark hour before daybreak. He sat up under his small blanket, and his joints hurt from the cold. "Curse this place," he spat, and the men around him barely stirred from their sleep. "My mind ages one minute and my body ages ten years."

     Brear attempted to get more rest, but gave up after the wind began swirling around him, chilling anything not under the thin blanket his mother made him six months ago. Instead, he silently made his way towards the clearing a few yards from the army's campsite. It had been the site of the army's last battle, a small skirmish that amounted to no gained ground and a few dead.

     In Brear's mind, a few dead was still to many, considering the war was over mere blades of grass.
     He heard moaning in the grass and ran to the spot, his arms before him in case he fell in the dark. It was only after he stumbled and tripped over the man did he realize where was. This was the enemy's side of the battlefield. This was a man from the other side, a man dragged halfway home only to be deemed not worth the exertion. This was a dying enemy.
     Brear knelt by the man's side anyway, his eyes attempting to scan for injuries and gushing blood but finding no source in the dim and hazy light. "Hello?" Brear said, shaking the man a bit.
     The man coughed up blood before whispering back. "You must run," the man said, and took a shaky breath in before coughing again.
     Brear paused, scrutinizing the man in the darkness. "Sir, you need to rest. I will get help for you, the day is almost breaking."
     The man groaned almost angrily at Brear. "No. I will receive no help today, boy. I am a dying man, it is destiny that I die upon this ground. But you, you have time. You must not die for senseless purposes. It is not your fate to bleed here."
     "It is no one's fate to die or bleed here," Brear replied, his voice a mere whisper and his eyes searching for any sign of help. "War is no one's destiny."
     "Nonsense," the man said, and Brear could feel the man's life slipping away from him, could almost see his soul pulling itself towards the heavens. "Everyone is at war with something. For instance, you battle with the notion that it is your duty to be here, even though you say yourself no man is supposed to bleed for this cause."
     Brear paused once again. In a way, he feared this stranger, this enemy. His father told him once that the truths of the world are held only in the gaze of dying men. He never believed it until the moment dawn surfaced over the clearing and Brear could make out the man's eyes.
     The enemy took Brear's hesitation for acceptance and spoke again. "You must run, boy. You must run away from this place, because there is no peace in blood. You will lose yourself in the war, just as I have lost myself. You must never look to an army as an identifier to who you are. You must run while you have the chance."
     Seconds after speaking, the man died in Brear's arms. In an enemy's arms.
     Seconds after that, Brear deserted the army.