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Your cries of war do not drown out the booms of the cannons nor their fire through the air. Each ignition has you flinching. Each body you step over has you swallowing, because that may be you in the future—in a day—in a moment.
Your kingdom does not have a vast quantity of gunpowder. Thus, here you are—armed with an issued sword and not enough armor to drown your cold-aching fear, a feeling that is only trying to keep you alive, and deep down, you wonder if this is what your God has always intended.
Lizardmen break through the frontline. In a blur of silver spears and black scales, they surge forward with an undoubtable faith, slicing and piercing through your comrades like mere paper.
Hold your ground! Push them back!
You hear your superior’s voice, muted under the clamber of death, and nearly laugh.
You do not get the chance to.
As if summoned by the very sun itself, a beam of light crashes down—sending great ripples through the earth. Your knees hit the ground. Your hands catch your fall, steadying yourself with the surface and the arm of a fallen soldier, but when you look up, you are just in time to see him emerge from the divine spotlight.
Through the legends told around campfires and by storytellers and within the lines of books—you have only heard of him in stories, because no one who has faced him on the battlefield has ever made it out alive.
The First Apostle of the Night Sky.
Adorned in fine, golden armor, surrounded by a riffling blanket of lightning, carrying a blade sharper than a reaper’s scythe, he, who bears the will of a God, commands the following silence of the battlefield. The Apostle stands there, still. Casting his gaze upon the war, no one succeeds in meeting it.
The second you happen to, willing or not, gravity slams down upon you—like a intangible enactment of justice.
You cannot fight this.
You will not make it out alive.
They say when a mortal soul proves their worth and earns the respect of both the People and the Gods, they can ascend high enough to surpass the shackles of death itself.
You turn to scramble away. A sob chokes out of your throat as your hands push off the ground, but—
Do not turn away!
All deserters will be executed by my own hand!
The battlefield around you surges to life once more, the sounds drowning beneath the pounding of your crying heartbeat and your hastily-taken breaths.
Death awaits you on either side.
Blood fills your mouth as your teeth cut through the flesh of the lip it bites down upon. You do not plead. You do not pray. You turn around, gripping the handle of your sword with fickle purpose, before charging ahead—toward certain death.
Stepping over the corpses of your brethren.
Yelling over the cries of the fallen.
You wonder of the glory your kingdom has been devotedly preaching about—the glory of being slain in battle.
It’s a pity you realized too late.
That there is none to be found here—neither glory nor your God.
You do not even make it twenty steps before a clash of cutthroat blue whips your body aside. Sent crashing through the strewn corpses, you do not try to rise once you come to a stop. Breaths come out wheezing. Numbness bites away at the tip of your fingers and toes. As you peer down your torso to see your burnt, bubbling flesh, you cannot find it in yourself to scream.
To not even buy a second's worth of time...
What a pitiful life you realize you have lived.
With hazy eyes and a quieting breath, your gaze does not pull away from the massacred being made before you.
The Lizardman is the eye of the storm. With slashes of his spear and crackles of his ice-cold divinity, he shreds through the soldiers with the determination of a warrior and the bloodlust of a killer. It takes far shorter than it should to surround himself within a spiral of bodies—something no one dares to approach. Not even your God.
In the midst of his own created chaos, the First Apostle whips his spear to the ground, shedding off your comrades’ blood. He does move to advance and you hope this is where it ends.
That is when you see it.
That is when everyone does.
As if fabricated out of nothingness, with a godly grace, a beautiful, blue butterfly descends from the skies and drifts forward to hover about the Apostle’s shoulder-guard.
The Apostle turns to it with all the attention he could ever spare. He offers up his finger as a perch. The butterfly lands upon it with a gentle flap of its wings, a voiceless acceptance and thanks, and the Apostle smiles with a softness that should not be shown within war.
As death claws you down, your eyes widen at the sight before you, a cruel feeling twisting within the core of your chest, between your broken ribs and burnt flesh.
It is unfair.
It must be.
After all, your God casted you out, intending your deaths as a simple trade for single digits of earned time, but, even though they do not need the help nor courage, their God has given them a sign—that he has never stopped looking over them.
You do not know what to believe in anymore. You do not know who to believe in anymore, because the afterlife you were promised—a life of glory, a title of honor, a place of regard…
Perhaps, it has always been a lie.
And so you pray.
Bearing all the shame in the world, enough to reach you after death, you reach out with a dying hand—a fading vision, a slowing breath—to that beautiful, blue butterfly, and you pray to a God you do not believe in.