The boy's days were quiet ones. Dawn came with the smell of wet earth and the sound of his father's shovel cutting into soil. Chickens muttered, the stream near their field glimmered like a sheet of beaten tin, and by noon the sun painted everything gold.
Life was simple: labor, bread, laughter at the table, and in the end sleep under a roof patched with love more than wealth.
He was sixteen, and the world had not yet demanded anything for his existence.
Then, one morning, a sound broke the illusion of peace in the village.
The distant clatter of hooves and a trumpet's thin cry. A royal messenger rode into their village square wearing the colors of the Edinian Empire, a dress colored in deep crimson and gold. He looked the kind of man who spoke as if he'd never worked a day of his life.
He stood before the gathered farmers and read a scroll in a ringing voice. The empire, he declared, sought brave men to defend their honor against the barbaric nation of Synox. Those who enlisted would earn riches, land, and eternal glory. Behind his words, banners flapped; they did not hear the desperation in his tone, nor see the tired horses that spoke of a long war turning worse.
The boy felt something stir in his chest. Pride, perhaps. Or the hunger for meaning, that peace could never feed. His parents begged him not to go, his mother's hands trembling against his face. But he left before sunrise, carrying only a small loaf of bread and his father's silence behind him.
The camp was mud and shouting and fear. They stripped him of his old clothes, shaved his head, and handed him a rifle that smelled of rust. From then on, he was a number sewn onto a sleeve. The instructors shouted that names were for civilians. "Names are how weakness survives," they said.
The camp taught obedience rather than thought. They clipped the edges of their lives, their names, routines, soft small talk until every morning started the same way: the pipe, the lines, the lists. The officers did not shout only orders; they told the story behind those orders in small, patient repetitions until the story felt like weather.
At first, the changes were almost friendly. They were shown carved pictures of Synoxian soldiers with faces blurred and features exaggerated, and an old sergeant would shake his head and joke about "beasts."
A recruiter pointed out that Synoxian farms smelled different. In lecture tents, men spoke of atrocities and stories with no proofs. Evidence was never pressed; instead, rumor and suggestion did the work. A joke here, a sneer there. A prize of extra rations for the man who first spat on a captured Synoxian's boots. A private oath sworn over a canteen. Small rewards; small cruelties that felt, to the boys who wanted to belong, like proof they had become men.
The boy learned to laugh at the right time. He learned to glance away when prisoners were herded past. He learned how to stand straighter when a commander told him to imagine the enemy as less than human. It was never a lecture of hatred; it was a steady, quiet redirection on what to admire and whom to distrust, which stories to tell over the fire. In the dark, when the men smoked and sang, the old songs of home would be interrupted by a chant, soft and then louder, about the sin of the Synoxians. The chant felt childish until it did not. Words wove into habit; habit hardened into instinct.
When they marched into Synox, the change was visible not as a shout but as a thinning of mercy. Doors were forced open; food was taken and the owners pushed into the square while officers counted spoils. They did not use their boots to kill unless ordered, but they took what they could carry and left what they could not. Churches were rifled for plates and wood, barn doors pried open. The commander called it "requisition"; the men called it survival. The boy watched a woman fall to her knees when a crate was taken and felt his hands go cold, but there was applause from the ranks when a man returned with a silver spoon, and an applause does a lot of work on a cold night.
There were worse things happening behind the veil of protecting, the kind of cruelty that blooms when law loosens. Prisoners were interrogated and beaten until they whispered names. Some officers performed cruelty like a demonstration, two men sent to "teach" a village a lesson. The boy saw doors smashed and heard the dull, private cries. He did not look long; looking long threatened the small, simple courage it took to keep walking. At times a man would come back from one of those raids with his face flushing with something like triumph, and the others would clap his shoulder. The boy felt a thinness in his chest, sometimes an ache that could look like approval if he let it.
Every atrocity arrived as a small, incremental easing of a loosening of a rule. The men told themselves they were protecting hearths and honor. They told themselves the Synoxians would do the same when they came. The boy began, slowly, to believe in a difference so deep he could not cross it with pity. Hate did not land on him like a storm; it seeped in like winter.
By the time the army pushed deeper into enemy land, none of them were farmers or sons anymore. They were hollow things wearing uniforms, their hearts armored in lies. When the order came to make camp near the valley, they obeyed in silence.
They had been ordered to rest in a half-buried bunker, the air thick with oil and sweat. The silence felt a little too complete.
The boy kept to himself, finger tracing the seam where his jacket had once held his father's pocketknife. When the sun fell, the men passed around biscuits and traded rumors: the commanders said the front would hold for another week, then another, and the boys chewed their bread and nodded.
Then came the first scream. The sky split open.
Boulders wrapped in flame fell from above, smashing tents and men and the sober quiet of the valley. A voice of someone's, a shout rising into a single, terrible name cut the air.
"Cinderfall!"
He didn't know who said it, only that the ground shook, and the world turned orange. He saw one of his friends, the boy who had shared his bread with, crushed beneath a flaming rock. Another's rifle melted in his hands before he could scream.
The boy had never seen anything like it. Rocks as large as carts, crowned in heat, hurtled down and turned living things into shapes he would not keep in his thoughts. He ran with the mind of one who has learned to obey, who has learned to survive. He ran because to stand was to wait for a slow, certain death. He ran past those he had eaten with, past the empty canteens, past the smell of burning wool and closer still to the place where his friends had been crushed and gone flat as a pressed coin.
He thought, absurdly, of his mother's hand and of the small table where they used to eat. Regret came hot and sharp: he had wanted honor, and he had taken the shape of what they called honor. He had been taught to believe that the men opposite were not like him; now he saw the faces of those he had helped hurt, and they were human as his own.
He turned his head just in time to see the next boulder descending like a comet of ruin. It struck the ground beside him, and the world went white.
When his vision returned, he couldn't feel anything below his chest. Smoke curled around him. In the distance, through the haze, a man walked or something that looked like a man but his body was cloaked in living flame.
The boy tried to breathe, but even that felt unnecessary now. He had always believed that dying would mean crossing this forsaken world into heaven, a place of serene peace. But there was no light, only the fading hum of the world forgetting him.
He was nobody, and he had died for nothing.
Months passed. Flags were folded and shipments tallied. In the palace of Edinia, banners were exchanged and seals pressed. Two representatives, one from Edinia and one from Synox, sat at a long table beneath frescoes that pretended to tell stories of noble sacrifice. They drank and laughed. They signed the parchment that would be called a treaty, and their hands, which had never dug soil nor sewn a hem, shook with the small pleasures of accord.
Outside their marble halls the land did what land does. Crops pushed up where bodies had lain; children chased geese across fields that would never again be as they had been. People told stories of peace as if it were an old friend come back to tea.
But the earth kept its memory. Beneath the new wheat, the bones of nameless boys rested in the dark. Where the valley had once been a ring of smoke and ash, the soil took in what had been left and turned it into quiet growth. Villagers would say, in the low hours, that a wind sometimes tasted of iron and of smoke.
The representatives raised their cups, and for a moment the marble halls seemed to hold the whole world at bay. They toasted for peace and fortune and the brave deeds that had gotten them there. Their wine glittered in the torchlight. Behind their laughter a servant polished a crest, and the ledger with the new names would be stored away, the ink smeared by time as surely as it was by the hands that wrote it.
When the peasants spoke of those days, they did not always use the grand words of the capitals. They spoke in the names of small things: the smell of bread, the silence after the bell, the hush when smoke had finally left the valley. And sometimes, just sometimes, an old man would stand and stare across a field and say, as if telling himself the truth of it for the first time, "They promised us glory, but it was only profit wrapped in flags."