Broken Souls.

Philenes ran through the streets panting. A Legate. He had finally made it as a Legate! He had never thought it possible, with his posting as merely a garrison soldier during the Great War. But they chose him, and now he had to gather up men. It was duty. Always duty.

The bells pounded distantly behind him. Sentries had spotted them; a raiding force. No doubt a vanguard of the greater army of Chaos that was quickly approaching the Empire’s borders. Roona was one of the more isolated castles in the North East. It had a strong garrison and a large town inside. He had been assigned there by the Marshal Bonarney herself as a second to General Toka Tsubaki.

The vanguard was an unknown size, but with the rapid pace they came at them with, it was likely they were confident enough to try to take the castle. The garrison had seen better days. The larger part of the men there had marched off with the Empress months before, and now they camped near Heracopolis following the rout at Aphysia, where four Imperial armies matched to their deaths in the deep wood.

What new strength they could find were mostly youths and retired, reluctant soldiers. But every sword and spear counted now. If they allowed the enemy to take Roona, then the lands of the North would be open to them. They must hold. Here.

Now a company of retired men had disappeared. He knew their type. Older. Scarred. Both mentally and physically. They have been fighting since even before the Great War and nothing their officers said could phase them. Many of them were simply… broken. Perhaps they were simply dead men walking. The Death March through the wastes following their defeat had killed them. Philenes could sympathise. Abandoned by their leaders. Harassed by the triumphant enemy. Staggering back leaving brothers and sisters in arms to die as supplies dwindled.

But he had his duty, and they had theirs. What was past is past. It was his duty to rouse them.

He burst into the tavern. It was as he suspected. A gaggle of men and women, seated on benches, chairs, couches, many slumped over dejectedly staring at nothing in particular with drinks in hand. Stinking of alcohol.

He seized the nearest one.

“You. Your uniform is a disgrace. But it's no matter. The enemy is upon us. Men! Come to the barracks, we must drive them back–”

A loud bang stopped him right there. A man, leaned back on a cushioned seat, had firmly pounded his glass of beer onto the table. Gravius his name was. Gravius. A survivor of the Great War and the death march. Had been serving since even before the Empress began her first reign. A veteran of 20 years.

“Tch. What use is there in driving them back my dear young Legate? What use is any of this?”

He said, gesturing around the room. The man rubbed the greying stubble on his chin. The soldiers didn’t respond to any of it.

“We’ve been fighting all our lives. Pertinax was like your Empress too. This battle would be the final battle. Or that one. One after the other. Just one more until we were over the horizon and we’d all live in peace and prosperity. What makes your Empress is any different?”

“Look at us. Is there even any reason to live on in this wretched earth of ours? The Empire is gone. Dead. We were once the greatest of the nations of man and now we’ve barely enough men to garrison our own borders and foreigners put their puppets on the Imperial throne at will. The Empire died in the Chaos wastes where your Empress lost our war and then ran off, abandoning us to our fates. Only fools like you are forcing its corpse to fight on for your own glory. Let it rest boy.”

Philenes was running out of time.

“You are soldiers of the Empire! If not for yourselves then for your children! You must defend them! The Empress will not fail! Marshal Bonarney herself said you were some of the finest soldiers left in the realm –”

A groan of subdued laughter rang out from the tavern’s occupants. A woman sitting at the tavern counter turned to him, deep scar on her cheek, the ugly mark running from eye to jaw. What was her name… Rosamund?

“That’s because there aren’t any more soldiers left in the realm. The best of us died on the fields of Orcemathe and Velucia in the thousands as we charged to stop the end of days. We failed. They died for nothing. Nothing. Now we damned survivors are all that’s left.”

She took a deep drink, finishing half a mug in one swing, before letting the glass vessel rest on the counter surface again.

“Face it boy, they’ve won. Your Empress has lost. The Princess Marshal is a fool, blinded by her worship of the little Empress on a desperate hunt for glory. She didn’t see what we did. Not out there.”

Gravius spoke again.

“You see? This is your army? Ghosts and liars? Revenants from forgotten wars? A congregation of the failed and fallen, disgraced and broken? This is your best hope? We just want to end our days here boy. We have no wish to march off into the Wastes again, not even if the Empress offered up her own bed to us. We believed what the generals said once. We fought for a brighter tomorrow, but the skies only grow darker. Never once better.”

“They sing of duty and honour and all those pretty things because they can afford to from behind the lines, commanding us forward into the muck. They didn’t see the things we saw. They didn’t do the things we did just to live one more day.”

He placed his hand on his temple, pointing towards his brain.

“First, it’s just a cut. But you cannot attend it. You never can. Nothing can soothe it; you try everything to forget, to heal the wound; drink, drugs, work. There is nothing. They are all but temporary respites from the whispers, the memories; those who you see died come to you. Their faces appear every time you close your eyes. Soon the wound festers. Every waking moment you ask yourself why did you lived and not them. You are reminded of your failures. You ask yourself. What’s the point in delaying the inevitable march towards death that faces us all? The guilt and pain will grow to be unbearable. By that point.” He leaned forward.

“Death. Would be a mercy.”

The bells continued ringing.