When Given a Lemon

Part 1

At one point during our ascent, my ears popped uncomfortably, which rather freaked me out.

In all my life, I think I've only experienced that once before and it was while hiking through a pass with several squadrons as we chased down a swarm of bug-like creatures that were indiscriminately killing all the game in the area…

That period of time feels like a different life in a different world from now. I was so much younger; a new recruit then. Unprepared, undertrained, and afraid of everything. Even those pesky bugs scared me!

So much has happened since I was thrust into this new life of dirty clothes, dirty roads, and endless chaos, though more than anything else was the degree of transformation that I underwent. If my more youthful self ran into me, I doubt we would recognize each other. I wonder if we’d even tolerate each other.

+I+

It was drizzling outside.

It always was, or was about to again if it had finally stopped.

There was no reprieve from the bitter wet that soaked everything from my new gear that was tucked away in a supposedly waterproofed rucksack down to the underclothes acting like the glue holding my uniform to my pruny skin.

I had been out here just less than a month. That's how long it has been since they had enlisted me – I phrase it that way because I had no say in my enrollment but they don't like us using words like draft or forced. Our troop had yet to see any real battle of literally any sort.

Hell, we had yet to see anything at all outside of a half drowned countryside! We were basically a band of useless brigands with ungainly weapons skills being led around in circles through the wet mush by our superior officers who were by and large not much higher in rank than we were. We wasted every day marching along an empty border protecting the far boundaries of rural farms and small wildlife from the so-called “monsters” that never appeared outside our anxious nightmares.

And let me tell you, with all the stupid rumors going around, our nights were full of them!

Monsters. What a joke! Despite the sleepless nights it incurred, we all knew it was nonsense. We all had bets that someone with too much time, and far too much power, had mixed up their medicines and dreamed up everything being fed to us from the so-called "front lines".

We knew the only place that monsters have ever existed was inside faerie tales that my Nan liked to tell. Outside of those dust ridden stories the real world was only full of normal folk, like us, and regular wildlife. If I hadn't seen some of the orders myself and heard the rumors brought to our medic-lieutenants-in-training and ancient staff sergeant, I would never have believed that people actually took any of it seriously!

Just one glance at the parchment and it was plain as day that the stories were made up! "Men with bat wings for ears and fanged teeth”, “a creature resembling a possum that had one eye and stood to my chest”, “dog-creatures that looked far too human" the list was endless. Even more bizarre were the reports that these creatures were causing all sorts of damage to townsfolk and soldiers alike!

Most of my fellow soldiers were from the same region as me and enlisted the same way that I was. The town I was from, much like many of the others in my area, were not an overly large or influential place so we didn't have a very wide disparity between wealth and social status like what exists within the military hierarchy that I've quickly had to adapt to.

Because of this, most of us were very open about how ridiculous we thought such stories were. Even most of our superiors were like minded.

The landscape here was soggy, bug ridden, and incredibly boring; a combination of dark wood and pastel mush. Many of us were too young to appreciate a good sunrise which was the only vibrant thing found here.