𝕷𝖚𝖉𝖔𝖘 ✷ 𝑨𝒂𝒓𝒐𝒏 𝑾𝒂𝒓𝒏𝒆𝒓

𝟑𝟕.- 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐆𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭 𝐖𝐚𝐫

-ˋˏ ༻❁༺ ˎˊ-

"Tore your banners down, took the battle underground

And maybe it was ego swinging

Maybe it was her

Flashes of the battle come back to me in a blur

All that bloodshed, crimson clover

Uh-huh, sweet dream was over

My hand was the one you reached for

All throughout the Great War."

𝐀𝐫𝐚𝐛𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐚

Wars are never declared with the first gunshot, nor with the signing of a decree. 

They begin in silence, in the quiet fracturing of something unseen. A belief. A promise. A heart. Before the first banner is raised, before the first soldier marches, something must first shatter. And it does—quietly, mercilessly, leaving only the echo of what once was.

Something inside me shattered, and it hurts.

We do not always witness the moment we break. Sometimes, we only feel the ache afterward, the slow spread of ruin beneath the surface. Like the earth after a storm, cracked and waterlogged, unable to hold its shape. I had not noticed my own undoing, had not seen the fault lines forming until they swallowed me whole.

I gathered what was left of me, what remained—

and I carried it to the shore.

Wars demand offerings, and I gave mine willingly. I collected the fragments of myself, the pieces sharp enough to draw blood, and I carried them to the edge of the world. To the place where land meets water, where battles end and begin again. I stood at the shore, the wind howling like a mourning mother, and I let the sea bear witness to my ruin.

I asked God.

I asked the higher being to let me leave myself behind.

But luck is not something I have by my side. And without luck, I have no chance to be heard. 

If only I could forget...

But war does not grant forgetfulness. It carves memories into the bones of those who fight it, leaving names behind like ghosts. I had tried to outrun my past, to bury it beneath duty and purpose, but it clung to me still. His name is inked into my ribs, written in the spaces between my breaths.

I am angry—angry at myself, angry at him for causing me these feelings, and I didn't know how to let go.

And rage is the fuel of revolutions, the fire that keeps us standing when our bodies beg to fall. But it is also a chain, a weight we carry even as we fight to be free. I had carried him with me, unwilling, unrelenting. His voice, his touch, his ghostly love—I had brought it all into battle, an invisible wound that never stopped bleeding.