Tales of the Travellers

3

I stood in the battle field a couple of days later. Some of the soldiers managed to make it back far enough to retreat, myself included, but Ami... I needed to come back to get him, I needed to make sure he was okay.

I trudged down the pathway, knowing that I was in full view of the enemy if they were to decide to attack me. I was almost daring them to. I was unarmed, I wore my logo of the army on my head and I had a bottle of water with me. I was hardly a threat, but you don't necessarily need to be to get shot.

I got back to where it all happened, each side retreated back to their own base camps, leaving the fields and the trenches that were once being used to save lives completely empty of life. The fields were like walking through a legit war. I stepped over bodies of one shot dead soldiers and the further I walked the more brutal their demise seemed to be.

My focus wasn't on Ami at the moment, since I knew where he was, but on the Commander, whose stupid hat I could see from a mile away. Even without a life to hold it up it showed off its bright red colour like the blood that stained the ground. I saw the Commander, lying among two other soldiers dead, his face in a state of shock and his eyes forever staring at the sky, reflecting the last thing he inevitably saw; Death.

I shook my head to his corpse, "Would you listen to me now? It's not fun being one of the toy soldiers, is it?" I wanted to much to kick the man, kick the man's corpse or something, but I decided to step back before I did something drastic and find Ami.

The trench was further back, and I had no proper means to actually drag Ami back to the camp... but I needed to do something.

I eventually found the trench where Ami was and stood at the edge of it looking down on Ami.

It was worse than I had originally thought.

Ami didn't have any legs at all, from mid-thigh down it was exposed flesh and shattered bones. He was lying in a thick muddy pool of his blood and was covered in scratches and wounds from the trade that was forced upon him.

I did this...

I did that to Ami...

My breathing heightened with a quick gasp and soon I found it almost impossible to breathe. My hands trembled at my sides and my teeth jittered. My finger nails found their way to my mouth as I chewed them. My mind continued to absorb the image, and went back to the night before when I shot the enemy character... threw the bomb at the enemy that had Ami...

Enemy? That man was a person...

How could I have done that?

I could feel my mind clouding and I had no way and no one to help me from slipping into the haze and losing my way. My breathing found me again and forced me to take deep but quick ragged breaths that tortured my lungs.

I could hear something ticking in my mind followed by words, conversations I've heard or made up, the sounds of explosions, what I imagined Ami's child sounds like, yells of other languages, my mother, my own father, my siblings and the stupid three legged dog we owned.

Everything was bombarding my brain and I could feel the strings in my mind snapping from the pressure.

Soon... it was too much...

I fell to my knees and released a long, blood curdling scream.

*

My mind wouldn't shut up, it wouldn't stop telling me things, reminding me of things I wish I could've forgotten.

I was deemed inadequate as a soldier and was discharged back to society, but soon I was deemed inadequate as a civilian and sent to the mental institute of the town.