Blood-Born

Chapter X - Fugue of War

"He who wishes to fight must first count the cost."

- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

The deadliest enemy that any soldier faced in the heat of battle was not their opponent or his cadre of weapons, but rather the hidden weaknesses buried deep by nature within their own mind.

Doctors had even coined a fancy nickname for it.

Fugue of War...

Every man had internal switches that they were born with, no matter what level of training that they may have received which might have schooled them with how to master or control them.

Put most any man under enough psychological traumas and at some point their minds just snap like a dried twig in a forest.

Poe had been warned of this during his training for the army and unfortunately had witnessed it firsthand several times during ensuing battles that he had participated in as part of the uglier days of the civil war.

Soldiers of both sides, fully armed and battle proven otherwise, suddenly stood befuddled amongst comrades blown to bits around them by shrapnel of cannon fire or wounded so visibly horrid during a charge that there was no chance that they would survive other than as screaming soon to be corpses; no longer recognized as the men that they had served with just moments before.

His own certain death narrowly averted when unceremoniously pulled from his feet to avoid Eve's impending charge by Adam, Poe made a solemn vow that if he managed to live to see the outside of this cursed dome, that he would never, ever leave his guns behind again.

Grizzly fights were neither pretty nor quiet, with what little sound that he could still hear left befuddled from the piercing roar of fury and howl of indignant anger from both Running-Deer and Eve as they fought far too close for any form of comfort nearby.

While his vision remained clear, as far as any sound it was almost as if he were underwater.

It had not gotten any better when Deer had finally walked up in far more familiar human form; naked, clearly exhausted, bruised and beaten only to collapse into him like a blanket of soft skin and a cascade of her long black hair.

Before she had stopped moving against him, Deer managed to softly have said something, but as he started to ask her to repeat herself, the lycan wolf had appeared just as Adam reached his sister who also remained still and unmoved in the shallow stream where she had fallen and been beaten unconscious and bloody by her own mother.

Poe was suddenly amused to find that he could easily differentiate the common timber wolf from their lycan cousins fairly easily now.

One had eyes showing human intelligence while the others clearly did not...

At the moment he was undecided which would have unnerved him more in this situation.

"Pull her back to me." Poe called out, trapped as he was beneath Running-Deer's body and unable to move unless he unceremoniously dumped her to one side.

Without weapons to clear, even if the lycan were to attack he realized that it would not really matter if he were standing or not.

He had gotten a real good look into the darkened depths of blood fury in Eve's eyes up close and personal before Deer had broadsided her; the lycan wolf would simply finish what Deer had otherwise so eloquently interrupted with her powered nudge of grizzled wrath.

Adam did as instructed, having gently turned Eve onto her back, his hands gripped beneath her shoulders as he ever so slowly drug her back to Poe while the lycan wolf stood, watched and patiently waited.