Stolen Truth

1

"M155204?" The commander asked.

"Present Sir," I said, all emotion absent from my voice.

"You will be going to war tomorrow morning. The lieutenant will prepare you and the other soldiers to fight today."

"Yes Sir," I said clearly, I had learnt very quickly not to mumble here. I had spent almost eleven years in this place and fighting in the war was the greatest honour one of us could dream of. None of us know why they took us, we only know that we fight for them and we fight to kill our enemies.

We don't know much about our enemies either. They are ruthless creatures who only seek control and we are fighting for the greater good of the world. The Blanks have an agenda, a world that is not plagued with the fear that these creatures have created in our society and where we do not worry that they will kill us, they are strong, but we are stronger.

We're soldiers, we don't have names or identities, we're just soldiers. We fight for the good of the people, we fight for the Blanks. I don't remember being taken from anywhere or having a life before I was, I only knew my age and that I was a soldier, born to fight. Lots of other boys died in the first few years, the training was too much for them and either that killed them, or they killed themselves. There were particularly special occasions when someone misbehaved too much, they were brought to be executed by the creatures our organisation created to protect us. The first time I witnessed one of these deaths I was seven, I remember seeing a shadow, a black hole with a white face and a grin far too wide to be natural, you could follow the bloodstains and cuts up to a pair of silver horns atop its ugly head, us kids used to call it the Chelsea Demon.

Some of us used to think that when they killed the other kids, the other soldiers, they were turned into a Chelsea Demon because whenever you got too close you could hear the sounds of a desperate wailing coming from the creature. Even after years of being brought up with the Chelsea Demons and the destruction they caused, I still couldn't go near one without this odd feeling in my chest, like I had seen them before and I had seen them do true evil. I try to push all of those thoughts away usually, despite their terrifying appearance, the Chelsea Demon is good, they will help us win the war.

I'm glad to finally be leaving this place, it had gotten to a point where I couldn't wait to get out of here. It almost felt like a waste of what I was capable of, I should've been out there fighting the dark ones all along after they killed my parents.

My room guard looked at me sadly as he watched me rush in with a smile on my face, all of the older soldiers give us that look when we go away. Going away to war means a lot to everyone here, we all hate it here. War has been going on for almost as long as I can remember, I've seen men leave and come back, but I've seen more men that leave and never return again. The soldiers that we do see return look traumatised, scarred, but the silent warnings they give never scares us. Some of them don't fight, they're the superiors, they get names. We call them blanks, everyone wants to be a blank, they get the most privileges and they get to live outside of here, the rest of us either die in war or die here.

We call the ones we fight dark ones because of their evil nature, we've grown up hearing stories of the dark things they've done, we've been taught to hate them. I do hate them, maybe without them my parents wouldn't be dead. I like to imagine sometimes that my parents were both blanks, my father would've been a general and he would've taught me how to fight, my mother would've stayed loyal by his side.

I don't know much about what my mother would've done, I've never seen a girl before, they say they're weak and can't be used in war. I suppose she would've done what they told us all the other girls did, cook for us, heal us, and clean for us. I still wish I could've seen her though, I wish I could've known both of my parents before they were killed.