"Do you really think the world is ending?" Sira asked, staring out at the receding fog drawing away from all corners of what was once the tainted plain.
Captain Chang adjusted his armor over the missing stump that had been his arm, chuckling to himself at the look of it. "Ending?" he laughed, clapping the younger soldier on the back hard enough to make him stagger forward. "Son, the world is just now getting started..." He seemed about to say more, but a racking cough interceded. Sira reached out a hand in aid, but the captain merely swatted it away, bent double to let the fit see itself out.
Sira sighed, placing a hand idly on the man's back as he gazed back out on the world beyond the wall. A great victory had been won today, there was no denying that, and while he felt like a puppet in a larger play, he had at least been given the chance to sit upon the same stage with the true players behind this great shift.
But, as was so often true here on the wall, the victory had come with a price. Much of the world had been rent asunder in the battle for dominance. What remained was so scarred and scored it hardly resembled its former self. Mankind had won its freedom from one enemy, but scarcity was quickly drawing the battle lines on an entirely new conflict.
Chang coughed out the last of his fit and righted himself again, still standing a good foot shorter and about a foot wider than his comrade from the small township nearby. He set his remaining hand on his hip, nodding to himself as he looked out on the retreating mists. The war was over; a war that started long before his grandfather joined the fight; a war that ended now under his watch. The swelling pride he couldn't help but feel was kept tempered in part by years of cautious optimism. He had told the men often what dangers lay in hope. Even so, there was no denying that for the first time in his surprisingly long years, Captain Chang felt at ease.
"Well, I suppose we'd better go help with the graves," he said, marching off with a bounce in his step. Sira raised an eyebrow, still growing accustomed to Chang's peculiar ways. Twenty-seven years on the wall, he reminded himself, were likely to have some manner of effect on the brain. The man's casual love for the macabre had become a legend all their own. Still, Sira knew there was greater leader on this unforgiving vigil than the short, round man now skipping down the tower steps, muttering to himself about what he would do now that the demons were "running like pigs from thunder."
Another sigh passed the young man's lips as he returned his eyes to the field now laid plain by the vanishing fog. The land was weak and barren, in need of much tending, but the disease, at last, was gone. All that remained now was for the resolve of good men to outlast their penchant to imitate the very demons their efforts had helped to banish.
With a deep breath of clean, rich air, the soldier straightened up and marched off in the wake of the older captain to lend a hand or two to their dark-but-necessary efforts. It seemed only fitting that the land be propped up on the backs of the young men and women who had died to see it made free. He could only pray their spirits would safeguard the newcomers to this broken plain the way their bodies had guarded the wall of the old.
What remained of the world was far from lost, he told himself, rounding the crumbling planks of the tower steps. He only hoped that, before his feet reached the bottom, perhaps he would start believing it.
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