Nothing Ahead, Nothing Behind (Book 1)

The field stretched as far as the fog allowed, a plain covered in broken bodies, abandoned weapons, and torn banners hanging like rotting flesh. Men lay where they had fallen, some split open by dull blades, others face-down in dark mud, still clutching spears that no longer meant anything. When he took his first steps, the ground gave beneath his boots, soft with trampled blood, filth, and entrails; each movement pulled at him with a wet sound, as if the earth itself were trying to keep him. The wind rattled empty armor on bloated corpses and carried the heavy scent of iron, smoke, and recent death. Only then did it become clear that, in the entire field, only one man was still moving. There had been no victory — only a finished massacre, and someone still breathing without having been chosen for it.

He walked slowly, as if the field might change if he moved too fast. He was thin, narrow-shouldered, his body shaped by years of carrying weight and repeating tasks that left no room for excess strength. The chainmail did not fit him properly; there were gaps where there should not be, straps tightened in haste, signs of armor worn more out of habit than command. The colors he wore were scattered across the battlefield — on torn cloth, on shattered shields — but on him they were worn smooth, polished by constant use, as if touched more often by other hands than his own.

He moved among the dead like someone searching for something he did not truly want to find. He stopped here, pushed a body aside there, turned over a helmet with useless care. Too many faces were unrecognizable, crushed by boots, buried in mud, deformed by the weight of those who had fallen after them. Silence was broken only by the wet sound of his steps and the distant cries of birds beginning to claim what remained. His eyes did not wander at random; they followed familiar colors, fragments of symbols, remnants of something that had once made sense.

He found him in a shallow hollow where the fighting had been thickest. The body was almost indistinguishable from the others, trampled out of shape, covered in dark mud and dried blood, as if the field itself had tried to swallow it. The face was no longer a face. He recognized him only by the crest still fixed to the armor — bent, but intact — and by the broken shield bearing the same colors he himself wore. He knelt without hurry. Wiped the mud away with his sleeve. That was enough.

There were no words. There was nothing left that would fit here.

He buried him slowly, digging with his hands and with a blade taken from the field, pushing aside soil mixed with remnants of war until he had something that barely resembled a grave. He laid the body down as best he could, adjusting it with the care of someone who had spent his life preparing another man for battles that had never been his. He removed the armor piece by piece, not to steal, but out of quiet necessity. The crest went into the earth. The colors disappeared beneath the soil.

When he finished, he stood for a moment, mud up to his knees, the wind tugging at his clothes as it did at the dead banners. He wore nothing now except what allowed him to walk. In his hand, only the sword — heavy, plain, now without an owner. He looked once more at the disturbed ground, then turned his back on the field.

Behind him lay the war. Ahead of him, nothing that had a name.