The Vampire’s Feeder

To The Fire

[Elias]

The cell had two features worth noting. A door that didn't move and a guard who apparently shared that characteristic.

"I want to speak to someone." I had my hands around the bars, which achieved nothing but gave me somewhere to hold on to. "Not you specifically, though you're welcome to stay. I want whoever decided this was appropriate. I want their name and I want their reasoning and I want both of those things before my patience runs out, which I am telling you in advance is not a long timeline."

The guard looked at me like I’d grown two heads and the jarring audacity to demand such of him. And I felt somewhat hypocritical for causing a scene whilst knowing the two men who’d likely thrown me in here.

All to prevent me from returning to my love. My Yara…

"I haven't done anything!" I released and punched the bars. Then the pacing began. I crossed the four steps of the cell permitted and turned again. "I haven't deserted. I haven't left the camp. I got in a fight with my own unit, which, if that were grounds for imprisonment, would empty every tent on this line simultaneously." Another four steps, turn, then... "I want out."

The guard continued his close study of the air in front of him, completely ignoring me like I was some sort of invisible statue.

"Hey? I'm talking to you.” I frowned. “Hey!”

The footsteps came from the far end of the corridor before I finished the outburst. I recognised the pattern of them before I saw him.

Marsh appeared at the cell door. He looked tired, the kind of tired that lack of sleep produced. He looked at me through the bars with a deeply pitiful look.

"Get me out," I told him.

"Elias—"

"I haven't done anything. Tell them I haven't done anything. You were there, you know I haven't—"

"Elias." Quieter now. He stepped closer to the bars, and the thing in his expression settled into its final shape, and I stopped talking because Marsh did not look like that without reason. All these months in camp, I had seen him deliver bad news three times, and each time his face had done a particular kind of work before the words arrived, the work of a man making sure the landing was as clean as it could be made.

His face was doing that work now.

"What," I said flatly.

He looked down briefly, then took a deep breath. "The inspector was doing rounds last night." He kept his voice calm. "He came through the section with two of his men, standard check, and our tent was…" a pause, then: "loud."

"Marsh..." my brow creased, recalling just how wicked the inspector was, never failing to remind us soldiers that he was of noble blood.

"Right after we knocked you out, he came in and saw the state of things. Saw you." Another pause, shorter. "He asked questions and Devon and I answered them because there was nothing else to do by that point, and he listened, and he was very calm about all of it, which should have been the first indication that… “

"Marsh." My voice had gone somewhere flat and very still. "Where is this going?”

Marsh looked straight at me, face hardening as if deciding to say the thing directly. "He's reassigning you," Marsh told me. "Effective tomorrow morning. He said a soldier with that much aggression needs to be pointed at something to use it against." He stopped. The pause had a weight to it that I was already beginning to understand before he finished. "He's sending you to the Western Front, Elias."

The corridor was quiet.

I heard it. Heard each word in the order it arrived, and understood the individual meaning of all of them.

‘Western front?’ I turned those two words over in the silence and waited for them to arrange themselves into something other than what they were.

They didn't.

The Western Front was where Belmund sent its offensives. The grinding, relentless, bodies-forward kind, where the werewolves were to be deployed and the terrain was wrong and so they sent those who were beyond men instead. It was the place where Crestfall had dug its heels in deepest.

We knew the number of casualties. Everyone on the line knew the numbers and not because you sought the information but because it found you, drifting through tents and meal queues and the long, honest hours of late watch when men said things out loud they would otherwise only think.

The western front had an eighty percent casualty rate and the enemies never took hostages…

“No…” my voice stuttered. I looked at Marsh. He was still watching me with that pitiful gaze.

“I’m sorry.”

"Marsh… I’ll die. Yara, what about my Yara?" I pleaded.

For the first time, I was truly horrified of dying. Of not getting to see Yara’s face one last time or even hear an explanation.

Marsh said nothing. Maybe because he knew that nothing he said would make a difference. But I could see his eyes watering up as they stayed fixed on the ground.

I turned and walked the four steps to the back wall and stood there with my hand against the stone and thought about Yara's letter folded in my pocket, the eighty percent and the fact that men sent to the western front did not write letters home because there was no point in making promises the mathematics had already answered.

I had wanted to go home, but instead…

“Marsh…” The tears trailed down freely now as I looked back at him. “I don’t want to die.”