Threats of Fate

The war was over. Corpses covered the battlefield, and a heavy silence settled over the land like a leaden shroud. The soldier wandered through the rows of the dead—once enemies, now only mute bodies. None of them had an identity anymore, no nation, no family, no story. It was all so meaningless.

He saw some of his comrades stepping over the dead, laughing without remorse. One raised his sword as if it were a trophy, while another turned away from the shattered corpses and moved toward the remnants of a campfire. They laughed, sang their songs—"for victory," they said, "for the light." But the soldier could not tear his mind away from the gaze of the child he had left on the ground. The questions inside him gnawed deeper and deeper, like an invisible, relentless pain.

"Is that it?" he heard a comrade murmur, glancing briefly at him.

"We've won, and yet I feel... empty." The soldier nodded silently, his gaze fixed on the fields of corpses. What have we truly won?

Soldier A: "This was us. All these dead here, this is our work."

Soldier B: "Don't dwell on it too much. We did it because it was necessary. For our people."

Soldier A: "Necessary? They were living beings, like us—feeling, thinking. And now they're... nothing. No fulfillment, no peace. What was the purpose of killing them?"

Soldier B: "Purpose? Their only purpose was to threaten our safety. We simply survived."

Soldier A: "But they were just like us, and you treat them like animals. Weren't they like humans?"

Soldier B: "They were enemies. That's enough."

The soldier, feeling more and more like a stranger among his own people, shook his head. It was as if he stood on the threshold of a truth he could neither grasp nor ignore. With every word he exchanged with the others, he felt further removed from them, as if he no longer belonged among their ranks.

A feeling of disgust welled up within him when one of his comrades laughed dully and stepped onto the crushed bodies of the enemies. These "enemies," whom he had fought so often, were now nothing more than cold, lifeless corpses. He remembered how he had been taught that the good could only triumph if the evil disappeared. But what if they were the evil?

With a bitter feeling in his heart, the soldier felt himself turning his gaze away from the other soldiers, their voices and songs fading into a monotonous hum. He withdrew, step by step, from his comrades, as if driven by an invisible force pulling him toward a truth he did not want to see but could no longer ignore.

His thoughts began to spiral. He felt the last conviction within him fade away, the final spark of belief that any of this had meaning. All that remained was emptiness.