Dead Weapons

Emit did not miss the smell of war. Not the rotting pungency that wafted from the hordes of undead when the wind turned, nor the acrid stench left behind by necromantic magic, nor even the iron-tinted mud of the trenches. His fellow soldiers in this endless war had different opinions, having been confined to their new bodies for years longer than Emit had.

“Just wait,” they said. “You’ll forget what it means for it to stink. You’ll start to wish you could breathe again, even if it meant filling your lungs with yellow gas.”

He never wanted to experience the burning on his clothes, through his skin, in his lungs. The endless choking, the slow, painful death that followed the release of the Necromaster’s newest weapon on the front.

They saved him, or at least recovered enough of him to put his soul into a golem body. It was a pragmatic solution to the virulent tide of ghouls, zombies, and other infectious members of the undead legion. He was in the capital when Senator Dross first proposed the countermeasure, caught snippets of his speech praising the Golemancy Guild’s support.

“Let the heroic dead fight to reclaim the sanctity of our afterlives!” Dross crowed before the throngs of citizens, coaxing their uneasy whispers into a raging cacophony of support. “They will cleave through the Necromaster’s hordes without fear, for fear is weakness of the flesh, and their bodies will be as hard as steel!”

His body was harder than flesh, that was for sure. Not nearly as strong as steel. The little lies politicians told, Emit reasoned.

And Emit was still very much capable of fear.

Not of pain, nor the scores of wretched abominations, nor even the gentle respite of death. Emit feared that everything he’d given up for his Empire would be for nothing. His touch, his taste, the hope of ever seeing his wife and children again.

Worst of all, he feared losing them. Their faces had faded away into the barest impressions, the endless battles wearing down on him like a gear ground into a smooth nub. His fraying mind hurt more than the gas ever did.

So he marched on, on through the muddy trenches, on through red rivers where bleached bones tangled among the driftwood, on the broken bodies of his compatriots.

Exhaustion was a ragged memory. The rage that once warmed his breast in life flickered mutely in his distant soul. All that drove him was the voice of his commander and his loyalty, as sharp and unbending as steel.

Flesh and blood soldiers hurried past him, the young men stumbling over themselves and nearly dropping their steamrifles in the way that only fresh conscripts would.

One of them turned around and saluted.

“Apologies sir! It’s an honor to fight by your side, sir!”

Emit squeezed his lance. It felt like a stranger’s hand held it for him, that he was being told that his clay fingers were squeezed tight around the stock. The young man’s voice resonated in his chest cavity in a nostalgic staccato.

Before he could say anything, the young soldier disappeared around a corner.

They would be going over that day.

Emile didn’t know why the thought drove a cold spike where he once had a heart. He’d gone through it so many times before.

The whistles would blow, and thousands of clay bodies would throw themselves into no man’s land, enduring magical blasts from the front and a hail of enchanted flechettes from behind. The magic would tear chunks from their forms until nothing but dried clay husks remained, and the flechettes would slip harmlessly off their clay hides, drowning their opponents in a salvo of flesh-eating munitions. Hopefully, enough clay soldiers would reach the trenches of the enemy and tear into their foes, unafraid of their infectious fangs and claws.

Then the fresh conscripts would follow, mopping up the remnants and securing the trench.

It was the same battle Emit had survived countless times. He’d made it across before. Sometimes, he didn’t.

How many times had they recovered his lifeless husk and reanimated him? Impossible to tell; It was always the same crying gray sky feeding into the same red-brown mire. The only way Emit could differentiate the battles was the intensity of the salvos fired from each new generation of weapons.

Emit got in line with the other clay soldiers. He stared at his reflection in his lance, the curve distorting his blank head and compressing his two eyeholes into something that might resemble anxiety.

Emit wished he could blink. It would spare him from the corpse flies exploring his insides through his eyeholes.

A line of identical faces stared at the trench wall. Many were as still as statues. Most had long stopped talking, their nervous tics and all-too-human shuffling smoothed over by time, dulled senses, and repeated reanimations.

Members of the Golemancy Guild carted headless horse statues behind them, the newest innovation to expedite the endless slaughter. The wet clay around the cavities glistened invitingly, then pressed against the clay soldiers and melted into their senses as an extension of their bodies.

Was he even human anymore? Or just a weapon that thought it once was?

The troops amassed at the edge of the trench. Uneasy whispers flitted between the newer conscripts. A voice among them pulled Emit from his stiff posture.

“Why’d you salute to the golem?”

“My da died in battle.” The young man responded, rubbing a graying tress of blond hair tied to his lapel. “These clay soldiers are all heroes who’ve given their souls for this war.”

Golden locks and rosemary sang in a distant echo.

“Y’ think he could be one of those clay soldiers?”

“Maybe. It’s been over ten years, though.”

A melodious voice, a delicate hand tucking a tear-stained lock of sunshine into his shirt.

“A friend of mine, apprenticed in the Guild, said they can’t tell the golems apart. Only that a soul is still attached to the framework.” The soldier lowered his voice and looked in both directions before continuing. “She says that Chancellor Dross has them repairing all the golems they find and sending them out, regardless of the condition of the souls.”

“That’s…troubling.”

He couldn’t remember their names. Why couldn’t he remember their names?

“Don’t look now.” A soldier hissed. “One of them is looking at us.”

They didn’t have time to meet his gaze. The whistle blew.

The other clay soldiers leaped over the trench and charged. Emit’s senses may have been dulled, but his reflexes were as sharp as ever, trained by years of charging at the sound of the whistle. He followed his brothers in arms, only two strides behind them to meet the storm, his lance held abreast towards their foe. From the other side, a horde of shambling zombies, sprinting ghouls, and lightning-fast ghasts rushed to meet them.

Emit’s thundering legs echoed through his body, ripping his mind from doubt to focus on the tide of decaying enemies baying for his death.

His son’s death.

Shots peppered across the open field, whistling death meeting screaming spells in a deadly prelude to the catastrophic crash between forces. Emit aimed his lance towards one of the faster wights. Changed his target when it crumbled into fizzling pieces, torn apart by flechettes.

He leaped over a clay soldier with a hole in his chest, relentlessly pulling his broken body towards the enemy trench, then deftly avoided a caustic black blast of magic that destroyed the soldier behind him.

Emit kept his lance steady, his momentum unrelenting. He shrugged off smaller bursts of magic tearing through his shoulder and part of his hip with the support of the equine frame.

His brothers-in-arms skewered undead on their lances like a grisly shish-kebab, then unsheathed their swords to cleave through those that remained. Those with traces of humanity still within them roared as they trampled their foes.

The others silently stabbed and cut. Clinically. They did not bother to struggle when they were surrounded and torn apart.

Emit finally joined the fray a second later, impaling a ghast through the neck and effectively decapitating the monster. He jumped over a pair of harmless zombies and crushed a prowling ghoul under his hooves, viciously bucking to splatter its gore about. With a scream of fury, he flung his lance through a ghast’s stomach and barreled into it, pushing them both into the trench.

He was last to leave, first to break through the enemy line.

He pulled himself to his feet, grabbing his lance and ignoring the snarling monster at the end to hold it between himself and the panicking dark mages in the trench. Their spells splashed harmlessly against the ghast’s body.

The same cannot be said for their bodies meeting the point of his lance.

Emit charged through the trench with vindictive glee, crushing and piercing through throngs of necromancers to return them to their dark god.

The ghast snarled and clawed at him, every impact pushing his improvisational shield closer to him. When it grew close enough for its poisonous claws to clip against his chest, Emit unsheathed his sword and decapitated it, then flung its twitching corpse off his lance.

The whistle sounded again.

Emit whipped his head about in confusion. It was too soon. There were still enemies in the trenches!

The charge of the flesh and blood soldiers nearly drowned out a subtle chorus of pops in the distance. Acrid memories returned to Emit, the ghost of burning pain welcoming him like an old enemy.

Yellow gas.

It bloomed where the necromancer’s line had not yet broken.

The one he believed to be his son jogged to make it to the enemy trench in the distance, the same resplendent gold as his mother’s bobbing around his helmet. He scrambled to pull out his gas mask, affixing it to his face right before tripping over a body.

Emit’s hollow eyes whistled as the wind changed.

Screw the Empire.

He leaped out of the trench, galloped across no man’s land to make it to him. A son whose name he’d forgotten. The cloud was already rolling over the young men, their forms crumbling to the ground and writhing in pain despite their masks.

Emit skidded by his son as he scrambled to his feet, wordlessly grabbing the young man by the arm and flinging him onto his equine half before darting off. The cloud of burning death quietly swallowed more of the land, enveloping the world in a mustard hue.

Emit was fast.

Not faster than the cloud.

He rushed downwind and towards the trench, thoughts racing faster than his hooves.

The Necromaster’s weapon. The Necromaster’s troops. They had to have something that allowed their still-living necromancers to survive it.

He jumped into the trench and ripped his son’s gasmask off his face.

“Hey!”

“It won’t help you.” Emit’s voice echoed firmly.

The boy froze.

There was no time. Not for doubt. Not for comfort.

Muddy walls surrounded them, a grave full of corpses and his son’s salvation. Emit found it on the face of a whimpering necromancer cradling a broken arm. Black pools stared back at him from the reflective lenses, a trunk-like tube running from the mask to the gourd laying at their side.

Emit ripped it from the mewling necromancer and secured it on his son’s head.

A snarl.

A ghoul dragged itself by its arms to defend its master, its lower half a mess of ground meat. It reached its claws up to Emit’s son, but a slash from his blade separated the limb before it could do anything. The boy’s breaths came in roughly at first, ragged and panicking as the first tendrils of gas licked his ankles.

The ghoul’s mournful snarl rose, and it made to swipe at the tube.

It was no use; Emit kicked it away.

“Go.” He commanded.

His son nodded mutely and ran off into the yellow fog to secure the trench.

The creature that should know no pain howled in agony, pulling itself closer to its choking master. They, she, blistered and smoked as more of the gas sizzled through her body. The ghoul cried out, holding its claw out to her, tears of blood running down its face.

Why did it not infect her with undeath?

Emit looked at the pair, noting the similar facial features despite the desiccated monster’s condition. The way it cradled her gasping, rasping form with the only limb it had.

Father and daughter.

What could drive a man to become a monster such as this? Unfeeling black voids stared back at him from the reflection of his sword.

For the first time since the war began, Emit’s doubt was firmer than his hateful resolve.

Would he condemn his own child to his fate? To fight past death in this endless war?

He cursed himself for feeling such.

The clay was still wet where his horse body connected his base form.

He wondered if he was a weapon or a human. Here was his answer.

Emit pulled himself from the horse body that had carried him to victory, the damage he’d taken nearly making him collapse. He pulled the girl from her weeping father’s arm and ignored his snarl. His swipe at his damaged hip nearly made Emit collapse, but he’d made his decision.

The ghoul watched, stupefied, as he pushed the rasping girl into the hollow of his horse body, then sealed it shut in time to save her from the densest of the poison cloud.

The haze of yellow death swallowed them whole.

Two dead fathers from two nations at war sat beside each other, as peaceful as the grave they yearned for.