The Old Lie: Dulce Et Decorum Est

The rain came down in cold, slanting sheets, turning the cemetery paths into ribbons of black mud.

The man standing among the graves did not bother with an umbrella.

Water soaked the collar of his century-old greatcoat. It streamed from the brim of his campaign hat and dripped soundlessly from his fingertips. He neither shivered nor blinked.

He had forgotten how.

A meadowlark landed atop a granite headstone a few yards away, studied him for a moment, then flew off again.

Animals always knew.

He stepped closer to the monument.

It was simple gray granite, weathered by Montana winters.

LIEUTENANT ELIAS THORNE

1888–1917

Beloved Son.

Beloved Brother.

Lost in France.

Below those words, carved in clean Roman capitals, was the sentence that made him smile without humor.

DULCE ET DECORUM EST PRO PATRIA MORI.

The Old Lie.

He reached out.

His pale fingers traced the letters.

"I never cared for poetry," he murmured.

His voice sounded strange in the rain.

Almost unused.

No body lay beneath the stone.

There never had been.

Only a pair of bloodstained identification tags, a letter from the War Department, and hope that had slowly curdled into grief.

His family had buried emptiness.

...

In October 1917, the earth itself had seemed determined to consume mankind.

No Man's Land was not land.

It was churned flesh.

Mud.

Shell holes.

Wire.

The dead.

Thousands upon thousands of dead.

Every bombardment unearthed yesterday's corpses and buried today's.

Rain filled craters with brown water that smelled of blood and cordite.

Lieutenant Elias Thorne had been twenty-nine years old.

Born near Helena.

Schoolteacher.

Volunteer.

Idealist.

He believed the newspapers.

He believed civilization needed defending.

He believed there was honor in sacrifice.

He believed nearly everything.

Until Passchendaele.

The attack began before dawn.

The artillery roared so loudly the earth forgot silence.

Men climbed ladders.

Whistles blew.

Someone shouted.

Someone prayed.

Someone laughed hysterically.

Then machine guns began speaking.

One after another, men folded into the mud as though invisible hands had cut their strings.

Elias ran because everyone ran.

There was nowhere else to go.

Mud grabbed at his boots.

A shell exploded.

He remembered flying.

Then falling.

The world became brown.

Weight crushed him.

He could not breathe.

Mud filled his mouth.

His helmet vanished.

His rifle disappeared.

He clawed upward.

His fingers found only wet earth.

Another shell landed nearby.

The trench wall collapsed completely.

Darkness.

Silence.

Cold.

He wondered if dying always felt like drowning.

Then something dug downward.

Not a shovel.

Hands.

Impossible hands.

Strong enough to tear through packed earth.

They seized his coat.

Pulled.

Dragged.

He burst from the mud like a corpse refusing burial.

The figure standing above him wore no uniform.

Only black.

Rain poured over a pale face.

Eyes the color of frozen rivers regarded him without pity.

"You are almost dead," the stranger observed.

Elias coughed mud.

"I..." he whispered.

"You may die now."

The stranger tilted his head.

"Or you may never die again."

...

He should have refused.

Every sermon he had ever heard warned against bargains made in darkness.

Every instinct screamed that something terrible stood before him.

Yet instinct belongs to the living.

The dying possess only desperation.

"Please."

One word.

That was enough.

The stranger bit his wrist.

Then his own.

Blood.

Cold as mountain snow.

It tasted of iron.

Winter.

Stars.

Midnight oceans.

History.

Then agony.

Every bone shattered.

Every nerve ignited.

He screamed until his throat dissolved into silence.

The rain kept falling.

By dawn, the battlefield held one fewer corpse than anyone believed.

...

The stranger called himself Matthias.

He claimed to have been born when Rome still ruled Britain.

He had forgotten the exact year.

"It ceases to matter," he said.

Time became seasons.

Seasons became centuries.

Names changed.

Empires did not last.

Only hunger lasted.

Matthias taught him.

Never drink too deeply.

Never remain anywhere too long.

Never trust another immortal simply because they cannot die.

Above all—

Never mistake eternity for happiness.

"You think immortality is life without death," Matthias once said while watching wolves cross the Carpathians.

"It is actually grief without end."

...

Matthias vanished in 1944.

Berlin.

Fire.

Bombs.

No remains.

No farewell.

Vampires were difficult to kill.

Not impossible.

Elias never learned what happened.

For eighty years he searched.

He found rumors.

Nothing more.

...

The cemetery had grown.

His parents rested nearby now.

His younger sister.

Her husband.

Children.

Grandchildren.

Names he had never met.

Whole branches of the family tree had sprouted, flourished, and fallen while he wandered Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas beneath borrowed names.

Sometimes he watched from afar.

A wedding.

A funeral.

A little boy learning to fish in the same river where Elias had once skipped stones.

He never introduced himself.

How could he?

Hello.

I'm your great-great-uncle.

I was reported missing before your grandfather was born.

Also, I haven't aged since Woodrow Wilson was president.

Families deserved better ghosts.

Rain washed moss from the lettering.

His reflection appeared faintly in the polished granite.

Or rather—

It didn't.

Only rain.

Only sky.

Only empty space where he should have been.

He smiled again.

"Appropriate."

A voice answered from behind him.

"You finally came home."

Elias turned.

An elderly woman stood beneath a black umbrella.

Ninety, perhaps.

Tiny.

Wrapped in a thick coat despite the summer rain.

Her blue eyes studied him carefully.

Too carefully.

"You've mistaken me for someone."

"No."

She smiled.

"I don't think I have."

His muscles tensed.

Humans rarely noticed.

This one did.

"My grandmother had your photograph."

She opened an old leather purse.

Produced a faded picture.

A young lieutenant.

Uniform pressed.

Smile hopeful.

The same face.

His face.

"My name is Anna," she said softly.

"Margaret Thorne was my mother."

His sister's daughter.

He stared.

She laughed gently.

"I was wondering if you'd ever show up."

"How..."

"Grandmother never believed you were dead."

The rain pattered against the umbrella.

"Everyone else accepted it."

"Not her."

Anna looked toward the memorial.

"She said she dreamed of you every birthday."

Dreamed.

Or remembered.

Blood carried peculiar echoes.

"She made me promise something."

Elias found himself whispering.

"What promise?"

"If a man who looked exactly twenty-nine ever visited this stone..."

She smiled.

"...tell him he's an idiot."

He blinked.

Anna nodded firmly.

"Her exact words."

Against all expectation—

He laughed.

It started quietly.

Then louder.

A genuine laugh.

His sister.

Even after decades.

Even after death.

Still capable of scolding him.

Anna watched with shining eyes.

"I knew it'd be you."

"You aren't frightened?"

"Oh, I'm terrified."

She chuckled.

"But life is too short to waste good conversations."

He looked away.

"Yes."

"It is."

They stood together in silence.

Rain drummed on the umbrella.

Finally Anna asked, "Were you happy?"

The question struck harder than artillery.

Happy?

Across one hundred nine years?

Across continents?

Across endless nights?

He considered every answer.

Found none complete.

"I was alive."

"That's not what I asked."

"No."

"It isn't."

She waited.

Old people understood silence.

"I loved," he admitted.

"I lost."

"I learned."

"I regretted."

"I kept going."

Anna nodded.

"Sounds human enough."

"I haven't been human for a very long time."

"You came back."

She touched the wet granite.

"Humans come home."

He looked at the inscription again.

The Latin.

The promise made by nations to boys.

Sweet and fitting.

The words that had marched millions toward graves.

Or memorials.

Or muddy fields where bodies disappeared forever.

"I believed those words once."

Anna followed his gaze.

"My history teacher hated them."

"He should."

"What do they mean to you now?"

Elias answered without hesitation.

"They're carved by people who survived."

Wind swept across the cemetery.

Somewhere a church bell rang.

He imagined all the boys who never returned from France.

Not vampires.

Not miracles.

Simply gone.

Their mothers had received folded flags.

Their fathers had received condolences.

The earth had received everything else.

His memorial was honest in one respect.

Lost in France.

Yes.

That part was true.

He reached into his coat.

Produced an old object wrapped in cloth.

Rust had nearly consumed it.

One American identification tag.

The mate had been buried here decades ago.

"This belongs with the stone."

Anna accepted it reverently.

"I'll leave it tomorrow."

"No."

He shook his head.

"Now."

Together they knelt.

She pressed the rusted tag into the wet earth at the base of the monument.

Rain immediately began washing mud over the metal.

As though the land itself wished to keep it.

When they rose, Anna asked one final question.

"What will you do now?"

He looked west.

Toward mountains that remembered him as a boy.

Toward forests older than memory.

Toward another century waiting in darkness.

"I'll keep walking."

"You'll be lonely."

"Yes."

She squeezed his hand.

For an instant he felt warmth.

Real warmth.

"I'll tell my grandchildren I met Lieutenant Elias Thorne."

"They won't believe you."

Anna grinned.

"They don't believe half the things I tell them."

She turned to leave, then stopped.

"Oh."

He raised an eyebrow.

"Margaret also said one more thing."

"What was that?"

"If you ever came back..."

Anna's smile became her grandmother's.

"...she forgave you for stealing her pie in 1903."

He stared.

Then laughed again.

The sound echoed across the rain-soaked cemetery.

Anna waved without looking back.

Soon she disappeared among the rows of stones.

Elias remained.

The rain continued to fall.

He stood before the monument until dusk blurred earth and sky together.

At last he touched the inscription one final time.

"Dulce et decorum est..."

"No."

Not sweet.

Not fitting.

Not glorious.

Only costly.

Only tragic.

Only final for those who truly died.

He turned away from the empty grave.

Behind him, rain slowly softened the edges of the freshly placed dog tag, letting it sink into the Montana earth beside a memorial built for a man who had never come home.

Ahead stretched another night.

Another road.

Another century.

And for the first time since he had clawed his way out of the mud of No Man's Land, Elias Thorne walked into the darkness carrying something he had not possessed in longer than he could remember.

Not hope.

Hope was too fragile a word.

Home.