The River. Part Two. Chapter One

War arrived not as a tempest, but as a relentless, freezing rain that at first masquerades as mere dampness, only to seep into the marrow, the thoughts, the dreams.

Everything that had preceded it — the drills, the marching, the barks of the instructors, even the aromas of Daisuke’s cooking — dissolved into a single, viscous instant.

The Shanxi mountains received them with a cold that gnawed at the bone like a famished hound. The September sun here was deceitful: brilliant, yet devoid of warmth, like the smile of a corpse. The 5th Division advanced through the narrow gorge, uncoiling like a serpent between the crags — a serpent that was blind, deaf, and absolute in its certainty of its own invulnerability.

The air was thin and frigid, redolent of stone and wormwood. The silence was so dense it felt as though it could be severed with a blade. Too dense. Ichiro felt it upon his skin, the way one senses the brewing of a thunderstorm. He marched shoulder to shoulder with Daisuke, and their breath, escaping in pale plumes, was the sole movement in this petrified world.

And then the silence ruptured. The sound did not originate from without; it was born inside Ichiro’s skull, the way a scream is born. The world around him shattered into a million trembling shards, like a reflection upon water struck by a stone. Time halted, then bled backward, coiling into a taut, vertiginous spiral.

The earth beneath their boots heaved like the spine of an awakened dragon. Geysers of black soil surged toward the heavens, and within them, like the petals of bizarre, carnivorous flora, bloomed scarlet chrysanthemums. They were agonizingly exquisite in their fleeting, furious existence. Ichiro watched one such chrysanthemum blossom exactly where Cadet Yamamoto had stood a fraction of a second before. He perceived no body, heard no shriek. He beheld only the immaculate, symmetrical beauty of the crimson flower against the ashen sky. He watched a bullet enter the chest of the infantryman ahead — neatly, with an almost tender grace, like a needle piercing silk. He watched the man fall, and the descent spanned an eternity, every inch of its trajectory painted upon the air like a brushstroke on a scroll. He watched the red flower burst from the wound — vivid, impossible in its splendor, unfurling petal by petal.

The air grew heavy with an insistent drone, as though a myriad of iron dragonflies had taken to the hunt. They danced through the void, trailing thin, invisible threads in their wake. One such dragonfly sang intimately against Ichiro’s ear, and he felt a warm, viscous caress upon his cheek. He observed the former cadets around him commence their grotesque, absurd dance. They collapsed, convulsed, and froze in unnatural postures, like clumsy marionettes stripped of their strings.

A carousel of memories that were not his own spiraled in Ichiro’s mind. The fragrance of his mother’s perfume entwined with the stench of cordite. The savor of salted plum onigiri met the tang of iron on his tongue. Yuki’s face, clutching her doll, superimposed over the contorted visage of a lieutenant who now bore a second scarlet flower where his eye had been. He attempted to raise his rifle, but his limbs were alien, rendered in cotton; they refused his command. He was but a spectator in a theater, captive to a play performed in a tongue he could not comprehend.

Through this kaleidoscope of delirium, he felt a hand upon his shoulder. Resolute, unyielding. It dragged him, tearing him from the embrace of this beautiful and terrifying reverie. It was Daisuke. His face was painted in mud and something darker, but his eyes were lucid, entirely sober. They harbored neither beauty nor dread. Only a stubborn, feral will to endure.

He hauled Ichiro from that gorge, from that theater of shadows, casting him into the dirt behind a massive boulder. Ichiro lay upon the freezing earth as the world slowly reassembled itself from the shards, reclaiming its familiar, hideous forms. The scarlet chrysanthemums had vanished, leaving behind only butchered meat. The dance of the dragonflies had ceased, yielding to a silence punctuated only by the rattling of breath and groans.

They were among the few spared. The remnants of their platoon, once the pride of the academy, were reduced to a huddle of filthy, terrified boys in tattered uniforms. They were ordered to Beiping. For reformation.

They trudged along the rutted, mechanized ruin of a road. Ichiro, his head still humming like an agitated hive, leaned heavily upon Daisuke’s shoulder.

“Thank you,” he rasped. “You… you have become a true warrior, Daisuke.”

Daisuke offered a crooked smirk. His eyes held no triumph, no elation. Only an infinite, mortal exhaustion.

“I simply refused to starve to death in that cursed gorge,” he murmured, gazing up at the bruised sky. “I hope they feed us in Beiping. I hope they let us rest. I am so tired of cold rice. I just want to sleep.”

Ichiro studied his face and, for the first time, did not see his cook-friend, the gentle keeper of the hearth. He saw a man who had stared into the exact same void that he had. And this shared nothingness bound them tighter than any oath to the Emperor.

Part Two. Chapter Two →
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← Paths
← A Road of a Thousand Years