Part 1
Chapter one
Rebirth
1649
Xander
Blood.
It was all he could see. All he could smell. All he could taste. He was covered in it from head to toe, chunks of flesh between his teeth and under his nails. His soldier's uniform that had been too big for him, presumably due to its prior unfortunate owner being a larger build, now constricted his body and was slick to the touch. His boots, once clean and polished, were covered in mud and guts.
I'm dying, he thought.
No man could survive losing this much blood, and the pain in his head and throat burned harsher than any fire he'd ever felt. He looked down at his hands, inspecting the splashes of redagainst his light golden skin. He must have been shot. The firing squad must have found him and shot him before he could run away from the battle that none of them cared about.
Xander had never been a true soldier, he was too lanky, he couldn’t even fill out the previously grey—now stained a dark-reddish brown—uniform he wore, yet he had been made to lead his small squad and join the ambush.
He struggled to keep opening his eyes every time he blinked; the blood coating his lashes caused his eyelids to stick together. His long, dark hair clung to his face in the most unpleasant way and, if it weren’t for the metallic smell and taste, he would have assumed it was due to a torrential rain storm.
As he wiped his face with his sleeve, he finally saw his surroundings. He was still on the battlefield. The same one his squad of soldiers had agreed to flee after cohesively realising they’d rather be killed as deserters than brutally murdered by an enemy attack, an enemy that they realistically had no personal quarrels with, yet an enemy they had been trained to fight nevertheless. It looked the same as before, but without the stampedes of idiotic young men in uniforms too big for them charging from both sides. There was no sound, not a single gunshot ran through the air, nor a shout or scream. It was as if the entire battle had just stopped.
Xander tried to step forward, but his foot caught on something in his path. A man stared up at him from the ground, dead, his throat torn out with blood slowly pumping from the wound and pooling around his mangled body. And yet somehow, Xander felt he was staring into his soul.
The collision had startled him, causing Xander to fall back, but not before he noticed how young the man looked. Younger than Xander’s age of twenty and six. Too young to be drafted into war, too young to have met such a gruesome end.
He prepared himself for the harsh landing against his back but was surprised by a softer, warmer one. Feeling behind him in an attempt to try to get up, to get away from the staring man, he found more blood. More bodies.
There must have been dozens piled behind him, with more and more piles across the field. Some he recognised as fellow soldiers from training sessions, which in reality were just a few days spent learning how to hold a musket and point it at the right person. Others he noticed wore the uniform of the enemy. The entire field, the entire battle, was lost on both sides.
Xander found the strength to stand, though his legs shook as they bore his weight now that the adrenaline was slowly wearing off and the ache in his body was creeping in. The crimson stains across the ground painted the field with death, the mountain of bodies displayed like some kind of gruesome sculpture, and Xander stood at the centre: the artist, the creator of this horror.
Each still, contorted form sent a pulse of sickening familiarity in his mind. A flicker of their desperate scramble through the mud flashed behind his eyes, the echoes of their choked pleas—cut short by the crunch of bone—rang in his ears, the metallic tang clinging to his tongue and teeth paid omen to the ghost of their lifeblood.
He had done this, he realised. He had killed them all. And he knew he had enjoyed it.
He began to walk through the field of dead, noting the similarities in the kills. Throats torn out, necks crushed, skulls caved in, abdomens cut open. He found his mouth watering at the sight of the fresh blood oozing from wounds of some of the fresher kills. He was disgusted. And yet, he was hungry for more.
His debate on whether to sink his teeth into one of the warmer bodies was cut short when he heard his name being called.
"Xander! Xander! Brother, is that you?"
He recognised the voice. It was Deion, his second in command of their squad and brother in battle. He turned towards the sound and saw Deion’s familiar tall frame staggering his way. He, too, was covered in blood, though clearly not as much as Xander.
Deion stopped a few feet away and took in Xander's appearance. "My God, is that…"
"It is not mine," Xander replied, finally admitting his understanding that the blood he appeared to have been doused in did not belong to him. "None of it is mine. I don't have a single scratch on me."
Deion finally took in his surroundings, his dark eyes widening as he acknowledged the piles of bodies across the field. A dawning horror blooming in his eyes gave way to a chilling comprehension, and as Xander watched the emotions flash over his face, his own vision began to swim, the edges blurring into a deep purple.
Through the haze, fragments of images darted in front of him, memories that clashed with the reality before him. Only it wasn’t his own memories. The twisted and broken bodies that almost mirrored the scene around him, albeit on a much smaller scale, were not his kills. They were Deion’s. He too had found himself surrounded by groups of dead soldiers, he too had become a monster.
"Xander," he stuttered. His rich black skin seemed to lose its warmth, as he looked as though he was going to vomit. "Brother, what have we done?"
Time seemed to warp, the present once again dissolving as Xander reeled his mind backwards. A montage of the past few hours played out, each moment a brutal revelation that he was able to pick apart and inspect. The killing, the feeding, the bloodlust, but before all of that:her.
“We did what she made us for,” Xander spoke, his voice sounding timid and unlike him. “We did what she wanted us to do.”
