The Victorious

Gargo was a dead man. It is important to know this. He had been dead for some time. But, then, he was nothing if not a survivalist, even in the dark lands after life.

Gargo had wandered for a good while; an age of ignorance and despair which was now embarrassing to him. He had trundled through the fogs of death, looking for his home, for his family, and finding only those who had gone before him in that dark territory. He had wept to the gods and found them deaf to his cries and bargains.

Gradually, he became aware he was dead. This realization came only after a handful of times when he was forced to "kill" others he had come across. Addled men, still wearing their death-wounds, would shamble toward him, pain and confusion in their glassy eyes, and Gargo knew they would try to hurt him, if only to reaffirm their ability to hurt something in this dreamlike realm. So Gargo -- something of a warrior in his living years -- had lain them low. He had stood over his opponents, no glory in these victories, and watched as their bodies melted away back into the fogs. He had even seen them since then, but the men took to shying away from him instead of contesting his will.

So he was not only a dead man, but he knew it. And since that time, he had made his way through the fogs aimlessly, seeing what he could see, ever greeted by the familiar landmarks of the deep woods where he had been set upon by his vile nephew and murdered. No matter how long his footfalls carried him through the mists and trees, the same large stones, the same creek, the same fallen logs marked his path as circular and never-ending.

He saw others come and go, a few spirits who could move into his dark wood and then out again, never to be seen a second time. This made him angry for a while, that other ghosts could return to their homes while he was condemned to haunt the same hilly hollow. Then he stopped caring and went back to his wandering, occasionally laying low another confused spirit with malice in its eyes.

And of a sudden, an indeterminate time later, the woods became crowded. Men in uniform, and many not, some screaming in an unknown tongue and others in a dialect he almost knew, rose up in the fogs, bound to his very vale. They clutched at each other, maddened, and made war: they in uniform and they in piecemeal armor, the foreign spirits and those more familiar. Gargo recognized certain features in the men of one army. The uniformed men, however, had noses and brows and bearings he had never seen before. The men -- soldiers, all... all these new spirits whether familiar or not -- kept at their war, shouting orders and rallying each other with desperate-sounding voices. They who spoke a dialect of his own tongue muttered words of failure and weariness and loss.

But the uniformed men wept loudest. They held their brothers and sisters in their arms and screamed over wounds that, Gargo knew, would never heal. They, the invaders, had been victorious. They had prevailed in their battle. And none of this was any consolation to their screams. Theirs was not a soldier's death, but an invader's death. Their afterlife would be spent among their fallen enemies, in a foreign land, no home to soothe their war-torn hearts. They had been victorious, and would suffer for it for time eternal.