What is this cold I feel? It's eating into my bones, and yet, it's so familiar. The black sky above me feels familiar too. Everything is so different... but it's all so familiar. I'm home but... why am I still there... why am I still in those dark forests, laying in the mud with my rifle waiting silently. Why am I still at war...

It was almost the New Year, and I was on leave so I decided I'd come back home to visit my family. The welcoming party was pleasant,but the food was tasteless,maybe it's just the war ration. or perhaps it's just me,but it'd left an evil and bitter taste in my mouth that never really went away. Regardless,it was nice seeing everyone again. Seeing familiar faces and hearing voices from before the war was relaxing and soothing... but something was still off. I could feel it gnawing at the back of my mind - a constant feeling of unease. The longer the silence dragged on, the worse it got. My instincts kept telling me that something was coming, something horrible...

It was too peaceful:no gunshots, no bombs or air raid sirens, absolutely nothing at all. It was all so strange. That was already disturbing enough, but there were also the conversations. They were all so.. unnatural, uncanny even. It was as if I wasn't truly home...as if it was all a dream or a fleeting memory. My younger brother casually asked me how many planes I shot down in the war, but I just couldn't bring myself to answer him. Not because counting makes it worse. You always wonder about what their life was like, and counting reminds you that you killed them . You and only you stole away the life of a random boy who was forced to fight and kill you for reasons beyond his control. The others in my team didn't count either; no one did... My father,the kind man that he is, asked me how many friends I had, and yet, I couldn't answer him either. I had friends, sure, but they're all dead now, lying face down in the mud somewhere in that forest just beyond the skyline from the city. My only real 'friend' was the black sky,cold yet ever caring. Whenever I was on duty,I would look at him, and he would look back at me. I could trust him because I know he will never leave me. He can't be killed by a fragment from a bomb or jungle malaria. hE won't grab my shirt and cry for hours until the infection finally put him to rest. He can't scar me.. He's calmed me and kept me sane. And he's here now, together with me on the balcony, waiting silently for the New Year's fireworks.

I don't even know why I bother coming up here. Maybe I just wanted to get away from all the questions and that crippling feeling of isolation and alienation. But, well, I am here now, waiting for the fireworks like when I was still young, waiting for my humanity to come back to me once more.

I never realised it, but I lost my humanity somewhere along the trial of dead bodies that I'd left behind. I thought that I couldn't lose anything else, but I did. Now, 'home' feels distant; it's not home anymore, my family isn't my family anymore. I'm lost, and my home lies somewhere in the forest together with the black sky and air raid siren. I should have never come back here. When did I die...

I wonder what those beyond the frontlines think of us. Do they hate us? Do they think we're monsters? I wonder what the soldiers think... Do they understand? Do they also look to the black sky for comfort? Those questions disturb me... it's always been easier to kill those you hate and yet... I can't bring myself to hate them, but I must kill them. No matter how hard it is. We can't give up now, or all of the deaths, everything would be in vain! Haha... That's what the government tells us, at least.

The hand of my watch slowly strikes twelve, weighing on the finite yet endless numbers. The New Year is here, but there is nothing: no fireworks nor cheers, nothing at all. A creeping and horrid silence haunts the air, a silence before an air raid. I remember this silence, I know it...and I... love it. It's soothing in a sense and with it, I finally feel at home. Then, suddenly, aloud gunshot broke that fragile silence. A crimson tracer shell followed the shot, striking through the air and tore the black sky in half. And many more follow, tearing up the peaceful sky. My heart starts to race as my chest tightens. A thought flashes through my mind: "I have to get to my post!". I frantically look around,filled with fear and anxiety, but I see nothing just some houses and potted trees.

"I'm not there... not anymore". I remind myself,yet my heart is still racing. I feel a chill coming up my spine. "Where are the air raid sirens and the planes? Why can't I see them? It's a clear sky!". As the thought flash in my mind, countless fireworks erupt in the sky into blooms of brilliant yellow and red. There is no air raid , no tracer shells nor planes, just the fireworks. But the chill stays with me. Why? Tears start to flow from my eye, but why? I wipe it, with my hands but I can't. Instead of tears, my hands are covered in blood. I can hear something ringing in my ears -A voice? I feel so cold..

"C'MON! STAY WITH ME, SOLDIER! YOU CAN'T DIE NOW. DAMN IT! YOU HAVE SO MUCH TO LIVE FOR..."

I walk upon the railings of the school rooftop. I can hear the gunshots, blended with the roaring of bombs ripping and tearing through the city. The earth shook as if in fear as the twisted and demented orchestra continued. The ceaseless drumming of artillery shells and bombs surrounds me as black pillars of smoke rise high and painted the sky dark. The winds carrying the bitter smell of gunpowder brush my cheeks as I gaze up. I’m used to the scent by now, though, so it’s not so bad. The sky itself looks dull and grey, like always. It expressed no meaning, a mere reflection of the lives of those who bothered to look up... I regret it all...

I am... or was a teacher at this school. You can’t have a teacher without students, can ya? Haha... Yeah... All of them are dead. They were killed, no, murdered... by soulless bastards with no sympathy nor humanity. Those dirty fucking scumbags... I’m angry, but I can’t be bothered to be. Grief is much more powerful, much more potent than that. I fuckin’ regret it...

Why do I regret it all you ask? Well, it’s because I helped those heartless bastards. Unknowingly, of course... I didn’t... know. It was just my job to report to Father. The 270 birds, 150 turtles and the locations of the anti-aircraft guns. I did not know. I had no regrets then because I did not know. “Blissfully ignorant” as they call it. But now? I could feel it tearing and gnawing at my sanity. I want it to go away... please... I didn’t know...

I’ve been working as a teacher for more than a year now. I’ve only had one class before all of this happened. How, you ask? Well, in Talone, a teacher would teach one class for a whole year, and then after that, they would teach the next class for a whole year. So, corresponding to the subjects, a class would have five teachers: Math, Literature and... other things like Biology, Physics and History. I taught Literature. Yes, not exactly the most exciting nor the most intriguing of subjects, but that was the subject assigned to me by HQ. Couldn’t have had it any other way. The students all hated Literature, and I agree with their reasons for the most part. I mean, why the hell would you need to know about the works of some dead man hundreds of years ago in the real world? The answer is: you don’t. Haha... but that... doesn’t really matter now, does it? They’re all gone... dead, killed, murdered whichever way you put it. They’re gone. They don’t need their paps teaching them anymore...

I was a “father”. I had no wife nor children, but I was, in every aspect, a father. I was a father to my students, so kind and so sweet. I loved them! I loved them all... Oh, how I regret it so much now. My children...

Other than being a teacher, I was, no... am a Beholder. “Once a Beholder always a Beholder”. What’s a Beholder, you ask? Well, I’d like to describe it as bird watching and counting animals. Steel birds painted blue with bombs inside their bellies, and armoured animals with 78mm gun turrets. I counted their numbers then I reported back to my “Father”. He loves my reports because, with them, he can fuckin’ kill everyone and “serve the country”. “Our” country, he said. Fucking cunt... He traded the lives of those in Ashkan for the lives of those in Willova. He had the bloody audacity to weigh and trade human lives. In the end, I’m amongst those traded away...

I was a damn good Beholder, too. But after I served my country, he threw me away. It was the most logical of options; I was just not worth the effort. There are many fit to replace me. Hell... I can’t even figure out how I’m going to escape this siege. So, he left me to die. He left me here so I can watch the folks here get slaughtered, and to watch the city burn. It was all my fault in the end. And I regret it...

But, no more regrets, I’m tired and sick of this shit. Life... is just not worth it anymore — the pain, the suffering — that’ll never change for me. Even if I do live on and claw my way out from the ashes of this city, this feeling of regret will never leave me. It’s just going to gnaw at me until the end of my days. I want to be without regret... No more regrets... No more...

The grey ground below and the grey sky above, it only takes a second for a man to fall to his death from here.

The plane engine could be heard from the cockpit. Its steady humming reverberated throughout the plane as the propellers tore through the air, with its wings cutting the cold and bitter winds in half. It was soothing in its own way, that steady and calm sound of the engine. Even against the vast black sky filled with nothingness, that familiar sound filled the pilot with a feeling relief. But relief alone cannot warm a man, yet loneliness could chill you to the bones. Even in the cockpit where the engine’s heat was supposed to warm him, the pilot could feel the cold of altitude and loneliness eating through his jacket and into his flesh. It wasn’t just the temperature, though. It was the entire atmosphere of the night: a sense of locked isolation; one man in one vast, yet empty, sky. The pilot was alone on this fateful, starless night, a steel bird of prey in the middle of hunting season.

It was all normal in those eyes that reflected and consumed by the vast darkness. The engine, the sky, and the biting cold, as well. The pilot was all too familiar with it at this point. Counting the medals pinned on his shirt, the pilot felt somewhat proud that this starless sky was nothing out of the ordinary. He did not know why he felt that way, but he did. It was a genuine feeling in his heart; a warm feeling that staved off the biting chills. He contemplated it for a moment before laughing bitterly and saying to himself that he shouldn’t be so proud about inflicting pain and death on others. But perhaps it was not pride that he felt, but comfort. Comfort that he was now with the familiar sky that reminded him of the times when he was truly “happy”.

“Those days were ‘good’...” he said aloud to himself as his voice trembled slightly. He counted sixteen medals in total; each one corresponding with a bomber he had shot down during his time in the interceptor with his crewmates.

He could feel tears welling up, and his eyes got blurry. And yet, for some reason, he could not bring himself to wipe those tears off. It was as if those tears reminded him of all the things he’d held so dear. Maybe it was his lover, always smiling and always optimistic. Or maybe, it was his crewmates who’d always share a piece of news from home so that they could all rejoice the good news and share the sorrows of bad news. Maybe it was something simpler than that. Perhaps it was his neighbour who’d always share some life stories with him over a cup of hot tea. Or perhaps it was the stray black cat of his neighbourhood that’d always brush herself against his leg whenever he gave her some food.

He could remember all those things and countless others, but there was only one thing that he held most dear, yet, he could not put his finger on it. As all the feelings in his heart blended together into something he could no longer understand, his chest tightened, and tears rolled down to his cheeks. The pilot forced out a wide, bitter smile.

“Stroci always said that to cry is to shame yourself. Get yourself together...” He reminded himself then wiped the tears off and clenched tightly to the yoke of the plane. “Not now...”

The man had been a pilot in training before the war. He had been so many things before war. He’d been a romantic, a lover, and an amateur writer, but all those things were stripped away from him. His lover died in a bombing raid; he was drafted to the air force as soon as he graduated from pilot school. Even his house burnt down, and with it, all his ties and bonds to his past. He had nothing to lose, and so he fought to die, but even death refused to grant him relief. Instead, he earned titles that he did not want and found friends in the direst of times. Against the curtain of the night, he could see their faces and hear their voices so vividly.

There was Brauning the gunner, with his tall nose and his clean-shaven face, and a hairstyle that’d looked utterly out-of-place. That bastard was a clever man who’d always obtain things seemingly out of nowhere a razor to shave, a comb to brush, a picture to remember, a piece of news from home... and a letter to those whom he left behind. His pockets had always been full of things. Sometimes, it’d be clips of ammo and grenades, and other times, it would be tubes of face paints and makeshift brushes. Brauning’d been a street performer before the war. A real talented one too from the looks of it. He could do magic tricks, balloon animals and, of course, face painting. He’d loved it so much that he’d cling on to the paints even after Brauning got drafted, and every time they were taken away, he’d always make some more appear. The commanders would look so surprised and furious the first few times, and then they’d join in the laughter. He even clung on to his paint until the bitter end, when blood painted his entire body a sanguine red. When they searched his corpse and ripped the uniform off him, paint spilt out on the floor. Blue paint, yellow paint, green paint all blended together into a nasty grey, but the red paint was nowhere to be seen, for one could not distinguish the red of his blood from the red of the paint.

And then there was his co-pilot and radar look-out, Stroci. Contrary to Brauning, the man was bald and had the thickest and most unkempt beard the pilot had ever seen. He was also quite chubby relative to all the military men. People would sometimes call him “Piggy”, and he’d always laugh. Stroci had the weirdest and loudest laughter of the whole division. It always sounded like he was choking or dying, but pure joy was always in his eyes when he laughed. Or so you’d say if you weren’t there.

The moment he heard the gunner glass behind him break, he unbuckled and jumped out of his seat faster than a cat and rushed to the back of the heavy interceptor. Mere moments later, the pilot heard a sound so unsettling that it sent chills up his spine, and so loud that it could be heard even over the plane engines. That was the first and last time the pilot heard Stroci scream. After the scream, the sound of mumbling could be heard for a few seconds, but the sound of an enemy machine gun behind him drowned out the mumbling. Then, in turn, the sound of his interceptor’s gunner machine gun drowned that out. The gun was indeed his interceptor’s, but it was so strange; it sounded dead and furious. A short burst followed by another burst, and... nothing. The pilot called out but heard no response. He could hear nothing but the engine of his own plane for seconds that felt like an eternity. Then, he heard it again: the mumbling and a faint sound of something being dragged on the floor. He peered behind him to see Stroci holding Brauning in his arms; his entire uniform red with blood. Stroci was mumbling faintly. He sat there in the small space between the cockpit and the gunner post, cradling Brauning in his arms. Stroci gazed up at the pilot, and it was like a knife to his heart. A gaze of disbelief through dry eyes. And he laughed, a bitter choking laugh that sounded like always...

The pilot sighed. His eyes still wet; he took out his map and looked at it. The dim light coming off his flight instruments struggled to illuminate the path which led him down to the darkest of places, his target, mark crimson red.

His mission was to bomb a village suspected of harbouring enemy soldiers, to completely root out all enemy presence in this area to prepare for a massive offensive, or at least that was what the brass had told him. It was strange. The bomb load he was carrying was not enough to destroy machines of war, but it just enough to destroy lives. That thought cut him deep. It seared and stabbed into his heart like a red-hot knife, carving out his soul and burning it. He was no longer the hero of the air force. He was no longer the one who protected the lives of the innocents who was caught up in the war. He was the murderer, the one who inflicted the pain and sorrow to those whom he did not even know. He was the person who would carve out a grim expression from those left alive and a stiff expression on those left to die. The thought pained him more than words could describe. He did not want to kill these “traitors”. Maybe the death of his crew had made him weak. Or maybe, he knew that the brass had lied.

The brass hated him; they always had. Or more precisely, they were afraid of him. He never openly protested against them, but they knew. From burnt papers to whispers at the dead of night, they knew all about him. They knew that he hated the war; they knew that he hated the government, and they knew that in his books, he expressed disloyalty against them. And that was enough. They drafted him so he could die a “natural” death but, either through pure luck or determination, he lived and became a hero. So... they had to kill him discreetly, or otherwise. They’d failed once, but they would not fail again.

As his engine continued to hum the steady melody of war, the empty sky suddenly lit up before him. Spotlights scouring the sky, as the steady sound of his plane engine was replaced with the frantic sound of air sirens booming below him. His eyes shot from one corner to the other to get a general view of his surroundings as he was trained. Then his eyes jumped to his map, then to his instruments, then to his pocket watch. Confused, he knocked at the plane’s compass twice, and its needle went from North to South then back again. While he was still in a panic trying to figure out what had happened, a familiar sound grabbed his attention, and he looked towards its direction.

A blazing star was born from a cold, dead shell of an anti-aircraft gun, just some distance from him. Then, just a mere split second later, the sky was filled with stars of red and orange, and he could hear shrapnel from the shells peppering the wings of his plane. He instinctively yanked on the yoke and pitched the plane upwards to throw off the artillery, but it was too late. He’d been flying too slowly and too low for it to work. A spotlight was lighting the belly of his plane up and consuming the whole plane in blinding light. And as he looked upward, a shell detonated right in front of him. He could feel his chest tighten up as his heart pounded as if it’d leap out. Shrapnel shattered his windshield as he slammed on the emergency ejection button and flew out of the plane. Not even a bird of prey could escape the hunters.

The sky was dark and starless that night. Far off behind the front lines, families of both sides gathered together around the fire, exchanging stories of the year that will soon become yesteryear. Then, as the clock stroke midnight, you could hear the bells tolling for a man who’d never lived at all.