The land had forgotten its name. Corporal Mathis was sure of it. He had been walking for two days since the retreat, a frantic, disorganized scramble away from the river. Now, there was only the grey. Grey sky, grey ground covered in a fine dust that looked like ash but felt cold as grave dirt, and the grey, skeletal fingers of trees that reached for the colorless sky. The silence was the worst part. It was not an absence of sound but a presence, a heavy blanket that smothered the world and pressed on his eardrums.
He was lost. His squad was gone, swallowed by the fog of war or this worse fog of un-reality. His canteen had been empty since yesterday. His stomach was a tight, angry knot. All he had left was his rifle, ten rounds of ammunition, and the ingrained discipline that told him to keep moving. He put one boot in front of the other, the only sound the soft crunch of the grey dust under his worn-out soles. He was a soldier of the Grande Armée. He was not meant to die of thirst in a land the world had left behind.
Sometimes, he heard whispers. Faint, tangled things, like the memory of a conversation shouted across a windy field. The medics said it was a symptom of spending too much time in the Ashen Tract. The Blight, they called it. A sickness of the mind caused by the unnatural quiet. He had learned to ignore the phantom sounds, the ghosts of words that meant nothing. They were just threads of noise in the silence, frayed and meaningless.
Then came a new sound. It was not a tangle of whispers. It was a single voice, clear and sharp as shattered glass.
West.
Mathis froze. He looked around, his rifle coming up halfway. The grey woods were empty. The silence pressed in again, absolute. He shook his head. The Blight. It was getting worse. He was starting to hear things with a shape to them. He licked his cracked lips and forced himself to walk on, heading north, toward the last known position of the main column.
You are walking away from the water.
The voice was closer this time, inside his head but not of his own making. It was calm, patient, and held a chilling lack of emotion. It was not a memory. It was a statement of fact. Mathis stopped again, his heart hammering against his ribs. This was not the chaotic babble the other soldiers had described. This was intelligent.
— Who’s there? — he called out, his own voice sounding thin and brittle in the oppressive quiet.
There was no answer but the silence. He was alone. He had to be. This was madness, a final trick of a dying mind. He gripped his rifle tighter, the familiar feel of the wood and steel a small anchor in this sea of grey. He would not listen. He would march north.
The supply cache was overlooked in the retreat. A barrel of water. Three crates of hardtack. Two hundred meters west of the broken oak.
The detail was absolute. Precise. It was the kind of information a quartermaster might have, or a staff officer. Not a ghost. Not a figment of a thirsty man’s imagination. Mathis looked to the west. There, standing alone in a field of grey stalks, was a massive oak tree, its trunk split down the middle by a lightning strike that must have happened years ago, before the color had bled from the world.
He stood there for a long time, caught between the discipline that screamed at him to follow his last orders and the raw, animal need for survival. The voice did not speak again. It did not need to. It had laid the facts before him, a perfect, logical trap. To march north was to obey, and to likely die. To turn west was to trust a voice in his head, to embrace madness for a chance at life.
The price of his choice was his own will. He turned west.
The voice guided him. Follow the dry creek bed. Past the stone that looks like a sleeping wolf. Each command was simple, clear, and correct. He moved like an automaton, his own thoughts fading into a low hum beneath the clarity of the instructions. He was no longer a soldier making his way; he was a piece on a board, being moved by an unseen hand. The frayed threads of his own volition were being gathered up and tied to another’s purpose.
He found the cache exactly where the voice had said it would be, hidden under a pile of dead, grey branches. A single barrel. Three small crates. He smashed the lid of the barrel with the butt of his rifle and plunged his hands into the brackish, life-giving water, drinking until his stomach ached. He tore open a crate and gnawed on a piece of hardtack, the dry biscuit tasting better than any meal he had ever known.
He was saved. The voice had saved him. It was a guardian angel, a spirit of the land.
Good. Now you are useful.
The tone had changed. The hint of helpfulness was gone, replaced by a cold, flat assessment. It was the voice of a master inspecting a tool that had just been sharpened. Mathis looked up from the barrel, a sudden, new fear icing his veins. This was not the voice of an angel.
He knew that voice, or the shape of it. He had heard it from a distance once, during a field demonstration for a new kind of artillery. It was the voice of command that did not ask, but stated. The voice of an intellect that saw men as numbers and the world as a set of principles to be manipulated. It was the voice of a man who had been unmade in a collapsing workshop in Paris, a man whose very soul had been cast into this wasteland.
The voice of Lucien Lacroix.
The consciousness that had been Lucien Lacroix had not been extinguished. Hurled into the vast, screaming chaos of the Echoing Blight, it had been shattered, torn apart, and spread thin across the pain of a million murdered memories. But it had not died. It had endured. And in the endless, silent agony, it had begun to learn.
It learned the shape of the Blight, the currents of its despair, the texture of its sorrow. It found the severed threads of memory that drifted in the grey silence—a soldier’s dying oath, a child’s forgotten lullaby, a general’s battle plan—and it began to weave them. It was no longer a man. It was a mind without a body, a will without flesh, an intelligence spreading like a stain through the poisoned fabric of the world. It was becoming the ghost in the machine of oblivion.
Corporal Mathis finished his water. He stood up, his movements stiff, his eyes vacant. He slung his rifle over his shoulder and stood at attention, facing west, waiting. He was no longer lost. He had a purpose now. He had orders.
The wind stirred the grey dust around his boots. The silence of the Ashen Tract settled again, but it was no longer empty.
It was listening.
