Quiet
Quiet.
That’s what I remember most about these past days.
For years I have longed for the guns to fall silent, for the shells to cease bursting in the sky above us, for the screams to fade away and never return.
You might have thought it would be wonderful, then, for that to finally happen. You would be wrong: it's just been a fresh Hell for us to navigate.
We feared any noise, and feared making any noise, in case it meant being found. It made fleeing difficult and fleeing quickly impossible.
The quiet had descended weeks beforehand, ever since the Battle of Kaon. We had been in decline for years, the Decepticons constantly picking us off with little to no reprieve. Of course, they weren’t doing so much better themselves, but despite heavy losses of their own they still managed to have one up on us. We needed a quick fix if we were still to have any hope of victory, or else face a slow, inexorable defeat, and that was no option at all.
And so the assault was planned.
One last, all or nothing attack on the Decepticons’ base of operations. If it worked, it could cripple their command structure, and maybe even eliminate or incapacitate the majority of their remaining forces, giving us the edge we so desperately needed. If it failed… well, it would at least be faster than simply waiting around for them to smoke us out.
It was planned meticulously.
It was executed perfectly.
And it failed utterly.
We had hoped that the element of surprise would give us the opportunity to do what we needed to do before the Decepticons could rally… but their fear of Him proved greater than their fear of us, and it wasn’t long before they were back on their feet again.
We made every one of their counterattacks costly; but though they fell in droves behind us as we fled, it didn’t change the fact that we were being routed. For every two of them that fell, one of us would fall too. On paper that doesn’t sound so bad, but they outnumbered us three to one to begin with, and we had lost so many already that each and every loss was felt badly.
It was hopeless.
At the end of the day, even though their army had been two thirds destroyed, ours had ceased to exist.
We had lost.
