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                            WaR                            
                    -by Emerald Burst-                     
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As the dust settles, and the flames die down, as the screams quiet, and the blood congeals. You understand what you'd just done.
You understand the devastation and horrific ends to lives you never even knew. You feel the wind die down, you smell flesh, burning in the hoouses.
You taste ash and copper as you lay face down in the scorched, bloodied dirt.
Then, once all of your senses quake in the extent of the atrocities they can experience, you see.
You see fire, you see smoke, you see death, destruction, and sorrow. You see the bodies of your comrades and your enemies.
And the bodies of civilians.
Not all who lay are dead, groans and shrieks permeate the air around you, stretching for kilometers.
Then, you stand. And as soon as you stand, you walk. You begin to wander through what you have wrought.
You wander past the dead, and the barely living, experiencing each pain, each injury, each sorrow! Of those around you. yet, as you look down at your hooves, stillo incredulously wrapped around the hilt of your blade, and you realize.
None may live. None must live through this horrible life left for them by YOU.
So, as you walk, you silence the pain, the suffering, and the sadness. Now, as your blade, slicked with necessary blood, you come upon the decimated remains of a house.
Then, you see your final sight. You see the corpse of a mare lying arched on the ground, a dead stallion next to her, tear streaks left on his face, and his lower body only ash.
A whimper reaches your ears. A whimper, from underneath the mare. You bend down, shaking in trepidation, in hope that you wont see what you know you will.
There, amongst the blood of her mother, lies a foal, unharmed, except in mind and spirit. But soon after looking at her, your orders and thoughts rush back into focus.
So as the crying babe looks at you for the last time, as she sees her final sight, you raise your blade. You raise it and weep a final single tear.
And as the rinnging swing of steel flies through the air, you close your eyes.
And then....
And then........
You wake up.
You awake from your haunting dream to an even harsher reality.
You wake up lying next to the mare you love, her mane, like yours, graying.
And you realize...... You realize something. Something so horrible, you begin to silently weep.
Amongst your true love. Your well kept cottage, your children in the next room, and the midnight birds singing outside.
You realize.....
That it wasn't a dream.....