A wasteland guide from a dying soldier

Across the plain, before daylight, our journey started, and just at the first peril, I collapsed, failing the whole army. This was my first battle and after all of the years, I've been training together with all of my peers I thought I was ready to rumble.

I was good, my captain always said that to me. The only one to not believe him was me. And there I almost died. "Leave me here, you must save the Magic Crystal", were my last words while I cried in my captain's arms. I'm disappearing now, joining the Ether that cannot be seen.

I won't participate in the rescue as I had wished for many years. I fought so hard to be part of that, facing the many injustices of the previous empire to rebuild a state of fairness, wellness and tranquillity.

When I was a kid I was small, with the signs of starvation on my skin, my bones crackled in at every movement I'd make, I was dirty and scared, but then I saw them, the soldiers in shiny armour, giving us the announcement that the President died and that we were finally free from his reign of despair.

There I decided that I wanted to change and become someone different, someone to be proud of. Even if I came from a family of ugly, filthy destitute people and was destined to be that and only that I took my life into my hands and changed it. It just started with a bath in the river and the request to be taken to the army headquarters and be trained as a soldier.

My captain was just a vice-captain the first time he saw me and he read my eyes and saw I much I wanted to change myself and the course of events. He took me under his wing and made a man out of me.

I worked so hard to become a good soldier, a good and respectable person but despite all of my effort the Event Horizon, the biggest change I wanted to achieve, will remain only a dream, an unfulfilled desire.

I won't march toward the Misty Factory with my shiny armour and my valiant sword, no matter how I improved my health, my body, my speed of movement, my response to stimulus or attacks, my mind calculous, my resistance. Nothing matters anymore.

My heart cries with me thinking that I won't conquer the place that I hated the most, that factory of outrage, sacrilege and hate that made my grandpa and all of the generation after him miserable because he opposed himself to the violence of the guards to defend a companion. I won't make them pay for their mistreatment and I won't plant my shield as a latent threat on the enemies' field to make them understand that their empire of insolence and abruption is done.

I won't see the environmental consequences of my army's valorous battles. I won't witness the grass cracking under the stones to reclaim the light of the sun and becoming greener than ever, not the shimmering of the flowers invading the plains again.

What a paradox dreaming of being one of the soldiers to push the hardest and fiercer resistance that my people had ever known, and being killed just as the first arrow rolls in on the battlefield. "I do not regret it. I saved my captain", I think to myself and my mind returns to when he said to me I was good. Maybe that's the problem. I am too good.

I time travel to the beginning when my craving for evolution started. How much I've grown in these years, how different I've become from the member of my family, how far I've come from the debris of my old ways.

Maybe that was my destiny, train hard enough to renounce fame to save the key to our victory against the enemy. How sacred was that first of April of the year 2038, in that lush period that was called the Lizard Session.

This is a too greater occasion to spend my last moments crying over spilt milk. I will give posterity one last contribution. I'll write a guide on how to safely traverse the wasteland and defeat our filthy foes.

Win, my fellow soldiers. Take the Crystal of Peace back home.

Inspired by Wasteland Guide by City of the Lost. Go explore it on In The Woods channel