Two months. Two months since the rain-soaked massacre at Asugamuzi, and still the screams echoed in Raghoul's skull like broken glass grinding against bone. The corpses had long since rotted into the earth, but their faces—twisted in final agony—haunted every step across the wasteland.
He moved like a ghost through the barren landscape, his body a canvas of fresh scars carved over old wounds. Each breath tasted of copper and ash. The cursed red flame that writhed beneath his skin pulsed with his heartbeat, a parasite feeding on his rage and despair.
In the dying light of another blood-red sunset, Raghoul's vision blurred. The sun above wasn't the sun at all—it was *his* sun, the crimson orb from his nightmares that descended to devour everything. Trees became skeletal fingers reaching toward the apocalypse. Villages transformed into funeral pyres. And always, always, the children's faces melted like wax in the infernal heat.
*Rita. Mishu. Kiswa.*
Their names were acid on his tongue.
---
The distant clash of steel dragged him from his trance. Through the haze of perpetual twilight, Raghoul spotted the war camp sprawling across the valley like a festering wound. Banners of the Land of Black Snow snapped in the bitter wind alongside the crimson standards of Sand mercenaries. The air reeked of unwashed bodies, rusted metal, and something else—the sweet, cloying stench of impending death.
Hidden among the rocks, Raghoul listened as voices drifted up from the camp below:
"We gut them at dawn," a gravelly voice declared. "The Scorpions won't see us coming until our blades are kissing their throats."
"Their blood will water this cursed earth," another spat. "Let their children weep over what's left."
Laughter followed—hollow, brittle sounds that made Raghoul's jaw clench. These weren't soldiers anymore. They were carrion feeders, drunk on violence and starved of humanity.
A figure emerged from the shadows below—lean, scarred, with eyes like chips of flint. Commander Kashin of the Sand, his reputation written in the dried blood under his fingernails.
"You there," Kashin called, somehow sensing Raghoul's presence. "Come down, stranger. We could use another blade."
Raghoul descended slowly, each step deliberate. When he stepped into the firelight, conversations died. The mercenaries stared at him—at the way shadows seemed to cling to his form, at the red glow that flickered behind his eyes like dying embers.
"Mercenary work?" Raghoul's voice was a rasp of rusted metal.
Kashin smiled, but it never reached his eyes. "The Kingdom of Scorpions needs to bleed. We'll pay in coin and carnage. Interested?"
The offer hung in the air like smoke from a crematorium. Raghoul thought of his empty purse, his emptier soul. What difference did one more massacre make?
"I'll take your coin," he said.
"Good." Kashin's grin widened, revealing teeth stained with khat and cruelty. "Tomorrow, we feast on their screams."
---
Dawn broke like a hemorrhage across the sky. The allied forces moved in a tide of black steel and darker intentions. Raghoul found himself beside earth ninjas whose faces were carved from granite and spite, their hands already slick with anticipatory blood.
The enemy camp materialized through the morning mist—pavilions and fortifications that would soon become tombs. Somewhere in those structures, men were waking to their last sunrise, sharing final words with comrades they'd never see again.
The first arrow whistled overhead, and hell erupted.
Raghoul moved through the chaos like a plague given form. His cursed flame danced along his blade, cauterizing wounds even as it carved new ones. The first Scorpion warrior he met died with surprise frozen on his face, Raghoul's steel punching through his sternum to kiss his heart.
Blood sprayed in crimson arcs. A young soldier—barely old enough to shave—stumbled backward, clutching at the gaping hole where his throat used to be. His eyes found Raghoul's, wide with the terrible understanding that death had come calling.
"Please," the boy gurgled through the fountain of red pouring from his lips.
Raghoul's second strike took his head clean off.
Around him, the slaughter unfolded in vivid detail. An earth ninja drove his fist through an enemy's chest, ribs cracking like kindling. A Sand mercenary pressed his knife into a wounded foe's eye socket, twisting until brain matter leaked down the blade.
"For every drop of our blood, we'll take a gallon of theirs!" someone screamed.
The battle became a symphony of agony. Steel sang against bone. Men wept for their mothers as their entrails painted the ground. The air grew thick with the metallic tang of blood and the acrid stench of voided bowels.
Raghoul found himself face-to-face with a Scorpion captain, a grizzled veteran whose scars told stories of a dozen wars. The man's eyes held no fear—only a weary acceptance of what was coming.
"You're already dead inside," the captain observed, circling with his spear raised. "I can smell the rot on you."
Their weapons met in a shower of sparks. The captain was skilled, his spear work precise and brutal. But Raghoul was something else now—something that fed on suffering and grew stronger with each life he claimed.
The red flame erupted from his blade, and the captain's spear dissolved into molten slag. The man had time for one final curse before Raghoul's steel found his heart.
As the captain fell, his blood joined the growing lake that was drowning the battlefield. Raghoul stood over the corpse, watching the light fade from eyes that would never see home again.
---
In the blood-soaked aftermath, as the survivors picked through the carnage like vultures, Raghoul found himself beside a young ninja whose hands shook as he cleaned brain matter from his kunai.
"First kill?" Raghoul asked.
The boy nodded, then vomited onto his boots. "I thought... I thought I'd feel different. Stronger, maybe. But I just feel empty."
"You'll get used to it," Raghoul lied. The truth was that the emptiness only grew, a void that devoured everything good until only the hunger for violence remained.
Nearby, the surviving commanders gathered around maps drawn in blood and ash. Their voices carried the casual tone of men discussing the weather:
"The supply depot's next. We'll hit them when they're sleeping off their grief."
"Leave no survivors. Corpses don't seek revenge."
"What about the civilians in the settlement beyond?"
A pause. Then: "What civilians?"
Laughter followed—the sound of damnation embracing itself.
---
That night, as the camp settled into an uneasy peace punctuated by the moans of the dying, Raghoul sat alone on a rise overlooking the battlefield. The corpses below looked like broken dolls scattered by a petulant child.
In the distance, fires still burned where the enemy camp had been. The smoke rose toward stars that seemed cold and indifferent to the carnage below. How many more would die before this war consumed itself? How many more children would never grow old?
The red sun vision came unbidden—that crimson orb descending to scour the earth clean. In its light, Raghoul saw himself as he truly was: not a man, but a weapon forged in the furnace of loss and tempered in blood. The children he'd failed to save, the comrades who'd died beside him, the enemies whose last breaths he'd stolen—they were all fuel for the fire that burned within him.
A voice interrupted his brooding. "Contemplating mortality?"
Raghoul turned to find an old earth ninja, his face a topographical map of old battles. The man's eyes held depths that spoke of too many dawns like this one.
"Wondering when it ends," Raghoul replied.
The old ninja spat into the dirt. "It doesn't. War is a wheel that grinds flesh into meal. We're just the grain being crushed between the stones."
He sat beside Raghoul, joints creaking like rusted hinges. "I had a son once. Bright boy, wanted to be a healer. Took an arrow through the lung in his first battle. Drowned in his own blood while I held him."
The old man's voice never wavered, but his hands trembled slightly. "Know what I learned that day? There's no glory in war. No honor. Just meat and metal and the lies we tell ourselves to keep swinging our swords."
They sat in silence, two broken souls watching the smoke rise from their handiwork.
---
The second day brought fresh horrors. The allied forces descended on the Scorpion supply depot like a plague of locusts. The fighting was more savage than before—desperation lending strength to both sides.
Raghoul carved through enemy ranks with mechanical precision. Each kill was perfectly executed, efficient, emotionless. A throat opened here, a heart stopped there. He had become death's own accountant, balancing the books one corpse at a time.
In one brutal exchange, he found himself surrounded by five Scorpion elites. They attacked in perfect coordination, their blades weaving a net of steel around him. Any normal man would have died in seconds.
But Raghoul was no longer normal.
The cursed flame exploded outward, turning the air itself into a weapon. Two of his attackers simply... ended, their bodies reduced to ash and screaming. The others hesitated for a fatal heartbeat—long enough for Raghoul to close the distance.
His blade found the third man's spine, severing it cleanly. The fourth took a kunai through the eye, his skull cracking like an eggshell. The fifth—a woman whose face reminded him painfully of someone he'd once known—died last, Raghoul's hand wrapped around her throat as the life left her eyes.
"I'm sorry," he whispered to her corpse.
It was the first time he'd spoken to one of his victims. It would be the last.
---
Victory came with the taste of ashes. The supply depot burned behind them as the allied forces regrouped, their weapons heavy with cooling blood. The casualty reports were read with the enthusiasm of funeral directors:
"Fifty-seven enemy dead. Twelve of ours won't see tomorrow."
"The Scorpions' supply lines are crippled. They'll starve before winter."
"Good. Let them gnaw their own bones."
In his commander's tent, Kashin raised a cup of wine that looked suspiciously like blood in the lamplight. "To another glorious victory! May our enemies choke on their own terror!"
The assembled officers drank, but their eyes remained cold. Victory had lost all meaning beyond the simple act of survival. They were beyond glory now, beyond honor—automatons programmed for slaughter.
Raghoul didn't join the toast. Instead, he walked among the wounded, watching medics work with hands stained permanently red. A young Scorpion prisoner—couldn't be more than sixteen—lay dying slowly from a gut wound. His eyes found Raghoul's, and in them was a question that had no answer.
"Why?" the boy whispered through lips flecked with blood.
Raghoul knelt beside him, close enough to smell the death already settling into his bones. "Because the world is broken," he said quietly. "And broken things cut everything they touch."
The boy died with that knowledge, another ghost to join the legion that followed in Raghoul's wake.
## The Endless Road
As the third dawn broke over the wasteland, painting the sky the color of old blood, the allied forces prepared to move deeper into enemy territory. The war machine ground forward, fueled by hatred and watered with tears.
Raghoul stood at the column's head, no longer fully human but not yet entirely monster. The red flame writhed beneath his skin like a living thing, whispering promises of power and threats of damnation.
Behind him stretched a army of the damned—mercenaries and soldiers who had traded their souls for survival. Ahead lay more battles, more blood, more children who would never grow old.
The red sun vision flickered at the edge of his perception, that crimson orb growing larger with each passing day. Perhaps it wasn't a prophecy after all. Perhaps it was simply inevitability—the logical conclusion of a world that had forgotten mercy.
Raghoul shouldered his pack and began walking. Each step took him further from the man he'd been and closer to whatever he was becoming. The road stretched endlessly ahead, paved with good intentions and lined with unmarked graves.
In the distance, thunder rumbled—or perhaps it was the sound of approaching armies, coming to feed the beast of war with their own flesh and dreams.
Either way, Raghoul would be ready. He had nothing left to lose but his humanity, and that was already bleeding out into the dust.
The war would continue. The wheel would turn. And somewhere in the smoke and screaming, what remained of his soul would finally surrender to the darkness that had been calling his name since the day he first picked up a blade.
The red sun was rising, and its light would burn everything clean.