Until This World Ends

Ch2: Battle Aftermath

Days after the rapture, a crude scroll had shaky scratches from a hand that didn't work well:

To say that I live in a haunted house is to not quantify haunted and not qualify a house...

~~~

Valentine regained his mind when blinking at silver-white clouds. No matter how many times he tried to focus, they remained a blur. His head was throbbing.

A shadow fell over him, and a Snouter* gripped his leg and began dragging him off for a private meal. A slow groan escaped his lips. The knight's shin bruised under its teeth's pressure on his greaves before fumbling around for the other blade. His sword was not in the sheathe, but he kept a dagger or two as the decorative inlay in the metal shin guards. Never used them before, and the damn thing was biting into one of them. At least he had kept them greased enough that the free one slid out of the housing silently.

Sitting up so fast that his head spun, he slammed it deeply into the creature's flesh. He felt the soft clink of yet another thing hitting the metal on his shin. The Snouter roared and pulled away as their instincts pushed them to do. It split it's nose and lip, spraying yellowish blood over the whole area.

Valentine shook his head and scrabbled backwards as the Moults** fell on the Snouter.

By this time, his head had cleared enough to make out the battlefield. It was dead bodies as far as the eyes could see, but not nearly enough to warrant his being left alone...

Left...

Something about it all bothered the knight, as he wobbled to his feet with the intent of flying off. Valentine ignited his soul's very wings to prepare to leap, as soon the Moults would turn on him. They sputtered to life as it half dragged him above the field, nearly giving out before he snagged on a massive Dimas' Tree branch. The knight hastily collapsed on it. His view painfully wobbled until he could match the gentle sway underneath his seat. The field was carnage, absolute carnage, but most of it was demon's blood, in its yellows and blues. There were dead men, occasionally. There were too few of them for this many carrion eaters to be roaming the field.

Why wasn't a squad coming out to kill them off? Leaving dead heroes of the faith to rot in a field...

They were invasive, the demonkind, but incompatible with life, so they would die on their own. But why allow them to kill the native species until they pass?

Closer to the city's walls, two hounds nosed around the dead, looking for something living.

Perhaps that was the old lord's dogs?

It had been ages since Valentine had seen any in the wild. It surprised him that they were ignored by so many demons picking through the dead. After all, what demon would pass up a fresh dog?

But they were. And Valentine couldn't make any sense of it, as it made his head hurt more.

It didn't make any sense until one of the dogs stood on its hind legs and walked away as a woman of his order. That's when Valentine was certain the blows to his head had left him insane.

*A tiger-striped baby blue pig? He couldn't place what these creatures were sometimes.

**Birdlike, made horrible mounts, had a fondness for horse flesh and Snouters. Anyone who has tasted both horse and demon meat says it is very similar.

~~~
As time passed, a firmer hand tried to excuse its brevity:

The house part is pretty easy to deal with. It's an old Gothic cathedral that rivals some feudal castles. That includes falling masonry that could take your life. I don't live in the main body of the church, but in the knight's barracks off of the side of the church's walls. And like most buildings in the region, the north side is the only safe side to live on.

~~~

The first 3 years had been rough. No horses to plow, no dogs to bark—the biggest native creatures he saw were dung beetles and honey bees. Well, except for the hallucinations of women-dogs that couldn't be real. Whatever they were, they kept their distance from him, to Valentine's relief.

But there was no reason to plow.

Between old fields that now grew wild and stored wines and cheeses, there was more food than a man could eat on his own. What he missed was paper to write on. Without caretakers or natural predators, libraries, both great and private, are filled with bugs. They had 3 years to decimate loose papers, without predation. Only those tomes that were rolled up and sealed in jars would last past the end of this age.

Past the end of Valentine.

His concern was always the soon-dead demons. He quit attacking them. There was no reason to—nothing to save, nothing to strive for. He would hole himself up in whatever building he was near whenever the next wave would come through.

What he did spend his time with was finding ways to preserve his culture, and he had no idea why he did it. Go through an old building. Seal away the life of a family in the mother's or daughter's hope chest. Make sure it was moved to the most secure part of the building.

The first home fell from neglect in 2 years. They were older structures that were on the verge of collapse long before his world disappeared.

That's when he quit going into these empty shells to save anything for the future. Decay was inevitable, and he was going to have one of these buildings fall on him, and so would end the line of man.

As much as he desperately wanted to join his friends, he wasn't in a rush to be with them, despite the loneliness.

After deciding to live, the notes became a little more regular. He studied his distant hallucinations, to work out what the dogs truly were. It passed the time while he endured headaches from the beating he took in that final battle.

Dates for planting favorite crops and charting weather cycles dominated his writing. Interspersed with little scraps of crude paper were the more random thoughts of the writer:

Are the guard's barracks haunted? Yes, there are ghosts. Whisper and Vesper were once holy maids of our faith and can take on the shape of women when they please. Most days, now, they rest at my feet in the form of sight-hounds.

Another:

I suspect they prefer to be dogs because they spend their afterlife with a broken man who can't hear what they say. Nothing is more aggravating than a man who doesn't listen.

Again:

They do not haunt me. No, it's the ghosts I cannot see that fill my mind's vision. This city and its faith are dead, lost in a war that decimated our people. I alone survive, holding the contents of our history and culture. I'm the unfortunate soul knocked unconscious on the battlefield who woke up amongst the bones and dust of my brethren. My mind can't recall why we struggled to live. Nothing endured. It was all in vain.

The last scrap had met with rain or tears. It made no difference to Valentine:

Why am I left to record this emptiness?