"The Battle" by Victoria Bellamy

The battle was over.

The sandstorm clawed at her skin as it encircled her, trapped her but she was oblivious. The cuts on her arms and legs still burned and her left leg drifted uselessly behind her. As the sandstorm cleared she saw what she had done. There were bodies everywhere, both orc and human. They were terribly deformed and distorted and she found she could not force herself to look. She fought hard to hide her tears of shame from the eyes of the world; she had known these men and they had fought for her, they had died for her. Most of them were hardly past adolescence, children in the eyes of the world, yet they lay here dead and for what? Their gaze locked towards the heavens betrayed their true feelings, their last in this world. It was a slaughter. She wanted to run away and forget but she knew she could not. The smell of dried blood and open flesh filled her nostrils and she fought hard to stop the bile rising in her throat.

There was movement behind her and she turned to see the rest of her a child army appear out of the sandstorm. The majority were badly wounded and those who could still walk carried their friends out of the storm. She couldn’t look at their faces such was her shame. A mother was wailing another sobbing, crying out in pain and it was her fault. She had failed them, all of them and even though they had won the war, in her heart she knew she had lost the battle.