Cycles Of War It was war. Every day, they would sit in cold metal capsules, cramped in like mice in a cage. At their specified time, the door would unlock, and it would be their turn to fight. Everyday, it was somewhere different, sometimes a forest where the mud squelched up into their boots, sometimes a snowy tundra where their fingers froze to their guns. They would charge at the enemy, sometimes the hunter, sometimes the hunted. The sharp smell of blood lingered on their clothes, their hands. Sometimes it was other people's. Most of the time it was their own. Obviously, they were right in doing this. They were fighting against sick, mutated creatures that couldn't even be called human anymore. When their throat was ripped out by cold, animalistic fangs, and they lay there dying on the battlefield, in puddles that stank of rotten flesh, or drowning in icy water that clawed at them with a cold that chilled them to their very soul, they knew they were right. And couldn't the others see, they weren't just fighting blindly but being a savior! They wasn't true though. No-one would remember their name, no-one would know they were anything but a barcode, a number, a plastic block on a map used to light a fire as the last ones desperately clung to #life. At the end, it was children fighting. They didn't know why, they were just sent with guns bigger than their own skeletal frames. Of course they list, of course they did, when the last soldier was a ten year old crying as he clung to the inside of his pod, not wanting to face whatever was outside. Even he died, as four of them crushed the pod with just bare, filthy hands. But it was war, and when it came down to it, no-one blamed the creatures for doing what they did. They could rebuild the earth, free of the humans who would send children into battle, god-forsaken children, and expect to get away with it. They conveniently forgot what they had done wrong. The creatures did well. They wiped out all trace of humankind, and it was forbidden to inform the next generation that humans had existed. Earth would be better, happier, cleaner, purer. Until one day, they thought they could be better. They didn't know what had happened with humans, hundreds of years had passed. In a lab, a formula ran through a test subject's veins, the fiery chemicals gripping his heart. Eyes, once a docile purple, glowed orange. It began to hiss, to crackle. "This world can be better. Better without you."