The survivors limped back to camp as heroes.
What remained of our column—perhaps thirty men out of the original hundred—were greeted with cheers and cups of ale. Sir Marcus, his armor dented and bloodied but his bearing still proud, recounted the battle to gathered officers. How the forward scouts had detected the ambush. How the column had held formation under fire. How courage and preparation had turned massacre into victory.
They called it a victory because we'd survived. Because the enemy had withdrawn rather than press their attack. Because sometimes breathing at the end of a fight was enough to claim triumph.
The celebration went deep into the night. Soldiers who'd faced death together bonded over shared ale and embellished stories. The kitchen staff—what was left of it—prepared a feast from whatever supplies had survived the ambush.
Elisabeth sat beside me near one of the cooking fires, her face lit by flickering flames. She looked tired but alive. Gloriously, impossibly alive.
"You saved us," she said quietly, her voice pitched low enough that others couldn't hear. "The warning you gave Sir Marcus. If you hadn't..."
"We got lucky," I said. The burns covering my body pulsed with each heartbeat, a constant reminder that luck might not be the right word.
"Lucky?" She turned to look at me fully. "Erik, you knew exactly what was going to happen. The timing. The location. The enemy tactics. That wasn't luck."
I met her eyes and saw questions there. Suspicions that had been growing since that first night when I'd woken screaming from dreams that felt more real than reality.
"Sometimes you just know things," I said weakly.
"Do you? Know things?"
The question hung between us like smoke from the fire. Around us, soldiers laughed and sang drinking songs. The normal sounds of men celebrating survival. But Elisabeth and I sat in a bubble of quiet tension.
"I know I'm tired," I said finally. "And I know we should get some sleep."
She studied my face for another moment, then nodded. "All right. But Erik... if there's something you need to tell me. Something about what's been happening to you. I'm here."
We made our way back to our shelter—the same canvas lean-to we'd shared for what felt like an eternity. Elisabeth settled onto her bedroll with the weary satisfaction of someone who'd survived the impossible.
I lay down beside her, listening to her breathing slow and deepen as exhaustion claimed her. The burns on my body continued their constant fire, but fatigue was stronger than pain.
For the first time in what felt like forever, I allowed myself to hope that the cycle was broken. That we'd changed enough to matter. That tomorrow would bring something new instead of another variation on death and failure.
Sleep took me gently, like a friend offering rest after hard labor.
I woke with a gasp that felt like drowning.
The darkness around me was wrong. Too familiar. Too full of the sounds of sleeping people who should have been celebrating survivors instead of preparing for another march.
My hand went to my throat, expecting to find the wound that had killed me. But there was no wound. Just unmarked skin and the rapid flutter of my pulse.
And covering every inch of my body, a tapestry of handprints burned so deep they seemed to glow in the darkness.
The pain was beyond description now. Not just fire but something more fundamental. As if my very existence had become an open wound that would never heal.
I sat up carefully and looked around our shelter. Elisabeth slept peacefully beside me, her face relaxed and innocent. No memory of the celebration. No knowledge of the victory we'd won together.
Because it had never happened.
Somehow, impossibly, I was back at the beginning. The night before the march that would lead to the forest ambush. The night before everything went wrong.
But this time, I couldn't remember how I'd died.
The victory had felt real. Elisabeth alive in my arms. The enemy withdrawing rather than pressing their attack. Sir Marcus wounded but breathing. A successful end to the cycle that had trapped me.
And yet here I was. Back in the darkness with burns that blazed hotter than ever and the growing certainty that nothing I did would ever matter.
"Erik?" Elisabeth's voice was thick with sleep. "Are you all right?"
The same words. The same concern. The same innocent confusion at finding me awake and distressed.
"Bad dream," I said automatically.
"What kind of bad dream?"
I opened my mouth to tell her about the ambush. About the arrows and the blood and the endless cycle of death that had become my existence.
Instead, I found myself looking at her with something approaching detachment. This woman who cared about me. Who would die protecting me if necessary. Who trusted me to keep her safe.
What was the point of caring? What was the point of fighting? No matter what I did, no matter how clever or brave or prepared I was, the cycle continued. Death followed by burning. Burning followed by resurrection. Resurrection followed by death.
An endless wheel of meaningless suffering.
"It doesn't matter," I said quietly.
"Of course it matters. Dreams can tell us things about—"
"No." The word came out flat and cold. "Nothing matters. Nothing we do changes anything."
Elisabeth sat up, instantly alert despite having been asleep moments before. "Erik, you're scaring me."
Good, I thought with distant amusement. You should be scared. We're all going to die soon, and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
"Head count! Everyone up! Movement begins in one hour!"
The familiar call that had become the soundtrack to my personal hell. How many times had I heard those words now? Fifty? A hundred? The number had stopped being relevant.
Elisabeth reached for her hidden knife with the same automatic gesture I'd watched her make countless times. The same quick glance around to orient herself. The same practiced efficiency.
A puppet dancing to strings she couldn't see.
"We need to get ready," she said.
"Do we?"
She paused in her preparations, studying my face with growing concern. "What do you mean?"
I gestured vaguely at the stirring camp around us. "All of this. The march. The mission. The grand plan to infiltrate and gather intelligence. What's the point?"
"The point is protecting our village. Stopping the Baron from—"
"The Baron will do whatever he wants," I said with absolute certainty. "Villages will burn. People will die. Tyrants will rule. And nothing we do will change any of it."
The burns covering my body pulsed with each word, as if responding to my growing despair. But the pain had become background noise. Unimportant compared to the crushing weight of futility that had settled over me like a shroud.
Elisabeth knelt beside me, her eyes wide with alarm. "This isn't you. Something's wrong. Something's been wrong since that first night."
She reached toward my arm, probably intending some gesture of comfort. I pulled away before she could touch me.
"Don't."
"Erik—"
"I said don't."
The harshness in my voice made her flinch. Good. Distance was better. Caring led to pain, and I had enough pain already.
Around us, the camp was coming to life with the familiar rhythms of preparation for march. Soldiers packing their gear. Officers shouting orders. The great machine of war grinding into motion.
All of it leading to the same inevitable end.
"I'm leaving," I said, standing up abruptly.
"What? Leaving for where?"
"Away from here. Away from this army. Away from..." I gestured at her, at the camp, at everything. "This."
Elisabeth scrambled to her feet, her face pale with shock. "You can't just desert. They'll hunt you down. They'll—"
"Kill me?" I laughed, and the sound was bitter as poison. "Good. At least then it might stick."
She stared at me like I'd grown a second head. "What are you talking about?"
But I was already moving. Gathering my few possessions with mechanical efficiency. The hidden knife went into my boot. The emergency funds Henrik had given me went into my pocket. Everything else could stay behind.
"Erik, please. Talk to me. Tell me what's happening."
I looked at her one last time. Brown hair framing a face that had become more familiar to me than my own reflection. Eyes filled with confusion and hurt and growing desperation.
In some other version of this story, I would have stayed. Would have fought beside her. Would have died with her name on my lips and her hand in mine.
But that Erik was gone. Burned away by endless cycles of failure and marked with handprints that blazed like brands from hell.
"Goodbye, Elisabeth."
I walked away without looking back.
The camp was busy enough that one more figure moving through the pre-dawn darkness didn't attract attention. Guards were focused on external threats, not internal ones. Officers were concerned with formation and timing, not the movements of individual camp followers.
I slipped past the perimeter like a ghost.
The forest that surrounded the camp was dark and quiet. No enemy soldiers waiting in ambush here. Just trees and shadows and the promise of escape from the endless wheel of death and resurrection.
I walked without direction or purpose. North, south, east, west—it didn't matter. Anywhere was better than the killing ground I'd left behind.
The burns covering my body continued their constant fire, but even that was fading into background noise. My mind was becoming numb. Distant. Like I was watching someone else's life from a great height.
Behind me, the camp prepared for another march toward inevitable slaughter. Elisabeth would look for me at first. Would ask questions. Would worry.
Then she would march with the column. Fight in the ambush. Die with an arrow in her chest while calling my name.
And I wouldn't be there to hold her as she died.
The thought should have brought pain. Guilt. Some echo of the love I'd felt for her.
Instead, it brought only the distant acknowledgment of yet another failure. Another person I'd failed to save. Another life that would end because I wasn't strong enough or smart enough or worthy enough to break the cycle.
But at least this time, I wouldn't have to watch.
Dawn found me miles from the camp, walking along a road that led nowhere in particular. My memories of Elisabeth were already fading, becoming dim and indistinct like dreams upon waking.
Better that way. Memory was just another source of pain, and I had enough pain already.
The burns covering my body pulsed with each step, a constant reminder of every death, every failure, every moment of hope crushed beneath the weight of inevitability.
This was hell, I realized. Not fire and brimstone, but endless repetition. Endless failure. Endless pain without purpose or meaning.
And I was trapped in it forever.
But at least now I was trapped alone.
The road stretched ahead of me, empty and endless. Behind me, the sounds of the marching column had faded to nothing. Just silence and the burning marks that covered my skin like a map of every way I'd failed.
I walked on, a dead man who hadn't yet stopped breathing, carrying nothing but pain toward a horizon that would never arrive.
The cycle would continue without me. Elisabeth would die. The Baron would conquer. Villages would burn.
And somewhere, in some other time and place, another young man would wake screaming from dreams of failure and find mysterious handprints burned into his flesh.
The wheel would turn.
As it always had.
As it always would.
But I would no longer be a part of it.
That was something, at least.
That was enough.