Mud frozen into greatcoats, the groans of the wounded, the scrape of troll clubs against shields — that was their world. A world where there was no place left for anything but survival.

And there was one battle. The one that was meant to be the last. Reconnaissance reported the movement of large enemy forces toward a key bridge. And he led them out to meet them. But it was a trap. Not just a horde of trolls, but their chieftain — a giant scarred and covered in ritual tattoos, whom the soldiers whispered about in terror as Stonespine. And with him stood another general, not a troll, but a defector from the Imperial legions, a man who knew every tactical move they would make. The battle turned into a slaughter. His soldiers were crushed by boulders hurled by trolls, and his flanks collapsed under the traitor’s cunning maneuver. And then he saw Stonespine, tearing apart his best unit.

They clashed in the center of the field, right at the bridge. General against chieftain. Steel against stone. It was no duel, but a beating. Every strike of the club resounded through his whole body with a dull boom, breaking bones through the steel of his armor. Yet he endured. He knew that if he fell, the army would scatter in flight. He caught the moment, dodged, and drove his blade into the giant’s armpit, where the stone skin was thinner. The monster roared and, as he fell, managed to smash him on the head with a fragment of his weapon. The world went dark. The General felt no pain, only the deafening ringing and the darkness swallowing him, with distant cries reaching him — whether of victory or death, he could not tell.

He awoke in the midst of hell. Lying on the ground among corpses and wreckage. In his ears — an unbearable ringing, pierced only by muffled sounds of battle, as if from under deep water. His body was alien, heavy, unmovable. The attempt to move his hand brought such a blinding wave of pain to his head that he nearly blacked out again. Through the haze clouding his eyes he saw smoke drifting across a sky turned crimson by fire. He tried to remember whose smoke it was — their camp or burning wagons. He could not. Thoughts tangled and unraveled like ragged shreds of mist.

"The bridge..." flashed through his mind. "Must... hold the bridge." But his body no longer obeyed. It was a shattered vessel, life leaking out drop by drop. He felt the warm stickiness of blood on his temple and neck, and the cold damp earth drinking in his heat. "So this is how it ends...", he thought with a strange, icy calm. "Not by the sword. Not in the charge. Just... lying here, waiting."

Time had lost its shape. It no longer flowed in hours but in bursts of pain and brief plunges into oblivion. He drowned in scorching darkness, then surfaced for an instant — to the rattle of wheels over a rough road, to strangers’ hands turning him on a stretcher. The air reeked of sweat, blood, and smoke — the stale scent of defeat.

Then came the half-light of the tent. The acrid sting of disinfectant drowned out the all-too-familiar stench of death. He lay on something hard, each breath like the rasp of a dull saw against his ribs. Consciousness returned in fragments. Through the swollen slit of his eyelids he saw the smoke-darkened canvas ceiling, the dim glow of an oil lamp casting restless shadows across the walls.

He tried to make a sound, but only a hoarse, voiceless breath escaped his throat. His body would not obey — it was foreign, heavy, shattered. And yet, inside that numbness, a single clear and burning thought remained. He forced his eyelids wider, straining to see more. "The bridge..." flashed through his mind, sharp and insistent. "Did they hold it?"

The tent was empty. Only a faint moan from the next cot and the steady drip of liquid into a metal basin broke the silence. He lay pinned to the bed by pain and weakness, staring at the ceiling, listening to the muffled, distant sounds of the camp. His fingers — the left hand, the only part of him that still half obeyed — curled slowly into a fist. Weakly, almost without force. But it was movement. It was the first, fragile attempt to return.