There’s this whispering beyond the bones. What makes a man a man, and what makes a man a machine. There’s stories if you look close enough of a fallen soldier in the Alps (rumored to give his life in service of his country), a story passed over and over by those who knew him. The story of a man that gave up everything for a war that seemed to end. Only it never did. And those stories were a lie to keep the legend of death alive. You see the Russians never wanted to reveal the fact they had found their prize, their little soldier that had been left to die in the Alps. Snow covered and half alive, limb blue from the freezing temperatures. They took a man that was native in the tongue they hated, taught him their own. Taught him to be just an echo of a gunshot. An echo that did’t exist, a fallen war hero that was just history and stopped existing as a person. And when the shocks hit your brain, that was it. You were theirs. You had been a ripped open warpromise, nothing more. There was nothing left to go back to, not a name, not a town, not a home. They had erased it all, and all that was left was cold snow and blood in their wake. You had a name once, but it doesn’t matter now.
