Icarus's blog: "Just South of Blue."

    The sky was orange on the third day. Vibrant evergreen life to the west, stirs of life returning to the forests. The clicks and skitter of braver rodents foraging for nuts in the trees. The breeze buffeted a fresh damp smell of rosemary and pine. To the east was a haze of craters, schrapnel and heaping mounds of cool corpses. Byron knew when the sun hit the hills of bodies, that the smell of green and health would disappear.
    He ran his hands through the ruined earth, the coarse grit of blasted battlefield was harsh and dry- flat, almost hollow. It wasn't an altogether foreign scene to him. He had weathered harsh campaigns, routes and slaughters over two dozen years. The days before authritic shoulders, and back spasms. The nights before guilty stomachs and sour consciences.
    Trenches and divets became graves. Broken blades and tatterred rags became markers and memorials. Until noon Byron engaged in a futile ritual of making tiny scratches in the headstones with an approximation of the amount interred. It seemed to lose all meaning when he stopped seeing faces gawking- their eyes sprung in terrified rigor, their mouths agape pleading in agony. As the day and his shovel drug on they just became empty holes to fill. The nauseating stench lessened after it sank into every open, sweating pore. Occasionally a carrion bird would hop close, nip at an exposed ankle, or a lulling tongue, if a stone was handy it was hefted half-heartedly, but tools and legs had become too heavy in the midday sun.
    Nothing really seemed to pull Byron back to his macabre task. He was unaware of any sense but the thud and shudder up his body as he contined to heave, dig, and pile. He hadn't noticed the count thinning, the hours waning, or the remainder of his company breaking away for bread, water, or bed.
    He had the distinct impression that he was wittling some abominable thing away. Some wrong that had to be erased. If he hammered at it long enough, maybe some semblance of sense would return- some small amount of decency.

    "Damnation Byron, just burn the rest and be done with it". The workaholic hypnosis had broken with the derision of a familiar voice. He took a blank moment to survey the remaining task, and saw that he was on the far side of the horizon of debris he had woken to. Light was fading, and his waterskin was drained hours ago. He contemplated the raw stinging sensation in his palms, and the few remaining piles. He was the only man with a shovel in his hands.
    "Don't have any pitch" he retorted as he struck the ground again, but the rhythm wasn't there, neither was the will. He flung the tool with an impudent clatter and sauntered a broken swagger to the nearest campfire where his legs promptly kicked themselves out from under him. Immediately he felt a tingling rush of blood coursing into his extremities, tightening the ache of his muscles, and releasing their burden in tiny bursts over time. When the pulse ended, he sat upright and helped himself to a hunk of bread and a fresh pouch of water laced with honey and herbs. The perfume of the herbs shot into the back of his head and covered the stink of sun-baked death just long enough for Byron to remember. He held back a wretch and a convulsion, he'd have to eat, rest, and work the stiff kinks out of his body. The fourth day promised another orange dawn, another littered horizon.