The Long Defeat

The war had taken everything. Cities lay in smoldering ruins, their skeletal remains stretching toward the sky like pleading hands. The fields, once rich with harvest, were now graveyards where the dead outnumbered the living. Europe had wanted war, and war had answered. It had answered with fire, with famine, with the death of a generation that had been too young to understand the cost of their leaders’ ambitions.

But even as the land withered, those in power refused to yield. Surrender was for the weak, they declared. Rebuilding was a dream for cowards. And so, the war raged on, long past the point where victory meant anything. The armies, once vast and disciplined, had devolved into ragged bands of survivors fighting for whatever scraps remained. The grand coalitions had fractured, each nation warring against its own shadow, convinced that if they held on just a little longer, the past could be rewritten.

The people—the ones who had not been fed into the machine—began to understand what their leaders could not: there was no glory in this. The only enemy left was starvation. The only battle worth fighting was survival. And so, in the shattered remnants of villages and towns, whispers of defiance began to rise. Not against some foreign invader, but against the very ones who had led them into ruin.

Small groups formed in secret, their goal not conquest, but escape. They fled the cities, seeking refuge in the wilderness, in the mountains, in the crumbling remains of what had once been civilization. They bartered, they scavenged, they built where they could. They did not fight for flags anymore. They fought for food, for shelter, for the possibility that there could be a future beyond the endless cycle of death.

But the old world was not ready to die. The rulers—desperate, clinging to their last shreds of power—hunted these deserters as traitors. They sent their enforcers into the ruins, dragging the unwilling back into the slaughter, feeding the war with whatever remained.

And so, Europe stood at the edge of its own grave, teetering between oblivion and surrender. Would the old world break apart, collapsing under the weight of its own madness? Or would something new rise from the ruins, something that understood the true cost of war?

No one knew the answer. But the blood-soaked soil would remember.