War Poems

WAR FRAGMENTS Recovered Poetic Signals from the Post-Circuit Fronts of the Hollow War — Veylon LIBRARIUM ECHO RECORD // 07.RIFT.Δ Access Level: BLACK VEIL Status: Corrupted / Fragmented “We return not victorious, only less than before.” — V. ──────────────────────────────────── VEILRIFT LAMENT We marched not on fields but across the ribcage of a dying god. Circuit-veins thrummed beneath our boots, a pulse not ours— though some claimed it was the Mycelial Will. I saw a boy with candles for eyes whispering prayers to a buried moon. The others laughed. I did too. Until he bled software. Until he sang. They called it *liberation*, but my mask knew different. I held a hand once, after the explosion. The knuckles still twitched. We do not bury the dead here. We upload them. A million souls queue for bandwidth. One screamed inside my helmet. I kept him company for days. He had a name. I forget it. We return not victorious, only less than before. The war? A protocol. The suffering? Optional, said the Oligarch with mirrors for teeth. But I remember each echo. I remember the rusted sky. The code-ash in the wind. I remember shitting myself in fear, but still drawing a circle in the dirt with my broken body— the only defiance left to give. ──────────────────────────────────── THE HYMN OF DRAEL They sent us to the Sura Moons to "negotiate"— which meant: arrive masked, weaponised, and fluent in the dialect of conquest. I stepped from the drop-ship into a mist sweet with spores. My lungs hiccupped on entry. I coughed mushrooms for three days. The natives called it *Skarn*. Their word for breath. And god. And song. It sang through their skin, not mouths. One greeted me with a touch— not hand to hand, but to the soft of my throat. He pulsed there like a heartbeat. I flinched. He recoiled, hissed low, and bled blue mist from his fingers. I think he forgave me. We were stationed beneath a monastery-tree whose roots fed on bones and heat. Inside, monks of the Inked Synapse stitched prayer-viruses into their own flesh. I watched one open his chest to a sun-moth, then die as it nested there, wings trembling like a wet confession. My unit razed them all three days later. One night—*the night*— I wandered out past the perimeter. I’d stopped writing by then. Just scratched glyphs into bark. A Sura female approached. No weapons. No mask. She was plated in translucent skin— her eyes soft engines of violet flame. She didn’t speak. She sang through her pores. The melody folded me inward. We lay together, not in lust, but like two fractured algorithms trying to debug the same grief. Her fingers mapped my spine. My blood tasted of burnt lichen. In the morning she left. My commanding officer later said: “Any intimacy with off-forms is a degradation of command fabric.” I told him she sang me back to life. He demoted me. I wrote the rest of the war in silence. I dream of her sometimes. Her breath entering me like a balm and leaving me hollow but clean. They called Sura-5 a victory. But I saw the monastery burn. I still hear their hymns in my helmet. They end mid-note. Just like us. ──────────────────────────────────── TRIAGE ECHOES They said: “We’ve repaired what matters.” But they lied. I still dream of worms crawling back into the holes they left. My chest is zipped with photon thread. It glows faint blue when I lie still. I no longer sleep. I *compile*. They took out a shard of memory— said it was “infected with grief.” I asked whose. They didn’t answer. The infirmary is full of the half-returned. One groans in symbols. Another draws faces on his bandages and names them like children. The ceiling leaks spores. Nurses wear rebreathers, but mine was removed “for observation.” I have grown something beneath my ribs. It sings. A med-tech came to examine me. She was beautiful in that drowned way— eyes fogged from old interfaces, voice like static in bloom. She placed a hand on my spine. Said, “You’re syncing again.” Then she left me with a printout: [MENTAL STATUS: MALADAPTIVE, BUT POETICALLY RELEVANT] I vomited once—ink, I think. It formed a circle. Inside it, a glyph I’ve never learned. I pressed my forehead to it and wept like a ruined algorithm. I asked to go back to the front. They laughed. Said I was “too expensive to lose again.” But war has already branded me. My bones pulse to its rhythm. My skin glows when the others scream. My words leak like coolant. And when I finally leave this place, I will take nothing but a mirror they placed in my mouth so I might see the next time I lie. ──────────────────────────────────── THE HARVEST ROOM The war is over. I am told this by a smiling voice embedded in my shoulder. I nod. The voice purrs: “Good compliance.” I am stationed now in the Harvest Room, a quiet wing where veterans rot politely in the folds of protocol. The walls are draped in memory moss. It blooms in the scent of adrenaline and speaks in pulses we pretend not to hear. I sit. I am very good at sitting. A doctor asks if I still write. I say: not in words. He jots that down. He thinks I’m improving. A fellow patient—Gara, or Garrun?— waters her fungi with tears every morning. Says they remind her of her sons. One was human. One was chrome. We are told the soil beneath the Harvest Room is sacred, sown with the spent codes of a thousand soldiers. Sometimes I kneel there, press my ear to the floor. It hums. Once, I thought I heard my name. At night, I walk the orchard. Synthetic fruits grow fat with veteran dreams. I pluck one. Bite. It tastes like the Sura moons— soft and ash-sweet, with the echo of a hymn you can’t quite remember. I vomit quietly in the roots. A child once visited our wing— all bright skin and no ghosts. She asked me, “Were you a hero?” I showed her my spine. She did not ask again. In the evenings, we gather. Gara hums. Someone coughs stars. I trace glyphs in my palm until my fingers forget they are fingers. The war is over. But the harvest has only begun. ──────────────────────────────────── POSTSCRIPT: Command now refers to Subject V. not as Poet-Class but as Proto-Commander. His presence alters protocols. He emits a field. Others obey. Without code. Without reason. We do not know if he remembers. We pray he does not. █