A rat ran along a log.
It scurried past skeletal remains, through barbed wire and past rusted weaponry. A hundred yards away a scream and a blast rattled through the air. It didn't scare the rat, long accustomed to the never-ending song of war.
It dove down into a crater, coming upon a leather boot. The vermin scurried upwards, reaching for bleeding skin. A kick sent it back, the owner of the boot still lived.
A young man, his uniform marred by metal shrapnel and soot. Empty hands hurriedly pushed him forward through the half-frozen mud, dragging a leg with a twisted ankle toward the east. His breath was ragged and shallow, pupils contracted and lips blue.
Things scurried behind him, dozens of rats grown fat on the bounty of battle. But that wasn't what the man feared.
The wounded man came up to the lip of the crater, casting a quick glance behind.
Through the haze another Gulschak burst forward, crossbow clutched to their chest. A shadow moved and the figure gave a muffled scream as they were hoisted into the air. In a flash the Gulschak was ripped in twain, the dismembered pieces falling to the waiting rats below.
The fleeing man had frozen, even despite the rats nibbling at his ankles. Then the shadow turned, two fiery orbs flickering through the dust and smoke.
The crawling figure's eyes widened and he burst forward with all the speed he could muster. He tumbled down yet another crater, the stale water at its base dousing him. He continued, but a furred foot, like that of a wolf, pressed into the mud before the fleeing Gulschak.
The youngling trailed his eyes upwards: furred legs in a pair of tattered pants, an exposed torso packed with muscles, and two long claws dripping blood. Gore smeared around a twisted snout filled with sharp teeth.
But most striking were the burning eyes, staring at the fleeing soldier.
"Hey little one," Wretch said.
"P-Please," stammered the youngling.
Wretch picked at something between his teeth and scooped up the wounded infantryman. Hauling the smaller figure, he walked through the battlefield toward the west. The smoke of war was so thick that the bridge forming the heart of Voska's defenses was only a gray shape far in the distance.
The Gulschak continued sputtering prayers until Wretch hung him upon a metal pole by the back of his coat, his feet dangling above the cold mud.
Wretch jumped up to crouch on a stack of ruined beams, continuing to pick at the thing between his teeth while the Gulschak blabbered continuously. Finally the tissue lodged between his sharp teeth gave way, and only then did the Gulschak grow quiet.
It was half a human ear.
"You ready to listen?" Wretch asked the dangling figure staring at him with wide eyes.
Another string of rattling blasts came from somewhere in the distance but neither party paid it any heed. Such things were continuous.
"I'm ready," the youngling gulped.
"Good, good," Wretch said. "Today's assault was weak. Why?"
"I don't know. They said the defenses in this area were brittle, ready to fall for some big operation. I didn't know this area was..."
Wretch nodded. A Gulschak tactic, send a handful of shells into an area followed by a few dozen men, and if they don't return, then the dogs were still there, still alive.
"Was what?"
The man trailed his eyes to the gore dripping from Wretch's chin, down to a rat trying to reach his dangling feet.
"The trench of the three dogs, every soldier on the western front has heard of this place. Filled with so many corpses the ground sways beneath your feet."
"Oh please, no need to flatter me," Wretch said, trailing his eyes over the grounds.
The continuous shelling of their position had turned the entire area into a nightmarish field of upended earth, discarded weapons and broken trenches, but Wretch was sure there were places just like this spread across the battlefield.
"A Blessed named Grendel, and a man called the Professor. Do you know them?" Wretch continued.
The man licked his lips from where he dangled. "I have no idea what you're talking about."
"The Professor is the one that makes those stitched brutes you send every now and then."
The man lit up. "The Projects? They come in chains. Some are docile but they're all controlled by a Blessed. They're effective most of the time, if a little disturbing."
"But you don’t know their creator," Wretch exhaled. "You're not much help, are you?"
The man froze from where he dangled.
"Wait! Wait, I know other things, just ask!" the man stuttered.
Wretch tilted his head, tapping a claw against his chin. "All right, you Gulschaks, why do you start a war like this? There are barely any humans left, yet here we are, kin slaughtering kin without a care in the world."
The youngling squinted at him as if it were some kind of test. "You don't know?"
Wretch yawned and spun a clawed finger to indicate the man should speed up. He caught his meaning.
"You and your Saint betrayed and killed all the engineers in your city. The father of machines fled, wounded in both heart and mind, to the Scar-Spines. There he burrowed and created the pit. The living city. The true city of man. Free from dogma, free from your false idols."
"Is that so," Wretch said, plucking a long metal splinter from his forearm. "He had the Flame of Ingenuity then? I know there are several types."
The youngling nodded with fervor.
"I've heard you lacked knowledge in that domain. I'm not even Blessed but I know that the Flame of Ingenuity is the purest and strongest of them all, while the Flame of Beasts and that of Reverence are the most putrid and dishonest."
The man finished the last words quickly and glanced at him, trying to judge his reaction.
"That makes sense," Wretch said. "That's very helpful of you. When you get back to your ranks, could you tell them to send some Blessed here?"
"You'll let me live!" the youngling lit up with an exhale. "Even after I tried to kill you earlier."
Wretch waved a hand in front of him. "I've slain a thousand of your kin. You're more useful alive. Now tell me, how far up your arm would you have to lose it to be sent away from the front?"
The youngling went pale.
"You wouldn't."
Wretch rose to his feet, grabbing the man by his arm and hoisting him off the beam he was dangling from. "Also, would you please guess my next Blessed name? First thing that springs to mind?"
The soldier was sweating and shivering in his grip. "Dog of War?"
Wretch pouted his lips. "Not quite right. Just pull your belt around the wound and crawl back to your comrades. Hurry though, the rats around here are growing bolder.”
“Oh, and ask them to send someone. Inspirational."
A moment later a howl of pain melded into the continuous clamor and groan of the front lines.
Wretch lumbered back toward the trench that had been their home for the last month, perhaps even longer.
Between his claws he held a freshly amputated hand. One by one he raised the fingers as he walked through the barbed wire and corpses, some of them new additions from the recent assault.
"Beast Flame, like me, like Grendel." He extended one finger of the hand.
"Ingenuity, machines and weapons like those raining from above."
Another finger extended from the bleeding hand.
"Death, living corpses and the like. And now a fourth, Reverence?"
Wretch looked down at the limp hand with four crooked fingers extended. There were different kinds of Flame, he knew that much. He also knew that his was that of the beast.
"Beast, Ingenuity, Death and Reverence. But there are others, half a dozen at least."
Wretch vaulted over a half-buried machine, a crawling thing that a Blessed had used to assault them the week before.
"Whatever, what's important is that next name."
Their time on the front had been an ordeal even for him. Constantly, the Gulschaks assaulted their line. First it was only regular infantry in the wake of artillery fire, then came the stitched horrors of the Professor, things Wretch gleefully ripped to shreds. Only then did the Gulschaks send proper Blessed, men and women brandishing gear of pistons and cogs, some piloting metal beasts that crawled across the earth.
It hadn't mattered to Wretch and his two colleagues. Whatever came over the lip of western trenches was theirs to kill.
At first they had a steady stream of supplies. The last one came fifteen days ago, a soldier who had crawled through demolished trenches to reach them with a box of stew, bandages, bolts and coffee.
Wretch took a right into a sunken trench. The shaved logs that made up the walls held markings, and Wretch stopped before them. One of his claws quickly scratched letters into the wood.
Wretch, Dog of War.
Another dud, he thought. But I'm closer, just a little further.
He continued down into a network of half-submerged tunnels carved into the cold earth. Everywhere, names were scribbled into the wooden beams.
Wretch, the Blind
Wretch, Collector of Laughter
Wretch, the Lost
Wretch, the Worthless.
Thousands of ideas, carved into every surface of their decrepit hideout. Wretch pushed deeper, parting a curtain littered with holes to reveal their home. The original bunker had been fortified. Tons of dirt piled on top and beams hastily pressed to prop up the roof above.
Wretch listened, then threw a handful of scavenged scraps into a dying furnace.
A rhythmic thudding grew closer, one that wasn't produced by the distant artillery, but by heavy steps mixed with the rattling of chains.
Someone stepped out of the dark into the orange light of the furnace, the beams riddled with names casting long vertical shadows across the room.
"Waddles, were there only regular infantry on your side?" Wretch asked.
The figure took another step that sent armor rattling. Waddles had a beam fashioned with spikes and nails slung over his shoulder and crude metal armor Wretch had constructed for the brute, stray plates connected with chains to form some kind of covering. The giant threw his weapon to the floor and lumbered up to Wretch with a sniff.
His hands and mouth were covered in red but tears were forming in his eyes.
"Enemy hurt my hand," Waddles sniffled.
"Poor thing," Wretch said and gestured him closer. "Let me have a look."
The giant lumbered over and fell to his knees before him. In the low light Wretch took the massive hand between his claws. A spear had produced a rather deep gash in the palm. but on closer examination, a splinter had gotten stuck deep between the bones.
Wretch carefully gripped the knot of wood in the bleeding flesh and pulled. With little resistance, he extracted a wooden shard several inches long.
Waddles sighed, opening and closing his palm again.
"It works now, it works again!" the giant exclaimed happily, giving him a crooked smile from his mangled and conjoined facial features.
"Wait a moment," Wretch said. "Let me bandage it."
In the past weeks, Waddles hadn't changed much personally. He was still the large and simple-minded brute, incapable of following an order that didn't involve the words "charge" or "kill". But on the battlefield he had improved, if you could call swinging a barbed tree trunk around an improvement.
After Wretch had applied a scavenged bandage over the wound, Waddles hunched down by the fire. He retrieved a dismembered leg from a pouch under his armor and put it straight on the furnace with a sizzle, filling the hideout with the scent of burned meat.
It felt wrong to acknowledge it, but it was a pleasant smell. The only things left for them to eat were rats and enemies, and the latter had more to chew on.
Still the rats were numerous, thousands of them in the trench they called home. They nibbled at Waddles' toes, and Fingers had a hammock arranged to get away from them. But they didn't bother Wretch. Even they knew better than that. Some even curled up by him for warmth as he slept.
"Wretch, the Rat King," he mumbled, carving the name into a narrow part of a beam to the side. But no, not that one either.
"Where's little Fingers?" Waddles said, turning his large head toward the two entrances.
Wretch sniffed the air then froze.
A shadow lunged toward him from the dark.
Wretch took an easy step to the side and his tail wrapped around the shaft of the spear while his claw caught the attacker by the neck.
"You've really grown silent," Wretch said with a toothy smile. "Did you wait for Waddles to burn the meat to hide your scent?"
In his grip was a struggling figure dressed in an oversized coat. But beneath the hood was not a face but something else. A ridged mass that left two slits for a pair of burning eyes. The same kind of texture was visible beneath the coat.
"Tsk, what did you expect after promising me a coal if I ever got a stab in," a voice called beneath the strange mask.
The ridges twitched and moved, revealing them to be human digits knitted close into an armor of skin and bone. In the past weeks of continued attrition, Fingers had changed the most out of all three.
The tiny Blessed hanging from his grip was dirty, with hair long enough to obscure the eyes. A new set of fresh scars ran over the nose and chin, marking the previously youthful face now covered in several layers of mud and soot.
Fingers tugged at their spear, still held by a coiling tail. "Let me down, will you?"
Wretch chuckled and let both the Blessed and the metal rod, sharpened into a spear, fall to the floor.
"You're getting the hang of your Blessings nicely. I also got you this."
Wretch revealed a severed hand from a pocket and threw it to Fingers, sulking on the ground. They caught it and sniffed at the dirty skin.
"Yuck, a smoker," Fingers said with a grimace. "You don't have to cut off the entire hand, you know!"
"You can only live on stolen rations so long before you grow too weak to fight. But I also got this," Wretch said and revealed a block of something from another pocket.
Waddles, chewing on a scalded arm, and Fingers, nibbling on the human hand, both looked at the item with wide eyes.
The colorful paper had been damaged to reveal aluminum foil beneath. Beneath the grime and dirt, letters could still be read.
"Chocolate," Waddles and Fingers whispered in unison.
"Finish your dinner first," Wretch said with a chuckle. "Also, one of the infantry said something big was coming."
Fingers cast a glance at the decrepit dugout, only lit by the furnace now burning red hot. "If we meet a Blessed above our rank, we get to retreat, right?"
Wretch shrugged his shoulders. "I thought the order was to stay until the blue firework?"
Fingers sighed. "Damn it, I had almost forgotten that. Why did you remind me?"
"Waddles likes this place," said the giant, seated on the ground, eyes still glued to the chocolate.
A while later, Wretch broke the chocolate bar in three and distributed it among the trio. Fingers and Wretch continued their shifts through that night with one keeping guard while the other rested.. Waddles couldn't be trusted to even notice the sunrise.
At dawn, Wretch sat up from the stomped earth he was sleeping on, ruffling his pelt and scaring a few rats away.
He listened.
A few minutes later Fingers returned with wide eyes. By then Wretch was already strapping the armor onto Waddles' bulky form. The giant gave a yawn.
"Boys," Fingers said with breath caught in their throat. "You're going to want to see this."
"A machine?" Wretch said, clasping a chain over Waddles' head. "I hear buzzing."
"The Gulschaks, they're flying."