The shaded window admitted little bands of light which illuminated the floating dust particulate in the air as it passed through. Lines on the floor moved imperceptibly as the sun crept abroad the sky, but I did not move at all. My eyes were only partially open and I felt the bruising around my orbits throbbing, so I did not move. I did not even know how many had survived and was too weak to go in search of answers. A nurse moved in my periphery, scuttling around the room doing one of her various tasks and humming a drinking song as she worked.

Perhaps I could get her attention and she might come over to help me slake my thirst. That was the worse of it. The pain was bearable; I’d experienced worse before, but I was so thirsty. Thinking back, it had probably been two days since I could remember drinking anything.

I could remember the initial assault on the camp, and chasing the enemy through the forest after they took off running through the night. We pursued them throughout the night until we ran them up to the wall of our own fort, where the archers fired upon them from the wall and they split to retreat into the woods.

The commander reprimanded us for not chasing them until we had killed every last soldier, but there was little we could do to pursue them further. The bulk of our company remained in the safety of the fort while a platoon of us volunteered along with about a hundred fresh riders to hunt the rest of them down on horseback.

The nurse bustled around the room still, bringing in or talking out various things, one of which was a mirror. She set it on a desk which sat in the corner of the room and I wondered at what I looked like with my injuries.

The ambush happened almost accidentally. We chased the remainder of the enemy out into an open countryside and met with a full division of their reinforcements. As we wheeled around to retreat, those who had escaped our chase had closed behind us and formed a phalanx to repel our horses. There was nothing for us to do but charge the barricade.

My spear was splintered and my sword blunted before we broke the line and still we rode on. The thunder of horses drowned out any human voice which might have called out in the sortie, and my friends fell on either side of me. Panicked, I spurred Mardeth on and rode hard until I was out of the fray. The enemy’s weapons glanced off of my shield and made contact on my body, knocking my helmet from my brow and cutting into my face. I knew not whether I was killed, and rode on through the blood which was clouding my vision. Long before I reached the fort, I lost consciousness.

I tried to move. Pain unlike anything I could remember shot like lightning through my lower back and into my legs and exacerbated the throbbing in my head, but I persevered. I felt a wound in my back trying to open as I stretched the skin, betraying a wound more grave than I could recall sustaining. After a lifetime, I was able to reach a sitting position and gained the attention of the nurse. Seeing her outside of my periphery, she was an angel. She gently lowered me back to my reclining attitude on the side not wounded and applied a damp cloth to my face, careful to not cover my one open eye that I might still look around. “Rest,” she instructed in a soft but firm voice.

How could I disobey? I was in too much agony to do otherwise, and I would have done what my angel asked even if she wanted me to walk across fire. I tried to gesture to the mirror she had brought in the room, which she apparently understood.

She brought it over hesitantly to show me my own visage and as she did so, I wondered what I should see when I look into the mirror.