It’s always the eager that are first to go. All the bright-eyed recruits chasing promised honor and riches. It isn’t until their friends, the people they shared meals with just hours before, are cut down in front of them do they first become engulfed by their brutal reality. Most break realizing they weren’t the hero of their own story, but a stepping stone for another’s. Astonishingly few grow to become the warriors from which stories are told, and mine is darker than most.