What I couldn’t understand were the battlefields. I happened upon them every now and then, because chance would have it that way, and it was always as if some exterior skin of the world had been peeled back to expose layers of rot underneath. I never did consider myself to be a political man, but I thought to myself as I picked my way through charred landscapes and realms of decay that there were simpler ways to mend disagreements than ways such as this. The scattered thoughts of veterans and survivors swirled at my heels, plumes of ash presumed to scatter in the wind but always sweeping along behind me like some morbid cape.

A few times I’ve stopped. Hands in my pockets, shoulders tilted back, right in the middle of all that carnage. I imagine the horns of my mask made me look some sort of daemon, come to ravage the spirits of the recently departed. One of these times, I had shots fired at me—tremendous cracks across the silence followed by shouting. They reared up out of the ruin of a building (a town! this had been a town!) with guns flaming and voices raging, “Out! Get out’f here!”

With a startled skip and a scamper I retreated to the nearest standing wall and dove behind it with heart thudding against my chest. Nothing serves to rattle the bones quite like the faceless steel of a bullet. It was something I never could get used to. But at least they let up to approach my hiding spot on foot. I could hear their steps crunching over the rubble and, as they drew near, raised my hands up over the broken top of the wall. Followed by my head.

There were three soldiers right there in front of me, and a forth who, drunken, appeared to have lost his way between their hidey hole and mine. The two women in the group were the ones with guns drawn and pointed at me.

“What do you think you’re playing at?” demanded the taller of them. She had smart brown eyes that were looking for just that one more thing to send her over the brink –whether to rage, to despair, to insanity, I could not have guessed. “Come on. Stand up. Take off that stupid mask.”

I did stand, of course, slowly. While I do not harbor any particular dislike toward death or what some might coin “the Great Unknown,” the open hostility inherent in the posture of pointing a gun at another is something that I have to cringe from, a reflex that I never had the misfortune of having stamped out of me. I kept my hands by my shoulders, and tilted my head at them silently.

The squint of their eyes was as frightened as it was angry. It dawned on me slowly that they had been here for the corruption of this village, that their fright and suspicion were not wholly unfounded. I was the masked intruder, threatening to violate what sacredness remained in this land. They did not know who I was.

She stormed forward with her pistol held out in front like a rapier, the other hand reaching. “I said off with the mask!”

But before she could grab it, I ducked out from beneath her hand, swept a single step to one side, and shrugged up my shoulders with as much apology as I could muster. This was evidently precisely the last straw that she had been waiting for, as rage flared in her eyes, and she pivoted, flung a hand toward me again. Again I bobbed back just out of reach. And again. My steps were delicate over the rubble, light and dancing, while her soles crunched heavily and stomped with the rage she could no longer keep pent up.

“Take it off!” she roared while her comrades looked on with eyes full of hazy uncertainty. “Take your mask off, I said!” Twice the pistol gleamed close to my face, and on the second pass I reeled in such a way as to give her an opening to seize a fistful of fabric. She promptly yanked, but the base of the fabric was connected to my scarf, which strained fiercely about my neck but did not give. Her grip slipped. I sprang away, clutching at my neck and coughing. And then crack!

The cold ferocity of the sound froze me to the spot. I’m inclined to believe that it did the same to her, as she seemed to have stopped moving as well. Perhaps she hadn’t intended for the gun to go off –not in such close proximity. But she was angry. She was frightened. And I am certain now that I will never know the true intent, or lack thereof, behind that minute curl of the finger that sent a cascade of fire splitting through my chest.

I don’t recall her expression in the instant that followed. My attention became like a thousand birds that had scattered at the crack of the gun. Suddenly everything seemed so very out of kilter, and I was vaguely alarmed by how little sense I could make of it. I tried to apply my senses to it, but as the few birds began to wing back it was to discover that their tree was wilting.

I gasped for air.

I felt as though some tremendous weight had descended upon my chest and was gnawing on it from the inside.

I have hurt before.

I have felt physical pain, emotional pain.

I have been spit upon, sworn upon, slapped, shoved, sucker-punched, and squeezed.

But this—

This—

This…

For the first time in so very long, I felt betrayed. Betrayed not by fate or happenstance or my own bumbling hands, but by those Others standing before me. I wanted to do something. Something. But even that thought found no resolute purchase as I shuddered and clasped confusedly at the wound in my chest.

Go away, I think I thought at I know not whom, Go away. It was the only true thought I could garner in the face of the encroaching numbness. Panic, helplessness, coldness, betrayal.

Betrayal.

~ * ~

The peculiarity of waking from such a thing as that was that I initially didn’t think anything of it. I stirred at the steady approach of something on the far reaches of my mind. The birds were returning in twos and threes, but I felt the icy clutch of alarm long before I knew its source. After a moment, I stirred one leaden arm, opened my eyes to study the foreign ceiling above me, the way the light of a nearby fire –contained– glanced off of the eaves and rafters. Holding my hand up over my face, I comprehended the lack of a glove, the skin pale in the orange light. Then, slowly, I lowered the tips of my fingers down to my cheeks, my forehead, my chin. Gaunt. Bare.

My mask was nowhere to be found.

It was gone.