Chapter 10: A bloodstained past
-I was very young, about twenty and a few years old, when something that made my life change happened.
-By that time, the herers race still survived. It was said that they were a small village of peaceful people, nature lovers. They lived for it, and enjoyed of a mysterious harmony with it's powers, always aside from technology and the cities. But, our superiors had other ideas. -Rezler stopped, as he recalled the past in his mind-. For them, herers were dangerous. Beings with secret and terrifying powers which could take control even over the climate, always living apart from the world, capable of, someday, rebel against our same homeland and threaten it with the most secret and terrible powers one could ever imagine.
-I'm not surprised at all. -said Onix, with a contained rage hard to describe-
-Well, so that's how things were. -said the hunter- That period of time was known as "The last war" period, even though it wasn't really a war if we think about that term as a battle between two sides. Herers were considered the ultimate and most dangerous threaten for the megacities, and the popular feeling was that someday their rejection for technology would lead them to go against the megacities with who knows which powers. I, as many other young people who trusted ingenuously the army and their succulent promises, was part of the squadron. We were a group of only thirty soldiers and our mission was to neutralize a small village of herers located in the northern mountains depths of the continent. We, the infantry, knew very little about what we were going to find or which would our orders be, until we finally arrived without being detected, to the village's fields.
Rezler had a short break, with a gloomy expression on his face.
-To kill. That was the only thing they told us. Kill them all. Astonished, my partners and I observed better the situation and everyone saw the same: many people working the land beneath the sun as it would happen at any farming human region; men and women like us, with the only difference that a long and straight horn came out of their forehead, and in their eyes the iris and pupils merged in bright colours. Seeing as we hesitated, our major, infuriated, took himself the rifle and fired the people.
-How did the villagers react? -asked Onix, after Rezler's short break-
-Nothing. They did absolutely nothing. Opposite to what they told us on the training center, those poor villagers did nothing else but shout terrified and try to escape in vain. In little time, gradually the rest of the soldiers, maybe more convinced seeing they wouldn't take any risk, copied the the major's action and begun to fire. When there couldn't be seen any herer alive around, we were divided in three groups and we were told to go through different streets of the village to slaughter everyone we saw, and that we entered every house. I, deeply affected by that dirty show, entered through the first door i saw; a kind of temple's door. There, in front of me, was a priest, terrified but calm and resigned at the same time. Recalling my orders, i aimed at the elderly with my weapon, shivering, but i wasn't capable of pulling the trigger. There was that man, looking at me...in front of me, in the deepest silence.
-What did you do finally?
-The priest suddenly collapsed on the floor, damaged on the stomach by a thick drilling bullet.
-Did you fire at him?
-I observed astonished my gun, and i wondered if it fired by itself, but little lasted my confusion as i heard the major's voice on my back..."Come on, kill him. What are you waiting for? Are you scared even now?". The major practically pushed me until he placed me just in front of the poor elderly and dying man, wrapped in pain. He ordered me to give the coup de grace to that "damn evil scum", but on that moment, more than ever, i couldn't. Then that man, despite his suffering and with difficulty, pronounced the words that nowadays i still have engraved with fire on my memory. "Fear leads to hate, hate leads to destruction. The end of this blessed Orice in which we are living won't be caused by nature, nor by other worlds. It will be caused by our own hate, the hate of oricean people against oricean people, which will grow gradually until the self-destruction. Boy, please, never let the seeds of hate inside of you...never." After the priest's words, his own blood splashed my face when the major, tired of waiting, shot his head off in front of my eyes. I remained there on my knees, astonished, as my major after dedicating me some words of hate, went out to continue the massacre.
Some minutes after that, the whole village was anihilated between shoots and explosions, and everyone proceeded to go by foot to out vehicles, on the other side of the mountain. On that same moment, the sky turned grey and a silent and funereal rain started pouring over the village, the rain which, as it's said, hasn't stopped pouring since then.
-What happened to you next?
-The major told me i would pay for my disloyalty, and i was warned that i would be investigated before they decided which would be my future...
-What did they mean by "investigate"?
-That's another story. Thing is, desertion became a simple vital need for me, i couldn't continue on that dirty militar world for the rest of my life. Since i was a child i had been a great hunter, and i was good with weapons, but the thing i'll never do is to kill in cold blood anything that's able to think, feel, and isn't edible.
-Damn, we are arriving to Aklas...
-What can we do... -said Rezler, faking tranquility which in no way he had in those moments...specially thinking of Mapryd-.
