Chapter 13 · free to read
Forty names in, my hand stopped being mine. Ninety in, Delacroix took the pencil. A hundred and forty in, the humming had gone out of the walls altogether.
Every name we wrote, it let a little more go. That is what it had wanted the entire time. Not blood. Not a fight. A clerk.
Two hundred and thirteen in the trench and two hundred and thirteen names on the paper. And the rubric closes the roll with a mourner who is himself of the dead. One line left. And Tomas had stopped reading.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.