"Inter arma enim silent leges"

I don't know his name. He doesn't know mine.

For all the violence we've inflicted upon each other, he looks none the worse for the wear. Really, it looks…right. It's hard to imagine my opponent not covered in slashes, with all the intact, unbloodied skin dusted with the pulverized asphalt beneath us.

It’s said that battle warps time and space around you. Minutes slow until they become lifetimes of their own, and when you’ve been fighting for weeks, months, years? You’re not the same person after that. The struggle to kill another of your kind drags you through time and through as many versions of you as your soul can generate, until you are left as a husk with a weapon.

If that’s the way I’m supposed to feel, then there is something wrong with me. The longer this goes on, the more I feel like myself. Every passing minute I spend struggling to end the life of that *thing* standing a meter in front of me, the more I am sure that I’ve arrived.

But I don’t know why I feel this way. I only know well enough to ask the question.

“Today,” He says, wiping blood from a deep slash in his chest into a perfect diagonal war stripe, “You meet your end. And I will be the one to introduce you.”

I look down at the gun in my hand, and…

A gun?

No, that isn’t right. I never had a gun. It was a spear. Well…*was* a spear. Until we got too close for dory and aspis, and I had unsheathed my xiphos…

And then, beard aflame, I sighted the enemy captain, still at the helm. We drew pistols, fired, then charged, cutlasses slicing through the air…

Ululating as my horse galloped, sun dimming through the outgoing cloud of arrows, my gaze never wavering from the enemy general…

Screaming at the top of my lungs as I and ten thousand others like me thundered across the cannon-scarred plain, bayonets on our empty muskets facing forward, like the innumerable teeth of a hungry leviathan.

We were both in battle dress. His gray top was shredded around bullet wounds in his shoulder and chest; mine was still one piece, but covered in mud and the remains of my nosebleed that hadn’t washed off in the rain. He was racing to load his MP40 before I could do the same with my PPSh.

“Wait,” I said, raising a hand to show the sincerity of my pause while pointing the submachine gun away from him. There was recognition in his eyes, like he knew the confusion I felt. Like he too had experienced a moment of forgetful awakening.

“You wonder what you are,” He said, pulling the charging handle to load a round. I flinched as the bolt clanged into place.

“You know?” I said, half question, half statement. He had said it with a confidence that…wasn’t confidence? Maybe…weary resignation, or apathy from the years of bloodshed?

“Look around you, and you’ll know too,” He said, lowering his maschinepistole.

Eastern Europe. Leningrad, 1941. Smoke billows into the skyline of a dead city. Houses and churches still burn as the living thing we occupy decays, leaving only its broken bones.

Southeast Asia. Laos, 1968. He flies in the MiG pursuing me as I erase a village with air-dropped bombs, not in anger, but to let my Thunderchief turn just a little faster.

Constantinople, 1204. I turn my bloodlustful gaze upon him - a lone city guard - as I drop the gold I carry from an altar I destroyed with my axe. I will add his body to the others laying in this street. The Venetians may have come to loot, but my purpose here is slaughter.

Mediolanum, 539. After four years of famine, there is nothing left to take from our ruined city, but here he stands atop the parapet before me. We are both as emaciated as the ruins below us. One of us, Goth or Byzantine, will die to the sword today. The other, probably to hunger tomorrow.

He’s right. I know what this is. What I am.

There is no pity, no remorse, no mercy in his expression, but it is comforting in its familiarity. I don’t know who will win this skirmish; I never know, really. But this is a thing we’ve done before, and a thing we’ll do again. Here, and everywhere, for as long as these hairless apes want for anything, we’ll have each other, and we’ll despise each other for it. Until the end, there is no eternal except the enemy.

No matter the weapon, no matter the uniform, no matter the casus belli or the status quo antebellum or the degree to which Deus vult, we will remain the same.

“You are war,” He says, raising his weapon, “And so am I.”

A gunshot rings out. A knife leaves its sheath.

We take everything, leaving only blood.