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It wasn’t the sort of place you’d take most girls, but Winnifred wasn’t the sort of woman that liked movies or carnivals, you felt. Not that you’d ever had any reason to ask, and she kept a lot close to her chest as might be expected of a spy, but intuition gave a clear bearing. All the better that you both keep things quiet and contemplative. So you’d go to Ysenhof’s big army graveyard, and wander from there. With most of the city drawn to the far less morbid festivities downtown, you’d be guaranteed quite amount quietus.
…The path you took was a familiar one. Back then, to you and your friends, this place hadn’t been one you envisioned ever resting in. The graveyard here was for the past generation, the ones who had suffered in the bitter Emrean War, not for those who’d win the victories of the days to come.
It felt like a long time ago, but it wasn’t particularly. Six years wasn’t a long time to Falkenstein, but it was to you. That was when you and your friends had first gone to war, fresh out of paratrooper training, though scattered over the Fliegerkorps at the time. Not even past your twenties yet you’d felt invincible, untouchable, the best the Reich had to offer. Yet half of you would be in the grave come two, three expeditions. You once had the infectious confidence of Alexander, in his ill-fated quest to unite the world.
Pessimistic and skeptical Isaac Grabb had been the first to go, cut down in the battles for Felbach’s reconquest, the retaking of the Reich’s northern reach and restoration to order of the rest of the northwest. Then Douran Dolcherr, your best friend, had fallen in Halmeggia, and Roland Bartholomeu had almost followed him. He was having a holiday with his girlfriend- funny to think that you’d once banged hookers together, but even that wasn’t the sort of closeness you’d had with Dolcherr. The dependence.
If only you could still come together again someday. The Luftpanzer Demi-Battalion had good people in it, new friends even, but you weren’t sure if you could let them as close as the others had been, not yet. In spite of your higher place in the command hierarchy, you were still young enough for them to not be too far unlike yourself. Not yet though. Sometime. You were aging too quickly for your taste right now, not in a physical way or anything like that, but…you couldn’t be <span class="mu-i">young</span> anymore. Too many obligations. Too high of a position. What did Kaiser Henrik feel like, you had to wonder, when he was crowned ten years ago, when he was merely sixteen? He was only a year older than you. That was always something to ponder whenever you felt overwhelmed.
The trip to the graveyard wasn’t made alone, though. A couple other people were with you, your son, and his…foster mother? Linda was coming along whether you liked it or not, if Eike was, even though the case wasn’t one of you just taking the boy because you felt like it anymore.
