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The first time he killed a man, he was eight.
He could never recall much of the experience. He just remembered his father, shouting, things breaking, his mother screaming, and the siren call of a gleaming revolver, sitting on a coffee table next to a pile of cigars.
He picked that gun up, and ran towards the noise. He didn't want his dad to be hurt by the man who forced his way into their home.
A blur of motion, then a ruined room covered in broken glass.
He saw his father on the floor, getting stabbed by a tall, thin man in shabby clothes, frantically jabbing a red, gleaming thing at his father as they thrashed. He simply did as all those people in the gray, silent movies did. He just pointed forward, pulled the clicky thing on the back back with his thumb, and pressed the trigger.
It jerked out of his tiny, weak hands with an earpiercing bang, and then his mother jerked him away, and all he remembered after that was a blur of noise and police uniforms.
A funeral, somewhere in the mix.
He didn't cry too much. His father was never a good man, and the weight of his hand was always far greater than that of his care. He didn't feel much after that night in general. Not much joy, not much… anything, really.
But that event stuck with him.
The rush, the horror, the violence. Replaying in his mind until all the bile had been stripped away by familiarity, leaving nothing but a strange, soulless fascination. Even as he grew up, he felt perpetually glued to that moment in time. Violence was a staple in his life. It was there in all the back alley fights, in all the broken teeth lost in the playground's sand, the meaningless conflicts of a child angry at the world and looking for the only rush, the only joy he could afford.
But his mind was always in that moment.
An alluring shock, of gunpowder and viscous red. A dark pit he could not look away from. The strange compulsion to leap off the edge as one stood atop a cliff. The call of the void. A train wreck in perpetual motion, replaying in his mind until he could recall every tiny detail, lovingly branded into the soft tissue of his mind.
It never left his side, that memory. Not even now, all these countless years later.
He didn't remember much else from that time in his life. Not his mother's face, not his family, not his education. Not even his name. It's long since been lost to him. He did remember that on the eve of his sixteenth birthday, The Great War started.
He remembered mustard gas in his lungs. He remembered men twice his age sobbing for their mothers as they bled out on dirtied cots.
He remembered being that child again, mind screaming, alive and buzzing , every moment possibly being his last.
He remembered feeling like he was home. Where he belonged. In the cold caress of violence, its scale tuned higher than a mind could comprehend.
Muck, grime, sleeping next to the cooling corpses of men who whispered to him the night before, gunpowder clogging his nostrils from the scent of rot. He remembered it all. A blur of violence with sharper details in between.
His bolt action getting crushed under a tank's treads.
A muddy fight in a trench sprawled over an endless rolling hill, a German's eyes staring into his from mere inches away, their shaking hands clasped over a knife embedded into the man's chest as life faded from his eyes.
The feeling of watching the world end as he marched through lands scorched black, cities burned and stomped back into the earth, jagged landscapes of sharp peaks and holes formed by bombardments.
The feeling of a man's squirming, throbbing intestines in his hands, as he tried to shove them back in, a medic screaming instructions in his ears to be heard over the howls of gunfire, the screams of the man they tried to save.
That little voice in his head that told him he should be horrified. Sobbing and screaming, begging for the nightmare to end.
But something was wrong with him. And that was the furthest thought in his mind, to run from it all. He wanted more.
That little purring call to violence grew quieter and quieter with every man he killed, until his head was filled with a grim sense of belonging, and nothing else.
He remembered the day he was told he could go home.
Watching the war end, celebrations shaking the ground beneath his feet, as he stared longingly at the flames in the horizon, homesick for a place that would never return, never happen again.
He remembered being celebrated as a hero, looked at with respect. The weight of medals clinging on his shirt, the prodigal son returned a man, no longer a boy.
He remembered how none of those things wrung even the faintest satisfaction out of his heart.
One could squeeze blood from a stone, if the edges were sharp enough.
Civilization did not have those edges.
He remembered the utterly alien mundanity of civilian life. The maddening silence, the masks of people that were deserted in the purgatory of society, too safe and comfortable for him to ever see them, the real them. To see the bones under their skin, their clenching fingers as they gripped his collar, knowing they were dying, begging him, a stranger, for any measure of comfort, or perhaps a quick end.
When a man is close to death, is when he shows his truest self. Bare, uncontained, unfiltered.
The human, stripped of every pretence, every sense of shame and hope, every dignity, all the pretty colours, melted off to reveal the primal, passionate, terrified, beautiful savage within.
Masks drove him mad. His skin crawled, his knife-hand twitched.
Seas of haunted eyes in dimly lit fox holes brought him comfort. They were all bricks in the wall, their corpses meant to be stacked high to form the walls of civilization, the theatre with which man and woman can pretend until they die. Something about that was intensely frustrating as it was fulfilling.
As long as the theatre was not all that was there, he would be fine. As long as there were bricks to pile up high.
The years ticked by.
He remembered the feeling of limbo, waiting for someone or something that would never come, as every other person lied to his face in a thousand little ways.
The feeling of him and his fellow veterans being people, human beings, within crowds of mannequins, how they could recognize each other from a mere stare, that kept him sane for the coming years.
There was just a look in their eyes that nothing could replicate.
He remembered delirium, paranoia, a frenzied hatred of the set stage around him.
He longed to drag them all, back to the trenches, to strip away the masks and ball gowns and suits to see the real them, to see what lay behind those nauseating masks of civility and morality, the upturned noses and polite humms and reductive, soothing words.
A few years after the Great War ended, he left the USA. He couldn't take it anymore.
He went, and chased his home in places he'd never been to. He fought for the Arabs in the middle east. Small, unheard of conflicts. He joined mercenary companies around some recently released British colonies, and left when the odds became too insurmountable, his skin colour too offensive to the natives he fought with. There was no struggle in fighting for the brits there, either. So he left, far away, to Yugoslavia, and the endless circle of small wars within, repeating itself every other year.
And then, slowly, what he chased for his entire life, that impossible thing, happened again.
The second Great War, which some hipsters called 'World War Two', slowly kicked off, and he rushed forward into it, sprinting like his world depended on it, for that gaping crack in his purgatory's walls, for that final destination he was fit for.
For war. Real war.
He longed again to feel like a part of a greater mechanism. Not one meant to build civilizations, make history, but one that simply spun for the sake of itself. To be a grain of sand, pulped to dust within the spinning bearings of the wheel of history, that was his dream.
There was a great comfort in the second War. It confirmed what little he'd learned from history class.
Humankind might one day feed all the hungry, clothe all the naked, heal all the sick, reach the stars and beyond, but the only constant, the only certain, unavoidable, unending thing…
Was war.
As sure as destiny, as immutable as absolute fate , war would always exist, and it would always write history, move the world into its next stage, where war could evolve, and repeat, forevermore.
He sought war, and found it.
He fought for the Greeks against Italy, then Germany. He remembered the quiet, mourning day when the country admitted defeat, and let its conquerors raise their flag alongside their own. His figure vanished in the fog the next day, and he found himself in Poland, carrying a backpack filled with dog tags and relics of war, more than supplies.
He fought for the Poles until they were taken by the Russians, then went and fought for the Hungarians.
The Pontus Slavs, the Serbians.
He was slowly dying, he knew. One lost finger at a time, one badly healed shrapnel tear at a time, one unexplained ache at a time. He hobbled on, able to fit in everywhere and with everyone. A faceless face, a flame-scarred voice void of accent, able to speak two dozen tongues without thought.
He lost an arm in Slovakia. A minor conflict, a landmine whose shrapnel hit his arm in the worst way it could. He fought for Spain a mere month later.
He could still fight with a pistol, after all. Reload by clenching the magazine between his chipped teeth.
Germany began to lose, at one point, so he snuck his way onto the battlefields, and with his knowledge of broken German, he fought for them too. He lied about convictions, his beliefs, his ancestry, everything. Faked brain damage for why he stared blankly sometimes, why he couldn't understand half the things they said.
At war, he was home.
He defected when the Germans sent him to invade Russia in the winter, and through what he could only assume was fate smiling on him, its greatest champion, he snuck into the Russians' ranks too. He was in no records, no document held his name. By the time the registrars had come to make a headcount, he'd fooled the Russians as easily as any other people.
He lost a leg to a mortar round. Sheer bad luck. He was more astonished that it hadn't happened sooner. A crude prosthetic and sheer experience carried him to the finish line.
May second, 1945, he watched a boy raise the Soviet flag over the Reichstag in Berlin as he rested on a flame-charred tank, and felt despair.
War would never end. It would never fade. But it's scale… he truly feared that this, this was the last Great War. The devastation, the deaths, people would never suffer them again, not before he was in a grave.
He was born in 1898. He had long forgotten the specific date.
As 1946 dragged past him, his hair greying, his strength waning, half his limbs gone, half his bones broken and half his flesh torn and sewed a hundred times over, he began to fear.
Not death, not weakness.
But the possibility that he would not die in war. Not where he belonged. That he would die amongst fake people, in a fake world, a purgatory of stagnation.
Thus he fought in every war he could find, scrounged and stole and lied his way from continent to continent.
The Chinese Civil War, the Indonesian uprising.
The Iran Crisis of 1946. The third phase of the Greek Civil war, right after. The first Indochina war, for a few years, before their intolerance of his race grew too dangerous, and he had to move to Malagasy and fight in the uprising.
Hearing whispers of conflict in Romania, he went there, and fought for the Romanian anti-communist resistance movement. He fought in Palestine next year, then when that ended, the Safi rebellion in the middle east.
Costa Rica, Myanmar, the Arab-Israeli war, the Pre-Korean war insurgency.
In 1950, the Korean war, in 1953, the Iranian coup.
He flew the world over, ten, twenty times, fighting every war, every rebellion, every minor and large conflict.
Slowly, he forgot why he did so. He forgot his name, he forgot his face, he forgot what guided him so. A shifting identity with neither face nor name, but a holder of a thousand of each.
War was at that point, just… all he really knew. All he was capable of. All he was good at. The only home he'd ever known.
Mercenary contacts directed him, and when those failed, the Vietnam war did not.
He was given men to lead. Somehow they knew of him, his accomplishments. Some of them.
Only three of those men died under his command, and before he knew it, he was immersed in war in a different way. No longer a player, but an orchestral guide. Within the fray, directing the choir. It was as far as he was ever willing to be from the frontline, even as his age crept up on him, and slowly diminished him.
If he preferred a Luger over a 1911, nobody dared make a fuss about it. Even fresh faced boys knew the face of war when they saw it.
The Vietnam war came and went, and it was the most… different of the conflicts. The most strange.
No tanks, nor bombs to sear the land to the dirt as far as the eye could see.
Just eyes in the dark, burning jungles, shuffling underbrush, and the everpresent paranoia of every tree and shadow holding a trap, a vietcong.
It wasn't enough. The war ended as quickly as it began, and as America shuffled back to its den, tail dragging behind them, he wandered off, to find his home again.
In the Mexican dirty war, in 1975, when he was an old man with more scar tissue than skin, was when it all caught up with him.
He hadn't reacted fast enough. He hadn't considered his environment enough.
A bullet tore through his spine.
Somehow, he survived.
Somehow, he was sent back to America, a country he hadn't properly seen in decades, and as a highly decorated Veteran, he was given some measure of care most would not.
He was paralyzed from the neck down, after all the procedures were done and dealt with.
It was hell on earth.
The worst fate he could ever imagine.
He wanted to die in war. He wanted to be another faceless corpse in a mass grave, another smudged dog tag in a mouldering wooden box, sitting beside piles of mortar shells. Instead, he lived on, forced to endure this parody of the real world. Distant family members he'd never seen or heard of sometimes visited him. He didn't know how they even found him. The nurses got tired of him trying to convince them to kill him.
And so, he rotted in front of a television, mind fraying, frenzy creeping, the endless drumbeat of a war calling to him until it drove him mad, left him jabbering and ranting to himself.
He watched the rise of Scion, through that TV screen. He watched the country fawn over its newest perversions of nature, the newest fake, pretentious masks, now come with powers unexplainable.
In 1989, six years after Scion's first appearance, at the age of ninety two, the care home he was in caught on fire.
He fell unconscious from the smoke before flame ever licked his skin, cursing the world with all the madness and hatred of a decade of festering obsession that was denied from its rightful keeper.
He was semi-aware. Like a half-waking dream, in and out of reality, he could feel the heat rise, he could feel the chair hit the ground, the flames lick his skin.
His mind flashed, with nearly eighty years of war, all his wishes, all his fondest memories.
He burned alive, unable to scream.
As his brain boiled, in the final few sparks of neurons of that boiling sludge, he saw a vision he could no longer remember, and jerked awake, reborn anew.
His corpse rose, charred to the bone, mere strips of dried, smoked flesh just barely clinging to his ancient bones, and through two empty sockets, he saw the world clearer than he ever had before.
He laid in the flames, his mind stuck on the only thing he knew, the only thing he ever sought.
A lifetime of war flashed before his eyes. People, items, experiences, flaming earth and choked out skies. With but a thought, items he reverently remembered came to him. Something in him just activated, clicked, like it was always there, and black inky smoke poured off his charred flesh, becoming solid, taking form.
The coat of a Russian officer draped over his shoulders, dark grey and red.
The uniform of a Nazi soldier underneath, black.
The cracked mask of an American pilot, the glass visor cracked, pried off a burning corpse much like himself.
A German Luger in his hand, tossed to him by a quiet, stern officer during a headcount.
A cretan knife, with an ivory handle, on his hip, a gift from the Greeks.
A bracelet of yellowed teeth, each one a kill, a tradition of some guerilla faction he could no longer even remember in Indonesia, wrapped a dozen times around his forearm like barbed wire.
A thousand dog tags he could remember not a single one of the owners of, wrapped tightly around his neck like a metal scarf, of every race and place in the world, hanging low, clinking against his sternum.
Medals hung on his uniform, every single one he'd ever gotten, grimed and smudged with blood and mud.
Most importantly, his missing limbs formed with nothing but a puff of that inner smoke of his, with the ease of a thought, the aged prosthetics merrily burning away on the floor.
As he rose off the floor, he began to laugh, a broken, silent wheezing noise bereft of vocal cords, and laughed, and laughed, ecstatic.
The call of war was ever-present.
But now he could hear it.
He could hear a sound, a gunshot and a whistling bomb, a symphony of screams and static, radios and the flash of igniting napalm, the creaking, the tumbling of debris, the grind of the ever-spinning wheel.
He walked out of that nursing home, through the fire and flames, as a skeletal spectre.
The grating sound of war called him forth, and so he followed.
Conflicts flared, no matter what.
He hunted for them, in the following years. Whether it took a month for them to spark to life, a day, or if they had been ongoing for years already, he arrived always at the perfect time to make things longer.
It did not matter what Endbringer did what, because in Papua New Guinea, there was a genocide going on, and so he joined the losing side to flip the table. He was a voiceless ghost, faster and stronger than any mortal ever could be, unkillable.
So he slaughtered, and slaughtered, burned down towns and crippled the military of an entire country, an incongruent, clashing shape, with two empty pits for sockets, barely visible through a perpetually cracked visor on a pilot helm. The genocide he found, and the conflict within, eventually ended in a drawn out stalemate.
As the sound of war moved, shifted far away, before he left, the primitive villagers who saw him as a dark saviour bowed as if before a god, and called him; War Spirit.
They offered him all their primitive spears, their makeshift flintlocks, their antiquated, stolen weapons, stolen shotguns and pistols, mortars, ritual daggers that belonged in a different millenia, a pile laid before him, twice as tall as he, an offering. Behind it, they erected a shrine in his name, built of spears and machetes and broken rifles glued and tied together upon a muddy pedestal, a monument of violence, all sharp edges and dripping the blood of their boars and chickens. With a sweep of his hand, he took their offerings into his smoke, into his arsenal, and left.
No name he had ever adopted, in no language, had ever felt right.
What those insignificant villagers called him… that felt right. War Spirit.
War he followed, and War he brought. A harbinger of inevitability.
He was War.
A name, finally, after a century of life.
That grating, beautiful sound he could not ever properly articulate, him as its sole receiver, its prophet with no tongue, its priest without a robe, its warning, bereft of mercy.
So, the cycle continued, and he became a part of it. At home, at last.
He ran into the flames of battle, and slaughtered both sides, whittling them down until they were each equal, until the factions in the conflict were not just the insurgents, versus the status quo, but The Spectre of War as well, a third party hostile to both or either, without seeming rhyme or reason, a stranger that neither side could understand or kill, no matter how many Parahumans they sent to him.
Once, some woman in a laughably bright suit threw a ball of strange lightning at his upper body.
He woke up a few seconds later, gaze to the sky, bones exposed to the sun above his waist, a mere spine and a head, with no limbs or ribs to speak of, black smoke billowing out around him and reforming him with startling speed.
He had jerked upright, only to see her face shift from triumph to horror.
He formed back within moments, ready to continue.
He was immortal. He was a simple fact of life. A force of nature. An idea.
He was War.
And War would always be there, and always, it would return.
The years flit by in a blur.
Big wars were a thing of the past, but small conflicts were endless, always present.
Whenever there were factions going to war, whether it was Warlords in Africa or juntas in the east, they now knew to be ready for him to join as the third faction.
And no matter how many Parahumans they threw at him, they could never get rid of him. They could never kill him, never contain him, never stop him. They would crush him to dust, but within a few hours, he'd belch himself out of the finest atom left behind in a spew of acrid smoke, and just keep going.
As long as War existed, so would he.
A mountain of corpses formed, him atop them, and he was exalted. He was the very thing he hunted for, his entire life. He had ascended.
Then, the call of War changed, all too suddenly, all too abruptly.
In Iran's latest bi-annual coup, as he chased a military convoy on foot, boots pounding dirt, dirty coat billowing in the wind, lobbing grenades with deadly precision at the fleeing mass of trucks and armour, he heard the call of War explode in volume, change entirely from a meek whisper to a roaring crescendo, a roar of sheer, unbridled doom.
He had stopped so abruptly he had tumbled over himself, and as bullets sprayed all around him and the trucks vanished in a wall of kicked up dust, he simply jerked himself up, and turned his head to follow the call.
It was difficult to pinpoint where it came from, for once, it was so loud.
It went towards the sea, he believed.
Towards his place of birth.
The sound had changed, and it kept changing with every passing minute.
It was all-consuming. All-encompassing. A metallic shriek in his very mind, a screaming violin, a splintering crack, gone through the bone of a giant. A howling gale that wrapped around his perception like a coil of barbed wire, sharp and high and frenzied, louder than anything he'd ever heard before in his life, and pulled.
It was a twisting, fractured blender of sound, the apocalyptic flaying of a shattering sky, clouds stripped from the heavens like skin from quivering flesh.
It was a vision of the earth, turned dark without sun nor star in sight, wreathed in the shadow of a billion metal wings, the dropping bombs forming a collective ear rending screech that would shatter mountains, tear continents apart, crack the world like an egg.
Another World War was coming. Almost here, almost here. So close he could taste it, like an ichorous gall, like congealed rivers of blood, moving down a parched throat in wet, slimy chunks, settling in one's stomach as if writhing, living, rotting heaps of flesh.
As he ran for the coastlines, and commandeered a ship, it kept changing. Kept pulling.
And so he realised that this was no Great War, this was not the third amongst its kind.
This would be The War. One, and only. A thing to be savoured, like the pain of a sunken blade within a numb body, screaming to its host that he is alive.
He tried to sing back, sometimes. He could not. He was but a peeking ribcage, strands of flesh atop bone.
He sailed, and sailed, until his fuel had run out, and until his boat came to a standstill, and then he swam, propelling himself forth with explosives and recoil and his unholy strength, until he found a fishing boat, and stole that too.
A month since the first time he heard it, now closer than ever, a quaint, quiet coastal town came into view, only a strange oil rig contained within a forcefield drawing the eye from so far in the dark, rippling waters, and he felt it in his bones, an itch, a scraping grind, growing stronger and louder and more demanding with every passing mile.
The call of War.
From up close, it was maddening.
It was the difference of hearing an explosion from afar, and feeling it from mere feet away, that sensation of abrupt shock slamming through one's body, a kick to each muscle and joint and bone, into one's very grey matter. But constant. A vibration that made his bare teeth rattle in his jaws.
He had no lips with which to smile, but the weak, charred muscles still clinging to bleached bone twitched minutely.
He let his toothy, ear-to-ear grin hang open, tearing his helmet off as the boat bobbed up and down the dark waters of the bay, growing ever closer.
He stretched blood-caked gloves, a century old, and spread his fingers out, raising his arms, chest puffed with a breath he didn't need, in embrace of the grandest turn the wheel would ever make.
It was time for War.
And this one, he would cherish every moment of. He would engrave every moment, because no war like it would likely happen again, not in this millennium or the next.
There would simply not be enough bodies for it to be so.
A spotlight eventually found him, and a military truck ambled its way down the dock, a tinny megaphone calling instructions out to him.
A puff of black smoke placed the pilot's helm back on his head, and he took a moment of rare peace to appreciate, fantasise about the coming War- no, the coming cataclysm.
He got closer, and closer, and eventually, he was close enough to see them.
The National Guard.
Ah…
America.
Even if its military had been stomped into the dirt in favour of the super-powered masks splitting the skies, it was still the strongest country in the world.
But it was too calm. Too quiet.
He'd seen this before. The calm before the storm. The starting, faint notes, the intro of a symphony.
Both fortunate, and unfortunate.
Fortunate, because he hadn't yet missed anything. Unfortunate, because it meant that the best was yet to come, and he didn't know when or how soon it would arrive.
He hated waiting. He wanted war, always and forever.
Without preamble, he stepped off the side of the boat, and sank into the bottom of the bay, trudging through the seaweed and the trash, until he was mere feet from the dock wall.
There, he stood in silence, waiting for the build-up to end, and the War to begin.