The frontier army has a rule.
New recruits don't count as people. They're just dirt to fill the trenches.
You don't have to win a battle on the border. Just fill the trench, and the breach will open a year later.
The Eleventh Battalion is this year's batch of dirt.
By dawn, only one person is left alive in the trench.
He squats among the corpses, picking up what the others left behind.
A mark crawls from his fingertip to the back of his hand.
"I'll take back everything you owe me, one piece at a time."
But when the history books are opened three hundred years later, this night bears someone else's name.
