ASHFALL INSTITUTE | SHADOW REALM

BATTLEFIELDS

P. A. Moore

Gray undertones dulled the morning light and deepened the shadows. The pastel Monet sky split apart by heavy surreal crimson and black brushstrokes. Two irreconcilable visions of the day ahead.

Dawn revealed a broken world. Smoke and ash lingered among the wreckage the way shadows do — clinging to darkness and abandoned souls. Nights when monsters, the terror of childhood memories, remained hidden under beds or crouched in dark corners felt like comfort and very distant now.

A pause on the battlefield brought a strained calm until the eerie quiet collapsed as roof tiles rode gravity, like kamikazes, through gaping ceiling holes onto the floor below where they lay shattered like the lives around them. Why had this world become intent on self-destruction?

The drones, cold and soulless, didn’t feel pain or know death. War carried no risk for them — only their victims on the ground. The enemy killed with calculated precision without ever seeing the terrified faces and wide-eyed panic of their targets. Death had become clinical — the battlefield observed on distant screens.

The boy carefully wiped the caked blood from his mother’s pale, cold face. Her wounds stopped bleeding hours ago, and he no longer heard her labored breath.

“Mama, Mama?” He held fingers that no longer squeezed back. “Where do I go now, Mama?”

The low, mechanical hum in the sky grew louder, but the boy didn’t run. Where could he go? He laid his head on his mother’s silent chest and closed his eyes. His faithful old dog whimpered and crawled toward him on shattered legs in one final attempt to protect the boy he loved.

The ghosts of Guernica still scream and call for new souls to join in.

P. A. Moore is the pen name of Pamela King, philosopher and artist. This story is part of the Shadow Realm collection at the Ashfall Institute.