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“Victory or death.” whispers the lone cabal soldier.
“We’re not dead, so we won” he tells himself quietly
This lone soldier sits down, sets his rifle against the rock he’s sitting on and thinks.
Thinks about the dead, taken things that haunt his past from Phobos and thinks about his old squad. The squad he spent his long tour in this foreign system with, the squad he spent rowdy nights and long, tiring patrols on that cold moon with, the squad he had to mercilessly put down after they were taken by the so called Hive “god,” Oryx.
He does not weep, no, but he thinks long and hard about the past and what the future holds.
The Red War, over.
Ghaul, dead.
Those around him are talking of finding the old, deposed emperor, Calus, and trying to rejoin him and his loyalists.
He has survived this long, surviving the Hive, the Taken, the Guardians.
He plans to survive longer, and he knows that his highest chance of survival is to go to emperor Calus and beg forgiveness for Ghaul’s crimes against him and pray he accepts and offers his mercy.
But he can’t bring himself to do it, to abandon all he knows just on a hope and a whim, and so he stays at the camp on the grounds of the EDZ. He stays, surrounded by the Red Legion soldiers who refuse to give up just because Ghaul died.
And he thinks about his home, in a faraway system.
And he whispers to himself, as much to remind him as to encourage him,
“Victory or death. We’re not dead, so we won.”