Interlude: Letter from a Survivor March 1931 – Wiltshire, England From: Private Edwin Dawley (ret.) To: Mr. John Mercer Dear John, I am writing to you in what I am told is one of my lucid moments (they think I am a madman, but it isn’t so) because your uncle will not. He’s a proud man, and what we saw in France took something from him none of us could give back. You asked him once what happened to Edward Hale. You won’t g...

Chapter Two: That Which Watches France, November 1917 — Three Days After the Collapse They said the trench had gone quiet. Not in the way you wanted—not like peace. The guns still barked in the distance. Shells still fell. But in their little stretch of hell—Sector C8, a kink in the front line no one wanted to hold—the birds had stopped flying. The wind had stopped blowing. And no one spoke above a whisper anymore. Privat...

Chapter One: The First Door France, November 1917 The rain hadn’t stopped in three days. Private Edward Hale stood in knee-deep sludge, his coat sodden and stiff with cold, watching the waterline inch higher against the trench wall. The wood was beginning to rot. Everything stank of iron and rot—old blood, wet canvas, and something beneath that… something sweet, like spoiled meat left too long under the floorboards. He ex...

France, 1917 The mud in the trench was always there, thick, clinging, and alive in a way that made Private Edward Hale uneasy. It sucked at his boots, pulled at his ankles like it wanted him down with the others who’d never made it back to the surface. He kept to himself mostly. The other lads in his unit thought he was soft, too poetic for war. He wrote no letters to anyone and stared into the mist longer than a sane man...