Helmand Province, Afghanistan.
The sun blazed overhead, casting long, shifting shadows across the jagged hills.
Dust rose in lazy clouds with every step the patrol took, clinging to their uniforms, their rifles, their skin.
It was the kind of heat that seeped into your bones, the kind that made a man forget there were ever places in the world where it rained.
Sergeant Jonathan Miller scanned the ridge lines, eyes narrow behind dusty goggles.
"Keep it tight, boys. No sightseeing," he muttered into the comms.
The mission was supposed to be simple: a reconnaissance patrol along the outskirts of Lashkar Gah, checking in on rumored Taliban movements near a half-abandoned village.
High command wanted confirmation. Boots on the ground. A show of presence.
Jonathan had been in the army long enough to know missions labeled "simple" usually weren't.
His squad — ten men, plus two nervous intelligence officers — moved in staggered columns, their movements practiced but wary.
Too quiet, Jonathan thought. No goats. No kids. No sounds but the wind.
The village ahead lay in ruins, scorched and crumbling, as if it had been abandoned years ago.
Still, orders were orders.
"Eyes up. Sweep and clear," Jonathan said.
They entered the village cautiously, boots crunching against shattered pottery and dry weeds.
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The main square was a ghost town, battered well beyond anything recent fighting could explain.
He didn’t like it.
He didn't like it one goddamn bit.
Then came the shot.
A single, distant crack that echoed off the canyon walls — and Private Alvarez dropped, a bloom of blood spreading across his chest.
"AMBUSH! CONTACT RIGHT!" Jonathan roared, diving for cover behind a broken stone wall.
Gunfire erupted from all sides.
The air filled with the thunder of AK-47s, the bark of RPGs streaking across the sky, the roar of adrenaline pounding in his ears.
Bullets snapped past, kicking up dirt and stone in vicious puffs.
Jonathan barked orders, firing in short, controlled bursts, dragging one of the analysts — a kid who looked about seventeen — out of the line of fire.
It was chaos. Organized, lethal chaos.
They were boxed in, caught between the ruins and the cliffs. No room to maneuver.
Jonathan knew the terrain better than this — he'd studied the maps. There should have been a fallback route.
There *had* been.
Until someone leaked their patrol path.
"Charlie-Six, we need evac! We are pinned, I repeat, PINNED!" he shouted into the comms.
Only static answered.
A mortar hit close by. The blast threw him against the wreckage of an old well. His vision blurred, ears ringing with that high-pitched whine he hated.
He staggered up — just in time to see a figure rise from behind a pile of rubble, RPG slung over one shoulder.
Their eyes locked, two soldiers from different worlds.
The man grinned, pulled the trigger.
The rocket struck meters away.
The shockwave lifted Jonathan off his feet.
He felt the heat, the shrapnel ripping through him.
Felt his body betray him, felt his knees give out.
He collapsed into the dirt, the world narrowing to a thin tunnel of light and sound.
Above him, the sky — endless, indifferent — began to shimmer.
The sounds of the firefight faded, replaced by something else: a deep, thrumming pulse, like the heartbeat of the earth itself.
He tried to move, tried to shout, but his limbs were like lead.
Something unseen pulled at him, like a river’s current dragging him under.
The sky twisted — not blue anymore, but a whirl of gray and gold, churning, rippling like water disturbed by a hand.
He drifted into it helplessly, through something thicker than air, something that seemed alive, curious.
A flicker of images — forests, castles, battlefields — flashed behind his eyes.
Unfamiliar, yet... hauntingly real.
The last thing Jonathan felt before darkness swallowed him whole was a strange, inexplicable certainty:
This wasn’t the end.
Not yet.
End of Prologue
