Dear Reader,
Please accept my apologies for stopping the telling of my story when I was only halfway through. Though I was not finished and had promised myself that I would not start the re-write until I was done I was not satisfied with what I had written and needed to do better. So, without further ado, here is the opening to “Tomorrow, we shall all die.”
I have ridden for sixty-three straight days and tomorrow at dawn, I shall make it sixty-four. There will not be a sixty-fifth. The horse I am currently riding once belonged to a General. He is a fine animal and has deigned to let me, a mere captain, ride him now. Though I do not expect him to, I hope he survives tomorrow and lives the rest of his days in freedom here in the plains. I have had three horses shot from under me, and have myself shot two out of pity. I have seen men die in a thousand horrible ways and I myself have been the cause of more than my share. At night when I sleep, I see their faces, each one in the moment before their life is erased by ball and saber and lance or on several occasions of late my own bare hands. Once I commanded a hundred of the finest light cavalrymen in the Army of the Republic. Once I was the father of a son and the husband of a beautiful wife who were the light of my life and the joy of my heart. Once we farmed my family’s land and grew the finest barley and wheat this side of the capital. Once, but not now. Now I am the chief of a ragged band, father to grimy, tired, and desperate men. Tomorrow we will all die and if we are lucky we will be buried in this empty plain and only the grass will remember our passing.
I’m eager to read what happens next.