His eyes trembled as he stared at his shaking hands, tears threatening to spill. The horrors of twenty years ago surged back without mercy.
Black smoke once billowed into the sky from a village reduced to cinders. Nestled in a quiet valley and once home to humble farmers, it had been a place of serenity and harvest.
Now it stood swallowed by ruin and devastation.
Houses and small shops had collapsed into skeletal frames of charcoal. What remained were blackened beams and drifting ash, as though the earth itself had been scorched hollow.
Near the village centre, a mass grave had been dug. Bodies lay heaped within it, unceremoniously cast into the pit.
Many wore frozen expressions of terror. Dark lesions marred their pale skin, and their open eyes had long since turned dull and opaque.
They had not been appropriately shrouded. No one dared touch them. The stench of decay clung heavily to the air, thick and suffocating.
