Prologue

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She was dead.
Her lifeless corpse lay on the bed.
Naked and ravished.
Neck broken.

"She's dead!"
"Lilly!"
The young man carried her body out into the street. The muddy water had turned bloody.

Villagers rushed to the crying man.
The crying father.

"Calm down!"
A soldier tugged at the reins of a horse.
"Fuck off!" Villagers yelled in union to the soldiers.

Pitchforks. Spears. Swords. Daggers. All in hand.
Men stared at the dead little girl in the father's hands.
"You bastards! You did this!"

The father knelt.
"Lilly!" A mother's cries.
"Calm down!" The soldiers unsheathed their swords. The villagers charged. A bloody massacre. The villagers were cut down, shredded by the soldier's swords. More villagers, "calm down!" Again again again. More blood. The villagers didn't stand a chance.

The soldiers hacked through them like a hot knife on warm butter. Torches. Fire! Huts were set ablaze.

The young father darted back into a building, the corpse of his daughter in hand, lifting up a hatch on the floor and climbing in. Another child, no not a child a baby curled up to her mother's breast.

Screams and shouts. The door from upstairs opened and heavy feet marched in. Soldiers. Bloody swords and armour looking for any life, like an eagle searching for a rabbit. Another child, curled up to her dad staring at her lost sister.
"Shhh," the father spat. Silence. The soldiers continued searching. Barrels and tables were flipped from above.

A mother, a father, a daughter and a baby all hidden under the floorboards in a dank cellar.
The baby awoke.
Cries.
A baby's cries. The mother muffled its mouth.
"Shut him up! The soldiers will find us shut him up!"

A crying mother.
"How?"
"How!"

"Shhhh"
More moving from above.
A voice,
"Can you hear that?"
Again silence. The babies muffled cries.

"Shut the baby up!"
"How!"
A father's firm hands. A click of the neck. A quiet yelp' of the mother.

A dead baby.

The soldiers moved out of the hut. They were free, they were alive, they hadn't been found.

A father, a lost man.
Walked into the streets of death.
Piles of bodies. Burning huts.
A lost daughter and a lost baby.

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