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Ya know I spent years wondering about it. Wondering at the whys and the hows and the what fors. Years of fighting my inner demons while I watched the slim girl I’d picked up grow into a beautiful woman now I’m standing here staring out at the group of people.

The greenery is broken by the sea of black and stone, I’ve watched girls and boys grow into women and men strong enough to fight for there dream. I’ve watched young men fade into old, bitter shells long before their time, seen and heard the effects of grief on them.

I still see it as I stare below me. The only problem is I have no idea how to respond. I can’t tell them I’m grieving, that I understand what they feel. How do you tell a woman you’ve watched grow up, have babies of her own, fight demons and gods alike, the every nearing apocalypse, that you have no idea what it means to lose a mate.

It’s these kinds of days that I stay away, I hide in the shadows and watch as a friend, a student is laid to rest but I do not weep. I can’t. I don’t mourn for them.

I glance over my shoulder at the dark haired angel that sits at her desk busy working on the next set of training sequences. Like me she’s watched too many die, seen too much of life’s darkness to really understand how devastating it is to someone who hasn’t seen as much as we have.

That the man they’re laying to rest was her brother should reach her but it doesn’t. Last night she looked me in the eye and told me straight out that she didn’t feel a damn bit of remorse or loss. She’d long since learned that death was merely the last stage of life and nothing would ever change that.

I asked her once when that annoyin’ over-sizes lizard died if she’d feel different if she were in his wives place. If she was the one standing there beside a hole in the ground would she feel any different?

A soft smile, a shrug of her shoulders and she moved to sit in my lap. Her words still haunt me because they’re true.

“Immortality is part of us, for some they strive to have it, they want to live a long life. For others it’s just another hurdle. If it were you that were being buried then I wouldn’t be standing there. I’d be there with you. Our kind watches over those who fade like cut flowers. When our time comes around those we knew, those we cared about will have been long gone. I feel sad that she's suffering but I can’t cry for her. I won’t cry for her.”

Now I stand here and watch as they sob into the shoulders of their companions. No, we don’t cry for those down there. We can’t cry because we’ll never walk that road and yet we’ve walked it a thousand and one times. From the moment that we met we’ve both killed, we’ve both saved, and we’ve both died. Yet through it all we stand together and we watch over those whose lives are on a short track. We’ll have time to grieve…after all we are merely observers in life, our kind doesn’t participate.

I am....
Swathed in fur hides and uncures leather, flesh mottled with red clay and war paint. I beat back the onslaught of the Others - those who walk on two legs, who use clubs and spears but are not men. The rude stone ax heavy in my hairy hands I smash skulls like eggs and ravenous after the battle I feast on my enemies hearts and wash in there blood.
Called the Hand of God, I wield a sword made of bronze. My shield is leather and beaten lead. I fought and I died in the desert sands of Jerusalem, struck down by the demon Ba'al in a holy war long forgotten by mankind though it echoes through eternity.
Here I died with my king the arrow pierced Leonidas, as the Persian chariots burst through the Spartan's defenses at he mountain pass called Thermopylae.
Near Bandirma atop a Ferghana bay I roll through the Persian cavalry on a field of 'heroic warfare'
At Carrhae, I retreat with Cassius's legions, cut to pieces by the Parthians who tricked the Legionaires into breaking formation then massacred the Roman troops with cavarlry.
In burnished steel armor, astride a stirrupless saddle, I beat back the huns who seek to destroy Roman civilization and thrust the into ignorance and superstition of the dark ages.
I ride a Mongol pony into Samarkand with Gengis Khan. We leave mounds of sun-bleached skulls and utter desolation in our wake, Harvesters of Death.
My chainmail encrusted with rust and sweat-salt. I hack my way over prostrate Jerusalem walls with the knights Templars. I put the Infidels to the sword and liberate the Holy lands in the name of my most holy Pontiff, Urban the Second.
At Bosworth I wear a white rose and die in the marsh during Lord Stanley's bloody advance.
I am the captain of mercenaries, I besiege Magdeburg with the Roman Catholic armies of Gustavis Adolphus. No one could stop us as we overwhelm the Hessian defenders and butcher thirty thousands Protestant men, women and children. Both sides fight for God I fight for plunder.
Wind chimes tinkle in the chill night air, the garden sparkles with crystalline ice. I wear a sky blue silk kimono my skin yello. I dance in the falliing flakes, silver blade flashing, dark ninja blood staining the virgin snow as black-clad forms fall dead at my feet. Perfectly dealt, my strokes slash out a haiku of death, each cut a decapitation, each lunge a disembowlment. I fight for the emperor and a shogun master.
I trek across the deserts of Egypt and steppes of Russia with Napolean. Our triumphs, our cruelty are legendary, out retreat through a freezing hell our penance.
At Verarus we remembered the Alamo by invading Mexico via the sea and defeating the Mexican army in next to a whaet field in a place called Antietan, then spring to life.
On the walls of Peking, I stand side-by-side with heroes, to beat back a horde of Chinese hatchet men who seek the deaths of all foriegn devils
For fifty-five days we hold, a hundred United States Marines who defeat a two-thousand year empire.
I feel the wood and fabric of my SPAD shudder under the chattering machine gun. I watch a Fokker DV11 crumple in the air, it's wings burning as it plunges, spinning to the Western front far, far below.
I fight in the trench, breath in poison gas
I parachute into Normandy on D-day
I wage war in Malaysia, Virtnam, Korea, Loas, Cambodia, France, Belguim, Austria, Germany, Japan, Afghanistan, Algeria, Istanbul, and Peking.
In Jerusalem, Actium, Rome, Paris, Fort Pitt, Yorktown, Moscow, Cambrai, Flanders, Belleau Wood, Guernica, The Sahara, Caen, Berlun, Dien Bien, Phu, and Haneri.
All of them were me... me. The eternal warrior, the hand of God, the master of war, an immortal spirit with no beginning and perhaps no end only an eternity of suffering and strife and the tides of battle. No peace, no rest, no love, no family, no home, the sword my only mistress, the battle banner my testament.
With stone and wood, with bronze and iron, with steel and adamantium as my tools, my weapons. I live the warrior's life, die the warrior's death a thousand times over. My lives line up behind me on parade and I see them all, like dim silhouttes marching over Golgotha.
I've suffered the spear's tip, the headman's ax, the slashing sword, the arrow pierce, the crossbow bolt. I've drowned, been crucified, blown asunder, felt the hangman's noose, and in the end, all that pain ever led to was a finality that is never truly a climax, only another beginning in a endless eternal cycle of blood and as inevitable as the rising sun, the phases of the moon, the passing of the stars, and the falling rain.
There he awakes as if from a long dream.
An endless parade of death.... yet no release. Not for me.

Always in the middle of a kiss
Came the profane stimulus to cough;
Always from the pulpit during service
Leaned the devil prompting you to laugh.

Behind mock-ceremony of your grief
Lurked the burlesque instinct of the ham;
You never altered your amused belief
That life was a mere monumental sham.

From the comic accident of birth
To the final grotesque joke of death
Your malady of sacrilegious mirth
Spread gay contagion with each clever breath.

Now you must play the devil's court for a term
And tolerate the humor of the worm.