No Choice (Eruri)

Dying Hope

He couldn't believe it. They had planned the whole thing so well. Where had it all gone so wrong?

Erwin heard the low murmur of the Garrison soldiers and felt their questioning and admonishing looks on him while they stepped with lowered heads through the gate. His fingers clawed at the gray mane of his mare, which pranced restlessly through the stone passageway from the smell of blood and sweat that surrounded her. The clatter of her hooves echoed off the cold walls as Erwin thought again about how all this could have happened in the first place.

They had gotten off to such a good start three days ago and, thanks to his revised formation, had come as far as they ever had. They had even withstood a storm almost unscathed with the help of the newly devised sound signals. But already the next day, they had reached this forest, this damned forest full of Titans.

They had been lurking among the trees as if they had already been expecting them. And all the hope that the soldiers had cherished up to that point had vanished in one fell swoop and died along with them. They had not even had a chance to comprehend what had happened at all before a third of their entire crew had already been destroyed. Not even Levi, on whom Erwin had placed so much hope, could have stood up to them on such a scale, and he was almost relieved that he had not been there.

The low sun blinded him as they stepped through the gate and rode past the assembled crowd toward their quarters. Many of them would spend this night and the next in the hospital, some of them perhaps even succumbing to their injuries for the next few days after.

He looked up as the reproachful stares of the bystanders burned on his skin, nearly threatening to suffocate him. As expected, he looked into the eyes of many scowling faces, and to his chagrin, these looks were anything but new to him. Only as he saw one of the present, he froze. A boy with dark hair stood together with a pretty girl behind the rows of the crowd and smiled almost cheerfully at him. The sight was so bizarre that Erwin could not withstand the boy's look and turned his face away in a reflex. Straining to look at the ground so as not to have to look the boy in the eye again, he now heard the voices of the people around him all the more clearly.

Why they still went out there at all. It was so safe here within the walls. There hadn't been an attack for a hundred years. There was no reason for all the victims. They would only waste resources and lives in a senseless way.

Erwin would have liked to scream in the face of each and every one of them that they were wrong. That there was a point to learning the truth. That they were trapped behind these walls and anything but free and happy.

The murmuring around him suddenly grew louder, and he did finally look up when he heard the voice of a woman walking two rows behind him directly toward the commander. Keith had returned on foot, for his horse had died in the field, and his second horse had also broken a leg in that wretched forest.

"My son Moses," the woman's voice came over to him. "I can't see him anywhere."

Erwin brought his mare to a stop and looked back as her words echoed almost all the way down the street. A middle-aged woman now stood directly in front of the commander, grasping both ends of his cloak.

Keith stopped at her sight and stared at her for a moment as if he didn't even know where he was anymore. An awkward silence filled the street, and Erwin was already about to ride back to help him. But just as he turned his horse, Keith turned to the soldier beside him. Because of a bandage that hid half his face, Erwin could not tell who it was, but with what he held in his hands, he knew all too well what it was.

He watched him step closer to the woman and hand her the remains of her son. So this was the mother of Moses, one of the soldiers who had been quite young. Her pitiful weeping filled the entire street as she realized, at the sight of her arm torn off, that she would never see her son again. In her despair, she sank down sobbing on the hard stones of the street.