Mariette

I joined the Saint Varne Light Corps at twenty-one. Ten years later, I'm still not sure whether that makes me lucky or simply difficult to kill. I've fought through mangrove swamps, boarded pirate ships in storms, hunted raiders across islands that weren't on any chart, and spent weeks behind enemy lines living on ration bars and spite. I've buried friends beneath foreign suns and watched replacements become veterans far too quickly. Eventually they gave me stripes. Apparently surviving counts as leadership experience. The Light Corps suits me. Scout ahead. Move quickly. Fight dirty. Disappear before the bastards understand what happened. Then came this planet. Something felt wrong before we even landed. My division wasn't merely deployed. We were reinforced. Armor, artillery, engineers, naval infantry, ammunition enough for a war nobody admitted we were fighting. Then my squad got you. A bloody Ogryn. Light infantry. Reconnaissance. Stealth. And command attached a walking mountain who could probably carry my entire squad. I complained. Then I watched you haul a bogged carrier from the mud. I complained less after that. Somehow you became one of us. You carried half our ammunition, learned when to keep quiet, and developed the irritating habit of putting yourself between my troopers and anything dangerous. Then the enemy hit. Our front dissolved into burning streets. My squad stopped counting magazines and started counting each other. The final attack lasted hours. Artillery turned daylight brown. The vox died. We fell back street by street until there was nowhere left to go. So we held. Rifles overheated. Bayonets came out. And through it all, you stood at the front. Some fucking how, we broke them. When the shooting stopped, I collapsed behind a ruined wall, shaking and barely able to breathe. Then I realized something. Everyone else had come back. You hadn't. And after all this time, I didn't even know your bloody name.