A deafening noise was followed by a line of fire brightening the night sky.
“What is it, mama?” The child looked at her mother, eyes shining in curiosity.
“They’re fireworks, honey. They are celebrating,” the mother replied.
“I love fireworks,” the child said while rotating her eyes back to the exploding sky. “Beautiful,” she thought. She was so small that her ears couldn’t reach as far as her father’s scream outside; her nose couldn’t smell the stream of blood and her mouth couldn’t taste war in the atmosphere.
“Time to go,” her mother said
“Go where, mama? I still want to watch the fireworks”.
Ignoring what she said, her mother threw her into her arms and ran outside. This wasn’t what a festival looked like. There should be colorful parades and people singing. Wait, they were singing something, a song with only one high note that struck fear into the heart of every listener. She covered her ears but the sounds of metal crashing, the sounds of people collapsing still fought their ways into her head, despite the asylum of her two small hands.
“Mama, I want to go home.” Tears started to drop on her shirt but her mother kept running, faster and faster. Everything became a blur, a blur with the orange color of fire and the black of dust and human corpses. Among that blur, she saw her father lying quiet on the ground, his eyes shut, his lips bearing a faint smile. She thought he was sleeping. She wanted to wake him up but her mother kept running. Far away, she recognized her brother holding a sword in his hands, playing with a black armor. She shouted his name and he turned back. In that instant, the moving black armor stuck a sword through his heart. The red stain on his shirt grew bigger and bigger. He kneeled on the ground; his eyes wanted to say something but he couldn’t gather enough strength. He tried to reach his hands in her direction and with that unbearable effort, he collapsed.
“What’s happening, mama? I’m scared,” she sobbed. A fence of black armors surrounded her.
“Don’t kill her. KILL ME!” She heard my mother’s scream, a scream that she could never imagine would come out of the mouth of such a gentle woman. But those black armors, they laughed at her. They laughed, the laughter only devils possess. One of them raised his sword and with the same agile movement, stabbed into the woman’s heart. She fell down, using the last of her strength to cover her baby from the beasts. But the beasts wouldn’t ignore the feast which had been prepared in front of them. They came closer to the child, so close she could distinguish their eyes from the total darkness of their figures, the eyes reminding her of mad wolves she saw in a hunt her father brought her to. She closed her eyes. She heard the sound of blade plunging into the wind. The world, along with its pain, simply melted away…