[ WP ] Reality is the escape .

I stand atop the wall again. A great stretching white line surrounded by darkness to the front and darkness at the rear. I grip my spear strongly in my hands, feel the grooves which my fingers have over the long years carved into the stonemetal. 
 
 There is a steady gibbering, laughing madness in the dark. The sound of it blends and crashes against the wall like waves against the ocean rocks. I wait, spear ready, my face is set in stone and I do not stand alone. 
 
 A laughing, screaming call, and the soldier to my side is dragged into the endless night by their spear. The white aura of their spirit fades amidst a tearing, crashing, crunching sound and by the last sputters of his light I see teeth and eyes and salivating maws. Soon he is but one more shadow in the dark. 
 
 Movement ahead and I strike out, met with a bloody squealing and squelching, and then that sound too fades into the periphery. Again, and again, I strike out. Once I feel a mighty tug, but this time my might is greater and my spear returns to me. 
 
 To my side, they fall. They fall in great numbers, pulled into that dark. A tingle of fear and bile surges from my belly, but my face is stone. 
 
 My muscles grow weary and soft, even the shrieks of a successful hit all blend together with the gibbering and the cooing and the laughter, and each time I am tugged I find it harder to yank my spear away. I am part of the motion of this time. The push against the pull, fighting the tide, and as I stumble a hand extends. 
 
 The walls are emblazoned again with our sort, and my face cracks. _Rest_, the one before me answers pleading eyes. _You may rest a time._ 
 
 I fall back, to the darkness behind the wall, fade, and awake. 
 
 To one Private Arnold, the true battle is forgotten, and he opens bleary eyes to a different sort of war. A war with screaming shells and the screams of dying men where before there was only the madness of the dark. Where brothers fight brothers, and death is met, at last, in a silence alien to the truth. 
 
 Respite.
