“So this is it, huh?”
In Mako’s hands a smooth stone sheared endlessly over the edge of his blade, the grzz-grzz-grzz of the whet no longer serving to sharpen the keen, razor sharp surface, but only to give him repetition, something he could do, anything he could do….
Kina wasn’t touching him, but she was standing close enough that he could feel the warmth from her body. Her steady heat gave him the courage to answer her question.
“Yeah.”
She sighed softly, and then moved around the woodpile to sit beside him. “The day we die….”
She paused, and then grinned, a twisted smile with no humour in it. “Somehow I expected it to be more climactic.” She glanced up at the sky, purple with dusk and slowly fading deeper as night approached. “Everything just looks…normal. Peaceful.”
Mako didn’t say anything, but in his mind he agreed with her. Part of him, the part he was attempting to quiet with the steady scrape of his whetstone in the soft night, was screaming.
This is it? This is the end? Where are the volcanoes, the deafening blasts of celestial horns? Where are the rains of blood from a crimson sky, the searing heat and gouts of flame? Doesn’t the world know it’s about to end? Doesn’t anyone care that we’re going to—going to—
Kina sighed again from beside him, one lone sound in the night. Were army camps supposed to be so quiet, so silent in waiting? Had it been like this every other night? Mako couldn’t remember.
Suddenly Kina spun and jerked his sword and whetstone violently out of his hands, shoving them away.
“Kina!”
“Shut up!” she yelled. Her brittle mask of humour, weighed down with obvious and unspoken tension, had shattered. He was faced with raw, boundless emotion, the emotion of the young girl Kina had never been, and it frightened him.
“Mako,” she said, forcefully, despairingly. “Damn it, Mako, I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die like this!”
She grabbed his tunic with both hands. Tears forced themselves from her eyes and her words came as ragged gasps.
“Kina!”
“Mako, Mako, why? I want to live!”
Mako seized her wrists, wrenching them away from his tunic. “Stop it!
She stopped struggling, which was good, because despite her size Kina was a soldier, and strong. She was sobbing softly.
He pulled her against him, let her bury her face in his shoulder, and stroked her rough dark hair with his hands. “It will be okay, Kina,” he said, trying to believe his own words. “Everything will work out, I promise. We won’t die, everything will be okay….”
After a while the weeping stopped. Kina raised her face, but didn’t pull away. The moon had risen and her face shone ghostly in its light, tear-streaked, and almost beautiful.
“No,” she said softly, sadly, with neither the rough indifference her voice had possessed at first, nor the mad, despairing hysteria. Just a calm, regretful statement of fact. “Today is the end, Mako.”
Suddenly, as if triggered by Kina’s words, it began.
Screams erupted from the other side of the army camp, terrible screams of inconceivable pain. Rocketing gouts of fire shot into the sky, painting the night a dull sickly red.
Mako froze, acutely aware of what was happening. Against him he felt Kina stiffen and draw back.
For a moment, the two soldiers looked at each other. Mako’s gaze was green and sad; Kina’s grey and quickly hardening; but as their eyes met they both saw what the other was truly thinking, both knew for certain what was seldom spoken aloud.
More screams tore them from their oasis of silent words, and the thudding of armoured boots, cries of pain and fear, growing nearer.
With a great heave, Kina spun backwards away from her husband, pulling her twin swords from their sheathes with a metallic scream. When she twisted to her feet Mako was already there, ready, pressed against her back. He felt her warmth in the night.
The screams erupted around them. Faceless soldiers appeared from nowhere and all at once the campfire was pooled in blood, dripping from the broken forms of Nation soldiers, torn in the jaws of the enemies’ reptilian mounts and illuminated by ruddy gouts of flame.
For a moment, time did not move. At his back, a soft, cool voice, Kina’s voice, said:
“Forever.”
And then it was night.

awsome! did you send me this over the summer? i think i read it before. it's so awsome, though. i wanna read more! are you gonna write more? i like your description. you might wanna make it a bit more evidant what's going on. i dunno, it mighta been supposed to not be evidant but i was a teensy bit confused? at first i thought it was an apocalipse and then i thought it was anothher army attacking? that may just be me though. i like how you ended it though. 'and then it was night'. that was so cool. kudos on that. :)