Part One Hundred — Before the Full Story

　I realized, a few nights later, that I'd never actually heard the full account of what happened on Eris's front — only the summary, the numbers, the shape of victory without any of the actual detail that had gotten us there.

"Tell me properly," I said, one evening, the two of us alone for once, Ace curled nearby, Sophia off in quiet conversation with Elaine somewhere across the town.

"Not the report. What actually happened, when they came at you."

　Eris considered the request a long moment, something thoughtful crossing her face.

"You sure you want the whole thing?" she asked.

"It's not a short story."

"I've got time," I said.

"And I think I owe it to everyone who fought that day to actually understand what they went through, rather than just the tidy version Elaine gave me."

"Alright," Eris said, settling in properly, the same careful precision she brought to everything else shaping her account into something clear and deliberate.

"Let me start from when we first saw them on the horizon..."

Finally.

The part of this war I wasn't actually there for, told by the person who lived every second of it.

　I want to give you her account properly here, in full, rather than the summary I'd already been carrying — because she was right, that evening.

　It wasn't a short story.

　It deserved better than a few sentences of secondhand report.

　It deserved to actually be told.