In The Jaws Of Hate, For Love

20250612

Prompt from PrideOnThePage

Dawn touches the horizon as we gather. We’re all dressed for a riot - masks, helmets, warding amulets - yet the silence echoes.
It will remain until the guard arrives to stamp it out.
I’m dressed in my uniform, medals pinned to my chest. The sign stretched between me and my equally decorated friend reads “You let us die for you. Make us kill for you. Why won’t you let us live?”. The crimson border is actually names. Our fallen comrades.
Other survivors from the forces stand with us. Ready to march. Our boots will pound in that precise rhythm drilled into us in camp and base and field. A familiar drumbeat now turning to swallow its tail.
Let the cycle end.
The cluster forming behind us is doctors. Nurses. Surgeons. Carefully dressed distinct from the medics hovering at the fringes. Their banners scream medical truths and the harms of forced surgeries and magical castrations. While I agree with each message I find the images hard to look at.
So I stare past them, to the coalescing mass of civilians. Howard’s tie-dye jacket helps me find him in the crowd. I whisper another prayer for him. For that beautiful, gentle man who is my husband, despite what the law decrees.
Sun rays are reaching over the rooftops to gild the square. Soon our procession will begin. A procession of mourning, of defiance, of desperate hope. We will pass through the town centre, past the halls of governance, to the dreaded Pink Hospital. That prison we were sentenced to the moment our secret slipped and our ‘sickness’ was discovered.
We will surround its walls. Block its gates. Make it so no new patients can be dragged inside to be tortured in the name of ‘saving’ them.
And then, if they haven’t already, the guard will come.
My heart pounds in my temples.
How many of us will die today? How many will be beaten helpless and dragged back inside our nightmares? What will happen to the allies who stand with us - and how many of them will scatter under pressure?
Will this accomplish anything?
I breathe out through pursed lips, sending that thought fluttering away across the paving like an errant leaf. To despair is to do the oppressor’s work for them. I must not waver.
Something bobs overhead. My eyes flick upwards.
A scrying eye, emblazoned with the mark of a local herald’s guild. A small guild, but having them present to witness still eases a touch of my nerves.
Now that I’m looking up I see many eyes floating over the rooftops. No telling how many are friendly, but… they are watching. People are watching us.
I take a deep breath and grip the banner pole tight with my good hand. Any minute now, the clock tower will chime, and we will march.
March into the jaws of hate, for love.

Prompt was “March”.