A child once strode upon a battlefield, three days after the decimation of the army of light. Alone, with only the dead for company, she stepped lightly through the fields of people she knew, who now lay before her, working hard to become one with the earth below her feet.

There was the baker, next to the mailman. Just down the row was a teacher she'd had as a little girl. Next to her was the policeman, and the fireman that had stayed at her side when she lost her mum and dad in a housefire.

She walked among these corpses, who had been so utterly destroyed in the battle. "Why did they have to die?" she asked herself, as she closed the eyes of the people she loved. "How did this happen?"

"It happens, my love", she heard a voice say. But before she could respond, it continued, "as it has happened time and again, throughout the long forgotten tales of your people".

She looked around, seeing some of her loved ones sink quickly into the ground. Then, she noticed a particularly cruel neighbor in the fields, eyes staring open against the fallow sky. But the earth rejected that person; no matter how much rot and fungus enveloped her body, nothing left went back to the earth.

The girl asked aloud, 'Why won't she go? Why take my loves - my friends - and leave this cruel woman here, even in her death?"

The voice answered, as a gust of wind, "She brings hate; and no matter what she says she hates, her true pain was hatred of herself".

The girl knelt down to her, and reached out to close the woman's eyes; but the immediately opened again.

Before the question could be asked, the voice answered, "When she is ready, after lying here on the deserted field of a battle that never needed to be fought - only then will her torment end. Only then can she be at peace".

"But, that's so sad" the girl said, standing up from the hateful, loveless woman, and taking a step back.
"How can I help?"

The voice formed a whirlwind beside her, taking the vague form of a man. Reaching out to caress her shoulder, it gestured with its arm to show her the bredth of the land around her.

"Billions, my love," it answered. "It takes a billion hearts rooted in kindness and love to truly show one rooted in darkness that there is a better way".

The girl reached up to take the whirlwinds hand, feeling its fingers gently hold her own, as they blew between her the digits of own hand.

"Then, how can I help?" she asked, her heart overfilling with emotion.

The wind looked to her, looked into her heart, and answered, "You've given her all you could, my child. It's up to her now, to take that to a place that will save her".

The girl still looked to the woman. Outside of the battlefield, she'd known her. Not always cross, but always sad, though she could never understand why.

"I've one more thing I can do" the little girl said. With an understanding nod, the whirlwind released her hand, as she walked toward the eternally dying corpse of the hateful woman, who lay dying on the eternal battlefield, eyes wide open, and unable to be closed.

"I know you, miss," the girl said, "but I don't know your name".

"Name?" the dying woman asked. "By what name would you know me, you foul, pittiful thing? I've never debased myself to consort with vermin of your ilk!"

The little girl knelt, and held the dying womans cheek in her hand.

"That's alright, my lady," she answered, tilting her head to one side, so the sun, low that it may be, shone brightly against the shadow casts by 'her' head. "There is a place for you. There is peace."

"How would YOU know?" the creature intejected, becoming less human with each passing moment.

"Because - I remember you" the girl answered. And, as the creature, once human, lay there dying, here eyes finally opened wide, as a little girl held her tight.

Some say the embrace lasted seconds. Other say it is still occurring. Regardless, the innocent love of one being reached out, in the darkest of places, and showed one who was eternally cursed to live in hatred, the real power that comes with love, with forgiveness, with kindness.

Be that girl; live that kindness, even after your life.