Burning Trenches

#On the Survey and Its Subject

"The fighting is the point." — Present assessment of Maldrake, the Wrathforged

The Burning Trenches advance. Everything else on record about them follows from that. Any clerk who files them under fortification has already made the error this survey was written to prevent.

This is a survey of the Burning Trenches as they stand in the present assessment of Maldrake, the Wrathforged, Sin-General of Wrath, compiled in A.S. 201. Its scope is narrow by design. It records what is known of the trenches in their current condition within his Thracian domain. Anything the record does not hold, it declines to state, and this office declines with full dignity. Their origin is unrecorded, and so is their extent. A survey that supplied either would be a forgery with a seal on it, and the archive is already well stocked with those.

Here is what the record holds. The trenches are a mirror of the Sagittal Line, carved in fire rather than mud. They do not defend. They attack.

#On the Ground That Advances

The Synod's trench is a humble thing, and I mean the word as praise. Hands dig it and timber shores it. It is drained when the Creator permits and flooded when He does not, and it stays where the shovel left it. Every instruction the Church has issued for the eastern front assumes that last property. A trench is a place. A place can be garrisoned and mapped, relieved by night and shelled by day, and the soldier who sleeps in it wakes in the same spot, wet.

The Burning Trenches writhe forward. The verb comes from the record, and I have found nothing better to replace it. They cross the ground the way a living thing crosses it, and the record calls the ground they cross consumed.

The Ledger has no column for consumed ground. It has columns for ground held, lost, contested and sown with salt. Consumed fits none of them. Taken ground is entered in red, lost ground in black, and ground the Burning Trenches have passed over cannot be entered at all. No form exists for it, and I will not draft one. A form would only suggest that the matter was in hand.

Maldrake's country carries its own signatures. Smoke crawls along the ground instead of rising, heat-shimmer makes every distance unreliable, and slag cools into shapes no mason would sign. These are recorded across the Thracian domain as a whole. I set them down here as the conditions the trenches move through, not as observations of the trenches themselves. No measurement of the trenches is on file. This office does not fake thermometer readings.

#On the Fighting

The trenches spew out warriors who exist only to fight. That coarse phrasing comes from the record, and I have kept it.

The record does not say who these warriors are. Maldrake's host has its categories: Ember-Soldiers, the Hammered, the Crucible-Born and the rest listed in his assessment. Filing the warriors of the trenches under one of those headings and closing the drawer would be tidy. Tidiness is a clerk's virtue, and accuracy belongs to the Ledger. The warriors emerge, and the record does not explain how they are made. This survey reports that they emerge.

To the Synod, a battle is an argument conducted with artillery. It has a question, such as a ridge, a crossing or the road to Bastion-Constantinople, and it ends when the question is answered. The battles along the Burning Trenches have no question. They rage along the trenches' length without strategic purpose and without territorial objective. They take no ridge and open no road. The fighting is the point.

The Bureau of Doctrine has a reading of this, and I sign it. Every corruption of Wrath that the Church has documented starts with a grievance and ends with the grievance forgotten and the fury intact. Maldrake is that sequence in its final state: rage that has outlived its cause and kept marching. The Burning Trenches are the same thing in the form of terrain. That is a reading of what the trenches mean. It is not an account of how they work. A reader who confuses the two may apply for transfer to the Thracian front, where the difference will be explained in person.

According to the record, the trenches must be fed, and they hunger for conflict. I keep that sentence exactly as written. An engineer will want to know what they burn, at what rate, and whether the supply can be cut. The record answers the first question with conflict and does not answer the other two. Neither do I. Hunger is the word on record. The Ledger does not turn a recorded word into a coal tally because a staff college finds the word inconvenient.

One error must be closed before anyone makes it. The purposelessness of the trenches is not the purposelessness of Wrath's armies. Maldrake commands legions with officers, doctrine of a kind, and siege engines. The Hellbow Legion presses Bastion-Constantinople in campaigns, and the Crucible-Born plan ambushes and then wait. A staff officer who reads this survey and concludes that the enemy cannot think will be corrected by the enemy.

#On the Other Fires

Three named features of Maldrake's domain lie close to this one in the record, and careless hands will merge them. They are separate entries, and separate they stay.

The Crucible Cities are urban centres where Maldrake refines his servants. Humans go into the crucibles as people and come out as weapons after years of cultivated rage, and the buildings melt and reform as the conflicts inside them reshape the streets. The cities do their work slowly, in a fixed place, on people brought to them. The trenches go out to the ground. No refining process is recorded for them, and the warriors they produce are not on record as Crucible-made. A Crucible City is a workshop. A Burning Trench is a front that has learned to walk.

The Char Fields are battlefields that never cooled. Rage pooled where the dead fell, the ground caught fire, and figures in the flames are still fighting engagements that ended long ago, without noticing that they are dead. The Char Fields are anchored to a particular war and a particular slaughter, and what keeps them burning is memory. The record gives the trenches no war to remember and no slaughter to stay loyal to. Their fighting has no prior battle behind it. Anyone who puts the dead of the Char Fields into the Burning Trenches has made up a population, and I will not countersign it.

The Eternal Forges are mountain complexes where weapons are made with no end and no orders. The Forge-Pyre Bastion is Maldrake's citadel. Nothing on file connects either of them to the trenches by channel, road, or source of supply.

#On the Present Account

The present account is short because the record is short. What it does say, it says plainly. The trenches belong to Maldrake and to Wrath. They lie within his Thracian domain, with no surveyed bounds. They mirror the Sagittal Line in fire. They advance, consume ground, put out warriors who exist to fight, and host battles whose only object is that the battle continues. They hunger for conflict.

One further report needs to be dealt with before a careless hand attaches it to this survey. In A.S. 200, the Bureau of Engineering's Thracian Subterranean Survey reported "routing behaviour" in slag-rivers beneath the Thracian trenchlines, which it described as liquid wrath moving in patterns toward specific targets. The survey was recalled under operational security before it was complete. It is tempting to annex that report here. I refuse. That survey covered more than the Burning Trenches, it was never finished, and its findings do not name any of Maldrake's trenches as a source, a channel or a destination. I cite it here only so that no later clerk can cite it here in my name.

When the Bureau's terrain form reaches this office, it will ask whether the Burning Trenches are ground or enemy. I have ticked both and initialled the margin.