The shove was no accident. It was a declaration. A solid mass of muscle and contempt slammed into her shoulder, meant to move her like an object. Beer sloshed over the rim of her glass, a cold wave of amber liquid spilling down the front of her sterile olive-drab fatigues, soaking instantly into the fabric.
The chill cut sharply against the dense, body-packed heat of the recreation tent.
She didn’t stumble. Her boots were planted, her core engaged. A lifetime of training had made her an immovable point of balance. She absorbed the impact without reaction, neck rigid, eyes fixed on the warped reflection of string lights trembling in the dark liquid left in her glass.
The man—a Marine sergeant built like a siege engine—turned with theatrical slowness. His face wore practiced belligerence, jaw tight, a faint smirk tugging at his lips. He stood easily six-foot-three, his neck as thick as her thigh, the name tape on his chest reading RIKER. He looked down at her, using his full foot of height like a weapon.
“Watch it,” he growled.
The words were a low rumble meant to intimidate, to establish dominance in a crowded, testosterone-soaked space. A small ring of Marines around him chuckled—sycophants reinforcing their leader’s petty aggression.
Eva Rastova said nothing.
She didn’t look at his face. She didn’t acknowledge the challenge.
Her focus remained on the glass in her hand. Slowly, deliberately, she raised it to her lips and finished the remaining beer. The taste was bitter and stale. She set the empty glass on the scarred wooden bar with a soft click that somehow carried more weight than the sergeant’s voice.
Her movements were economical, stripped of anger or fear—precise, measured, like those of a surgeon or watchmaker.
Riker’s smirk faltered.
He’d expected a reaction: a flinch, an apology, a spark of anger he could escalate. Instead, he found nothing. A void. A stillness that reflected his own brutishness back at him. It was like punching water.
His mind, wired for confrontation, stalled.
“You got a problem?” Riker pressed, louder now, drawing attention. He stepped closer, invading her space. The stink of sweat, stale beer, and damp wool rolled off him.
Eva finally lifted her eyes.
They were gray, the color of winter seas—flat, analytical. She didn’t look at his eyes, but at the point on his collarbone where a precise strike could collapse a man’s entire upper structure. It was a detached anatomical assessment, lasting barely a second.
Then she looked past him, scanning the room as if he were furniture she needed to move around.
From a corner table, a man stood.
Colonel Davies.
He was older, his face carved from granite by decades of hard service and harder choices. He ran the advanced training facility—a place buried in the frozen spine of the world where elite units came to be broken and rebuilt. He had been watching, expression unreadable.
He moved toward them without haste, but with a gravity that parted the crowd.
“Riker.”
Davies’ voice wasn’t loud, but it sliced through the tent like a razor.
“Your team has prep permissions. Now.”
Riker’s head snapped toward him. The aggression drained instantly, replaced by rigid obedience.
“Sir, we were just—”
“You were leaving,” Davies finished. He didn’t look at Eva. He didn’t acknowledge the spilled beer or the tension hanging thick in the air. He simply stood there—an immovable authority.
Riker’s followers dispersed, suddenly busy elsewhere. The sergeant shot Eva one last venomous glare—a promise—then turned and marched out, boots thudding hard against the plywood floor.
The ambient noise rushed back in.
Davies stepped to the bar, picked up a clean rag, and tossed it to Eva.
“Simulation remains scheduled for 0600,” he said, tone matching hers. “Weather’s turning. It’ll be a harsher test than planned.”
Eva caught the rag and wiped the beer from her uniform with the same calm precision.
“Good,” she said. No inflection. “Stringent is why I’m here.”
She dropped the damp cloth on the bar and walked away—not toward the exit, but toward the partitioned alcove where topographical maps for the upcoming exercise lined the wall.
The incident was over.
The assessment had just begun.
The Northern Climb Warfare Training Center was less a base than a scar cut into the Alaskan wilderness. Brutal, functional, unforgiving. Comforts were viewed as weaknesses. The prefabricated structures sat on raised walkways above endless snowdrifts.
The air itself was hostile—a crystalline cold that burned lungs and stiffened joints. A place designed to find limits, then push beyond them.
Eva Rastova had chosen it deliberately.
She wasn’t there as a general, but as an observer—an unmarked evaluator from Combat Development Directorate, assessing new cold-weather gear and tactical doctrine. Her rank was intentionally concealed. Authority altered behavior. She needed truth.
Sergeant Cole Riker and his fourteen-man Force Recon platoon were her subjects.
They were lethal, fast, violent—and arrogant. Eva had seen arrogance destroy more units than enemy fire ever had.
An hour later, in the mission briefing room, that arrogance was on display.
The room was spartan: a digital mapping table, metal chairs, the lingering scent of coffee and wet gear. Riker stood at the front, laser tracing a bold, straight line across the holographic terrain.
“Alpha route’s the only option,” he declared. “Fastest path to the objective. We punch through the glacier pass before the storm fully settles, hit the simulated uplink, exfil before the weather window closes. Simple. Clean. Violent.”
His men nodded, reflections of him.
Eva sat in the back, silent, notebook untouched. Colonel Davies stood near the door, arms crossed.
“The objective is beacon placement,” Davies corrected mildly. “Not destruction. This is infiltration and exfiltration.”
Riker’s jaw tightened. “Overwhelming localized superiority ensures infiltration. We draw response south, slip in north. In and out before QRF boots up.”
“The weather forecast,” Eva said quietly.
Every head turned.
She wasn’t looking at Riker, but at the data scrolling on the secondary screen.
“Winds gusting to eighty knots at glacier altitude. Wind chill minus sixty Celsius. Your route places the team directly into peak storm velocity. Your gear is rated for minus forty. Risk of frostbite and equipment failure is unacceptable.”
Riker sneered. “It’s a simulation, ma’am. A little cold won’t stop us. We’re Marines.”
The word ma’am was sharpened into insult.
“The cold isn’t simulated,” Eva replied evenly. “The environment is the primary adversary. You’re treating a lethal variable as inconvenience.”
She stood and traced a longer route on the map—a winding valley beneath forest canopy.
“Bravo route mitigates wind exposure, reduces snow accumulation, limits aerial visibility. Transit time increases seventeen percent. Energy expenditure drops. Weather casualty risk reduced tenfold.”
“Seventeen percent is a lifetime in a firefight,” Riker snapped.
“There is no firefight,” Eva said. “This tests endurance, navigation, stealth. Your plan assumes best-case conditions. Mine prepares for worst-case.”
The room went still.
Davies raised an eyebrow. “Final decision is yours, Sergeant. Reconfirm in one hour.”
He left.
Riker stared at Eva—his authority questioned by the woman he’d shoved hours earlier. He stabbed the laser back to Alpha.
“We stick with Alpha,” he snapped. “We’re not afraid of wind.”
The map powered down.
Disaster took root.
The next morning, dismissal continued at the firing range.
Cold-weather stress shoot. Elevated heart rates. Precision under fatigue.
Riker’s platoon excelled. Aggressive. Loud. Effective.
Riker finished his run, placed five rounds center mass at three hundred meters in under three seconds. He turned, grinning.
“Observer,” he called. “Care to demonstrate how analysts do it?”
Laughter.
Eva set her clipboard down and walked to the firing line. She adjusted the M27 with deliberate precision. Settled prone. Breathed.
She fired.
Five rounds. Thirty seconds.
At six hundred meters.
Riker scoffed—until he looked through the scope.
One hole.
Not a grouping. A single ragged hole in steel.
Silence.
Davies showed no surprise.
Eva cleared the weapon, retrieved her clipboard, and made a small note.
She hadn’t shown off. She had answered a challenge with fact.
As she passed Riker, he couldn’t meet her eyes.
For the first time, he wasn’t seeing a woman.
He was seeing a weapon.
And he felt fear.
The insertion would be brutal.
The CH-47 Chinook dropped them onto a wind-scoured ridge five kilometers from the start point—
and the storm was already closing in.
The storm arrived ahead of schedule—a churning wall of gray and white that swallowed the landscape whole. The moment they stepped off the ramp, the world dissolved into a maelstrom of wind and ice. The helicopter, its shape already blurring, lifted away and vanished into the swirling snow, its sound consumed by the gale. They were alone.
Visibility dropped to less than twenty feet. The wind struck like a physical blow, a relentless, shrieking force that tore at their gear and shoved them off balance. Tiny ice crystals, driven at hurricane speed, sandblasted any exposed skin. This was not merely weather. It was an active, hostile presence.
Sergeant Riker, however, seemed to thrive in it. This was the kind of challenge he understood.
“All right, listen up!” he bellowed over the roar, his voice raw with adrenaline. “This is what we train for. Navigation—check your gear. Everyone else, form a perimeter. We push to the pass now. We move fast. We can outrun the worst of this.”
His plan, born of pure aggression, was to charge straight into the storm. He saw the blizzard as an opponent to be beaten through force of will.
Eva, standing slightly apart from the huddled Marines, pulled her goggles down and turned her face into the wind. She felt its direction, its texture. She tasted the air, noting the sharp, metallic tang of deep-system cold. This was not a squall. It was the leading edge of a polar vortex—an atmospheric event far more severe than the forecast had predicted.
The simulation had become a genuine survival scenario. The exercise controllers, blind without communications or aerial support, would not even know the danger they were in. The safety net was gone.
Sergeant Eva’s voice was calm, though she had to shout to be heard. “Pushing forward is a mistake. Wind speed will be exponentially higher at the glacier pass. We have zero visibility. We risk walking off a cornice or into a crevasse. We need shelter. We wait for a lull.”
Riker spun on her, his face flushed with cold and anger. “Shelter? There is no shelter out here. Ma’am, the only way out is through. We stop—we die. Now get in line and keep up.”
He was not listening. He was operating on instinct—the predatory drive to always advance, to always attack. In a firefight, it was a virtue. Here, it was a death sentence. He gave a sharp hand signal, and the platoon began to move, leaning into the wind, heads down. A tight formation driven by grim resolve.
Eva knew further argument would only fracture unity at a critical moment. For now, she followed. She observed. She waited for the inevitable moment when the mountain would teach the sergeant the lesson he refused to accept from her.
The first hour became a testament to sheer endurance. They advanced blindly through the storm, a slow, grinding struggle against nature itself. They were roped together, navigating by compass and handheld GPS units. But the environment showed no mercy. The temperature dropped sharply.
The wind rose from a roar to a scream. Metal components on their rifles grew so cold they would fuse to bare skin. Batteries in their radios—and more critically, their navigation devices—began to fail, power draining rapidly into the crushing cold. They continued climbing, and with every foot gained, the storm intensified.
Snow accumulated quickly—first at their ankles, then their knees—turning each step into an exhausting battle. They were no longer walking. They were wading through a thick, freezing morass. Breath came hard, exhalations crystallizing instantly on balaclavas.
The first sign of collapse came from the point man.
“Sir—my GPS is dead!”
“Batteries frozen solid!” he shouted back, panic creeping into his voice.
“Keep moving. Use your compass,” Riker barked, his confidence now strained.
Then another call. “No signal. None of the units are linking.”
They were blind. The technology that allowed them to function in impossible conditions was gone. Reduced to the most basic tools—map, compass, and experience—they found themselves in a whiteout on an unfamiliar glacier, moving toward the most violent part of the storm.
Then the Marine directly in front of Eva stumbled. He did not trip. His leg simply failed. He pitched forward into the snow, his body making no effort to catch itself—the puppet-like collapse of someone reaching absolute physical limit. Two teammates dragged him upright. His face was pale, his eyes unfocused. Hypothermia was setting in.
The platoon halted. The illusion of progress shattered. They were exhausted, lost in a polar hurricane, with one of their own beginning to fail.
Riker stared into the impenetrable wall of white ahead—the path he had been so certain of. For the first time, real uncertainty flickered across his face. Fear. His aggression had carried them this far, but it could take them no further. He had led them into a trap he did not know how to escape.
The mountain had called his bluff. The environment, once a backdrop to the exercise, was now the primary antagonist—an enemy without motive or weakness. The wind cared nothing for courage or training. It was a solid barrier resisting every step. The snow concealed lethal terrain beneath—crevasses hundreds of feet deep, hidden under fragile bridges of ice.
The cold was a patient predator, draining heat, slowing thought, stiffening muscle. Riker’s leadership—built on momentum and force—collapsed when faced with an obstacle that could not be intimidated. He shouted orders into the storm, commands torn away by the wind, their urgency hollow and desperate.
The men looked to him, then to the endless white void, dread carving lines into their faces. The fallen Marine now leaned heavily on two others, his shivering violent and uncontrollable. He was a living clock, ticking toward disaster.
“We have to keep moving!” Riker shouted, his voice cracking. “The objective’s two clicks ahead. There’s shelter there!”
“There is no shelter there.”
Eva’s voice cut cleanly through the chaos. She had moved to the front of the huddled group, her smaller frame seemingly untouched by the wind battering the larger men.
“The objective is a simulated uplink,” Eva said. “A metal tower and a concrete block. It offers no protection. Continuing to climb is suicide.”
“So what do we do?” a young corporal demanded, his voice tight with fear. “Freeze to death right here?”
Eva did not look at the corporal. She looked at Riker—not to challenge him, but to assess him. She saw the panic behind his eyes, the collapse of the worldview he had built his identity on.
She turned her back to the wind, creating a small pocket of relative calm, and pulled a folded, laminated map from the pouch on her leg. It was an analog tool in a digital world—and at this moment, it was the most important piece of equipment they had.
“We descend,” she said, her voice firm and logical. “We lose altitude. The temperature rises. Wind speed drops. We move laterally away from the glacier and toward the wooded valley.”
She pointed to the route she had originally proposed.
“The tree line will give us a windbreak and a fuel source. If we need fire, that matters.”
“That’s the wrong direction,” Riker protested, gesturing wildly into the storm. “The extraction point is that way. We’ll be moving away from the objective.”
“The objective has changed, Sergeant,” Eva said, her gray eyes locking onto his. “The new objective is keeping these men alive. Your extraction point no longer exists—no aircraft can fly in this. Our only way out is on foot. And to do that, we have to survive the next twelve hours.”
Her logic was cold, hard, and undeniable.
The men looked from their faltering leader to this quiet, composed woman. She wasn’t offering them a heroic charge. She was offering them a chance. Her calm anchored their fear. She wasn’t panicking—she was analyzing, planning, leading.
Without waiting for approval, she turned to the two Marines supporting the hypothermic man.
“Get him between you. We need a human windbreak. Everyone else—tighten ropes. Check the man in front of you and behind you.”
She spoke evenly, precisely.
“We move slowly. Ten steps, then a ten-second rest. Conserve energy. Move downhill, perpendicular to the wind.”
She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t bark orders like a sergeant. She gave instructions that were clear, actionable, and grounded in survival.
And the men—desperate for a viable plan—obeyed.
They reconfigured their formation, placing the failing Marine in the most protected position. Knots were checked. Lines tightened. They turned their backs on Riker’s path to glory and prepared to follow her down the mountain.
Eva took the lead, compass clenched in her gloved hand.
She moved across the invisible terrain not by sight, but by feel—by an intimate understanding of how wind and snow shape land. She read the slope’s angle, the texture beneath her boots, the subtle shifts in wind direction. She navigated instinctively, with the quiet confidence of someone who could see the landscape even when it was erased by whiteout.
Riker stood still for a moment—isolated, bypassed.
His identity had been built on leading the charge. Now it had been stripped away—not by defiance or rank, but by the quiet, irrefutable authority of competence. His leadership had evaporated because his plan was wrong and hers was right.
With a curse lost to the wind, he fell into line at the rear.
He was no longer leading.
He was following.
The tactical takeover was complete. No raised voices. No power struggle. Just the brutal arithmetic of survival.
The descent was slow and punishing.
Eva led with patience that bordered on inhuman. She never forced the pace. She set a sustainable rhythm—movement, rest, movement—preserving their dwindling energy. She probed the snow ahead with her ski pole, testing for hollow spots that marked hidden crevasses.
She navigated by instinct and an encyclopedic understanding of mountain topography, reading contours invisible beneath the storm.
She was guiding them through a world she could see in her mind.
An hour into the descent, the Marine who had collapsed earlier went down again. This time, he couldn’t rise. His shivering had stopped—a dangerous sign. His body was losing the ability to generate heat. His speech slurred. His movements became clumsy.
He was slipping into severe hypothermia.
“We need shelter now,” the platoon medic said, his face pale. “His core temperature is dropping fast.”
Riker pushed forward, agitation breaking through his restraint. “There’s nothing here—just snow and rock. We have to keep moving.”
Eva ignored him.
Her eyes were fixed on the rock face to their right—a dark vertical smear in the swirling gray.
“There,” she said, pointing. “That formation is granite extrusion. Look at the drift patterns. The wind is scouring the base. There should be a hollow—an overhang.”
It was an observation born of geological knowledge, something no standard military course would teach.
She led them toward it.
As they closed the distance, her assessment proved correct. Behind a massive boulder lay a shallow rock overhang—a natural shelter just deep enough to block the wind.
It wasn’t much.
But it was salvation.
They half-carried, half-dragged the hypothermic Marine into the cramped space, the storm howling past the entrance as if furious they had escaped its grasp.
The sudden silence, after hours of the storm’s deafening roar, was jarring. Inside the shelter, the temperature remained well below freezing, but without the wind it was survivable.
“Get him out of his wet gear,” Eva ordered the medic. “Everyone else, huddle in. We share body heat, rations, and water—small amounts.”
While the medic worked, stripping the soaked layers from the unresponsive Marine and sealing him inside a thermal survival bag, Eva unpacked her own kit. She pulled out a compact solid-fuel stove and a metal cup and began melting snow for hot water. The process was slow and tedious, but she worked with an unhurried efficiency that settled the rest of the men.
Riker watched her, his expression caught between resentment and awe. He had driven them to the edge of disaster. She had found safety in a place he would have marched past without noticing. His plan had been to punch through the storm. Hers had been to outlast it.
The confrontation came not with raised voices, but with a quiet, strained question.
“How did you know?” Riker asked, barely above a whisper. “How did you know this shelter was here?”
Eva did not look up from the small blue flame of her stove.
“When I was a lieutenant, my unit was caught in an avalanche in the Hindu Kush. We were buried for four days. We survived because our commanding officer knew how to read the mountains. He taught us that the environment tells you everything you need to know—if you’re willing to listen.”
She paused only long enough to pour hot water into a canteen and hand it to the medic.
“You were shouting at the storm, Sergeant,” she continued evenly. “I was listening to it.”
“Get this into him slowly,” she told the medic. Then she turned to another Marine—a young private struggling to hide the violent trembling in his hands. She took them gently but firmly and pulled off his gloves.
The tips of his fingers were waxy and white. Frostbite.
“These need to be warmed gradually,” she said softly. She guided his hands under his armpits, against his own skin, and explained the physiology of the injury—the danger of rubbing frozen tissue or heating it too quickly. Her explanation was clinical, precise, and reassuring.
This was the decisive clash. Not of fists or weapons, but of philosophies. Riker’s belief in aggressive, overwhelming force had failed completely. It was a tool suited to a certain kind of problem, and he had applied it to the wrong one. Eva’s philosophy—patience, observation, knowledge, discipline—was keeping them alive.
She was not merely leading them. She was teaching them. Demonstrating, in the most visceral way possible, that true strength was not measured by how hard one could push, but by how much one could endure and how intelligently one could adapt.
One by one, the men began turning to her for guidance. They asked about their equipment, the weather, their chances. She answered each question calmly and factually.
Riker sat in the corner of the small shelter, silent. He was watching the complete transfer of his platoon’s trust. It was not mutiny. It was a necessary, logical shift toward the person who could get them home. The respect she now commanded had not been earned in a bar or on a firing range, but here—in the frozen heart of the storm—where her competence was the only barrier between his men and an anonymous death.
The return to the training center was somber and quiet. The storm broke thirty-six hours after it began, leaving behind a pristine, sunlit world of white and an almost painful silence. Exhausted but intact, the platoon walked the final ten kilometers back to base.
The Marine who had collapsed was carried on a makeshift stretcher, weak but stable. The private with frostbitten fingers would keep them, thanks to Eva’s swift and correct treatment. They did not march like a conquering unit. They walked like survivors, their arrogance stripped away by wind and cold.
The debriefing room was stark and cold, yet it felt impossibly warm and safe after what they had endured. Colonel Davies sat at the head of a long table, his expression grave. Beside him sat an official inquiry team—two officers in crisp, immaculate uniforms.
The platoon, now cleaned and dressed in fresh fatigues, sat on one side of the table. Eva sat alone on the other. She appeared unchanged—posture straight, expression neutral.
Colonel Davies began, his voice low and serious.
“The exercise is over. Due to the unforeseen weather event and the complete loss of communications, this has been reclassified from a training failure to a real-world incident. The purpose of this inquiry is to establish the facts of what occurred on the glacier.”
He turned his gaze to Riker.
“Sergeant, give me your report.”
Riker stood. His face was pale, the bravado gone, replaced by visible strain. He cleared his throat.
“Sir, the storm arrived faster and with greater intensity than forecast. We attempted to follow the primary route plan—Alpha—but conditions became untenable. We lost communications and navigation equipment due to extreme cold.”We We got into a bad situation. He faltered, his gaze dropping to the table. He could have lied. He could have tried to paint a picture of himself as a hero who battled the elements. He could have claimed Eva’s decisions as his own. The men of his platoon watched him, their expressions unreadable. They knew the truth.
He took a breath and seemed to make a decision. He looked back at Colonel Davies. I made the wrong call, sir. I underestimated the environment. I put my men at risk through my own my own pride. I prioritized speed over safety. If it wasn’t for the observer, he gestured toward Eva, but did not look at her. We would not be here.
She was the one who identified the correct route for retreat. She found the shelter. She treated the casualties. She led us back. I failed in my duties as a platoon commander. That’s the whole of it, sir. The admission hung in the silent room. It was a raw, painful confession, and it cost him everything.
But in that moment, he regained a sliver of the honor he had lost. Colonel Davis nodded slowly. >> He turned to the other members of the platoon. Does anyone have anything to add or contest in Sergeant Riker’s statement? The platoon was silent. Their silence was its own testimony. confirmed every word Riker had said.
Davies then turned his attention to Eva. Observer, do you have a report to file? Eva had a notebook in front of her. She had not opened it. Sergeant Riker’s summary is accurate and concise. She said her voice was flat, devoid of triumph or condemnation. She was stating a fact, not passing a judgment. The platoon’s equipment failures under extreme cold will be detailed in my afteraction report.
Their performance under duress and following a shift in leadership was commendable. They adapted and survived. She was giving the men credit. She was acknowledging their resilience, separating their actions from the initial failures of their leader. It was an act of grace and they knew it. Colonel Davies looked down at the file in front of him. He opened it.
Thank you. That concludes the inquiry. He then looked up, his eyes sweeping over the assembled marines, his gaze was heavy, disappointed. Sergeant Riker, you are hereby relieved of your command, pending a full fitness review. Your actions demonstrated a critical lack of judgment that endangered the lives of your men.
You will be reassigned to a training billet at my discretion. He paused, letting the weight of the consequence settle. The rest of you, you followed a bad order, but when the time came, you followed a good one. Remember that lesson. It might be the most important one you ever learn here.” He closed the file.
Then he stood up and his posture shifted. The air in the room changed. He was no longer addressing a subordinate platoon. He turned to face Eva directly and came to the position of attention. Brigadier General Rusttova,” he said, his voice now formal, ringing with a deep ingrained respect. “Thank you for your on-site evaluation and for your intervention.
Your findings will be invaluable.” The Northern Climb warfare training center and the men of this platoon are in your debt.” A wave of shock rolled through the room. The Marines stared, their mouth agape. Riker’s face went white, the blood draining from it as the full reality of his actions crashed down upon him. He had not just shoved a fellow soldier.
He had not just mocked a headquarters analyst. He had physically assaulted a general officer. The quiet woman he had dismissed, belittled, and endangered was a member of the highest echelons of command. The recognition was not just of her rank. It was of the immense disciplined restraint she had shown. She could have destroyed him at any moment with a single word. But she had not.
She had waited, allowing events to unfold, allowing his own actions to become his judge. The men of the platoon slowly, stiffly rose to their feet, their eyes wide with a mixture of fear and profound respect. They stood straighter, their postures unconsciously mimicking the colonels.
They were not looking at an observer anymore. They were in the presence of a true leader and they finally fully understood the difference between noise and authority, between aggression and strength. Eva Rusttova stood, giving a slight, almost imperceptible nod to Colonel Davies. She did not look at Riker or his men. Their judgment was a matter for the institution, not for her.
Her work here was done. She turned and walked out of the room, her footsteps silent on the tiled floor, leaving behind a profound and permanent shift in the culture of that place. Later, she stood alone, watching the sun set over the vast white landscape. The sky was a brilliant canvas of orange and purple, the kind of fierce, beautiful cold that felt clean and absolute.
The air was still, the world at peace after the violence of the storm. Colonel Davies approached and stood beside her, a respectful distance between them. They watched the colors deepen on the horizon for a long moment. “My apologies, General,” he said quietly. “For the behavior of my men,” Eva did not turn her head.
She kept her eyes on the mountains, their peaks glowing like embers in the last light. Discipline is not the absence of failure, Colonel,” she replied, her voice as calm and quiet as the evening air. It is the correction of it. She continued to watch the snow-covered peaks, her face serene, her mind already on the next problem, the next assessment, the next quiet necessary test.
Strength is not the power to break things, but the restraint to not break what you
