War of Rights · published
You have already faced the horrors that consumed Harpers Ferry and the Drill Camp, but now the earliest reports from Antietam have reached your hands. The fields of Sharpsburg lie in shadow, haunted by the first stirrings of the plague. It is time for you to fight in the first major battle, where the undead first rose.
Sir,It has been several days since the guns fell silent at Antietam, yet the fields show no peace. The dead still carpet the ground, their faces fixed in silence beneath a black sky. The stench of decay grows thicker with each passing hour, carried on a wind that feels colder than it should for this season.Men speak in hushed tones of something unholy moving among the fallen, a black rot that crawls across the earth as though the very soil were poisoned by all the blood spilled here. Even the crows have begun to fall from the sky, their bodies stiff and blotched before they hit the ground.Orders arrived this evening. We are to fall back to Burnside’s Bridge and join with what remains of the Confederate line to stem the advance. None among us thought such words would ever be written, yet no man questions them now. Whatever comes from the darkness makes no distinction between blue or gray.The men are gathering again near the bridge, determined to hold the line one last time. I will join them soon. If this letter finds its way home, tell my family I fought to the end, though I fear this may be the last I ever write.— Cpl. J. Whitaker, 10th United States Regulars