A third of the way to me he pulled out a machete, using it first on bright warriors, then on the little people. He wielded his weapons with cruel precision, sporting a sadistic smile, sized in proportion to the suffering he inflicted. He crippled and dismembered and destroyed. I sensed he was warming up for me. At this pace, he would cover the ground between us within a few minutes.

My legs crumbled, arms wounded, torso crushed, air and blood wheezing out of my punctured lung, I tried to crawl away. I couldn’t. My head in the dirt, a flood of images raced through my mind, images of a broken life I would never have a chance to fix.

Just then I heard a great voice, speaking a language I couldn’t understand. Was it a dialect of titans? I turned my head just enough to see the bright Commander, dressed in red, also marching toward me from the opposite end of the valley.

The face of Shark Eyes’s counterpart was rock solid, his chin set and resolute, his eyes loyal and kind, burning with an unquenchable fire. He did not scream or gloat. He entered the foray, and even as he marched toward me I saw him stoop to help a lowly soldier who faltered while trying to protect one of the translucent little people.

I looked back and forth between the titans. I silently pleaded with the commander in red, Don’t stop for anyone else. Keep coming!

The red-garbed titan wielded his sword with amazing accuracy, as if an extension of his powerful right arm. He cut through the ropes of the enemy’s bolas and blocked the poison darts and flaming arrows with the flat of his sword. Always with an eye on me, he called out commands to his warriors. Then suddenly he stopped in his tracks.

He raised his hand to two lieutenants beside him, quieting them, then looked up to the sky as if he were listening to someone. Was it his commander in chief?

The dark commander marched on, gloating and energized when he saw his enemy stop. As he came at me, my spirit felt trapped in frozen flesh. In what I assumed would be my final seconds of life, I became strangely contemplative about this ancient war I had witnessed for the first time.

The conflicting missions of the two armies seemed to have no fog, no gray, only black-and-white clarity. I had lived my life in terms of compromise, rule-bending, trade-offs, concessions, bargaining, striking deals, finding middle ground. In these two great armies, there was no such thing. Good was good, and evil was evil, and they shared no common ground.