In the dim afterglow of a forgotten war, a solitary clerk etches names onto medals no one will claim. The heroes are gone, the victors vanished — only the archivist remains, forging memory from silence.
A Cracking Silence
It began — as all endings do — without announcement. No cannon fire, no trembling ultimatum, no gloved hand slapping another across a map. Just a silence that felt heavier than sound, leaking from official buildings and telephone lines. You could hear it in the corridors of ministries, in the rustle of curtains at the Grand National Theatre, and in the absence of footsteps where footsteps had once been predictable.
The country — unnamed, as most condemned things are — was still officially at peace. The clocks worked. The trams rattled, late but present. Newspapers still arrived, though thinner, and always wrapped in a second layer of neutrality. There were speeches, of course. There are always speeches. Grand ones. Speeches about unity, heritage, and a destiny that was “forged in the crucible of our ancestors.”
And yet, the airports glowed at night like escape hatches.
Cabinet ministers were suddenly unavailable, travelling abroad for “strategic consultations.” The Defence Chief took a sudden sabbatical in a neutral climate “for health reasons.” Bankers issued directives by proxy. Generals resigned, citing “ageing mothers and heart murmurs.” No one wept for them. No one stopped them. Everyone understood, though no one ever said it out loud.
They had intelligence.
We did not.
In the cafés, men in tattered coats murmured half-jokes. “When the pigeons fly east, the bombs come from the west,” said one, tapping his coffee cup twice, as if that made it prophecy. In the bakeries, there were fewer loaves and more rumours. In offices, especially the grey, windowless kind where decisions are processed but never made, the lower ranks were told simply: “Do your duty. The State will inform you when necessary.”
But the State had left the building.
In its place were portraits of men who no longer occupied their offices, wearing uniforms with medals they’d awarded to themselves. The elevators still stopped on the top floor, but only to open onto empty corridors. Some claimed they’d seen stretch limousines driving away at night, under military escort, carrying trunks of state silver, priceless art, or merely trunks full of cash and silence.
No war had been declared.
And yet everyone was packing.
Except us. The others. The leftovers.
The ones who would stay behind to be bombed, to bleed, to hold positions no one had mapped, to become names on medals yet unminted.
Because that’s how wars are fought:
First, the architects escape.
Then the fodder becomes myth.
The Department of Glory and Dust
Ilya Vromsky did not consider himself a hero. Nor a coward. Nor anything in between. He was, as he often told his mirror, “merely a function.”
He worked in a low, windowless office beneath the Ministry of Civil Merit — a building that smelled faintly of varnish, damp wool, and ageing ambition. The plaque on the door read:
DEPARTMENT OF GLORY AND DECORATIONS
(in peeling gold leaf)
Inside: a rusting filing cabinet, a broken intercom, and rows of dusty medal moulds — “FOR VALOUR”, “FOR SACRIFICE”, “FOR LOYALTY ABOVE SELF”. A dead man’s collection of virtues, waiting to be rebirthed in nickel and ribbon.
Ilya’s job — if one could dignify it with that term — was to manage the paperwork of state-approved bravery. His days passed in the copying of names, the verifying of citations, and the delicate stamping of phrases like “against overwhelming odds” and “in service to the Republic.” He had never met a single recipient. Nor asked to. He preferred the quiet logic of bureaucracy — it offered safety, a kind of moral asbestos insulation from the fire outside.
And yet, on the morning after the Minister of Defence was reported to have collapsed suddenly while boarding a jet to Zurich, Ilya found a folder waiting on his desk.
It was grey. Unmarked. The government seal had been partially torn, as if someone had opened it in haste, reconsidered, then left it for a lesser man to handle.
He opened it with mild reluctance, as one opens a bill they’ve already decided not to pay. Inside: a single sheet of paper, unsigned. Typed in uneven spacing.
FOR IMMEDIATE IMPLEMENTATION
Subject: Post-Conflict Recognition Framework
Objective: Begin preparation for the issuance of civilian and military honours.
Recipients: To be determined.
Narrative: Victory must be demonstrated through remembrance of sacrifice.
Instruction: Start engraving. The names will come.
There were also blank citation forms, thirty-seven in total. Printed but not filled.
A quiet panic crept into his lungs.
No one had declared war.
No one had issued mobilisation orders.
And yet someone wanted the medals ready.
Ilya held the folder for a long time. Then, gently, with something like reverence or disbelief, he placed it in the top drawer beneath the medal ribbons. For the rest of the day, he sat in silence, watching the second hand of the office clock twitch toward inevitability.
Outside, in the courtyard, a statue of an unnamed soldier pointed nobly toward the horizon — though his hand had cracked at the wrist from years of cold and neglect.
That evening, Ilya walked home through streets that were unusually clean, unnaturally quiet. He passed two policemen smoking behind a checkpoint. They nodded at him with a tiredness too old to fake. Behind them, the checkpoint barrier was already lying on the ground, as though no one had the heart to keep it upright anymore.
In his pocket, he fingered the corner of the memo.
A simple instruction: Start engraving.
He did not sleep that night. Not out of fear.
Out of obligation.
The Improvised Front
The invasion, when it came, was insultingly quiet.
No tanks rolling over borders in neat rows, no enemy uniforms draped in symbols. Instead: blackouts. Static on radios. The sharp, inexplicable disappearance of entire postal districts. Maps stopped matching the terrain. Roads once leading to towns now led to silence. The Ministry of Defence building was struck by something — a missile, perhaps, or an unpaid gas bill finally exploding — and no one came to extinguish the flames.
There was no strategy, only noise.
And in the absence of orders, the people began issuing their own.
A retired factory foreman named Arkady took charge of an abandoned checkpoint by welding together road signs and broken tractors. A children’s librarian, Vera Koskina, armed herself with a sabre from the local museum and taught teenagers how to lay traps using encyclopaedias and piano wire.
A blind priest began broadcasting hourly prayers over the frequency once reserved for government alerts. He claimed God had returned to judge the cowards who fled and reward the ones who remained despite understanding nothing.
They called themselves a militia, although no one agreed on the name. “The Grounded”, “The Last Company”, “The Shadow Defenders” — each unit choosing a moniker based on either mood or local dialect.
No generals.
No maps.
Only instinct, memory, and an unspoken agreement that surrender would feel worse than death.
Back at the Department of Glory, Ilya Vromsky kept stamping medals.
He worked in the dark now — candles jammed into filing cabinets, wax dripping onto commendation forms. The electricity had stopped two days earlier. The central office, where the names were once verified, had been looted. Ilya found his supervisor’s chair overturned, still warm. On the wall, someone had scrawled in charcoal:
“EVERY MEDAL IS A GRAVE MARKER.”
Still, he worked.
The forms no longer arrived from above. Instead, names began to appear in other ways. Scribbled on napkins left at his door. Typed on slips of paper shoved through the letterbox. Sometimes, he swore, they simply wrote themselves.
One morning, he found a name that matched the milkman from his childhood street.
Another day, he saw the name of a woman who had once slapped him in primary school.
The next week, his own brother — presumed drowned years ago — appeared in black ink beneath the line: “Exemplary Demonstration of Duty in Hostile Conditions.”
He tried to question it once. For an hour, he stood in front of a cracked mirror, holding a medal that read “For Unseen Sacrifice”, and asked aloud, “But who decides?”
The mirror offered no reply.
Each evening, the shelling grew louder — though it was unclear whether the noise came from enemy fire or collapsing infrastructure. The city had begun to blur. Walls leaned at angles. Smoke took up permanent residence in the sky.
And yet, somewhere between the ruins and the defiance, new legends were born. A man who redirected an entire enemy convoy using only a children’s atlas. A group of janitors who sealed a tunnel with nothing but bricks and the body of their supervisor. An old woman who threw jars of fermented cabbage at advancing troops and somehow turned them back.
There were no official announcements.
But Ilya received their names.
And he engraved each one, with the same care as a jeweller, onto cold, state-issued honour.
Because someone had to.
Because stories, like medals, must be shaped before they are told.
Even if no one survives to wear them.
The Ceremony of Shadows
The war ended as it had begun — with no announcement.
One morning, the shelling simply ceased. The horizon, once broken by plumes of fire and steel, offered nothing but a flat, lifeless silence. The radios stopped hissing. The priest’s broadcasts turned to static, then to an unfamiliar voice reciting government-approved proverbs in perfect, artificial calm.
Rumours leaked in before the officials did.
The enemy had retreated.
Or had never fully arrived.
Or had merged with something already inside.
Depending on whom you asked, the Republic had either won with great dignity, or survived by accident. Both versions were printed, alternately, in the newly returned newspapers.
And then, the suits came back.
They arrived in motorcades escorted by smiling police. Their uniforms were pressed, their cufflinks glinted. They returned to buildings that no longer had functioning lifts. They held press conferences before walls still bearing smoke stains. Each sentence began with “We always believed…” and ended with “…thanks to the unshakable spirit of the people.”
Ilya was summoned by official letter — wax-sealed, overly perfumed, signed by no one he recognised.
He was to attend a “Ceremony of National Gratitude”.
Location: Grand Hall of the Restored Parliament.
Dress code: Modest Formal.
Function: Presentation of Civil and Military Decorations for Outstanding Service.
He brought with him two battered crates — one of medals already engraved, the other of blank ones, “to be filled posthumously.” He took the tram, which now ran without stops. The other passengers stared ahead as though the act of motion itself were penance.
The Grand Hall was neither grand nor whole. Several columns had been hastily plastered over; a portrait of the President had been rehung, slightly askew, above a wall still bearing the shadow of explosion. The lights flickered — patriotic, perhaps.
A small orchestra played something triumphal but out of tune. The audience comprised journalists, returnee officials, and a row of survivors who looked like they’d been dragged out of another war entirely — soot-faced, twitching, unsure why they were seated beside a buffet table.
When Ilya entered, no one greeted him. But they took his boxes.
From a raised platform, the new Minister of National Continuity — a man whose name was entirely unfamiliar — began a speech.
He spoke of “unyielding sacrifice,” “heroic perseverance,” and the “noble refusal to collapse.” He paused often for applause that never quite found its rhythm.
Then the names were read.
Some had lived. Some had not.
Some, Ilya noticed with quiet dread, had never existed at all.
A woman named Natalya Petrovna Zinchenko received the Medal of Irreproachable Honour. She stared at it as if it might explode.
A boy — no more than sixteen — accepted two posthumous medals: one for his father, one for his mother. He looked at the camera, blinked, and left without a word.
As the last medal was placed, the Minister turned to the crowd and said, with bright sincerity:
“And let this remind us — the people are our greatest resource. We owe them everything.”
The crowd clapped.
A little too loudly.
As if to drown something out.
After the ceremony, Ilya lingered in the vestibule. No one stopped him. No one thanked him. The crates were gone.
In a far corner, he saw one of his old citation forms pinned to a noticeboard. It had been altered. The name changed. The citation embellished. His own handwriting overwritten by a more photogenic narrative.
He reached out, slowly, and touched the ink.
Still damp.
“Truth,” he whispered, “is no longer printable.”
Behind him, officials were laughing over canapés shaped like grenades.
The Medal Factory
The Department of Glory was never officially reopened.
The building still stood — part ruin, part museum — but its corridors had been repainted in neutral tones. A new plaque had been affixed near the door:
HERITAGE OFFICE FOR SYMBOLIC MEMORY INITIATIVES
in smooth, forgettable plastic.
They sent Ilya a letter, unsigned as always. It thanked him for his “interim custodianship of national morale” and politely advised him that “his unique contribution would now transition into historical abstraction.” A small pension would be arranged. He was encouraged to pursue “quiet dignity in private reflection.”
No return address.
He read the letter once, then tore it into seven equal pieces and flushed it down the Ministry washroom sink. A minor, final act of treason.
Each morning now, Ilya returns to the building anyway. He no longer clocks in. There is no payroll. But no one stops him.
The guards are gone, or pretending to be. The lobby is silent. The elevators still shudder upward, though they make no promises.
In his old office — Room 207, next to the defunct citation archive — he has reconstructed a kind of ritual. He sits at the desk. He unpacks the few remaining medals from his private stash. He sharpens his engraving tool, though it’s grown dull. He lights two candles.
And he begins writing names.
There is no list. The names come from memory, from dreams, from whispers under his floorboards.
Elena K., who sewed bandages from old curtains.
Marat V., who refused to abandon the east side even when it burned.
“The Janitor’s Wife,” who lived, cleaned, and disappeared without a trace.
Each medal he engraves is placed in a drawer — not for delivery, but preservation.
He no longer pretends the names are verified.
He no longer questions their origin.
Sometimes, he wonders if he is the last state function still operating. A department of one, assigning dignity in the absence of a government. A man with no authority, giving out honours no one will wear.
And yet, the drawer fills.
At night, when the candlelight flickers across the metal faces of forgotten valour, he whispers the same words to himself:
“We must shape the myth before they replace us.”
It is unclear who, if anyone, will one day find this room.
Perhaps some future bureaucrat will mistake it for an archive of records.
Perhaps they will melt the medals down.
Perhaps they will simply build over it and call it progress.
But for now, the medals wait — cold, unclaimed, quietly gleaming in the dark.
Because that is how wars are remembered.
Not by those who win them,
But by those who stay behind
To engrave what’s left.