The Epic

Wrath of Georgia
Book Two of The Epic
Georgia. 1864. Sherman is marching to the sea and the state is burning from Atlanta to Savannah.
Cain Graves enlisted a Confederate soldier and a conviction. Atlanta fell and the conviction reversed direction. What is left is grief weaponized - a man who loves fiercely and destroys what he loves with equal intensity, who cannot tell anymore whether he is killing for a cause, for a brother, or simply because stopping would mean feeling it.
Into the carnage walks Mr. Cord - a weapons dealer selling to both sides, ensuring the killing continues and intensifies. He is patient. He is courteous. He smells faintly of bay rum and cedar with something floral underneath that has no business on a battlefield. He is Satan, who was made once to bind wounds, and who now rips them open in a cornfield for sport.
Moving against him through the same fields is a battlefield medic who tends the dying on both sides of the line - Union and Confederate, it does not matter to him. Soldiers closest to death report a faint glow before they go. This is Chamuel. He finds Cain not at his most violent but at his most broken, and offers him the one thing Satan and Mr. Cord cannot - the absence of resistance. Wrath needs a wall. Chamuel gives none.
Witnessing it all from the marsh grass is Corporal Elijah, twenty-six years old, 103rd United States Colored Troops. Six months ago an old man in a field camp pressed a dying hand to his forehead and Elijah woke up carrying sixty years of another man's memory - the memory of a plantation porch in 1749, a gentleman in white linen, and a soul collected while a freedman watched from the tree line. Now Elijah writes in the margins of a field Bible because it is the only paper he has. He cannot intervene. He can only record.
And somewhere beyond the smoke, a man in white linen hums a tune that will not be written for another century. He appears twice - once at a crossroads, once at the collection - and he is not hunting Cain. He is confirming what was already decided.
The battle between Chamuel and Satan happens in the Savannah marshes at night, where the reeds bend around shapes that have not worn their true forms in a very long time. The collection happens in that same marsh, under the same moon, and the coin rolls across Lucifer's fingers exactly as it did one hundred and fifteen years before.
Cain's brother Jesse survives.
The Graves line carries forward.
The scribes keep writing.
And the war the official record left out continues - one soul, one generation, one century at a time.