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MUSTARD I – Ch. 20 | KT OLLA

A FEW sighs kept interrupting a long streak of silence. It was dark that night, as dark as all hopelessness can be.

Seated on the floor with his back against the wall, Moro brooded on his predicament now.

He had been taken among several recruits that evening. And now, he sat alongside them in the garrison cell.

These were the men conscripted to join the army, the British army. From that side of the colonial territory.

They were to be transported to Eko, which by then had been renamed Lagos. And from there, they would board ships sailing onto England.

Those packs of men, alongside others across Anglophone Africa, were being sailed to the shores of Great Britain.

To fight as soldiers defending the kingdom. Or to be deployed to trenches on the west front and fight on the side of Britain.

Now here at the guard room of the British station, people slept away their sorrow while some others cried.

Moro chose to ponder all through night. So he sighed a load of times.

He thought of how he’d escaped the Fourteen Years War when he was a little boy.

How he’d fled an ostentatious show of magic in war. To live a sane quiet life elsewhere.

Now he thought he’d escaped dying for other men’s sake. And had lived to grow and thrive, and be more.

Yet now that he’d grown well and had seen enough, he must face another war.

At this point he broke in tears as he felt small in the hands of men. He cried, but no one could hear him.

It was the hardest part for him.

The middle-aged one wondered what would happen to him. Whether he’d survive the war. Or whether this was his deathbed.

Well, it was the unknown future that so bothered him. A morrow he seemed not to know.

So Moro sobbed quite softly. Then hours passed and the night brightened to day. And gone with that dark night were the tears and sighs, the sorrow and pain.

For Moro had slept off from the tears of that night. And when he slept, he dreamt of a Day Star brighter than the noon sun.

He dreamt of a Light he hadn’t seen before. It was a bright hope and a future.

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