There is no such thing as a winnable war.

A hero may be gifted with skills and talents and may be granted command over armies, but he is nothing more than a puppet of destiny. It takes more than skill to follow your cause and ultimately prevail in that to which you aspire. It takes daring and courage, wisdom and clarity of mind and above all, it takes the ability to make difficult decisions and the strength to get back up and keep fighting even when the repercussions of those decisions set in, when the fates themselves seem to conspire to cripple your body and destroy your mind.

And even so, it is what a hero can achieve, and not who he is, that is of the ultimate importance. Personal wishes and dreams are disregarded and it is often the hero who is forced to make the greatest sacrifice - giving up his freedom to change the world for the better, for the sake of people other than himself, no matter the odds. And in the end, many of the few heroes who fulfill their destiny, survive and thus manage to outlive their usefulness, many of them are forgotten, too broken to be of further use.

In the beginning, in the end and in the aftermath, a hero is always alone.
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Who is that person? Why is he all hunched over like that and wounded, if you look very closely? If this is a battlefield, where are the bloody corpses?

It's up to your imagination to answer those questions. ^^
It's been months since this came into my head and demanded to be sketched. I finally started colouring it when the pretty fluffiness of Spring's Approach became too much for my defenseless brain. Maybe that's why I made this so crimson and bloody, instead of all grey and melancholy as I originally pictured it, but I figured I already did something similar. So it asked for a lot of dust. And there I was, left with trying to see if I could make a picture have warm colours and still seem ominous. If you ask me, I've failed miserably, but I still like the end result. ^^
As for the corpses, I really thought about hinting at some carnage and battle aftermath in the background, but it seemed like it would only distract from the focus of the picture, and the warrior's loneliness seems to have evolved into an important part of the impression. O.O

Alternate melancholy filter-modified version here:
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