“The rising sun burned away the morning mist in slow, reluctant strips, revealing the landscape below in stages — each revelation worse than the last. Green meadows where farmers had walked behind oxen three weeks ago now yielded only a harvest of the dead. A river that had once carried irrigation water to the surrounding villages ran dark and sluggish, thickened with blood and debris. A child's wooden toy — a carved bullock cart, the kind sold at every village mela — lay crushed beneath a soldier's boot, its bright paint flecked with someone's last breath.”