Wide-eyed and apprehensive, Pakistani children returned to the school where their classmates and teachers were slaughtered last month.
In a show of defiance they travelled - on packed motorbikes, rickety buses, clapped-out vans and on foot - to the scene where 152 people, 133 of them children, were murdered by the Taliban.
As they neared the school gates, soldiers carrying guns patrolled the entrance where the elevated boundary walls have been fitted with steel wire fencing.
In the deadly attack on December 16 that was condemned across the world, several Taliban attackers wearing bomb vests cut through a wire fence and went from class to class in a killing spree that left 152 dead at the Army Public School in Peshawar.
Harrowing eyewitness accounts revealed how students were forced to watch as bodies were burned beyond recognition during a three-hour orgy of bloodshed.
Other survivors told how they played dead while insurgents scoured the school looking for children to shoot, before open fire indiscriminately - sometimes with smiles on their faces.
For 16-year-old Shahrukh Khan, who was shot in both legs while pretending to play dead in his school's auditorium, going back was a traumatic experience.
'I have lost 30 of my friends. How will I sit in the empty class, how will I look towards their empty benches?' he told AFP before the school reopened.
'My heart has been broken. All the class fellows I had, have died. Now my heart does not want to attend school,' he added.
Raheel Sharif, the head of Pakistan's powerful army, made an unannounced visit with his wife, greeting and hugging anxious students dressed in green blazers.
Parents spoke of having to sit down with their children and mentally prepare them for their return to the murder scene, which now has an airport-style security gate installed at the front.
'He was terrified but we talked him up. We cannot keep him imprisoned between four walls and we must stand against militancy,' Muhammad Zahoor said as he walked his son to the school.
'I want to go to school to see my friends. I will join the army after my schooling and will take revenge,' said Muhammad Zaid, his son.
Like Muhammad Zaid, many struck a defiant note.
'I am not scared. No force can stop me from going to attend my school. I will go and tell the attackers, "We are not afraid of you"', 16-year-old Zahid Ayub, who sustained minor wounds, told AFP.
A teacher - who wished to remain anonymous - said rows of empty seats, especially in the 9th and 10th grade classes, had made the first day back a surreal experience.
'Students were greeting each other and saying "You're alive?" They were taking their parents to different spots and explaining to them where they were during the time of the attack and how it happened,' he said.
'Photographs of the martyred are pasted on a noticeboard in the school. Students and teachers were placing flowers in front of it and weeping,' he added.
Parents across Pakistan spoke of their trepidation in dropping their children off at school.
'Driving to school in the light of a quietly subdued rising sun. There's a kind of stillness in the air. It sounds like a million mothers saying a silent prayer as they drop their babies to school. Stay safe. Stay safe,' wrote Saima Jamil Ashraf, a parent in Karachi, on Instagram.
Following the attacks, the Pakistani government scrapped the death penalty ban and moved to establish military courts to try terrorism cases.
By Thomas Burrows
