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.26
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one more time
[attr="class","sumreign-lyrics"]
now, i can't remember why i needed to run, needed to try so hard.
“
Teach me how to fight.”[break][break]
This is your first impression of him:
pathetic, even compared to the holes torn into his tent or the rats that scurry around your feet in hunt of a rotting feast. No one here is without their own unique breed of misery, but none of them quite live up to a man with half an arm (
and that was the lucky
side), nothing beneath the stumps attached to his hips, and half a face that learned the hard way what risks are involved in playing with fire. His suicide attempts have been numerous, but they never get far. You would've left him to a slow, miserable death without looking too long were it not for the fact that he has something you want. Knowledge. Experience. The sword that had scarred his back when it was strapped across it that night, heated to horror by the flames that burned their lives to ash. No one else here can hold their own in a fight for three embarrassing minutes, but
he could, once, a prodigy with a blade – and with fortune and time, you may be one yourself.[break][break]
Of course, it's not that simple. His laugh escapes him like a sob. (
Maybe they're one in the same.) “
How much have you got to compensate me?”[break][break]
Rhetorical; no one here has anything that could possibly look like compensation. They wouldn't be here, otherwise. Eight years old, though, and you're still a good few years from learning what the definition of 'rhetorical' even means. You tell him, “
Dinner. Next dinner, too, if you want.”[break][break]
You may as well be offering him part of your soul for as scarce as food is here, so the sudden twist of his lips, parted into a bloody scowl is all the more shocking a reaction.[break][break]
“
I don't send children out to die. And I'm not wasting my time with the reckless. Try again in twenty years, little one.”[break][break]
And that's that. No amount of foot stomping or hissing, clawing or begging will change his mind. You go back to your family fifteen tents over and tell them you were playing with the other children – no, you most certainly will not explain the puffiness ringing the corner of your eyes.[break][break]
The worry on your mother's face only serves to remind why you can't afford to take 'no' as an answer.[break][break]
Your furthest neighbors give you strange looks when they see you with your siblings. Distantly, you figure it must be strange that your elder siblings are able to hang off your arms – even if you were already hardly shorter than your father the day you met, a sudden growth spurt accompanied your earliest teen years, solidifying quite easily your height over the rest of your family – in the same distant way you acknowledge that if it doesn't look like a halfling, it doesn't walk like a halfling, and it doesn't talk like a halfling, you're probably not what you so proudly claim you are.[break][break]
Somewhere out there, there's a man with your nose and a woman with your eyes missing their daughter terribly. They lost you (
'you lost them' doesn't ring so true when you can't muster up a single sliver of grief at the thought) in the same way that everyone in the camp lost something, but you scarcely have an image of them left to remember them by. Did they even survive the attack? Considering how many others did not, it's hard to hold your breath – but then,
you survived.[break][break]
Don't think too long, too hard about why you shouldn't have.[break][break]
“
Again, Lucretia! Again!”[break][break]
Fuck their strange looks, anyway. Family isn't about who you were born to, but who you were meant to be with. What did your biological parents ever do for you but leave you sobbing among bodies smeared black while ash rained down from heaven? Nothing that compares to the tinkle of laughter from the youngest as you lift him above your head and run in loops around the others. They've lost their home and their future, but they haven't lost their brilliant spark of life.[break][break]
You can't risk letting them lose anything else.[break][break]
“
Teach me how to fight.”[break][break]
His smile means nothing when it turns it on you: a pantomime of a feeling he must have forgotten half a decade ago. “
You're not very good at counting, are you, little one?”[break][break]
“
I'm not little,” you snap, though you're betrayed by the crack that sullies your attempts at belligerence. It hasn't been twenty years, but to your credit, you hadn't hung around the outside of his tent every day waiting for scraps of sympathy, no matter how badly you'd wanted to. “
And I don't care about counting. I want to kill monsters. Teach me.”[break][break]
For a long while, he's silent. He sizes you up in the space of silence with two eyes that have seen more than you may ever known, piercing and dull and terrifying all at once. A whole two minutes must pass before the woman spoon-feeding him what qualifies for soup at the camp sighs, and you wonder for the first time if you're not the only bloodthirsty youth who's come preaching violence to a man with both feet in the grave.[break][break]
He says, finally, “
I know what you're after.” Does he expect a response? A pregnant pause follows, tempting you to fill it, but you haven't anything more than your demand to repeat, and he clips it before its prime, anyway. “
You think this life is unfair. You think that beast took everything and more from you. You go to bed every night dreaming about what kind of sweet, sweet revenge you'll be able to enact, if only you could swing around a sword and find it.”[break][break]
“
I can do that.” You
have to.[break][break]
“
No you can't,” he snaps. “
You barely understand how the world works, much less how to kill a thing like that. Can you even read? Write? How old are you?” Indignation must spark on your face, split your mouth open to spit fire, but he douses it in a heartbeat. “
You want revenge because you think that will change something in your miserable life – but it won't. It won't bring your home back. It won't bring your family back, if that's what you lost. And it won't make you happy. You'll die trying like the rest, a waste of time and effort.[break][break]
“
Don't bother wasting mine.”[break][break]
There is one more sibling in your halfling family than you have not met, and don't figure you ever will.[break][break]
Her name was Harriett: the eldest of the bunch, a natural-born leader with a brilliant smile and two missing teeth, one in the front, another in the back. She loved to sing with all the volume her little lungs could muster and ran swifter on smaller legs than any of the other children in her corner of town – swifter, your father used to brag, than the winds themselves. Was it pride in that speed, you wonder, that made her believe that she could outrace the terrible world-ending nightmare that had descended upon your city that day? You'd imagined, upon first hearing of the tale, that she'd gone back for some personal affect that wasn't worth her life. A testament to her strength of character, even at such a young age, then, that she'd gone back for something equally worthless of one of her brother's.[break][break]
I'll catch up with you, promise were the last words any of them heard from her. A single child lost in a family as large as yours is a fortune, compared to the lineages slaughtered in a single swipe of a claw – but no one at your dinner table can feel very fortunate when there is an empty place set aside to your right, reminder of what should be and is not.[break][break]
There was no body to recover. Her grave marker is only in memory.[break][break]
And you, then: What are you? Sole survivor stepped in to replace a sole loss? Your parents don't think of you that way, you know, or the siblings you always wanted and suddenly have. But it doesn't stop the creature in your mind, always chasing, one pace away:[break][break]
You're dead, it taunts.
You are already dead.[break][break]
Stop lying among the living.[break][break]
“
Teach me -”[break][break]
“
The answer is no, little one.”[break][break]
When the wolf arrives, its written off as a children's tale. You'd have thought it impossible among a camp of refugees who lost everything to one heartless creature's whims already – but then, who can believe the wildly disproportionate tales that spring from the mouths of a dozen imaginative children, each recounting different from the last? There are no paw prints, either, to mark its existence in this world, no lambs left out to the slaughter. Perhaps they disbelieve because there's nothing to substantiate. Perhaps they disbelieve because they can't afford not to.[break][break]
You believe, though. You have seen its eyes glow in the darkened woods that lurk just beyond the bounds of your makeshift home, and you have seen its scarlet teeth revealed from behind an uncurled maw. It is not a wolf. It's not, but you cannot call it anything else. It mimics and it taunts and it stalks, assembled to resemble an animal, but only assembled in its image.[break][break]
If only you knew what the proper stance was – how to cleave a beast, a man in two – you would have stood your ground long before the first disappearance. There's only one thing you can think to do.[break][break]
“
Little one, I'd tell you I've gotten tired of these meetings, but that'd mean I had patience to spare for you to begin with.”[break][break]
Eight years later and he looks as pitiful as the first time you laid eyes on him. Some miracle (
torture, in his own mind) that he's even lived to see this day, unable to live his life without the kindness and aid of the other refugees who change his clothes and feed him supper, but there is a fatigue in his eyes beyond that of a man who has given up on the waking world. Sixteen, and you can figure with a look that he hasn't got much time left to give in him.[break][break]
“
I... We all need your help.”[break][break]
“
Haven't got much of that to give, I'm afraid.”[break][break]
“
You're the only one here left who knows how to fight.” Those who could lift their weapons had died futilely, thinking until their very last that they could at least delay a thing that defied logic before it got to their loved ones. For most, it mattered not. “
I've seen it in the woods. An undead. It'll take whatever it can get its teeth in – it's already started with Johan. I don't... I don't know how to stop it. But you do, don't you?” Your hands are balled and your teeth are grit, but you force it out with your raging tongue: “
Please.”[break][break]
His own rage makes yours feel like a tantrum. “
Stop it with what, little one? Ought I get up on my feet, grab my shield and sword, and charge into the night like the days of old? Oh, yes, little Johan will certainly feel a lot safer then.” Despite your greatest efforts, you flinch, frightened of the blaze that erupts from his words. “
You ask the impossible. You've always asked the impossible. Take your delusions – all of them – and leave me the hell alone.”[break][break]
They're dead, you think with hate on your face and tears threatening your eyes.
They're all dead, and you've abandoned them to it.[break][break]
“
If you don't go – they'll – they'll – ” He's closed his eyes; his ears. He will not (
cannot) save them now. “
If you don't go – I will.”[break][break]
With finality, he tells you, “
Then there will be two corpses in the forest by morning.”[break][break]
It or me. It or me.[break][break]
In your hand, you wield the best weapon you'd managed to find: rusted iron, a warped bar that would not sharpen against stone and will probably do
you more harm than your target. You've nothing but the wits in your head and the adrenaline bursting through every vein when you step past the forest's edge and into the territory of the dead, the best your camp could offer packaged into an underfed girl with blood on the mind. Yet despite how laughably unprepared you must seem to a voyeur's gaze, deep down, this all feels
right; who better to face undeath than a corpse parading among the living?[break][break]
And it comes to you, like ash drawn to ash, but more likely a territory master without expectations for visitors and without patience for trespassers. Up close, you can see the rot and decay as its not-quite muscles carry it in careful circles around you. It's not, and likely never was the canine it mocks. Its skull is pieced together beneath slipping, reeking flesh from all sorts of shattered shapes and sizes – one leg juts out much further than the others while another splits into more than one 'paw' at its end – the tail at its back finishes in what must originally have been a human hand. What was it, you wonder, before it arrived here, unwelcome? The first wave of a necromancer's wrath, or an experiment run loose from its maker? Whatever its storied past, its future is written in blood:[break][break]
It, you think, taking up you're best effort at a stance,
or me. “
Come at me, fucker. I'm not afraid of death.”[break][break]
It lunges.[break][break]
“
You know – it's kids like you that made me not want to have children in the first place.”[break][break]
An anomaly, someone had called you once; an impossibility, as defiant as you are foolhardy. Today, you're knelt down before him with the whole of your body, forehead pressed to dirt and knees curled up painfully beneath you, but it's a miracle you're here at
all.[break][break]
He'd spread the word of your suicidal idea (
you wonder about the specifics, but it probably had something to do with the second pair of weary eyes staring down at you now), far enough that your parents had caught wind of it. By the time they'd found you, you were bleeding out into nothing, and your bane wasn't quite dead – but you'd worn it down to a point where many hands and solid rocks could beat its unholy bones into dust. Five minutes later, your mother had sobbed into your crimson-dyed hair, and she would have lost a second child. Five minutes later, and Johan would have likely gone out with you.[break][break]
Needless to say, it was
not five minutes later. Here you are, wrapped up from what feels like head to toe in bandages that stain if you move too quickly, aching down to the marrow of your skeleton. When it came down to
it or you, you were the one who lived to tell the tale.[break][break]
“
I'd hoped this would knock some sense into you, little one, but here you are again. How many times must I tell you? Revenge won't solve your problems, and no one will come to save you if you go after that beast alone.”[break][break]
“
It's not about revenge.”[break][break]
You expect something back, the same way he parries everything that ever escapes your mouth, but for once, he's silent. Once you realizes he's finally going to
listen, you scrape together the strength to put your most closely guarded thoughts into words. “
I lost my parents, and my home when our city fell – that's what you wanted to know, right? But to be honest, I don't really care about that. I hardly remember them. But I do remember how hard my family – the family I found here – has struggled. I'll never be their real daughter, no matter how kind they are to me. The only thing I can do for them is make sure that no one has to live through the same pain as them.”[break][break]
Something more threatens your tongue: Tell him how you feel empty inside, today, every day before it, but something lit up in you when you swung your first strike there in the woods, and something set ablaze when it drew its first blood just seconds after. If you died there, the only thing that would have changed is that you'd have gone out of this world for
something. No one you've ever known to go can say as much. He wouldn't understand, though, you don't think. He lives in a different half-light than you, even if you both exist somewhere between the living and the dead.[break][break]
So caught up in this thought are you that you almost miss when he mumbles, “
... Gods damnit.” You raise your head in time to see him shudder, a leaf caught in his own wind. When he speaks again, its in a tone meant to be heard; contrarily, though, it doesn't sound like he's very convinced of his own words. “
That halfling family of yours doesn't seem to share you feelings on the matter. They ran right on ahead without a care for their well being as soon as they knew you were in danger. Do you understand what that means? Many of us have lost more than we can ever live past – but you, you can start again. Go home to what you've found. Live well with the people who love you as their own. Even now, it's not to late for you.”[break][break]
“
I can't.” Honestly: “
I shouldn't have been the one to survive. If I'm still here, I've got to make it mean something.”[break][break]
He stares. You stare right back. Your third wheel shuffles two paces behind before resting her towel down and skirting around you for an exit. The night before, you felled a monster who threatened the worse-than-humble camp that has built itself into the entire world you know. Now, even before he ever dips his head in defeat, you know you have felled the most stubborn piece of work that camp has ever housed. “
It doesn't matter what I tell you, does it? You'll run off to your death whether you know how to face it or not. Ignorant child! I hope you hate me for this one day. I hope you curse my name long after I'm gone; at least it will entertain me while I roll in my grave. Get up. Yes, you heard me – on your feet.”[break][break]
“
Does this mean –”[break][break]
“
Yes, yes. Gods, don't make me say it aloud.” He rubs dust and sweat from his brow with his only remaining hand. Beneath the shadow his fingers cast, he looks no better than he would have had you knocked all the wind right out of his lungs, as if overcoming his pride is the greatest blow a person could have struck against him. “
If you had half a brain, you'd have looked for a teacher who could at least spar with you. As it is, you'll have to make do with coaching from afar. Wipe that smile off your face, you brat! Tomorrow, at dawn. If the sun gets over the horizon before I see you here, this is all over, understand? If I don't change my mind before –”[break][break]
Empty threat. You smother it by taking his head in your trembling hands, your hug made awkward and uncomfortable both by the chair he's bound to and the wounds that crisscross your body. Does he mind? You'd have thought he would, given everything you've known about him over the years, but the moment your arms are around him, he only stiffens in shock, and once that settles, he even brings his better arm up to pat between your wrappings. It's been a long time since someone has held you, and since you have held someone in turn.[break][break]
“
Thank you,” you say, a mantra, repeated until you forget what it means. “
Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
