Post by Mammon on Jun 13, 2017 13:09:09 GMT
| Killer’s Remorse |
Condemned
Mammon's PL: What does it matter when you’re dead?
He moved through a land of grey and browns, were all colour had seemed to have been leached out or diluted so much that it was just so much mud, the wastes were lit by an unsightly bright light warming the scorched earth before him. The wasteland was truly a graveyard.
He stood before a large depression in the earth, where decades ago some great fight was waged, it was hundreds of feet deep and thousands wide, the basin around the crater was pocked and weathered by time, with no cover except for a few desperate scuffs of vegetation clinging to life in this lifeless land. He wondered what would happen if he jumped in, what would happen if he hit the bottom. Would he die again? Or would he just be stuck down there?
He sat there again going back to his last memories, his thoughts flashing through his eye’s burning themselves in his memory, of the soldier that stands stiffly in his starched and pressed uniform. In those threads that mark him out as a fighter, a protector, a defender, a killer, a thief, a monster. Soldiers were bought and sold in their dozens and he was no exception, 'sold' to the tyrants as heroes and their acts no matter how terrible or benign would be treated as heroic. Each soldier wanted to be a 'hero' fighting for his people, not an oppressor or a monster. Except him. Yeah, he had been Xylo’s little hatchet man, he’d do what he was told and enjoyed doing it. How many cruel little battles happened under his watch, where he might’ve spared some instead of snuffing them out as carelessly as one of his smokes until the tables had turned on him that day.
It was on that day when the sound of fighting could be heard, the clamor of bolts, the shouting of the slaughter, the explosions that sucked the air from your lungs and filled it with sulfur and left you painted across five different buildings, it was where men and boys were turned to so much mud. Broken hilts: Helmeted heads caved in, limbs jerking back in death throes, stained red beards and grim faces that would no more smile or move again.
Only so much mud in the long run, war is worse than hell. He should know he has been to hell. But where could he go from here, it wasn’t like he could just turn over a new leaf. Could he? Absurd, he was damned and he’d always be damned. So what now, what was the one thing he truly wanted?
Maybe you could start a family, get yourself an ugly wife and have a couple fat kids. No, he couldn’t just change on a whim. He knew in his heart of hearts that he wouldn’t be happy that there would always be that urge, to conquer, to betray, to destroy. He was a demon after all and the only thing a demon could get from this was-
Revenge, it is the knife’s edge, it is served cold and hot, but it is a double-edged sword for it gnaws at you like a bad dream making you wake in the middle of the night in a hot sweat, filling your mind and blinding you to all else. And when the deed is done, what then? Will it bring back your honour? Your broken body? And one score settled starts ten more, so in this endless cycle of being avenged and revenged, is it worth it?
Hell yes, he’d be avenged, revenged, vengeance would be his in all its terrible forms. But how? I mean he was dead, he’d need to correct that, and also what form would his retribution take? Killing them would only send them here, and hell, well it was a walk in the park. Literally, there were parks.
“I could torture them, cut them into tiny pieces.”
“But they’d heal.”
“It needs to be a subtle thing, something big too.”“Yes, there whole blasted race should feel the ramifications of their mistakes. Why punish them when you can get others to.”
Yes, he’d do just that. It was like a teacher holding back a class because one student said or did something stupid, not only would he lose time but the whole class would turn on him. Know your enemy and you were halfway to winning, or at least ten percent.
And there in the darkness, he remembered those same words he spoke when everything went tits up. "See what hell hath wrought, see it in all its terrible majesty." He felt like that was some kind of great irony and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but hell hath wrought something terrible that day.
Hate, now there was something he understood, gasoline for the flames. Sure it only made things worse, in the long run more pain, more enmity, more death. And by the end it is either the only thing left or burns out entirely leaving you with nothing. But when he had died and no saving grace was there to catch him that was all that was left, all his being burned with a will.
“I will do far worse than kill them. I’ll hurt them. And I’ll wish to go on… hurting them. I shall leave them as they left me, as they betrayed me. I will leave them in a universe dead to them, buried alive and with no one to dig them out.”
And he tossed a rock down the hole, it bounced off the walls and began its slow descent into the darkness making a slight clatter as it pulled more earth down with it, ‘thud’. “Here’s to revenge.” and he began to float away like a bad wind.