LW 00: Shadow Heart

No one knows why the wars started.  Or when.  Or why.  Just that they are. 

I have been to every part of this universe.  My feet have made the ice fields of Ilazki sing.  I have felt the burn of the sun on Chromandae.  I have spilled blood in the arena of Gegenes and washed my hands in the seas of Icaunus.  I have haggled with traders in the bazaar on Adur and felt the thrum of the steam engine trains on Atarrabi.  I have even stood on the steps of the Academy of Lugos and heard the hum of the electrified defenses mingle with the quiet chorus of night city sounds.

But, before this, all I remember is waking—

The last remnants of something beautiful had faded away, and then I was abandoned.  I was betrayed.  

My knees against icy ground, I tried to rub away the red stains on my hands but they were too thick; they flaked and then smeared.  There was a pool of it around me, and I believe that it was mine.  It was thick and congealed from the cold, and there seemed to be more than there should be.

There was barely anything in my veins, and nothing in my mind.  It was bathed in a brightness that I couldn’t see past.  Still cannot see past.   The bleak dark of that place was crushing me, so I turned to the sky.  But there was nothing there.  Only the darkness.  It was on the outside of me, but it was on the inside as well.  I could feel it turning and scratching, a feathery creature in the very pit of me.  It scraped beneath my skin.  Not to get free, but to make certain that I was aware that it was there.  Always there.

I shut my eyes, willing to give in to the cold.  Even a frosty wind becomes a warm blanket when you stop fighting it.  But then, the children came.  Like skittish prey, their eyes wide but cold—disillusioned and old.   They stepped over the bodies and spoke not a word, studying me as children are wont to study dead insects pinned beneath glass.  I had no reason to move, and so I didn’t, and they were able to step around me at their leisure, glancing at each other intermittently as if arguing without words.  They took me with them, led me away from the dead. 

I do not know if there was a time before then.  I only know:  I must destroy something.  I am looking for something, and I must destroy something. This is what—all—that I know.  That I have ever known.

I can see the outlines of the Pillars against the sun as Kirin rotates slowly into night, the black shadow of Panotii behind me.  The stars sit like a captured moment above, and Lugos has already begun to dominate the sky.  Most believe that the Solarians chose it as their capitol in order to serve as a constant reminder of the Republic’s reach, and they fling their curses into the silence.  I believe it is beautiful in its constancy.

The last of the light glimmers on the rims of the glass jars which circle me like an army; I placed them there.  I grip my hand tighter around my khopesh and swing—

The air whistles, and I feel the blood in my veins moving again.  I came to this world with weapons only, as a weapon only.  

But sometimes, sometimes I look at the stars and I am sure that this clawing feathery thing is the only life inside of me.  And something tells me that there is someone that knows this.  When the pale sun sets over the ice, it leaves only darkness behind and the dark is me.  Is we.  Is my home.