Here's a short story that I wrote a couple of years ago. i don't really know what inspired it, but I think i was in a bad mood as i wrote it (obviously.) Now that I look back at it...geez, it really was kinda dark and depressing. Hmm. Well, I guess it's just a splurge of my own. Any comments would be appreciated. Thanks!
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Comfort. Security. Warmth. Food. Kindness. Assurance. Routine. Love.
These are all things I lack in my new found life.
Chaos. Confusion. Anger. Anxiety. Fear. A continuous sense of losing. Hate.
…All of this is what I now have.
This is not what I wanted. This is not what I intended.
But this is what has happened.
Here I sit, writing down thoughts that may not be as secure as I would wish them. If the wrong person read these words that I print here, I could be killed. But I am willing to take the risk for at least a simple moment of printing my troubles down onto paper to clear my head, for however little respite that will give to my overburdened mind. Again and again, day in and day out, we sit, guarding the city of the Ancients that we ourselves stole from the Immortals. We stay, guarding from a race that wants to do exactly what we did centuries ago, to root out the inhabitants of the Ancient city, and claim it for their own.
Ah, what a tangled web the Goddess has woven. We fight to keep others from committing the same atrocities our ancestors created all those years ago.
If there is supposed to be any sort of humor in this, then I must be blind, for I do not see it.
How can fighting beget peace? How can peace bring war? The two are opposites in the Way of Life, yet they always lead to one another. Is it something in mankind that demands blood and death? In any population, there is always the small minority that bring unjust hate and death into a seemingly peaceful existence. Why is that? Is it that some souls cannot abide by what is good and virtuous? Is it that some souls need to feed that anger, that anxiety, that…HATE that causes them to act in the methods they choose? What good is dying when life was fought for so hard, yet obtained by complete and utter chance? I must be blind, deaf, and dumb. I must walk around without any senses at all, and stumble my way through life. Unless…is it the rest of mankind that walks through life with a haze over their eyes, a haze of their own creation? Is it because people choose to ignore what life really entails that we fight like animals to keep what we have roughly taken from another? Why must it be this way? Why must the few who honestly see life in the way it was meant to be seen, suffer and have their innocent blood spilt just for the greed and lust of the strong and…ignorant? Is this some cruel joke of the Goddess herself, one that she amuses herself with? Are we naught but puppets to be pulled on marionette strings and danced to a tune only she herself hums? …Is our Goddess like the rest of us, eager to see blood spilt and tears shed, all for the sake of some kind of twisted entertainment?
I wonder, and pray that I am wrong.
…I fear to think that I am not, for then…
…there is no star of hope to shine down on any of us…
The journal was ripped roughly from Edriel’s hands, causing his stub of a barely inked quill to drag a long, dark line of precious, rare ink across the paper. Edriel did not reach for the book once it was gone. He knew he would not get it until his tormentor had seen what he had snatched. He sat, looking up with great weariness at the ring of dirty and angered soldiers standing before him. His hands fell loosely between his knees and all tension was gone from his body. He had no strength left to keep his muscles tight in preparation for whatever they would decide to do to him.
“What is this?” Jathniel demanded, squinting and looking at the tiny writing on the brown page of the book he held in his hands. “It’s bloody scratches!”
“That, I think, would appear to be some sort of runes,” Kadmiel offered, looking down over Jathniel’s shoulder.
“It’s Jair lettering,” Edriel said softly.
The three soldiers looked down at him in distaste. “What son of a pig are you?” Jathniel questioned, his voice a cutting whip. “No one writes in Jairian anymore.” He threw the black book down at Edriel’s feet, smiling with satisfaction as the book landed face down, covers apart, into the murky puddle in between the broken cobble stones. “Why the head guard wanted you in this squad is beyond my understanding. You should have stayed behind, waxing boots.” Jathniel spat onto the ruined book between Edriel’s feet and stomped away down the dreary alley, to where the rest of the soldier’s sat. Kadmiel and Ithiel followed him, as close as two blood sucking ticks on the back of an overgrown wolf.
Edriel quickly reached down and picked up his book, but it was too late. Thick black ink ran down the pages in trails of black blood, mingling and dripping along with the contaminated water to splash onto Edreil’s boots in black tears.
He grimaced and slammed the book shut, causing black droplets to fly into his face. Angrily, he blinked them away from his eyes. All those thoughts, erased. The minute path to a faint liberation was gone. With that notion, all of the frustration he had placed down onto the paper came jumping back onto his mind. All he had fought for was a small motion of relief, but all he had gotten was only a few second’s respite.
Edreil glanced down the alley to make sure that no one was looking in his direction. All he saw was the grey, tight backs of the rest of the soldier’s in his squad, standing around the meager fire someone had luckily lit on this dreary, foggy, and somber, wretched day. He pitched the book with all his might so that it flew the five feet to the wall opposite him, slamming into the stones and flapping to the broken cobbles in a fluttering of stained pages. Watching the diary bleed black ink into the brown water it had landed in, Edriel placed his head into his hands. He heard a couple snickers come from the back of the alley, but he didn’t care. They could laugh all they wanted.
They would all soon be dead.
No one could hope to survive tomorrow. The enemy had already penetrated the city and was asleep right now, in the back alleys and streets that Edriel had grown up in on the west side. The war was already lost. The enemy had the city. All they could possibly do now was flee. But no one would. They all refused to believe that everything they had fought for, everything they had, all the people they loved, were all gone, and they would never see them again. No one wanted to think even for a second that they were fighting for nothing. That tomorrow, they would all be looking death in the face.
But Edriel knew. He had listened to the reports; he had discovered that the enemy held more than half the city. Probably there was only two other squads of soldiers that had yet to die. The enemy had flowed into the richer quarters of the city first, doing away with the king and his nobles, followed quickly by al l their servants. All that remained now, supposedly, was the greater amount of the population, the poor and the beggars. There was a faint rumor that the king’s toddler son had been whisked away from the palace before it had been consumed by the flames. But it was only a rumor that could not be traced back to an original source. If it was at all to be believed, perhaps they all fought for the chance that their people may one day rise again and take back the city they had called home. But Edriel knew that deep, deep down that would never happen. This was it. All that was left of their once great mighty city were a couple squads of soldiers who fought for a cause that no longer existed.
“We stand on death’s door, tonight,” he whispered to the damp still air about him. Slowly, he forced himself up to stand on numb legs and feet. His uniform was stiff, his body covered in grime and sweat, his hair pasted to his forehead. Whenever he unbuckled his sword from around his waist, it always felt as though he had just removed some important body part, like an arm or a leg. Edriel sucked his dry tongue around his teeth, and made his way over to the semicircle around the campfire in a defeated, meaningless walk. He received probably the last meal he would ever eat, a poorly watered down broth from a soup that had been cooked at least four weeks ago.
Edriel sipped at the barely hot water that had just the faint hint of what chicken could have tasted like, feeling nothing fall into his stomach. He would still be as empty and dry as before he started sipping. His body seemed to no longer want food, but he continued eating only out of habit. He looked around at the soldier’s standing around him, a few talking in muted whispers, but most just stood silently, looking at nothing in particular. More than one just held the barely warm bowl in their scared and marked hands, looking for al the world as though they had forgotten what to do with it. Despair had sunk into some, while others where fighting it off by irritating those weaker than they, such as Jathniel who was nagging at Ithiel for something or other.
Tomorrow, we die, Edriel’s thoughts echoed hollowly in his mind as he sipped at the last of his final dinner.
Edreil closed his eyes in an attempt to sleep, but he knew that sleep would never come. He was fatigued, exhausted, stretched to the point beyond weariness, yet his body would not pause long enough for sleep. It was an odd feeling; to feel as though some sort of devil had crawled inside and stretched him all apart, but his body still remained in one piece, despite all the tearing, hacking, and dislocating the demonic presence had wreaked inside. If he finally succumbed to sleep, his brain knew that he would never wake again and therefore forced his numbed, disjointed self to stay conscious at all times.
I feel like a paint that has been stretched over too much canvas, Edriel thought to himself, lying on his back upon the broken cobbles. I have been stretched so thin that there is no longer any color left to me. He opened his burning eyes and squinted, seeing only a hazy blackness between the silhouettes of the two tall buildings that cradled his alley. This damnable fog hides the stars from me. I wish I could see them…a faint mist had begun to drizzle and Edriel could feel the tiny water droplets form on his skin. He closed his eyes once more, the harsh coldness of the stones beneath him finally becoming numb against his back, his uniform worthless.
