Sitting in the branches of an ancient elm tree, watching the sunset spread across the distant horizon, I think back on all of the conflict that I have seen. The decades long campaigns that I have played a small part in, the shorter wars that I have helped to start or end. What does it mean when the day is complete? When I am the only one left to walk across a battlefield devoid of life except for the harpies who come to pick apart the corpses of the fallen, does that mean that I have won? That my contract has been completed and that I should simply continue on to the next one? I have often looked down at the blank, bloodstained, or mutilated faces of those who have died, by my blades or by those of others, and wonder if they will be well recieved in the afterlife. Or if there is an afterlife at all. If these are the only lives that we have, then why do we waste them on such trivial things as war? I bring my drinking gourd to my lips and swallow a long gulp of the rum inside. It is something that many have wondered, and many will wonder still. I doubt that I will find an answer, but it does not stop my weary mind from chasing that elusive goal...
 The Saint of Ravens · Sat Mar 28, 2009 @ 10:42pm · 0 Comments |
