A few beads of blood trickled down the Warden's face beneath her mask - a small cut to the scrying rune was all that it took to deactivate it, and Kyalin needed no assistance in vanishing. It left a poor feeling in her gut, but this had gone on long enough. It was time to end it.
Memories of the families she had condemned to the barrows came rushing back to her mind. "None who would sacrifice their neighbors to such a madman deserve their freedom" she said. She was younger then. She was less experienced, but the question never went away. What gave her the right to lock up terrified villagers for trying to rid themselves of a Satyr threat when the Wardens had failed to arrive in time?
"What gave them the right to sacrifice their own children" Kyalin muttered, as though responding to her own mind.
The images of the dead in Winterspring became fresh as the blood-soaked snow that day as well. Dead watchers in their prime, cut down in droves around her - and her armor being the only thing to spare her the same fate - a gruesome death at the hands of a vicious, blood-hungry demon hunter. But that was in her prime, and before her inauspicious timing made the monster into something incomprehensibly worse. She would not defeat him this time. There simply wasn't a way.
A watcher forgoes the trappings of a normal life. That's what she was told. A watcher does not live her life for herself but for her people, and shall endure every trial and pain only for them. Death is not a possibility, but a certainty, in an existence devoted solely to bringing justice to those who deserved it, and the law to the lawless.
She descended into the chasm, crescent in hand.
Memories of the families she had condemned to the barrows came rushing back to her mind. "None who would sacrifice their neighbors to such a madman deserve their freedom" she said. She was younger then. She was less experienced, but the question never went away. What gave her the right to lock up terrified villagers for trying to rid themselves of a Satyr threat when the Wardens had failed to arrive in time?
"What gave them the right to sacrifice their own children" Kyalin muttered, as though responding to her own mind.
The images of the dead in Winterspring became fresh as the blood-soaked snow that day as well. Dead watchers in their prime, cut down in droves around her - and her armor being the only thing to spare her the same fate - a gruesome death at the hands of a vicious, blood-hungry demon hunter. But that was in her prime, and before her inauspicious timing made the monster into something incomprehensibly worse. She would not defeat him this time. There simply wasn't a way.
A watcher forgoes the trappings of a normal life. That's what she was told. A watcher does not live her life for herself but for her people, and shall endure every trial and pain only for them. Death is not a possibility, but a certainty, in an existence devoted solely to bringing justice to those who deserved it, and the law to the lawless.
She descended into the chasm, crescent in hand.
Edited by Kyalin on 5/13/2013 7:51 PM PDT