Ninety Degrees

“There are all sorts of people out there-”

Dirt brown hair with several glinting hairs of gold spread throughout it, long tresses clumping together and soaking in ever so gently the thick viscous liquid.

There was a time when I would have, without a second thought, taken up arms and gone to wage war against anyone who even so much as thought to harm my friends.

“-and a great many of them could kill a stranger in ten different ways, for the mere price of a hot meal.”

Blank staring eyes, clouded with the miasmic haze of death – so much so that he couldn’t tell if the grey tint was the man’s original eye colour or merely an outward expression of his inner turmoil.

Now? Now I cannot wield a blade or any manner of weapon – not for myself, not for my… for my friends. Why?

“You have experienced this yourself, although the bounty on your head is far greater than a single meal. And with such a great prize, many men, women and children have chased after you.”

The deceased man, the dead man, the corpse, it is alike to the ones he has left behind, a trail of carcasses that stretch out and remain long after his trail has faded. None of them have been remembered on his person, not even with a single hazy blemish of sun-bleached gore or a notch on his blade.

Once upon a time, my friends meant the world to me – harm them, and I would see it as an attack upon myself. Many people have tried to reach me through my friends, and they all died sorry deaths for it. But now, now… no-one can reach me, and my desire for fatal reprisal has all but vanished.

“Originally, there were the weak that gained nerve from the vision of the payment. But then only the most foolhardy continued when you remained unassailable. After that, came the more likely opponents.”

But this one was not of his doing – unless, somehow, he had managed to travel full circle in such rapidity that even the first had not begun to decay. But that was unlikely, and the manner in which this shell had expired indicated to his skilled eyes that there was a rather proficient killer in the area. One other than himself, of course.

All of them – those that I care for – all are now dead. My family, my friends, my allies, all have been destroyed sometime or other during the all too long pursuit. When I realised there was no reason for me to pursue for vengeance, it was already too late.

“Not only did the competent would-be killers begin crawling out of the woodwork, but there were also those that were not exceptionally skilled in front-on confrontations, but had nonetheless gained a reputation of talent in the lethal arena of bounty hunting. They targeted your friends in order to force you into a skirmish where you would fight as if both your hands had been tied up.”

He sniffed, and the smell of a familiar toxin entered his nostrils. Many years in the business had left him bereft of any weakness to such a craven manner of assassination, and his opponent was wide-eyed in shock when he caught the would-be killer’s short blade in his fingers.

The last man I killed was somebody I had known a long time ago. He was also the last associate in a small band of cutthroats, responsible for the torture and subsequent murder of two of my closest friends.

“You have encountered many kinds of assassins and hit-men and murderers, varying in skill and talent and race and heritage. None of them have been identical to another, although from your point of view – and from the point of view of the present – they are. All of them are dead, for one.”

A quick twist of his fingers, the tensile muscles of the digits bending effortlessly, and the cheap blade snapped. Another lengthier blade swept at his neck, but this was parried with his own dagger. The two edges fought at each other but his won out, breaking his opponent’s knife and sweeping in and out slickly with the ease that comes with much use.

He was the last one – not just in his group, but of all the people that had harmed my friends. I had not chased after them all in chronological order of offence – that would have been folly, as the catalogue of crimes is long. As he died, I told him that he was the last one I would need to kill.

“I am not here to kill you. I am not here to try and collect on the bounty.”

Another body slumps to the ground to join the first, and he stands up, shaking his clothes a little to loosen the well-worn fabric. His blade is cleaned then returned to its scabbard, and he turns his back on the two bodies – one already stiffening with rigor mortis and the other cooling rapidly in the night air – and walks away without a second look back.

He laughed – blood bubbled out of his mouth – and told me there was still one more person that had harmed my friends. One person I would never be able to bring myself to harm, even if I had killed him, who I had known and been friends with for a great many years.

“I’m not even with a clan or a guild or anything – it’s just little old me, asking you some questions. So sue me if I’m curious about the most notorious man in all the country – I am a journalist, after all.”

He had a job to do, and there was nothing in the whole wide world that would stop him. There were people to avenge, people that he needed to put to rest on his own terms that stretched further than the funeral. This was his life and if he needed to spend five years of the ‘springtime of his youth’ on a quest of closure, then so be it.

Yes, there was one more person that I wouldn’t ever be able to harm with such mortal wounds, to go at them with killing intent so sharp they would collapse on the floor gasping. And that is why I no longer kill. Why I am here, weaponless, without a will, without a dream.

“Would you believe me if I said I wished I was just like you? Lots of people do, actually, because you’re so strong, so powerful, and nobody can hurt you. But there’s one question I want to ask you…”

Blood and ashes – that’s all he saw in his life now. Nothing more, nothing less, and he believed it would remain that way until it was all over. When their spirits had all been laid to rest. When his own spirit had calmed.

The last person remaining that had harmed my friends, that I would never be able to kill… was myself.

“When you were young, did you ever wonder what kinds of people you would kill?”

A/N: This is a little piece of waffle that I dreamed up after a night (and morning) of tossing and turning in my bed (for some reason, I couldn’t sleep). Originally, the first line would be ‘What kind of people would I kill? All kinds of people.’ However, that didn’t seem viable for the kind of piece I was doing. I know this and the last piece I put up here are progressively gruesome (compared to the ones I wrote years ago), but this is only a small chapter in the evolving of my writing. Don’t worry, soon I’ll be able to write drama! Yippee!!

If you haven’t realised, the words that are in the first font (Times New Roman) are generally in Second Person (except for some portions near the end), the words that are in the second font (Arial) are in Third Person, and the words in the third font (Lucida Handwriting) are in First Person.