Derrick4
I sit outside in the snow on a small three-legged stool. My thin leather Boots don't protect me from the snow but my dead legs don't care. Or perhaps, maybe they do care and I just don't know. I can see the toes squirming through the leather, are they uncomfortable with the cold or are they moving for another reason? I don't know.
My hands are working on the bindings, lashing together the thin strips of wood that we have salvaged from the broken beds upstairs. I tell myself I'm making a crate but I can't help noticing that it looks much more like a coffin. I think about the day's events and I wonder if I could have changed them if I had tried harder. I think of Harken, the tall human woman with the pale face and dark hair just touched with grey. I remember her eyes being touched with sorrow. Was it sorrow or was it more of a haunted look? Did she have another secret that she was keeping?
She said she was a widow. I had just assumed that the pain in her face was because of that. Did she know what she was going to do when we arrived? She let the others go, little man with his wagon and his dark elf friend. She didn't accost them, she didn't feed them to the mugger upstairs. Why did she choose us? I guess it didn't matter in the end.
Whoever she chose, she was Breaking the old code. You can't break the old code. My father had told me that it doesn't come from a person, it comes from a fundamental truth. He said that it is what it means to be civilized, that the code is what we promised when we set ourselves apart from the beasts. The stories say that we stood before the master of beasts and made the promise, calling ourselves civilized meant that we would not eat of a man's table and drink of his wine with ill in our heart. Did Jihan have ill in his heart when he ate from the orc's table? Is that why he is dead now? I don't think so but I can't be sure. I know what was in my heart and I know that I did not eat the food that was offered because of it.
Why did I kill Harkon anyway? Was it because of the old code? I don't know. I wasn't pretending to be the weapon of the code at the time. At least I don't think I was. It my mind, it was me thinking those things and doing those things. The anger that I felt, it was mine. It was not a supernatural anger, not a foreign anger. It was the familiar anger. I gave her a chance to tell me. If she was forced, if she was compelled she could have told me. I could have forgiven that but that is not what she did. She looked at me with arrogance, she sneered "A girl's got to eat."
She said it like it was acceptable to drug a stranger with your food and murder them in their sleep. That's not all right, that can't be all right. I could have forgiven her if she had been sorry but she wasn't. She looked me in the eyes and challenged my anger. She didn't want forgiveness so that's not what I gave her. I gave her justice.
I took her to the black place beyond the stars and I made her look. Jihan didn't understand but that's because he's never had to look at the black place beyond the stars, look into the nothing that waits with black wings in the darkness and black teeth that eat the light. I have looked, I have seen it and I came back. She could have come back if she was stronger, if she was braver, maybe.
I stand up and look at the Box. I hear the Dwarf approach. "That is pretty good for a box made from beds. I just have one question, how are you going to fit the antlers in there?"
Shit.
