Reflections from Something Else

A small collection of memories from another story I cannot and will not upload.

     “How could you want this?”

     “How could you not?”

     A soldier at arms with a tarnished blade unable to cut.

     His resolve as firm as his grasp, but hindered by a cut deeper than just skin.

     “Has this all been a guise? Have we been nothing but tools at your disposal?”

     The standing soldier can only smile at the kneeling one, pitiless and void of remorse.

     “Tools are useful things. You are merely an obstacle. A rock in my path, to be kicked aside and disregarded.”

     The kneeling soldier cannot wince, but grinds his teeth in hate and shame.

     Hate for the friend that betray him.

     Shame for even trusting him in the first place.

     “And what of ------? Has her friendship meant nothing?”

     The soldier, now slayer, can only smile mockingly.

     It is all that he knows to do.

     “No. No, ------ is not a tool, because we both know she cannot be used. Nor is she a rock, because if one were to kick her, they should break their foot. Not at all is she those things.” The betrayer steps forward, the blade caressing the soldiers cheek. “No, she is the lily that waits in the pond, her root strong beneath the wilted waters surface.”

     The blade digs a cut along the soldiers skin, a rivulet of blood dripping forth and slicking his face.

     “A lily with a root. A lily which should not have been planted at all, and would have been better left elsewhere, where her beauty could not have tainted the waters below her.”

     “I don’t understand.”

     “Then you never will.”

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

     “This is revenge, isn’t it?”

     “No. Revenge is something that happens after something else has started. This is only the beginning.”

     They continue to fight with ambition, the closing cometh with a sliver of hope for the betrayed soldier.

    

     To be quashed.

 

     “The beginning of what?”

     “Justice.”

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

     The soldier lay still along the sanded stones of a pathway chosen not oft by the present village inhabitants.

     The night was over.

     The early morning had just begun.

     A single figure stood above the corpse, a blade methodically dripping of something once stilled.

     What a pity he was so loyal.

     What a shame he had to die.

     Still a greater shame, should he have lived for the sake of the one woman who had wronged the figure.

     In every way possible.

     The man, the figure, the soldier, the slayer turned to wait in hefty silence for the woman in question.

     Even more to pity was the slayer himself.

     Because, when you’re so in love that you go crazy with want, it’s quite hard to see reality.

     And when reality becomes skewered, it slowly cracks, then shatters, and all you have left are mangled pieces to watch in melancholy.

     Before long, that reality seems fake, and all you know are the twisted pieces you created from it in hopes of putting it back together again.

     And before you know it, you’ve gone mad.

Author's Note

This is from my fanfic on another website. It's from a scene where two of my OC's, who had been life-long friends, fight one another until only one is left standing. It's the end of halcyon days...
And the beginning of the winter war.