Please Give Feedback; A Short Story

[QuestingBeast]

<p>


</p>


<div style="text-align:center;"><p>The Duel</p></div>


<p>

<span style="font-family:Georgia;"> Mother, in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, I met a woman. I spoke to the woman only yesterday, and she told me a story so intriguing that I thought to share it with you. She came to me in the pitch of night, and raised such a ruckus at my door that I had to hear her out, and her severe eyes and the fear that carried her on kept my attention. In her German tongue I scribed her story. With sloppy quick strokes I quilled the tale as she told it. She wanted the parchments as soon as I’d finished, and even went so far as to shake her purse of coins in my face, with a fist held back to match. Yet I stayed her hand with an easy lie. I declared there were words misspelled, illegible. I claimed that the scribing needed to be copied down for some good reader to tell what the tale told. All drivel, as you well know. No shop in this city writes with greater accuracy or more perfect loops than my own. She was skeptical, and her green eyes narrowed at my words, but enough doubt withheld the voicing of thoughts quivering behind her eyes -- she kept back the accusation that I was a cheat. I took the night to copy the tale for you, in the English tongue that I so miss. While I am a foreigner here, I have heard of the strange customs that they use to uncover truth. They call it Stradtrech. This is a trial by might. For, they say, whoever overcomes in battle is God’s chosen. Uncivilized though it be, I have seen for myself the result of this. The weak have overcome the strong in the most unpredictable of manner. And in some cases, mercy has been shown. By crying out “Craven”, a man might be spared. But only to a life that has no merit -- for any murderer or seeker of justice may lawfully slay him at any time. Now on to the story, mother. I have taken cares to modify their barbaric tongue so that it may appear in more comprehensible format.</span>

Fear permeates more often than the arousal of justice. Rare is the man so foolish as to brashly take on forces greater than he. A life is not so commonly risked. Indeed, I know not of your country or its ways, but in mine the lives on the outskirts of the town that are cut short or beaten down -- those are lives that entertain. The slow call of death mesmerizes the eyes of the clumping crowds, spreads the bloodthirsty smiles, and curls the laughter of their stomachs. I was among them. I was born one of them. There is not much beyond the campfire, the mead, and the toil of our hands to live by. And I was content in my ignorance. I devoured the refuse I was fed because that was the easier path. The comfort of peace and safety was too great a prize for my gluttonous mind to deny, and I was too much a coward to allow the niggling, isolated thoughts fair representation. But, though it was not something that happened unto all, there are times when such contained lifestyles lose the peace that makes them bearable. Those times, when a wrong so horrid and so inexcusable transgresses to such extent that there is no escaping the malfeasance, unless you deny it ever happening in order to return to the life lived before. I cannot deny it. There are people who deserve to die. Life is a sacred thing; I know this. It is something for which no price or value can be placed. A child born is a child worthy of compassion and care, of love and gentle guidance. But there are those that walk among us and put on our skin. I look upon the one that has been revealed to me and I want to cry and to scream and to hurt and to take his face and crack and break it between my fingers until the red runs like a river and splits him like shattered glass. Evil, dark thoughts. Do they make me any better? Do they make me any worse? To repay evil with reactionary hatred; I have heard it called unmerciful, cold, and heartless. But it seems to me more heartless to let it go. When you see the tattered bloody mess, smell the stench of vomit, and hear the wailing, ceaseless cry that never ends because it echoes on and on in your head. The wrongdoing will never pass. It remains, like a stinking wound, whatever civilized recompense is made. No clock turns back to undo it. Nothing can reach into what is past and make it right. That is why I say any forgiveness from my mouth would be a lie. I want and desire just recompense for the crime. I want to be able to return to the comfort of before, I want it to never have happened. Yet, I know this all to be wrong. I know forgiveness to be the higher, righter path, I know that if all took on such a mentality, if we held anger in our hearts at all times for every wrongdoing, we--no, I, would rot and chafe into a beast that cared for nothing but to be unprovoked; I would be seeking only my own desire. But what else do I know? My perspective is finite, my being is chained, kept to one body and one mind. What more do I know beside myself? How can I lift the veil of knowing and see into another, see into the currents of fate and tell what the truest, greatest action to take is in any way? I cannot. I accept this, what I am. I am a being held in hatred, in fury, and I am all denial and opposition towards fate and the works thereof. So I would take justice into my own hand. I would grip its cold, wired handle and raise it high above my head. Let the gauntlet fall. It knocks against wood with a rippling thud beside the beast it targets. That man made no movement but for his eyes. Black, lightless circles scanned over the world with an almost apathetic regarding. The strength that clung to the creature’s body could be witnessed in the bulging that accompanied his movement. The beast stood. And, staring up at him, I saw my sister again. In that moment she was beside me. Her torn dress was held to her body by her hands, but it covered little. She was not sobbing. Tears had long left her cheeks. Bruises coated her body. Blood slaked her legs, dripping onto the wooden floor as she stumbled in. I stand in a field of grass. It stretched out six feet, the markers of wood piercing the ground. The abbot presides over this duel, and he calls out the accuser and the accused. I and my enemy. I cannot find the words to break past my fury, so I splutter at him and he shakes his head at my anger. I am not mad. I insist that I have seen it. That all the village has seen it and knows of his slithering soul. But his status keeps him clean. Fear of royal retribution keeps the town from lynching him like they would anyone else. The beast is given a pointed, shaven club. As for me, a sling. In my veil is cradled a weighty stone, tied twice with a bunching of knots pulled into a rigid ball. The cloth feels thin and weak. It bends and snaps as my hand holds it aloft, twisting around as the lump pulls away from my limited strength. I do not expect much of myself. Tales have been told, true, of women afar, of those ladies in France that have beaten back barbarian threat. They were rewarded status and honor. They were exalted in their society. But that was in France. Here I am given a hole that the man is half-submerged in. Here I stare down a monster thinly veiled in human flesh, and question my convictions. The emotions that drove me before seemed lesser now when the time for action comes. The strength flees from my heart, seeing the beast and knowing what I ought to do. It is odd how cowardice walks hand-in-hand with honesty. The moment I faced the truth of necessity, the moment I recognized my own undeniable desire, creeping up beside it was the want to flee from truth. Like a worm that squirms as the sun casts its light on it, that was the state of my heart as I stared down a greater strength challenged by my own self. Foolish me had sealed her death. In my fear I saw faces familiar among the judges. Worry stretched lines on them and that made me the stronger for it. It swells one with a tingly kind of joy to know one is more than a speck in the eyes of a friend. The courage spurs me to swing the sling, to heft its weight and look for blood. My enemy could not act first, contained by the hole as he was, so I make for him. My steps carry me cautiously in a circular path around him and the sneer alight his face. The pointed club is a foot above his head and it gleams with bloodlust for my throat. Every touch of foot to ground becomes more rigid with the going. Though his stretch of mouth seems to tell me he had no stock in this fight, the sick pleasure in his eyes remind me of the beast that was living inside this human visage. Wildly I swing the stretching fabric for his face, but it impacts nowhere near. The sling swings past his nose and his free hand catches it up. As my weapon swings around his arm, a force follows, sudden and unknown. It carries me down to solidly impact the dirt with a broken cry. There is a pressure on my neck as my blinded, burning head tries to turn the body around. I can feel it deepen, and I am being dragged by my neck towards the beast, scraping across the crumbling ground. My hand has not let go of the sling, and I tug at the curled fabric as my feet crunch into the dirt, propping up a platform to bring me up. The man is lifting up the club with a shine in his eye. I cannot break his hold quick enough, I cannot retrieve my weapon in time as the wood formed to harm slams against my shoulder. The bone gives way, groaning and snapping for impact. I can hear a cry escape my throat; my soul goes numb. The pressure turns easy -- only for an instant. Perhaps the enjoyment of my pain distracts him. I take the chance, and in a curling motion break away. But I do not return the distance -- the sling is still caught to his forearm and I cannot lose this opportunity. I throw myself forward, the inside of my elbow catching around his neck. Knees slide and slip in the dirt, and he writhes under my wrapping but I do not let go. Fingers, meaty and strong, grasp at my arm, scrape at the hand that covers his eyes. He sucks in a breath, shallow against my tight hold. The fingers travel down my arm and find the crushed shoulder. They squeeze with a fury merciless. The pain takes me. I shift towards it and with the veering of my gravity, he maneuvers me, forming my wavering into a sure path down to the edge of the hole where my body lies, held in place by one flat hand as the club rises and falls in heavy blows cratering against the side of my thrashing body. I see his empty eyes in the blur of pain. He tells me to cry for mercy. But though I moan and scream from agony, I will not give that to him. In truth, I would sooner die even now than accept such a monster’s call. Call me proud or call me foolhardy, my cowardice had died with the pain that burns me. Now it is not hate that moves me, that turns my heart numb. I have no name for the emotion. It was a silent cunning with no clear current through my heart. I would have died there, but the man tires of me. He believes I have it my heart already surrendered to his assault. The quicker end to the duel, barring execution, was to pull me in, and that was what he did, his arms wrapping around my stomach, bulging against the sides of my purple, swollen waist. As I felt gravity fall, my hands scraped against his thighs, and then higher before I was submerged into the hole with him. Flesh gave way to my grasping hand, and it I snatched mercilessly, my prodding legs finding new strength, the knees stomping hard against the edge of the curved hole. The sling that I’d never released slipped free of his arm and as my footing came to, I smash it against him, raising the veiled stone high and bringing it down hard. My hand finds its way around his jaw as I scramble for footing and crush his face time and time again, the roar of the crowd behind us egging me on. “Craven,” he cries. Heedless, I crush through to his brain.


</p>

 

[Inmento Riku]

THIS!


OH.MY.GOD!


I loved the writing, the details, and even the story before the story.


My only major criticism is that although it is amazing, and I want more, I almost got lost reading and scrolling because of how it is laid out. Not a big problem but it's there.

 

[QuestingBeast]

Now that's a greater compliment than I feel I deserve. My thanks!


Hmm, I wonder how I could modify the scrolling to make it an easier read... Perhaps indentation per paragraph?

 

[Dusky]

It truly is wonderful. I think the set up isn't very believable, but I'm intrigued and would like to know more about this.

 

[Talon]

I like it alot!¡!¡ Very well written and a good short story. 9/10

 

[Inmento Riku]

Now that's a greater compliment than I feel I deserve. My thanks!
Hmm, I wonder how I could modify the scrolling to make it an easier read... Perhaps indentation per paragraph?

I think that's all it would need, as I didn't notice anything else wrong with it.

 

[SkyGinge]

Your writing has a really nice flow and progression to it - you use varying sentence structures well, and there's none of the clunkiness in connecting sentences and phrases that's so often found in stories like this. It's also wonderfully concise in the opening part especially: here, everything is honed in to the story you're trying to tell, which keeps things nice and focussed and is a particularly valuable skill for a short story writer. There's lots of nice linguistic devices at work to good affect throughout the text too, and several great and impactful one-liners. So stylistically this is on point - well done!


The character voice is, for me, a little peculiar in parts; you have a tendency to mix idioms and choose peculiar forms of sentence structure and wording. For this piece, I think this sometimes works in your favour: it evokes the nice affect of making your character seem exotic and a foreigner. However, it is something you ought to be aware of, as whilst meaning often transcends dodgy wording, it'll still strike readers as odd subconsciously. This gets particularly rough towards the end, where the majority of your sentences read as somewhat dislocated because of unnatural phrasing. I think I understand Immento's comment on scrolling also; your paragraphing is interesting in that an awful lot of your sentences are segregated into their own paragraphs, which you don't need to do. This isolation empowers them, but obviously the affect loses its power if you over-saturate your text with it, as this arguably is (whilst also meaning you have to scroll a lot more than you have to usually!) I would suggest reassessing your paragraphs and joining together several of them, leaving only the statements you want to stand out the most in isolation (I've suggested several places to do this in my analysis). To me, the introduction works as it is, but when you get into the story-within-a-story, that's when it becomes slightly too much, and in addition, you also lose some of the concision and flow of the start at these latter stages.


As for the story itself... I must admit I'm a little torn. The opening sets it up very well, but the proceeding story isn't actually that much of a story. Instead, it begins as the philosophical musings of this woman which, whilst well written, borders very heavily on telling over showing, and does waffle on a little at times. Instead of allowing these opinions of death and whatnot, and this character, to come out through actions and events, they are instead presented through this musing which, whilst it will appeal to some, won't appeal to all because fundamentally, the story aspect is lacking. Therefore it reads impressively, and you do draw some really nice conclusions and reflections in there. The problem for me is these are conclusions that should be being drawn after you've shown us some action which explicates them. Then we have the fight against the dude, but it is given very little context and came off as generally confusing to me.


Below is my in-depth commentary! You should be happy with yourself though - you evidently have a talent for writing.

The Duel
​

Mother, in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, I met a woman. Immediate interesting start and character voice! It's not often you find a historical setting like this in a short story, so I'm immediately intrigued as to where this is going and how you'll use the exotic setting.


I spoke to the woman only yesterday, and she told me a story so intriguing that I thought to share it with you.


She came to me in the pitch of night, and raised such a ruckus at my door that I had to hear her out, and her severe eyes and the fear that carried her on kept my attention. The wording in this line strikes me as a little odd. I'm not sure if 'the pitch of night' is just an idiom I've not encountered before, but otherwise I think you've got mixed up with 'pitch black'. The meaning, semantically, transfers over fine but it did come off as a little discordant to me. I'm interested as to how your character perceives 'the fear


In her German tongue I scribed her story. With sloppy quick strokes I quilled the tale as she told it. Again, I might be wrong, but I think the correct adjective order here is 'quick sloppy strokes' unless you're purposely trying to be a bit discordant (this also sets you up with a nice little bit of semi-alliteration)


She wanted the parchments as soon as I’d finished, and even went so far as to shake her purse of coins in my face, with a fist held back to match.


Yet I stayed her hand with an easy lie. I declared there were words misspelled, illegible. I claimed that the scribing needed to be copied down for some good reader to tell what the tale told. All drivel, as you well know. No shop in this city writes with greater accuracy or more perfect loops than my own. She was skeptical, and her green eyes narrowed at my words, but enough doubt withheld the voicing of thoughts quivering behind her eyes -- she kept back the accusation that I was a cheat.


I took the night to copy the tale for you, in the English tongue that I so miss.


While I am a foreigner here, I have heard of the strange customs that they use to uncover truth. They call it Stradtrech. This is a trial by might. For, they say, whoever overcomes in battle is God’s chosen. Uncivilized though it be, I have seen for myself the result of this. The weak have overcome the strong in the most unpredictable of manner. And in some cases, mercy has been shown. By crying out “Craven”, a man might be spared. But only to a life that has no merit -- for any murderer or seeker of justice may lawfully slay him at any time. Somewhat peculiar past tense in some of the middle lines here - it works decently at the moment, but to my eyes a little clunkily and could easily be replaced with present tense given you start the paragraph with 'this is a trial by might'. At the moment, in this semi-past-tense state, it feels to me as if you are dislocating the events of the Stradtrech somewhat whereas fixing the the sentences as follows would make them come to life: 'The week overcome the strong in the most unpredictable of manner. And in some cases, mercy is shown.'


Now on to the story, mother. I have taken cares to modify their barbaric tongue so that it may appear in more comprehensible format. The correct expression is 'taken care'.

Fear permeates more often than the arousal of justice. Rare is the man so foolish as to brashly take on forces greater than he. A life is not so commonly risked. The first sentence here is a little hard to untangle; again, I think I get what you're trying to say but it reads as if you've just chosen impressive sounding vocabulary without actually unpiecing each part of it. Given this is quite a notable statement on the nature of fear and justice, I think it would do better presented a bit more simply. You don't need the definitive 'the' in 'the man'; it should either be 'a man', or just 'man.


Indeed, I know not of your country or its ways, but in mine the lives on the outskirts of the town that are cut short or beaten down -- those are lives that entertain. The slow call of death mesmerizes the eyes of the clumping crowds, spreads the bloodthirsty smiles, and curls the laughter of their stomachs. Nice use of three at the end here - again, particularly good flow here.


I was among them. I was born one of them.


There is not much beyond the campfire, the mead, and the toil of our hands to live by.


And I was content in my ignorance. I devoured the refuse I was fed because that was the easier path. The comfort of peace and safety was too great a prize for my gluttonous mind to deny, and I was too much a coward to allow the niggling, isolated thoughts fair representation. 'I devoured the refuse I was fed' simply doesn't make sense, as refuse is a verb, not a noun. You can't eat a 'refuse' because to refuse is an action, not a thing. However, I do like the metaphor you were attempting.


But, though it was not something that happened unto all, there are times when such contained lifestyles lose the peace that makes them bearable. In regards to the paragraphing issue, I would join this line to the two paragraphs before it; they're all talking on the same subject.


Those times, when a wrong so horrid and so inexcusable transgresses to such extent that there is no escaping the malfeasance, unless you deny it ever happening in order to return to the life lived before. Perhaps a little picky, but 'a wrong' is clunky wording, and isn't a natural word choice for this sentence. The sense of wrongness is conveyed in 'so horrid and so inexcusable', so I'd replace it with a friendliar 'when something'.


I cannot deny it.


There are people who deserve to die.


Life is a sacred thing; I know this. It is something for which no price or value can be placed. A child born is a child worthy of compassion and care, of love and gentle guidance.


But there are those that walk among us and put on our skin. I look upon the one that has been revealed to me and I want to cry and to scream and to hurt and to take his face and crack and break it between my fingers until the red runs like a river and splits him like shattered glass.


Evil, dark thoughts. All of these last five sentences should be connected to the line starting 'Those times' in a single paragraph: again, they are all talking about the same subject so should be linked, and again splitting them up at the moment is just making reading the text very bitty, forcing us to pause unnaturally between each and every line, and destroying the power this effect can have. The sentences themselves are great.


Do they make me any better? Do they make me any worse?


To repay evil with reactionary hatred; I have heard it called unmerciful, cold, and heartless. But it seems to me more heartless to let it go. When you see the tattered bloody mess, smell the stench of vomit, and hear the wailing, ceaseless cry that never ends because it echoes on and on in your head. The wrongdoing will never pass. It remains, like a stinking wound, whatever civilized recompense is made. No clock turns back to undo it. Nothing can reach into what is past and make it right. At this stage, this isn't really a story within the story, but more of a woman making well-worded philosophical statements. Whilst it is eloquent, this is bordering on telling, not showing. The third sentence here is incomplete. The last sentence mixes phrases - you should either be saying 'Nothing can reach into the past and make it right' or 'Nothing can change what has past to make it right' (I think the former is superior and what you were going for).


That is why I say any forgiveness from my mouth would be a lie. I want and desire just recompense for the crime. I want to be able to return to the comfort of before, I want it to never have happened. Yet, I know this all to be wrong. I know forgiveness to be the higher, righter path, I know that if all took on such a mentality, if we held anger in our hearts at all times for every wrongdoing, we--no, I, would rot and chafe into a beast that cared for nothing but to be unprovoked; I would be seeking only my own desire. Again, this paragraph I feel should be connected to the previous one.


But what else do I know? My perspective is finite, my being is chained, kept to one body and one mind. What more do I know beside myself? How can I lift the veil of knowing and see into another, see into the currents of fate and tell what the truest, greatest action to take is in any way?


I cannot. I accept this, what I am. I am a being held in hatred, in fury, and I am all denial and opposition towards fate and the works thereof.


So I would take justice into my own hand. I would grip its cold, wired handle and raise it high above my head.


Let the gauntlet fall. For paragraphing, I would attach this, the following and the previous line to the line beginning 'I cannot'.


It knocks against wood with a rippling thud beside the beast it targets. Wording here is somewhat suspect: you've just changed tenses from a suppository future tense to the definitive present tense, and from the last line, it's difficult to understand how the gauntlet was targeting anyone.


That man made no movement but for his eyes. Black, lightless circles scanned over the world with an almost apathetic regarding. The strength that clung to the creature’s body could be witnessed in the bulging that accompanied his movement. The beast stood. Why is it only 'almost apathetic'? Why do you need the almost? Be wary of needless ambiguations (which isn't a word but should be ). Strength clinging to the creature's body is an interesting image too, suggests a kind of externalised force as opposed to power welling from within.


And, staring up at him, I saw my sister again. In that moment she was beside me. Her torn dress was held to her body by her hands, but it covered little. She was not sobbing. Tears had long left her cheeks. Bruises coated her body. Blood slaked her legs, dripping onto the wooden floor as she stumbled in. This has suddenly gotten very meta 0.o


I stand in a field of grass. It stretched out six feet, the markers of wood piercing the ground. The abbot presides over this duel, and he calls out the accuser and the accused. I and my enemy. The frame narrative is clashing with this story in the middle, I think. It's difficult to imagine someone writing home to tell of a story which is essentially the philosophical, metaphysical musings of some random women - it would seem more natural is this middle story were more concrete.


I cannot find the words to break past my fury, so I splutter at him and he shakes his head at my anger. I am not mad. I insist that I have seen it. That all the village has seen it and knows of his slithering soul.


But his status keeps him clean. Fear of royal retribution keeps the town from lynching him like they would anyone else. Paragraphing: attach these two lines to the paragraph beginning 'I stand'.


The beast is given a pointed, shaven club.


As for me, a sling. In my veil is cradled a weighty stone, tied twice with a bunching of knots pulled into a rigid ball. Attach these two lines!


The cloth feels thin and weak. It bends and snaps as my hand holds it aloft, twisting around as the lump pulls away from my limited strength. I do not expect much of myself. Tales have been told, true, of women afar, of those ladies in France that have beaten back barbarian threat. They were rewarded status and honor. They were exalted in their society. But that was in France. Here I am given a hole that the man is half-submerged in. Here I stare down a monster thinly veiled in human flesh, and question my convictions. The emotions that drove me before seemed lesser now when the time for action comes. The strength flees from my heart, seeing the beast and knowing what I ought to do. It is odd how cowardice walks hand-in-hand with honesty. The moment I faced the truth of necessity, the moment I recognized my own undeniable desire, creeping up beside it was the want to flee from truth. Like a worm that squirms as the sun casts its light on it, that was the state of my heart as I stared down a greater strength challenged by my own self. Foolish me had sealed her death. 'limited strength' is peculiar wording. Consider this context in every day life: would you really say 'My limited strength' or something a little more natural in terms of describing weakness? Love the line on cowardice!


In my fear I saw faces familiar among the judges. Worry stretched lines on them and that made me the stronger for it. 'familiar faces' is the natural order, not 'faces familiar'.


It swells one with a tingly kind of joy to know one is more than a speck in the eyes of a friend. The courage spurs me to swing the sling, to heft its weight and look for blood. The start of the first sentence here strikes me as odd, though I can't quite put my finger on it.


My enemy could not act first, contained by the hole as he was, so I make for him. My steps carry me cautiously in a circular path around him and the sneer alight his face. The pointed club is a foot above his head and it gleams with bloodlust for my throat. Again, 'in a circular path' is a needlessly elaborate and clinical description.


Every touch of foot to ground becomes more rigid with the going. Though his stretch of mouth seems to tell me he had no stock in this fight, the sick pleasure in his eyes remind me of the beast that was living inside this human visage. Couple of typos here: generally, wording has become a little more clunky towards this latter half, which makes me think it might just be an issue of proofreading and that you could potentially have picked up on some of these later things on your own. I'd connect these last two lines to the line beginning 'It swells'.


Wildly I swing the stretching fabric for his face, but it impacts nowhere near. The sling swings past his nose and his free hand catches it up. As my weapon swings around his arm, a force follows, sudden and unknown. It carries me down to solidly impact the dirt with a broken cry.


There is a pressure on my neck as my blinded, burning head tries to turn the body around. I can feel it deepen, and I am being dragged by my neck towards the beast, scraping across the crumbling ground. My hand has not let go of the sling, and I tug at the curled fabric as my feet crunch into the dirt, propping up a platform to bring me up. The man is lifting up the club with a shine in his eye. I cannot break his hold quick enough, I cannot retrieve my weapon in time as the wood formed to harm slams against my shoulder. The bone gives way, groaning and snapping for impact. I can hear a cry escape my throat; my soul goes numb. Wording generally has become generally clunky over these last few paragraphs: try reading it aloud, and really question whether your expression is natural or not. I can retrace it and point out my issues with them if you wish, but for now I think it's best you look over it yourself.


The pressure turns easy -- only for an instant. Perhaps the enjoyment of my pain distracts him. I take the chance, and in a curling motion break away. But I do not return the distance -- the sling is still caught to his forearm and I cannot lose this opportunity.


I throw myself forward, the inside of my elbow catching around his neck. Knees slide and slip in the dirt, and he writhes under my wrapping but I do not let go. Fingers, meaty and strong, grasp at my arm, scrape at the hand that covers his eyes. He sucks in a breath, shallow against my tight hold. The fingers travel down my arm and find the crushed shoulder. They squeeze with a fury merciless.


The pain takes me. I shift towards it and with the veering of my gravity, he maneuvers me, forming my wavering into a sure path down to the edge of the hole where my body lies, held in place by one flat hand as the club rises and falls in heavy blows cratering against the side of my thrashing body.


I see his empty eyes in the blur of pain. He tells me to cry for mercy. But though I moan and scream from agony, I will not give that to him. In truth, I would sooner die even now than accept such a monster’s call. Call me proud or call me foolhardy, my cowardice had died with the pain that burns me. Now it is not hate that moves me, that turns my heart numb.


I have no name for the emotion. It was a silent cunning with no clear current through my heart.


I would have died there, but the man tires of me. He believes I have it my heart already surrendered to his assault.


The quicker end to the duel, barring execution, was to pull me in, and that was what he did, his arms wrapping around my stomach, bulging against the sides of my purple, swollen waist. As I felt gravity fall, my hands scraped against his thighs, and then higher before I was submerged into the hole with him. Flesh gave way to my grasping hand, and it I snatched mercilessly, my prodding legs finding new strength, the knees stomping hard against the edge of the curved hole. The sling that I’d never released slipped free of his arm and as my footing came to, I smash it against him, raising the veiled stone high and bringing it down hard. My hand finds its way around his jaw as I scramble for footing and crush his face time and time again, the roar of the crowd behind us egging me on.


“Craven,” he cries.


Heedless, I crush through to his brain. Interesting end, though I still fail to see what in this story enticed the Englishman to write to his mother about it.