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