benlehman

My first and hopefully only work of fanfic.


He did not reach for the knife, black and befouled, that hung at his belt. She looked at him, puzzled, for a moment, and held her strike.

He smiled at her, apologetic and almost shy. "We both know that you're going to kill me, Shear, and we certainly both know that I deserve the death. More than death."

"You're speaking to the wrong sort of priest if you expect to distract me with talk of Justice, blasphemer!" she announced, loudly. As if she was proving it to herself, he noticed, and knew in that moment that she was as good as his.

He shrugged, his great fat shoulders rolling under the black robe. "I don't expect to avoid your blade, m'lady nor, frankly, would I wish to. The world will be a better place for my passing. But, if I am about to die, I might as well spend the last seconds talking with a pretty girl, and not floundering about like a worm out of the soil. Wouldn't you agree?"

She shuddered as he called her pretty. His words were like a foul, rotten oil, and she desperately wanted a bath. Still, though, she held her sword. Something in her heart would not let her kill so helpless a monster. "You're a calm one," she said.

"Do I look it? Don't let appearances deceive you, m'lady Shear. I assure you that I am appropriately terrified. In fact, you are the most fearful thing my eyes have ever seen, and I would kneel and prayer to my lord for salvation if I didn't think that you'd cut off my head before his name ever got out of my mouth."

She smiled at that, very briefly. He noted it, and added an observation: "It's always that way with humanity -- fear and faith are intertwined. The nature of sacrif..."

She slashed out with her sword, then, and pierced him halfway to his heart. He did not even shriek, although tears ran down his cheeks from the pain. "Do not even begin to speak of faith, you beast! What do you know of faith? What can you say of sacrifice?"

"Kill me if you must, m'lady," he said, "but do not belittle my sacrifices. For the sake of my lord's cause I have turned myself from a good man into a terror. I have killed my kin, and the girl who I most loved. I have rent open friend's faces with my very hands! Destroyed lives, crushed hopes, left dreary misery where once was joy. Do you think that I enjoyed this? I have given up all that makes me man for the salvation of our kind. You must kill me, and it is my place to be killed, but at least show respect for my sacrifice! My faith!"

Something in his litany of sacrifices jarred her, and she remember her brother, her mother, the town that she would, sworn to Letar, never see again. It was unconscionable, this similarity. She thrust the sword deeper into him. His eyes widened in pain, and his blood crackled and popped from her red hot anger.

He looked into her eyes, saw her recognition, and spoke, "Yes. Within everyone of us, there is a rot, for we are imperfect. Without Genti's form, how can we know that rot? Without my work, how would men know honor and forthrightness?

"I, too, have given myself for humanity's sake. Give me that dignity, Lady Shear."

She pulled out her sword, and stared at him, horrified. His boiled heart beat once, slowly and, even as she turned the sword on her hand to pay the price of his healing, his eyes glazed over with the marks of death.

She fell to her knees and cradled his fat bulk in her arms, sobbing into it. She had killed the one man who would have understood her. And now, there was nothing left but to give him proper rites. "Oh, Letar..." she began through the tears, but could not bring herself to continue for a long time.