corpseknight | Year 2: Blind

It started to rain as Auroran walked away with his eyes, the sounds of the priest's crying dissolving into the plash of raindrops hitting the waves.

The boardwalk overhead wasn't watertight and afforded ill protection from the wet. Drops rancid with dust and the day's refuse pattered against his skull, washed the sea-salt from his hair, trickled down his ears and the back of his neck and curves of his battered face. It stung where it seeped into the Light-burns, igniting anew the pain of ruined flesh trying to knit itself back together only to fall apart again. Some of it began to pool where his eyes had been and this wasn't nearly so painful, just strange and unwelcome.

He tried to blink, as futile and stupid a reflex as breathing.

It was so dark.

A moth refolded its wings with a velveteen rustle in the dry haven beneath his discarded breastplate. Around him a thousand raindrops raced toward the sea, each dribbling and dropping and plinking along its own path in a fluid cacophony. Across the bay a captain yelled at his clumsy deckhand; in the rooms above, a pimp at his clumsy whore; somewhere, a woman dropped her last precious teacup and burst into tears over the pathetic wreckage. Metal ground against metal as he shifted his bound hands enough to pull Terminus Est closer to him and lay his face against her haft, skin-covered bone against leather-wrapped metal.

He could taste the monstrous remains of himself bound into the runeblade. Fever and fear and righteous indignation of the unsleeping paladin in the apartment above trickled down with the rain. There were goblin-smells, living-smells, jungle-smells saturating the air besides: Blood and breath and sex and food, heartbeats and viscera, green and growing things.

He should have gotten up. He had his 'blade and his wits and needed nothing more to free himself. There was no reason to linger and wait for the Kamil to take a second blood-price and drive a blade between his unprotected shoulders.

It was so dark.

Now there were no colors, no glimpses of motion at the edge of vision. No familiar smears of red and black, smelling like Krenyn or smelling like Kae. No blue--green--when, if, ifwhen he could bring himself to stand in Merosiel's presence again.

'Sorry,' he had said to Auroran, 'sorry, sorry, sorry,' an avalanche of apologies, piling on each other; once he'd begun he found he couldn't stop his traitor tongue from spilling the words. 'Sorry,' as if it could be an anodyne for the terrible scent of grief and shock the priest wore like a dead woman's blood ingrained into his slept-in clothing. 'Sorry,' even after the deed was done, and Auroran wasn't the one losing the eyes.

At least he wasn't so stupid as to say what he was sorry for; the awful, evil trick that they had played. It was wrong and nothing would convince him otherwise. Nothing would convince him it wasn't necessary, either, not when the paladin denied outright ever harming Merosiel in his madness and his bitch-jailor smelled of glee at the news and spoke of whores and objects.

He had told Auroran to smile. Be magnanimous in victory. The priest enjoyed exacting his blood-price; it came as no surprise, though, that all Merosiel's friends were predators.

Even maimed, stupid predators who would likely be dead by morning.

(He had promised Krenyn he would be alive when Krenyn found him.)

If he would know when morning came, robbed of light.

(Krenyn would surely be here before morning.)