Bloodtoil
M | 2017 words | First Age
[hell] cont.;/contra [self]
Live, kill, die, live again. Sunset, sunrise; ash on the wind, in the eyes, in the mouth; dead earth, dead skies. Dead bodies, animal and man. Milestones burnt to black; dead futures maggot-seeded, conceived to be strangled at the hour of their birth, not infanticide, the potential to grow old never existed. Ruins, not quite ruins, artefacts of abandonment. Days and nights indistinguishable, distinctions and demarcations meaningless; darkness overhead (starless skies), darkness overhead (stormclouds, infertile), darkness underfoot (grass charred to the root), darkness underfoot (a not-grave), darkness between the hands (indelible residues), darkness between the hands (inevitable blasphemies), darkness between the hands (simple human nature), darkness behind the eyelids. It has been fifteen years. The new Anfaucalitsë is a kind of hell. Hell like-- Live, kill, die, live again. Skirmishers, unburied bodies. Swords never stay unslaked. We eat dried horse meat and drink milk cut with blood. Flesh rots slowly under sunless skies; polluted runoff turns red at the foot of another slaughter-scene, then brown downstream. Scavengers glut themselves or die starving. Angamando haemorrhages slag and smog. The periphery is grey from east to west, and cold as ice come nightfall. Live, kill, die, live again. Offal tastes spoiled. Hearts are hard to chew. Killing is not a habit of valour. Live, kill, die, live again. We lie together on narrow cots. I ask him if this is what being dead will be like. He doesn’t answer because he doesn’t know. I don’t sleep that night. Live, kill, die, live again. Penance promises absolution (we have done nothing that demands forgiveness) and excoriation indurates the self (we are already more swords than we are men); this place offers neither.
We encounter a supply convoy shortly before dawn. We slaughter them to a one, gut the captain from sternum to cock, and nail the carcass hand and mouth to a dead tree. It is the only dead tree for miles around. We set fire to the carts and toss the rest of the bodies into the water; let it run foul for foul men. It will not dissuade the orcs, but it may kill some, and history cherishes the corpse.
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