Hatred and Joy for life both.

Two days since she left the warm embrace of her home. Her blood sticks to the inside of her mouth after the fight with the first beast, something that tore through glass and stone in pursuit of hunger. They push to the garrison as the lights of the city flicker against the setting sun, and enemies soar through the sky hellbent on taking them. The nuclear paladin of Solvesian renown glows radiant in the sky in battle for them, and in brief thoughts she wonders if she could have done the same, if stayed on the path. But the thoughts return and bring the taste of bile and hatred both, she pushes them down to focus on the task.
 
Tactical thought comes easily, the consequences on her mind and body come later, to use one of them as bait to cull the herd, to cut the head off this snake. Briefly though, she sees her face in the reflection of the garrison's windows as the light fades, brief flashes of guilt, fear, and the horrid feeling of futility. She imagines more beasts flying through the sky, burning her home, her people to the ground.
 
Compartmentalize, the voice of her paladin master says in the confines of her mind, focus on what matters now.
 
She wishes she could have saved Shiro. Life is sacred. There is so much blood and killing in the war to come. Her thoughts go back to the garden outside the Brightworth manor, how properly trimmed, neat, as it was. Imagines how swiftly it was torn down, the flowers pulled from root. What is preferred, the gentle hand of the gardener, or the cold blade of the tool killing all at once?
 
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The scouting party's captain lays on the ground, claws dug razor sharp into his back, the smell of sulfur and acrid dust rises in the air from the residue of eldritch magic. Her arms, first the ones glowing of force in the strength of her spirit, flip him over so that the fear of his eyes could meet hers, the hatred one could truly feel for another.
 
Her hands, the ones of blood and flesh, and anger, wrap around the coils of muscle of his throat. They squeeze and strangle. The others pound on the sides of his face like a drum, like the beating of her heart in her ears. Thump. Thump. Thump.
Those poisonous thoughts rise in her again, her oath, not to redemption and the life this one could have lived, but to vengeance, to the lives lost from this one alone.
 
Life is sacred. Life is sacred.
 
Your life, her voice says in the pits of her mind as the light leaves his eyes, is forfeit.
 
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She wants to look anywhere else, to banish the thoughts of what shes seen to the depths of the astral planes for something to eat and then despair.
 
Grafting, the act of adding that of one to another, in agricultural practice it is done to bear fruit from one tree to the growth and burden of another. She tries to compartmentalize again, tries to detach the thought of ripe fruit from the putrid sight of a man defiled, in pain. She turns to the new blood, Desmond, and tells him to find help, to find anyone, because in the desperate pleas of her mind she must do something, to have someone help her, join her in her agony. His flash of obedience is the only thing to impress her, and wonders if given the chance like him, in her life if she would have chosen this life. To have gone and learned in an academy only to witness horror unending in the brief time of the truth of this world.
 
She so desperately wants to share his determination, but can only find her hands grasping and un-grasping at her sides in quiet shock and desperation to reach out and comfort the dying man in front of them. She wants to hold his hand, to tell him he would be okay, even if it was a lie for herself, wanted to hold her teammates so that they might ground themselves and know comfort in the shared trauma of being together. But she doesn't.
 
Her training takes its bitter, horrid hold. He needs to live. Life is sacred.
 
They needed to know, anything, please, anything. Or else, he would be far, far from the last.
 
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She reads the signature at the bottom of the letter, its inky outline framed by the charred bits of browned, burnt paper, "Oleander" it says. When she can finally tear her eyes away she looks at her companion, a face she has felt a silent unity with as their travels have taken them between countries, duchies, and kingdoms. Thinks about how the writing couldn't possibly be hers, in brief flashes imagines parents, an older gentlemen with the same uncommon paths of thinking, a woman with more maturity but the same headstrong sense of progress.
 
She thinks of the flower, the Oleander and what it means, the colors for peace, friendship, health. Their petals flowing in the wind, plucked off from the head in a vibrant hue of yellows and pinks.
 
She thinks of stems in bunches. The sticky, bloody, thoughts rise again, and her last thoughts are of stems, green and vibrant.
 
The gardener's hands push forward and wrap around them like the neck of life, and in equal parts squeezing and snapping, breaks them in two.
 
Oh, she thinks, what our blood can do.