Kiana, an Interlude

Her first thought, when her wings are away and the adrenaline burnt up, is that fighting is so much bloodier than she thought. Logically, she always understood that if you cut something, it bled. But none of the histories or the stories talk about the smell of it; of the blood and the gore, the sweat mingling with the smell of death. It was enough that she had to beat back a wave of nausea as she took a deep breath, before looking at her… handy work.

The first kill wasn’t so bad: straight through the heart, like she was taught. Quick, painless, and overall, not so gory. The second kill…

Her javelin had gone straight through his neck: that much, she had seen. But the explosion of divine energy after the fact had completely decimated the man’s head. When she picked up his body, she had seen bits of bone and grey gore strewn in the snow, and seeing the headless body laying next to its compatriot was unsettling, to say the least.

She hadn’t meant to react so violently. She tried to be methodical about the whole fight: she was simply defending her and Kura. But when she heard the whizzing of a bolt, followed by a hiss of pain from Kura, she felt that all too familiar white rage start to bleed into her bones. Before she knew what was happening, she had launched the javelin, and… Well…  

She quickly gets to work, putting thoughts of the fight off until later, when she has more time to think. The whole process is quick, mechanical: gathering and piling wood, and a quick prayer to Asona. After a quick rest, they are back on the road, giving her plenty of time with her thoughts. Though not her first kills, these men seemed somehow more… real, when compared to the xvarth in the caves. Those had seemed barely human, and their lives had been on the line the whole time. This was just ordinary men, with ordinary lives, and now they were dead. Because of her.

In all her training, all the drills and workouts and spars, it had somehow never occurred to her that she would eventually be taking all these skills out into the world to do harm. She is supposed to be a protector, a shield: when, exactly, had she become a killer? Is this what she had always been destined for? Nothing more than a well-trained attack dog for the church?

She shakes her head, trying to toss the thoughts from her mind. No, that’s a stupid thought. She had been protecting; she was protecting Kura, and she had helped that man with the cart. What the bandits had been doing was wrong, and even if they hadn’t deserved to die, it wasn’t like she could just let them attack without defending herself. Gabriela and the church wouldn’t lie, and they wouldn’t have spent all this time on her just so she could mete out violence into the world. They wouldn’t.

She takes a steadying breath, and looks at Kura, walking ahead of her. The sight of him there, safe, relatively unharmed, calms her. If no one else, she can trust Kura; Kura would tell her if she had been out of line. He wasn’t looking at her any differently, wasn’t treating her differently than normal, other than giving her space to think. Surely, if what she had done had been so terrible, so out of line, he would say something.

She resolves to do better next time, regardless. It wouldn’t do her any good to continue to lose her temper, in a fight or outside of one. Ever since the… Finger Incident, she had promised herself that she would never lose control so completely again. It still chills her to think about how much she didn’t remember from that day; coming to, surrounded by blood and pain, a small part of her enjoying it. That wasn’t her. And so long as she kept that anger, that white hot rage in check, it wouldn’t be her ever again.