No Good Men: Volume One

Chapter X: A Lonely Path

Denmo Basin, Askarai

One would never understand. The true pain felt when you choose to abandon your people. Not just the emotional burden of leaving behind hundreds, no, thousands of souls to a life of cruelty and unforgiving obedience. The untold physical burden that well, I rightfully endured.

Their blood painted the water red all around me, tainting my cowardice with their holy sacrifice. The iron flakes of a soldier's splintered armor and sword splicing the skin all over my weakened body.

Was I a liar? An enemy? A coward? If you were there and you saw me then yes, I would have been all of those things on that fateful day. But you weren't there. My people were slaughtered like animals. It was a nightmare, and I made a choice.

Life has a cruel way of punishing us for our sins, and it seems that my punishment is long overdue. If I had any respect for those killed there, I would be dead. Yet I find myself waking up in a cold sweat every morning. Traveling every day from village to village, in hopes to-

Wearing a set of dirty tan rags, a frail man looks up from his notebook and sighs, "I don't know."

A short layer of black hair sits atop his head, discolored and dirty from the harsh elements of the drylands in Askarai. The man sits up against a small hut with an overhang made of straw and loose branches suspended above the front on two bamboo stilts. He scratches his thin and raggedy beard, before tossing his white feathered quill into a small brown sack laid beside him.

The man gently fits a cork into the snug opening of a small inkwell sitting between his stretched legs and places it into the sack before taking one final look at his words and whispering, "how can I still not know?"

Frustrated, he slips the notebook into the sack and tugs at two pieces of rope around the lip of the bag, closing it shut. He lays his head back against the wall of a small hut and looks up at the cloudy sky above. Sitting atop a lonely hill, the building is a modest structure of clay and straw, surrounded by a field of tall brown and yellow grass with only the occasional tree sprouting above the land.

The man stands up and walks into the open doorway of the hut. A burning candle sits on a decorative handle in the wall right beside where the man entered the building. Across from the flame, a table lies before a lone window overlooking the rolling hills to the north and the brewing storm darkening the sky.

The man takes his sack and throws it on the rickety table. He then slides a wooden barrel no taller than his knees out from underneath the table and lifts the lip off of the top. Less than a handful of dried rice and a bottle of unopened mead remain at the bottom. The man reaches down and cups the rice with his left hand, scraping against the barrel as he salvages as much of it as possible before dumping it into a black pot sitting on the floor beside a mound of charred wood on the right hand side of the hut.

He lifts up a wooden pail filled halfway with water sitting underneath the candle, and he gently pours some of the water into the pot of dried rice before taking a few gulps and quenching his thirst. The man places the pail back by the doorway, and walks back to the table before reaching over it for a few pieces of flint on the window sill. He takes a small piece, crouches down by the charred wood, and places it next to a small knife leaning up against the wood before pausing at the faint sound of a horses' neigh.

The man stands up, and slowly turns back to the window facing the hills. A light rain showers the land, forming a blanket of fog and haze outside. He cautiously steps over towards the window, and leans over the table to get a better look. A pair of torches flicker from the base of the hills and quickly grow brighter as they approach the hut.