Blood

Chapter One: It Ends In Fire

"This is the way of the world boy" Callahans father said "Pain makes us bleed, the blood forges us into iron, and we all end in fire" it was the first time Callahan had heard his father speak in the days since his mother passed. As they stood together in front of the funeral pyre Callahan observed his father closely as he spoke, silent tears running down his weathered cheeks. Callahan wouldn't cry though, his mother made him promise he wouldn't weep for her in her final hours alive, and he intended to keep that promise despite the empty pit he felt in his stomach. Two years ago his grandmother and grandfather had passed, Callahan helped his father build their pyres too. Barely a man at the age of 13 and he had already experienced loss and understood death. He didn't know why those men had broken in and killed his mother, but he could sense his father blamed himself. The distance and silence between them had grown, and it stung like the thorns on a rosebuds sting your hands if you reach too quickly. He reach up and put a hand on his father's shoulder as a final display from a son to a father. In the months that followed Callahan was treated less like a son and more like a worker in his father's fields. Each morning he was sent out to dig for something, the reason for which he knew not, his father would sit on the porch with a shotgun across his knees and a whip around his shoulders, and while his father had never struck him before, Callahan feared to be on the end of that whip. For three-hundred and sixty-five days he dug until his father's field which previously was filled with rows and rows of crops was now nothing more than craters. After a year of digging a day came where Callahan wasn't woken in the morning by his father telling him it was time to work, but instead he woke to the sound of a gunshot emanating from the front porch, he rushed out of bed, into his boots, and out the door. There stood his father, shotgun still smoking in his hands, standing against a gang of six, no, seven men. His shot had fired off wide not harming anyone. The man standing at the head of this gang of mysterious attackers laughed at Callahans father "Oh William, that was pathetic, I told you I would return in one year and now here I am" he put his hand on the revolver hanging off his waist "Do you have what I asked for" Callahans father shook his head as an answer and dropped his gun at his feet. His chin was held high, the knowledge he would die soon was apparent but the choice to die on his feet instead of on his knees was as well. Callahan stood paralyzed at the front door as he watched his father fall to the ground dead. The man who shot him shouted at him "Maybe you'll learn faster than he will. Find what I asked for or die. You have one year" Callahan couldn't move. He was terrified, but still he did not, would not, cry. As the gang left he steeled himself, he knew what he had to do in a year from this day, and he knew he couldn't let them get away with this.