Anubis

Redemption

In each of our lives comes the day of redemption. It's not always obvious, not always rearing its welcome, but usually ugly head when you need it. No, often when you least crave it does it present itself. Healing and coming-to-terms usually precedes mended bridges and clearing deeds. It's probably best that way, making it easier to suck up your pride, because redemption has to come from you. You have to accept it and work for it. I understood this, so when mine came, I was apprehensive. But it was too glorious, too tantalizing to ignore.

It came in the form of a different rotation of nightly guards.  I was particularly agitated, and the guards hands shook with inexperience while administering my nightly dose of sedatives. He hit a nerve, and suddenly I was raging. All I knew was he was on the floor, my elbow driven into his throat when my sedatives kicked in. Security had been called, it seemed, and I was being strapped to a board by ten or twenty people as I sleepily fought them. I was injected with a paralytic when I almost ripped through its restraints, then completely sedated. The last coherent thought I had was that I was finally too dangerous for them to handle. Too much of a loose cannon, and they were getting rid of me.

Good.

I woke to find myself in a musty warehouse lit only by only a single, uncovered lightbulb. Its wires were exposed and it flickered. Leather straps held me to a metal chair at my wrist and ankles, and around my torso was a thick chain. It burned with cold.

Why would they hold me like this? It would be easier to just take me out and erase my existence.

They wouldn't. Someone else had me. I couldn't be released, I would hurt too many people.

I screamed and thrashed, and a tear formed in the restraint in the cuff on my right ankle.

A low whistle sounded from the dark and I heard hushed voices whispering about how I was exactly what they had suspected. A savage.

My face was suddenly grabbed, and brown eyes stared down into my soul.

He whispered about how I was no monster, only a survivor. I quieted, my mind screaming about how wrong he was. That I should be executed and left to rot, but something inside me wanted to believe him. So exquisitely, in fact, that it forced me to listen to everything he told me.

He spoke  about an insurgency called the Black Phoenix. How they were planning on destroying the government, ending the torment to people like me and their families. He whispered plots and schemes so perfect my combat-driven mind weeped for his intellect. They just needed me as their destroyer, their brawn to his brains.

It was all so beautiful, and I didn't care about the cost to me.