Some are simply born for war.
Not by any curse or blessing. Not by any sin of their forefathers’. Not by any means that elven or human hands can wreak. Some are born bathed in blood screaming their cries of battle from their start; mothers weep for lives that are from the beginning bound to doom. Their tiny fists shake and the room trembles before them in awed silence. Fathers watch on with furrowed brows as a name falls from their lips; a fate foresworn unto them that one day it will be hailed in victory or defeat.
Some raise themselves up to stand on the hilts of blades too large for their hands. The first taste upon their tongues is blood from biting back their words, and the only instrument they learn how to play is in the archaic art of making a sword sing as it performs the delicate arc of demise.
She darkened her eyes with the ash of the very pyre they tried to burn her on. Her shadow fell upon those who could not compete with her taste for battle. Her blade could split the sky like lightning when she struck in a dazzling display of blood and the macabre; her shield would buckle under the weight of her foes and it would not splinter. Her legs would buckle under the weight of her foes, and they would not splinter.
There were some, however, who were not born for war. Who fell in the long shadow of those who lives were destined to become weaved into ruin and tapestry; there they withered into the nameless, the gaunt, the forgotten. Their hands were tainted with blood they could not wash away. They were thrust into a destiny that left them staring into the eyes of crows who cry for murder, murder as their foul beaks tear into the flesh of that who was once a friend.
He fell behind her long shadow; he tried to build himself as a savior, a saint; and knew not that he would be captured by the hands of the heretic, by the pagan. His trembling hands thrust a spear into the air and could only hope it would make contact with flesh.
She could put the fear of the divine into anyone.
“Pick a Vala,” she would say, “and pray.”
