Chaos

一
Even in that ancient time the light had long since been separated from the darkness. On a night without moon or stars, shadows were cast through the hearts of three farmers who stood strong and frightened around the form of a young woman. She lay beaten and scarred from a life of pain lived long before these men had chased her down a black road. Rain poured down like the blessings of demons washing away all sound and sin so that the woman, though scared and desperate, didn't bother to yell for help knowing it would flow away with the mud in the street.

The men were angry at everything that had led them here. None dared look at each other nor peer into the woman's wet eyes. They had spent their lives working other people's land for too little money so that they could not afford a woman in the brothels let alone a wife, or a family. Not one moment had they been free men to have what they wanted and do as they pleased, instead they struggled to grow food for a rich man on the outskirts of a city where only the beggars were below them. Here now they seethed with power in the mistaken illusion that they would finally be able to take whatever they wanted. But as they stood over the young woman a figure approached from behind. A man wielding a gnarled sword so gently and quickly that none of the attackers knew he was there. Not one lived long enough to hear his neighbor hit the ground, to feel his own blood pour into the rain.

With the bodies of her attackers red and brown at her feet the woman now looked up at the man who stood in their place. His face showed nothing but contempt for her cowering in torn rags. He held his sword in perfect stillness so that rain drops rang notes and flowed off it's tip. He was covered in leather and heavy cloth with a mail shirt formed from metal plates that fit into each other like the skin of a snake that needed to shed. His hair stood against the rain and was wild reaching in all directions like fire. His scarred and beaten face looked like old meat from the market thrown away by undiscerning butchers.

After a time the man sheathed his sword, leaving her in the sopping earth as he returned to the road and continued on to the great gates of the city.

The woman stood now and stepping over drained bodies to follow her hero. As she got to the road she looked in both directions. To the right, in the direction the man had taken, lay the gates through which she'd only just escaped, the city she had lived in her whole life, a place that now meant only pain and suffering. To the left the road led into darkness and the completely unknown where she might finally find safety.

She touched her face, feeling the deep scars that now defined her more than any features it had once possessed. She thought of the scares on the mysterious man's face and turned to watch him walking as a silhouette against the city. She wondered if a known hell with a savior at her side was better than the unknown darkness that lay beyond her imagination.

The rain was ebbing now, and silence was returning to the world. The woman pulled her wet rags tight around her for warmth as she turned to walk in the same direction as the scarred hero.

二
Sleeping gates-men stood watch as the scarred man walked into the still city. As armor groaned against leather his body betrayed nothing of the hatred that boiled inside him. With each step into the grid pattern of shops and houses of this ancient town he could smell the anguish of life, the empty existence of people who's only wish was to avoid inevitable rot. He could feel every dwelling place pulsing with fear. Women who feared their husbands, husbands who feared the state, Children who were afraid of monsters in the dark. He could smell it all, fear of life, fear of death, fear of pain. He imagined great leaping flames reducing it all to cinders while the people who clung to that order burned in the inferno.

Behind him he could sense the woman from the rain following, entering the city an archers length behind him. He paid it no mind only noticing it as he noticed every stone that found it's self under his foot.

The scarred man scowled in anger as he remembered how she had played her roll perfectly. Running from those who wished to hurt her, cowering in fear. She acted as she had been taught to by her proper society, a society that would see her dead before it saw her fight back. As he'd stood over her he could see no difference between her and the men who were doing nothing but what they were made to do. They were mere puppets in this world, bending to every desire, anxiety and sadness. Those men and this woman had never made a choice that was motivated by anything but their own anxious animal instincts, yet continued to believe they had any semblance of a soul. He saw no wrong in breaking the ugly toys of fate. But at that moment as he had considered her laying in the mud something had held him still. In that stillness there was the quiet whisper in his pulse that had said not her. As a man who'd burned his whole life as fire following the straw he had long since learned to trust his instinct and so questioned it no further. Reason was for the scholars who wished to dictate their ordered existence, he wanted no part in it.

The clouds above were thinning now and one by one stars broke free to shine down on the man as he made his way past each abandoned stoop. Finally he stopped and turned towards the door of an inn. As he did he looked back to see the woman, also stopped in her tracks, watching him. The clouds drew back from the full moon and a curtain of pure white light flowed along the road making her figure glow while casting a long dark shadow infinitely behind her. Her rags, still heavy from rain and mud, waved meekly in the wind. She looked dead, like the ghost of a woman with a forgotten name.

He stepped into the alley beside the inn and dropped his bag and sword at his feet. leaning himself against the building he sat in the driest patch of earth he could find, feeling the woman walking on the road towards him.

As a child some had said that spirits roamed in the night searching for young boys to devour. Believing the rumors as any young boy would the scarred man had gone out with a kitchen knife to face them, but he'd found nothing to slay that night but only hungry dogs haunting the dark corners in search of food. It was then he began to understand that the whole world was organized by fear. He began to see there was no place in such a world for him.

The young woman was timidly coming closer. The scarred man with his eyes closed felt her peer into the ally, then walk across the street to lay against a building near by where she could watch him. She reminded him of those dogs searching for scraps in the shadows. As he drifted off to vigilant sleep he wondered only for a moment what inside him had begged to leave her alive but the thought drifted away as easily as the clouds over head and he fell into dreamless dark.