08-21-2009, 02:00 PM
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Chapter Two, Part One
Chapter Two:
Empty
It’s difficult to describe how it feels to have no heart. It’s still beating inside you. You still have a pulse. There is a hollowness, though when you drink and eat food you can feel it go inside, touch the organs and fill them up. They are there still. Yet there is something missing. A sensation that was normally there in the chest, gut, torso—that is gone. Though you do not lack anything physically.
You are hollow inside.
Yet you cannot see that vacant place. If you were to cut yourself open and look inside you would not be able to find where it was that is so empty now.
The best thing about peaceful and content cities like Kanet was that their security was horridly lax. I was even a little surprised by this. That the sewers were so over looked. There were so many ways to get beyond the walls to the inner sector, where the capital and heart of the city stood in arrogant white marbles, imbued with crystals of ocean and sky blue matched with the lilac purple of amethyst. Great towers caped and lined with bright shinning silver and gold, quarts framed windows, and statues of Elohim goddesses carved out of rose quart stood in vain, feigning the majestic. Perhaps it had once been the temple of the people who had first banished the drow to Delusuu, but now it was filled with the shadows of the people they once were.
Deluded with peace and softness.
It was very possible they would fall to the clever drow emperor. Sheinron would have to concern himself more with the wood elves in the south. Those old enough to remember when the drow once mingled with them in the fertile lands and never forgot; their long life spans had always made them one of the mightiest of Iki. Though this war would prove which was truly the worthiest.
The drow had never allowed softness.
The soft were weak.
They died.
The waste land had never let them grow soft. So the drow never allowed the young softness. For their young would be the ones to conquer the fertile lands. They would be hard, rough, and strong. Not like the children of Kanet. Spoiled by peace, grow soft, plump, and weak. They would be the easy prey. And so was the society of the drow naturally chaotic. Only the strongest, cleverest, and swiftest would survive it.
It was never for the land.
They were proud and did not need fertile lands to survive. It was for their pride and strength and great undying hate for all the other races of Ranelu that they were to conquer them all and destroy their peaceful and soft little lives. Any other creature alive was far below them. Too inferior to be anything but their slaves, their animals, their pets.
I cared nothing for this. There wasn’t really anything I cared for anymore. I did not want to destroy anything, save one man, and yet I would destroy anyone and anything to do it. Including this land and the people of Ranelu. Elohim help those poor souls that got in my way. So many already sacrificed for my selfish goal. I pitied not the drow I have killed time and time again. We’re not innocent, but the soft people of Kanet were. And there was a time when that would have mattered to me.
But that was long gone now.
All I knew now was that this mission was going to be more easily accomplished than I had ever thought. It must have been just as easy for the recon team that had brought me all that I needed to know about the structure of Inner Kanet, as it was labeled on the map. My target was known to take her morning walks in the gardens area. I was under Inner Kanet now, so I hauled myself out of my dark and dank grave like the waking dead to mingle with the pale creatures for a time.
Necromancy.
This was what it must be like.
Do the dead have that same emptiness as I?
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