Smoke and Silver
Dec 28, 2015 19:47:38 GMT
Post by nodens on Dec 28, 2015 19:47:38 GMT
Though there was little anyone could have done - and certainly not without great risk of worsening matters - the resentment festered like an aching cavity in the hin's heart. It had been weeks - weeks! - since the elders had passed their judgement, and still his family - the few who had managed to linger up to now - clung to life. Too cowardly to die outright, he thought - too spineless, as usual, to reject the paltry spoiling leftovers passed to their gaping mouths by guilt-ridden well-wishers. The bitter cruelty of it all left the hin at a loss for words - a loss for thoughts to think but my, how the other families quailed at the sight of what could easily have been them! How they bowed and scraped and murmured fretful apologies to his brothers and sisters - and not one offer to take their place!
The rules were simple, and brooked only an absolute interpretation. To steal is a crime. To live - the verdict.
It was the death of every other person he had ever loved that was to be the punishment.
He stares down at them now, the pain in his heart growing an inch for every fruitless tug his father managed against the grasping tar - by now up to his neck - by miles for every moldy biscuit brought before his sister, a pitiful offering to appease an impossible situation. No doubt everyone felt as he did - that it would be better if they were to starve, rather than submit to this atrocity until the pit had swallowed them completely - and they the bubbling blackness of the pit - and hoped that with every bite of rotting sustenance, some hidden poison might grant final mercy. And yet it was Zed and only Zed - the thief, the culprit - who hadn't the strength to go say goodbye.
In the fullness of time - from the depths of his remorse - grew a plan, and the desperate resolve he would need to follow through. In accordance with tradition, he was to bear witness to their deaths and then join them a day after. Instead, he would leave. He would leave tonight, taking with him everything that his family - no - all that he could carry of his legacy,
In the dead of night, he would be gone,
and he would take the lives of his family too.
~More to come~
