A Flickering of Light

A heavy crack resounded through the air as my axe split the piece of firewood in half. Sweat poured down the back of my neck and into my tunic as I felt exhaustion begin to set in, and I stretched my body out in various angles in order to rid some of the tension from my muscles. I had been working overtime over the past few weeks, given both that the days were starting to get colder, and the fact that tribute had been increasing year over year recently. Either way, if I wanted to make sure that the other villagers had enough fuel to get them through the winter without freezing to death, then I'd need to keep chopping from sun-up until sun-down through the foreseeable future. I couldn't really complain, though, given just how bad plenty of other people had it.

The dog lying next to me smelt the person approaching before I had even heard her. Bozo stood up from where he was lying near the wood pile and ran off towards a woman walking towards me, the mutt's tail wagging happily and his tongue lolling out all over the place. The person in question carried a bowl in her hands, filled with a steaming something that made my mouth water when the scent hit my nostrils. Placing the axe down against a nearby fence, I wiped my hands on my tunic and began to walk towards River to meet her halfway.

"You, young woman, need to take a break before your body falls apart on you. You might be one of the burliest people in the village, but that doesn't mean that you can push yourself forever, you know." The curly-haired brunette gave me a wry smile as she handed the crudely carved bowl over to me, the warmth radiating through it from the soup inside of it heating up my tired hands. Bozo danced happily around her, and River knelt down to scratch the dog's ears and let him lick her face.

I snorted a bit at her words, while lifting the bowl up towards my lips. "If I count as 'young' to you, then I'd hate to see what your definition of 'old' is." I took a testing sip of the liquid - lukewarm, thin, bland, and barely enough to keep me going for the rest of the day. Again, though, I couldn't really complain; at least I had food. "Besides, General Sade's men will be here any day for tribute collection. Every piece of firewood that I split is one more piece of firewood that goes towards keeping them satisfied, and keeping them off the backs of the rest of the villagers."

River rolled her deep green eyes at me while she scratched at the base of Bozo's tail, causing the dog to lift one of his back legs up to scratch at his haunches. "What do I keep telling you, Dawn? You need to worry about yourself before you worry about the blackguards. Keeping them satisfied won't mean anything if you work yourself to death trying to do so. Didn't you say that you're like this during your time in the cities, too? Always taking the beatings so that the other folks don't have to." As Bozo darted off to chase after a gaunt rat that ran out from some grass, River turned to look up at me from where she knelt. "Besides, I think that most folks in the village would rather take another lash from General Sade's thugs before losing you, Dawn. Myself included."

I stopped drinking my soup for a moment, closing my eyes in thought. No, there wasn't any point to starting that old argument up again. River and I had gone through it plenty of times, and neither one of us had ever managed to change the other's mind. She just didn't understand how afraid I was of losing any of the villagers, her most of all. I continued sipping from the bow, but my eyes remained closed so that I didn't have to look at River.

As I finished the soup - my stomach barely satisfied at what it had received - I opened my eyes again to hand the bowl off to River. When I did so, I spotted a young, dark-skinned man walking out from the forest, a basket tucked under his arm that was full of mushrooms, herbs, berries, and other bounties of the woods. He stopped a moment to speak to Old Man Grove, who was busy harvesting turnips, though I couldn't hear what they were saying from that distance. As I watched him, I idly wondered if some of the herbs that he had with him were for Eve's fever. Sky knew a lot about medicine, and he always did his best to get whatever any of the villagers needed whenever he went out gathering.

I supposed that my eyes must have lingered on him for too long, given the teasing comment that River spoke up with. "You know, just staring at him isn't going to get him any closer to your bed." The woman had stood up by that point, arms crossed and with another smirk on her face. "You're honestly just like some kind of bashful teenage girl with him, Dawn. I've never seen you so afraid of talking to someone that you want to sleep with than with Sky."

I shook my head slowly. "It's not that I'm afraid to talk to him, River. It's that I've talked to him too much, and now I'm afraid of what getting into a relationship with me might do to him." The young man gave a wide smile to Old Man Grove, one that I swear sparkled in the noontime sun. "He's the cheeriest, happiest person that I've ever met in this world, and I'm afraid that he might lose that if he spends too much time around me. Do you know that he's somehow never been to the cities? All the bad things that I picked up from there might rub off on him if I'm not careful." I let out a deep sigh, and looked away from Sky. "No, I'd rather just watch him from afar, and use that energy of his to keep me going through the day."

An eyebrow rose on River's face as she gave me a questioning stare. "Uh huh. So if you're afraid that getting into a relationship with you might ruin people, then what does it say about me that we're sleeping together, Dawn? Was I already ruined before our first kiss, or something?"

I cringed a little bit as I realized just how dunder-headed my words are, and I awkwardly mumbled out an "Uhm…" and an "Err…" before I gingerly reached out a hand to grab onto River's, which she graciously allowed me to hold. Letting out a sigh, I gathered my words together and tried my best to apologize. "You know that's not what I meant, Rivs. It's just that the way that I feel about him is different than the way that I feel about you, and…" The look on her face suggested that I was only screwing things up even more, so I just clenched my jaw and frowned. "Sorry. I'll shut up."

River let out a sigh of her own, and shook her head as she squeezed down onto my hand. Reaching her other hand up to my face, she brushed some of the mussy blonde hair out of my face and gently stroked my cheek. "Don't worry, you big lug. I know what you mean." The woman leaned in to place a kiss on my lips, a sign that I hadn't screwed up too badly with what I had said. "But it's just like I was saying before about the work, Dawn. You need to worry about yourself as much as you worry about others. I'm sure that Sky will be fine if he spends some intimate time with you." River got a dirty look on her face, and I instantly began to fear what would come next out of her lips. "Well, so long as you don't break his pelvis, anyways."

I blushed furiously as the other woman laughed at my embarrassment, and I looked around to make sure that nobody else had heard her lewd comment. Sky himself, thankfully, was walking into the communal house at the moment, and was well out of earshot of us. Still, I spoke in a low voice as I responded sheepishly to her dirty joke. "Come on, Rivs. I mean, he is a good looking guy, but that's only part of it…" Not that I hadn't fantasized about the things that I'd do with Sky given the chance, but that wasn't a victory that I was willing to hand over to River.

River gave me another smirk, as her hand settled on my bicep and gave it a squeeze. "Hey, don't worry about it, Dawn. What was it that Old Beech always used to say to us when we were kids, with her toothless grin and wagging her wrinkly finger? 'You've gotta squeeze every little last bit of happiness out of this life, even if it's like trying to squeeze blood from a stone sometimes'? So, y'know. Go squeeze some happiness out of Sky, why don't you?"

It was my turn to roll my eyes, as I broke myself off from River and headed back over to where my axe had been set down. "Enough of that, Rivs. If things are going to go anywhere between me and Sky, then they'll go there on their own." As I hefted up my tool, I gave the woman a pointed look. "And don't you dare go trying to matchmake for me like you did with Breeze last year."

River laughed a little bit, obviously not taking my words to heart. "Sure thing, Dawn. Sure thing." Bozo came back at this point, the rat caught between his jaws, unmoving. He dropped it in front of River, who just gave him an awkward smile and another rub of the ears. "Anyways, I'm going to get back to the soup hall. I'll bring you back another bowl if we somehow have any leftovers."

As another crack sounded out and I tossed the two new fresh pieces of firewood onto the pile, I shook my head before raising my axe back up. "No. Give it to Eve. She needs the strength right now. Or Rain. She's still breastfeeding Brook, isn't she? I'll be fine."

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw River give me a long, hard stare, before turning to go with a wave of her hand. "Sure thing, hero. Sure thing." She probably was going to bring me any extras, knowing her. And, knowing me, I'd take those extras and give them to Eve or to Rain.

Until that point, though, I still had plenty of firewood to chop. In spite of my time in the cities, I still hadn't really picked up on much of numbers. Not that General Sade's territory had much in the way of learned folk, at least compared to General Deus and General Bene's territories; after all, Sade much preferred to fill his cities with bloodsport arenas and brothels than with schools and libraries. Even so, I could still gauge the amount of firewood that I had by eye, and I knew by feel how much more I'd need to make it through the winter on top of tribute to the blackguards. I was pretty sure that I'd have enough by the time that the snow began to fall - and nothing could stop me from chopping wood in the cold, either, not even River's complaints - but fear that I might be wrong drove me to make sure that I had more than enough.

The rest of the afternoon went by uneventfully, as it usually did. Rain brought Brook over to say hello, and I somehow managed to make the baby cry simply by looking at it. Old Grove came over, complaining about his knees and his backs and his everything else and enlisted me to finish weeding for him, which I did as quickly as possible so that I could get back to chopping firewood. At some point, Eve came walking by, and I nearly carried her back to bed before she told me that Sky said that some fresh air would do her some good. Breeze came back from the forest with a number of game birds slung over his shoulder - I was a big fan of quail, so I was looking forward to that. Big Pine brought some scrap wood over, mostly unusable leftovers from his carpentry projects.

At some point, Sky came by, apparently on River's orders to "make sure that she's not overworking herself". I knew the real reason behind River sending the young man my way, of course, but I kept my mouth shut on that matter. Instead, I gave the herbalist a bunch of single-word answers, hoping that he'd go away sooner rather than later, and not notice how much my eyes lingered on his lithe body and his deep brown eyes, or the ever-growing blush on my cheeks the longer he stayed near me.

I thought about what River had said earlier, about how I was acting like a bashful teenage girl, and I found nothing in how I was interacting with Sky to disprove her argument.

Eventually, Sky seemed satisfied that I wasn't becoming sick from exhaustion, and finally began to let me go from the conversation. Before he left, though, he stopped for a moment, and spent several seconds staring at me. My cheeks turned a bright crimson under his gaze, and I began pretending to wipe my forehead to try and distract from the blush. "Wh… What is it, Sky? Do I have something on my face?"

The young man leaned up closer to me, his eyes staring deep into mine, and I felt my mind run wild. What was he doing? Had he noticed? Oh, please, by the earth, tell me that he hadn't noticed the way that I was eyeing him up before.

"You might be physically fine, Dawn, but I'm also worried about your emotional health." Sky withdrew, crossing his arms and giving me a stern look. "You were being awfully curt to me during your check-up, weren't you? But you're much more vocal with River and the other villagers." He frowned a little bit, and the expression on his face sent a pang through my heart. "Have I done something to disturb your feelings, Dawn? If I have, then I deeply apologize." Huh? "Part of looking after the health of the villagers is maintaining their emotional humors as well as their physical ones, and it would be rather bad if I've disrupted your emotions in some way."

Fuck, that was why I adored him so much. Before she passed, Old Beech always used to say that he was only like that because he had been lucky enough to not have drawn too much attention from the blackguards, because he hadn't seen the full cruelty of the world that we live in, that he was just totally and completely naive. Maybe she was right, but I honestly didn't care, because it was things like that - where he didn't take my shortness with him as an offense, but rather a sign that he might have hurt me somehow - which made him the light that kept me from totally succumbing to the darkness, a light that I was desperately afraid that I might somehow break if I got too close to it.

"No, no, I, uhm…" Whatever other qualities that I might have possessed, being a good liar wasn't one of them. "I, uhh, just always get a little down whenever the sun starts going down. Yeah. That's it. You just don't usually talk to me around this time." What absolute horseshit.

It was clear that Sky wasn't buying it. I was grateful that he hadn't noticed my ogling for what it was, but that didn't mean that I was otherwise going to be able to bullshit him. "Hmm. If you say so, Dawn. But I'm going to be keeping an eye on you from now on, okay?" He wagged a finger up at me, like a parent lecturing their child, and I couldn't help but let a little laugh out at the sight. It only caused him to pout at me, which in turn only made him even more adorable. "I'm serious! If you begin to feel your heart fall out of balance, you need to tell me, so that we can fix it!" By the earth, he was so lovely.

"Yes, mother." I teased. I supposed that this much was fine. Talking to him every once in a while, seeing his brightness up close every now and again, with little risk that I might end up somehow extinguishing it.

Sky opened his mouth to chide me again, when the town bell began to ring. From the center of the village, we could both hear Breeze shouting in near-panic. "The blackguards! The blackguards are coming! Tribute day is here!"

Both Sky and myself began looking around nervously, before Sky yelped out a "Look!" and pointed over at where the trees were thinnest. Sure enough, a small cohort of modestly armed and lightly armored people riding on horseback were rapidly approaching, with nothing but malice and greed on their faces.

I balled my hands into fists, my fingers digging into my palms. "Damn those bastards, coming early. Always trying to keep us on our toes, never letting us fully relax." There was no point in wasting my preciously limited time by complaining, though, and I began gathering my firewood onto a sledge. "You get going too, Sky." The friendliness of our conversation had evaporated in seconds, and now the both of us only had looks of anxiety. "Don't give them any reason to be upset." The young man nodded, and began running off towards the communal house.

As I set the firewood into stable patterns, I felt myself slamming them down with undue force. An anger. An anger that only came up once per year, but an anger stronger than anything else. An anger at the blackguards, at General Sade, at the Dark Lord, and at the entire world. A weak, impotent anger, that simply swirled around in my stomach with no way to be resolved.

Within record time, the village had gathered up all of its goods, and brought everything to the town center, where the blackguards watched us scramble around while comfortably sitting atop their horses. I didn't recognize any of the thugs that had arrived, but that wasn't unusual; they liked to rotate their cohorts between settlements so that we'd never know exactly what we were getting into on tribute day. Some years it wouldn't be too bad, the blackguards led by someone who was simply interested in gathering up the goods and heading back; more often than not, though, the cohort was full of ruthless people looking for any excuse to start beating villagers. Not too much of a surprise, given the fact that only the most vicious of individuals could become blackguards in the first place. I heard Little Brook begin to cry somewhere nearby in Rain's arms, and the mother practically smothered the baby to keep from drawing too much attention from the extortionists. River, standing right next to me, squeezed hard down onto my hand; I squeezed back, of course, for all of the good that it would do.

One of the blackguards - a bald, heavily scarred man with light skin and a husky build - climbed down from his horse and advanced forward to the collection of goods, stoically observing the items that we had gathered up for tribute. My firewood, Sky's forest bounties, Old Grove's turnips, Rock's wool, Breeze's meat, and everything else that the village had spent all year growing, raising, hunting, and gathering. A long minute passed as the man closely inspected the goods, squeezing vegetables, tasting berries, and feeling cloth. One minute turned to two, and then three, the blackguard clearly delighting in how we grew more and more anxious with each passing second.

Finally, he found the excuse that he was looking for, in the quail that Breeze had brought home today. "What the fuck is this shit?" The man picked up the freshly killed gamebird, so fresh that it hadn't even been plucked yet. "You're only supposed to give us prepared meat, you fucking moron." The blackguard tossed the quail hard into Breeze's face, and I couldn't tell if the blood that came out was from the quail or the hunter's nose. 

Everyone stood stock still, doing their best not to do anything that would make the problem worse. Breeze looked around for help from the other villagers, but nobody was willing to offer it. All that speaking up would accomplish is giving the blackguards yet more reasons to mistreat us. "Sir, I, uhm…" Breeze began muttering out broken words, his legs shaking as a cold sweat began to form on his forehead. "I just killed that today, sir, and, I, uhm, know that it's not fully prepared, sir, but I thought that you would still want-"

A punch to the gut sent Breeze down onto his knees, and I noticed that the blackguard wore some sort of metal studs on his knuckles, presumably for that exact purpose. "Did I fucking ask, moron? No, I didn't." Maybe Breeze shouldn't have tried to offer an explanation. Or maybe silence would have elicited the same response. More than likely, the scarred man just wanted to dole out the first blow of tribute day, likely a sign of many more to come from him and from the others. Indeed, the blackguard already began kicking Breeze while he was down, the hunter curling up into a defensive position. "Do. Not. Fucking. Argue. With. Me." Each blow punctuated a word, the sound of Breeze being brutalized ringing in all of our ears.

The rest of us diverted our gazes from Breeze and the blackguard. We had all experienced that sort of treatment before, in one way or another. Even the supposedly-naive Sky came out of some tribute days with his own fair share of bruises, even if he had never been picked to go to the cities. But they wouldn't kill Breeze, at least. Probably. Maybe. In spite of what seemed like random, mindless violence, the blackguards had an unfortunately cohesive method to their cruelty; they understood that every person that they killed was one less person to extort from and abuse the next year, and so they did their best to keep the full-on killing to a minimum.

Didn't mean that they wouldn't tie him up to a post and whip him for entertainment, though. I would have taken his place, if I could, since my body already carried plenty of scars from whippings and worse, but all that I'd manage if I tried was to get two people lashed rather than just one. The only consolation that we had was that this treatment typically only happened once a year on tribute day, barring those that lived in the cities. Though I had never been outside of General Sade's territory, I had heard from travelers that everyone who lived in the territories of the other Generals experienced this kind of cruelty on a daily basis; dealing with the blackguards didn't seem all that bad, in comparison.

Still pretty bad, though, having our dignity completely stripped away and destroyed every autumn.

As a pair of blackguards dragged Breeze off to prepare him for their barbaric little games, the man that I presumed to be the leader repositioned himself in front of the rest of the villagers. He kept a hand on the hilt of his sheathed blade as he took the time to make slow, agonizing eye contact with each and every single one of us. When he finally shouted, it came like a crack of thunder, and I saw several other villagers nearly jump out of their skin. "You absolute fucking worms!" I heard River let out a small whine that she was desperately trying to muffle. "Do you really think that this pathetic tribute is worthy of General Sade?" The blackguard picked up one of the turnips, threw it on the ground, and crushed it underneath his boot. "In return for this grave offense, we will be taking extra tribute this year."

The tension across the entire group of villagers instantly doubled for intensity, and I heard a couple of people let out gasps in spite of their better judgment. It wasn't unusual that particularly vicious cohorts would take extra tribute on top of the half that they normally took, but everyone knew what it meant for the town. A cold, hungry winter that not everybody would survive. Old Man Grove. Little Brook. Poor, sick Eve. The old, the young, the feeble. The people that the blackguards knew didn't contribute much to their yearly hauls anyways, that they felt were acceptable losses to the livestock that they milked every autumn. The people that they knew we would make the difficult decision to leave behind first, a decision that they delighted in watching us make.

There was no fighting it, though. The time of Light was long, long gone, and any heroes that might have meaningfully opposed the Dark Lord were long, long dead. This was what the world was, now. The Dark Lord had the power to obliterate hundreds of people with the snap of his fingers, and his Generals weren't far behind in terms of might. We could revolt, sure. We might even be able to kill some of the blackguards. We might even be able to kill the next group of blackguards that they send, maybe, if we were exceptionally lucky. But, eventually, General Sade would come, would obliterate us, and would parade our bodies around his cities as a reminder to everyone else as to what happens when the natural order of the world is challenged. Even Sky's boundless optimism wasn't able to deny such simple truths.

The blackguard leader began calling out some names, presumably those of his subordinates. "Gran! Steel! Coop! Get up here and grab your picks." Another inevitable part of tribute day. A handful of members of each cohort who had especially distinguished themselves over the past year - whether through brutality, cunning, or simple brown-nosing - were each allowed to pick out one villager from the town that they extorted to take with them back to the cities, with the expectation that their pick would be allowed to return to the their homes during the next tribute period. 

The folks taken from our village last year still hadn't returned, but we did our best to hold out hope that they'd be showing up soon. Much as with tribute day, the blackguards didn't want to waste too many of the people that they took back with them to the cities; they did their best not to work anybody to death in the mines, to ensure a lack of fatalities in the arenas, and to keep any of the particularly sadistic of their number from going too far in the brothels - not that this was a guarantee that a year in the city wouldn't do a person in, of course, something that I knew all too well from experience.

River and I stood stock still as the one named Coop looked us up and down, a hungry look in his eye, telling us what we'd be subjected to if he picked us. I hoped that he'd pick me, though, over River or anyone else. Not because I wanted to be picked, of course, but because I knew that I could tolerate and survive a year in the city better than anyone else in the village. It always hurt being away from home for a year, but it always hurt more to see one of my friends taken away for that time instead of me.

I watched as the woman named Steel pulled Eve out of the crowd, a choice that I had conflicting emotions on. Sure, being picked was never a good thing, but there was more ample food in the cities, and the blackguards had plenty of doctors on hand to keep their picks healthy enough to keep serving them; if it meant that Eve would be able to make it through the rough winter we'd be going through this year, then I supposed that it actually wasn't as bad as it could be.

Meanwhile, the person named Gran had decided on Big Pine. I made a mental note to make sure to keep the table that he was working on dry, so that it wouldn't warp before he was able to finish it. I'd also miss mud wrestling with him in the spring, but that was of secondary concern. As far as I could tell, it looked like Gran was sizing Big Pine up to either work in the mine or fight in the arena, both of which shared their own risks. I said a quiet prayer to the earth to get him through his year.

My heart stopped a little bit as Coop stopped in front of Sky, giving him a thorough look over. Seeing the way that the blackguard practically devoured the herbalist with his eyes instantly made me feel guilty for the way that I had done much the same to Sky earlier. I wanted to shout out at Coop that he shouldn't be looking at Sky that way, that the young man wasn't meant for something that crude, that he deserved more respect than that, but I managed to restrain myself from such idiocy.

In spite of how attractive Sky was - or, at least, in spite of how attractive I personally found Sky - he had somehow managed to go his whole life without being taken to the cities. Old Beech had said that luck was the only thing that kept him so cheery and kind, and I worried what he might be like when he came back next year - if he came back next year. Would he still have that light that kept me going through the darkness? Would he still give me the joy that kept me going through this endless cycle of tribute, extortion, oppression, and persecution? Or would he return darkened as the rest of us were?

My stomach churned as I watched Coop pull Sky from the crowd. The blackguard was squeezing down hard on the dark skin of Sky's arm as he dragged him off. Didn't he know that Sky bruised easily? He had to be gentle, or else he'd hurt Sky. Wasn't that obvious? Even as he was being led away, though, my kind, happy herbalist found a moment to turn back towards the rest of the villagers, and give us one of his trademark smiles, his eyes still shining so, so brightly in the increasingly dark evening.

I didn't understand what I was doing, even as I was doing it. While my mind was fearing what would happen to Sky if he was taken to the city, my body began acting on its own, in a way that I didn't comprehend, in a way that I knew it shouldn't. It advanced upon the blackguards on its own. It ignored River cries of warning and fright on its own. It drew the carving axe from my belt on its own. I had pulled back and slammed down my arm on its own. It had cut straight through Coop's wrist on its own, severing the man's arm that had been gripping Sky far too roughly. I told Coop that he needed to be gentle with Sky, but he didn't listen to me. And now my body was looking down to meet Sky's gaze on its own, an awkward smile on my face opposite of the herbalist's utterly shocked expression while some of Coop's blood spurted onto my face.

I was glad, at least, that the last thing that I would see in my life was Sky's face.

I felt myself tackled to the ground by several bodies all at once. I could hear blades being drawn from their sheathes as punches and kicks and elbows and knees began colliding with me, forcing air out of my lungs, breaking my nose, and otherwise injuring me in all sorts of ways. In the middle of all of this pain, though, I managed to conjure up the cowardly, selfish thought that - at least - I wouldn't be around to see what they did to the village in retaliation for my actions. I had never considered myself especially courageous, of course, but that one was definitely a new low.

"Wait, you fucking morons!" I heard the voice of the blackguard leader sound out over the cacophony of blunt force impacts, a shout that stopped the assault on my body as quickly as it had begun. I found myself still quite alive even as the blackguards began to crawl off of me, a fact that made me in turn confused, concerned, and then terrified. These people never showed mercy, unless it was in service to an even greater cruelty.

"You! Get Coop's arm bandaged! Don't let the fucking idiot bleed out. Everyone else, keep the villagers here! Don't let any of them go anywhere!" The man's subordinates began running off to follow his orders, while the blackguard leader himself squatted down in front of me. The blood was too thick in my eyes to see clearly, but I could still imagine the sneer that he must have had on his face just by virtue of his words. "Damn, you're a real dipshit, aren't you?" He grabbed onto my hair and yanked my head up, so that I had to look directly at him - even if I couldn't actually see him.

"You know, I've been running with the blackguards for, I don't know, a long fucking time. A real long fucking time. And it's been fucking great, honestly. I get to do whatever I want, whenever I want, wherever I want, and to whoever I want. Mostly, anyways. I really don't get why people like you are such pussies about joining up, honestly. What is it? Some kind of guilt, or something?" The tone of his voice, in spite of his constant profanity, was calm, level, even professional. "But that's not the point. The point is, in the real long fucking time that I've been running with the blackguards, I've seen a lot of fucking dipshits over the year. You know, back when I first joined up, they sent me and the other rookies out to deal with some upstart villagers. Meant to root out the dipshit weaklings who thought that they'd be able to cut it in the blackguards.."

"The villagers, though, were absolute dipshits. They knew that they had no chance against the blackguards. And even if they did, they had no chance against General Sade. Let alone the Dark fucking Lord." He let out a laugh that sounded more like a bark. "But, y'know what? Those dipshits at least had the good sense to get together and get a plan going before they decided to be dipshits. Didn't mean anything in the end, of course, but at least they had a little bit of sense behind their dipshittery. But you?" The blackguard looked down at me with a frown, shaking my head a little bit through the rough grasp that he kept tangled up in my hair. "You? You just fucking come at a blackguard with an axe, with a bunch of other fucking blackguards all around you. Now that's some real dipshittery. What the fuck were you even thinking, by the Dark Lord?"

A smile spread across his face, a smile devoid of any friendliness, any kindness, and any love, but full to the brim with a cruel joy. "So yeah. You're a real dipshit, girlie. But don't worry. We're going to clear that dipshittery right up here in a bit." His other hand gave me a gentle pat on the cheek, getting some of my blood on it in the process; with a disgusted look on his face, he wiped his hand on my clothes. "In fact, we're going to use the dipshittery that happened here to try and help prevent more dipshittery in the future. Momma always said that I should try to find the good in the bad, after all." The self-satisfied grin on his face said that he really thought he was smart for that one. 

"So, plan is, we're going to do the worst possible shit that you could ever imagine to your little village here. And then we're going to do even worse shit. And you're going to watch every single last moment of it, girlie! And then after that, we're going to take you back to the cities, take you on tour, so that you can let everyone know what happens when you get up to this kind of dipshittery." He sounded so happy. So proud.

I wanted to scream, to shout, to yell, or whatever else I could. A scream of fear, of anger, of guilt, of all that and more. All that I managed to do in that moment, though, was let out a low, choking gurgle.

I faded in and out of consciousness for the next while, barely feeling the beatings that the blackguards were delivering after a while. "Not too much! And not the head!" The leader would remind them. "We need her awake for the next part! Just go for the gut or the crotch or whatever. But do not fucking kill her, either!"

Eventually, after what seemed like an eternity of physical abuse, someone splashed a bucket of warm water on my face. No, not water. Piss. A bucket full of piss, that got into my hair and soaked through the cloth that had been used to gag me. It jolted me awake as fast as smelling salts.

I awoke to exactly what I expected to see. The sun set, the sky dark, torches held by the blackguards to illuminate the scene: every single last person from the village tied up and gagged about sixty feet away from me, with the thugs keeping guard around them. Even Bozo was there, muzzled tight while he growled at the blackguard holding onto him. Come on. Did they even have to do this shit to my dog?

As for the actual people, there were a variety of expressions on their faces as they looked at me. Most of them were afraid. A lot of them were angry. Not that I could blame them. Another good portion, mostly the older folks, just looked resigned. My eyes met River's, and all that I saw on her face was pity. I looked away in shame, and my gaze landed right on Sky. And in his face was nothing but love and kindness. A love and kindness that I had condemned to a horrible, excruciating death.

While I felt the rope tight around my wrists, I thought about how none of this would have happened if only I hadn't been such a coward, so afraid of never seeing that smile again.

"Alright, alright, alright! Good fucking evening, everybody!" The blackguard leader stood in front of me, spreading his arms wide. "I know that you all want to get onto the main event as soon as possible - especially the country bumpkins!" An uproarious laugh came from the blackguards, and I couldn't tell if they genuinely found the 'joke' funny, or if they were just trying to keep in the good graces of their leader. "But it's like General Sade always says - the longer that you have to wait, the more exciting that it'll be once you get into it!" I saw Coop standing nearby, wincing as he held onto the bandaged stump where his hand used to be. I met his gaze, and he smirked viciously, pointing towards Sky and giving me the most wicked look that I had ever seen on a person's face.

I had been afraid of losing my guiding light, and now I was afraid of having to see what Coop would do to it. In truth, that was what my entire life in this world had been up until that point. Fear after fear after fear. My mind strained against the fear, even as my body strained against the post that I was tied to.

"And remember! We're not doing this for our own fun and enjoyment! Well, maybe not just for our own fun and enjoyment." I couldn't see his face from where I was tied up, but I could still tell how smug he must have looked in that moment. "We're doing this out of the kindness of our hearts, for the good of everyone else that lives in General Sade's territory, and in the Dark Lord's world! We're doing this so that dipshits like this-" Pointing back at me. "-don't make us have to do this to anyone else!" He turned on his heel, meeting my gaze. "Remember that when you're watching, girlie. Remember that we didn't want to do this. Remember that you made us do this."

I was afraid of the blackguards. I was afraid of General Sade. I was afraid of the Dark Lord. I was afraid of the world, where a person could lose their life or everything worth living for at a moment's notice, at the whim of the cruel and the vicious. It was an all-consuming fear, one that drove my every action, that drove me even in that moment, as I gazed across the seemingly vast distance between me, the villagers, and the blackguards surrounding them.

"This is for the benefit of people like you!" The scarred man turned back towards the villager, jabbing a finger out in their direction. "So that you can fucking learn. So that you can fucking learn that this is the Dark Lord's world. That this is General Sade's domain. That this is the land that the blackguards manage. And that means that you have to do what we fucking say, have to do what General Sade says, and definitely have to do what the Dark fucking Lord says. Not that either General Sade or the Dark Lord would ever lower themselves to coming out to deal with a bunch of fucking hicks. Nah, that's the shit that we have to shovel."

I remembered the fears that I had experienced during my years in the cities. The fear that made me do my best to satisfy clients in the brothel, to make sure that they wouldn't abuse me or the other workers. The fear that made me labor as hard as I could in the mines, so that my team and I would get fewer lashes when they inevitably came. The fear that made me restrain myself whenever I fought in the arena, to keep from hurting the weaker combatants more than I had to. More than I already had. Those were fears that I had carried home with me, fears that I carried even now, as memories of my times in the cities came flooding back.

"And look at what happens when you don't do what we say! Look at what happens to you, when you don't just shut up and do what you're supposed to do!" Once again he turned back towards me, walking forward and grabbing my hair to force me to look at the other villagers. "Because you didn't do what you're supposed to do, all of your friends are going to die. Even your fucking dog, too! They're going to fucking die! And it's all your fucking fault!"

Fear. My whole life. Driven by fear. Even this was driven by fear.

"You think that it would be a real simple fucking idea that even the simplest of dipshits would be able to get, but apparently not! And now we have to go massacre an entire fucking town, just to teach it to you. What a fucking tragedy, huh?" The smiles on the faces of the blackguards began to grow, expectant looks on their faces as the time for their fun grew closer and closer. "So watch, girlie. Watch what happens when people don't do what we say. And then, tell every single last fucking person that you meet what happens when they don't. Understood, girlie?"

I spat some blood out onto his face before responding. "Not really, sorry. Can you say all that stupid shit again?" The sheer anger on the man's scarred face was unlike much else that I had ever seen. I could have only imagined what he was about to say or do in response to that, primarily because he never got the chance to say or do anything after I headbutted him, broke out of my wrist bindings, yanked his blade out of its sheath, and buried it deep within his chest.As I withdrew the sword from the blackguard leader's heart, his body crumpled to the ground with an abject look of shock on his face, an expression that virtually everyone else around me was also wearing. Coop, Sky, Steel, Eve, Gran, Big Pine, every other blackguard, every other villager, frozen in a mixture of surprise and confusion - except for River, of course, who just smiled behind her gag and shook her head in disbelief.

One of the first lessons that I had learned in the arena was that you should always try to make the opponent do what you want them to do. At that particular moment, that was for the blackguards to get away from the villagers before they had the good sense to hurt any of them or take them hostage. With a whip of the blackguard leader's blade that sent droplets of his blood onto the ground next to me, I spread my arms out in front of me. "Well?" I wore the same sort of grin that they had all worn when interacting with us, and used the same tone of voice. "What are you waiting for, dipshits?"

As every single last backguard came charging at me with screams of rage, I was glad to see that my fears hadn't all come to fruition quite yet.