The watchers

My eyelids tremble, twitch.
The tension in my shoulders is tight.
My arms are crossed and my hairs stand on edge.
They are watching me. I can feel it. Staring.
Judgement is not theirs to pass.
I refuse to be labeled.
I refuse to be pinned.
You'll never see the death of me.
I'll die by this struggle.
I'll die being myself, to my last breath.
Never shall I change again.
The watchers cant have my soul.
It's mine.
Mine.

Not my knife

Depths of numbness

The edge, the balm

In the midst of the storm

I find the calm

On my knees with my knife

Stolen joy

Stolen suffering

I don't deserve this

This isn't even my knife

A failure of duty.

The captain of the town guard kicked his off his boots and sighed, planting his feet up on the tavern table. His eyes were hazy and far away, his face red and his body heavy with a drunken stupor hanging over his mind. His subordinate guardsmen caroused all about him, harassing the barmaids and slamming gauntlets down with mighty guffaws at the joking words of their neighbors. To the untrained eye, spirits were high, but these men were drowning. The captain's eyes were far away with more than just the drink. A younger looking guardsmen still clean of face silently wept in the corner, staring at his sword, caked with black sludge. Another man walked slowly with wide eyes down from the upper floors of the lavish tavern, having glanced out an upper story window a second too long, his eyes having lingered on the far off, midnight curtained treeline. He left his blade sheathed at his side, hurrying to the bar counter to shout and bluster at the harried barman, demanding a stiff drink while tears streak down his cheeks and into his beard. A simple looking man, lay on the floor at the captain's feet, a bruise on his cheek where he had been punched clear into unconsciousness. The captain cast his doberman like eyes down on him and scoffed, and quaffed his flagon remembering the simpleton's words. "What are you doing away from your posts at this hour? What of your sacred duty?" Imagine the blithering man, speaking to his betters like that. The captain shook his head and put his forehead down on the table, reveling in sedation. It was then, in that silence of lack of thought, that he could hear the slithering. All about the noisy tavern, slithering black tendrils invaded this place of light. Like snakes, they curled in from the shadows. Disturbing invaders they were, and legion they were. "The warriors of old were not so lack luster~ In their gleaming mail and bearing their shining weapons~ You disgust me, mere men you are, uncloaked by honor or sacrifice. You are just as you seem, and will die as you are. Unworthy." A hissing voice said all this without warning, as the first man died. Many men in the tavern rose, some fell out of their chairs, the women began to scream. A man had been grabbed at one end of the room and brutally dispatched by the strong tendrils of the feind. The captain rose from his chair slowly, stupidly, watching the second and the third man get yanked into the growing shadows. Erikson. Drevel. Conchor. They died drunken, sudden deaths in the unseen places of the world. In the same moment half the candles blew out, leaving the captain and several other men on islands of light in a sea of nightmares. Danger and excitement had a way of sobering a man up. The brew of the master elixir smiths, had nothing on a pure sudden dose of life-threatening circumstances. It did not matter how out of it the captain was when the tendril of darkness pierced his right spaulder and lanced into his flesh and bone, he was no longer in that quiet place. He was in the loud rush of battle once more, just like those days with his training instructors and the first day of real combat on the great kingdoms borders. He felt more alive than he ever had, once again. Black blood went spilling everywhere as the captain's sword flashed in the air by his side, slashing the meat of the tendril away from its bulk.

Bar joke.

A vampire, a zombie, a ghost and a priest walk into a bar. The zombie goes up to the bar, knocks over the barstool and walks into the counter repeatedly bumping into it, he orders some brains. The vampire upon crossing the threshold without permission bursts into flames and runs in screaming his ghastly head off, he orders some blood. The ghost possesses the barman and starts wigging out about having a body. The burning vampire bites the possessed barman and starts draining him of blood. The zombie grabs the barman and starts eating his brains. The ghost is really upset and starts throwing bottles and bar stools all over the place. The priest comes in last and then leaves immediately without even ordering anything.

Unseen hands

"Just go." He pleaded with her, face a stony mask. "I won't let you throw your life away, you're coming with me, or I'm staying here to die with you." The man bit his lip until it bled, a noise was coming from not too far off, a sound like a chorus of shrieks. The sound came echoing off the walls of the dark cavern, loud clanging, harbinger to the violence to come. "It's going to kill so many, we can't let it get out." The woman said this almost absent mindedly her thoughts on the noises like the man. Glancing over his shoulder the man's face twisted with fear. He drew a short sword from his hip and passed it hurriedly to the woman, ushering her behind him. He found his bow in the dark of the cavern's floor and notched an arrow to its sinew cord. "Together." The man said. "Together." The woman agreed. Breathing hard and brandishing her defiance to the pitch about them, the pitch of the darkness, and the rising pitch of the singing of scraping steel. The woman summoned her inner strength for the impending havoc. Only the man, however, bore witness. Nine different locations about the curvature of the cavern tunnel played host to flying sparks. Floor, walls, and ceiling. The locations of spitting sparks drew closer every moment, moving around clockwise, spinning like a dervish. Nine blades hefted in unseen hands.

Dismissed

Several cloaked backs bent over a scarred tabletop. A large parchment map sprawling over it, adding its own fibrous hills and valleys to those depicted. "You're sure they went that way? Have you attained confirmation?" A head bobbed. "We have sightings from our forward scouts. The forests are crawling with the usual vermin but we have reason to believe they may have..." Fear touched the man's voice at the last few words and he stopped talking, steel gray eyes scathed his face, every man present glaring at him. It was so hot in this stuffy tent. All the captain wanted to do was to get on his horse and go home. Back to Tilden. Where the grass went on forever and the houses were as islands in a great sea. His body shuddered as he thought about it, how the grass would look as the great winds blew through them. He thought about how his wife's golden hair, waved just the same, as he rode off to do his time in the great service of...why was he here? Why fight on? With horrors like that in this world, what hope was there? The soft sound of metal sliding off leather drew the captains attention back from far off crisp laughter and honeyed tones. The lieutenants cloak fanned out behind him rather dramatically as he brought his recently unarmored leather clad hand hard across the captain's face. The blow sent him reeling and he fell back away from the table, only barely catching himself as he struck the earthen floor. "Honestly captain Meddle, we haven't the time for this." The captain knew at once why he had been struck and flushed with anger. The lieutenant had read the mood of his thoughts as easily as he might have the map. Chivelians are good at reading people. Unnaturally so. Hatred for this entire mission swelled up fierce and hot in the captain's mind, but he hammered it down into a hard blade of practicality and reason. Standing, he reached into the pack on his back and tossed a scroll onto the table, then saluted his superiors. One forearm down under his chest, fist closed, palm up. His other up over his chest, fist closed, palm down. An uncomfortable gesture, representing heart and body, if not mind in this instance, dedicated to the great service. The lieutenant, to Mendel's surprise, returned it. Tapping his forehead before mirroring the gesture. "We move again in a few hours, we're taking that cave one way or another. Begin preliminary scouting for our departure immediately. Dismissed."

Good boy.