The cold sweat and hairs on the back of my neck stuck on my skin from when I awoke a few minutes earlier, I dressed in my armor and brandished my flail. Luckily, the training area resided far enough away from the sleeping quarters that I was free to channel my rage into a physical form.
With every clamor of my flail slamming into the armor of a straw-stuff man, the rage reverberated out of my muscles and into the air around me where it could dissipate.
The moon lit up the training arena in a white glow as if the Goddess of the Moon herself washed away my sins. Every thrust with my shield required the full force from my body to bully the straw man around the dirt covered clearing. Every push banishing the blood-stained memories from my mind until it was too much to handle.
When the horrors overwhelmed me, my shield dropped to the dirt kicking up a little from the force of the fall. Both of my hands then clenched around the shaft of my flail, turning white from the pressure, and I beat every negative emotion out of me and into the straw man.
I dispelled everything: my guilt, regret, anguish, grief, despair, hopelessness, and rage – undying rage. I dismissed it all until the straw man's innards decorated the arena in scattered clumps of broken hay.
That night was a full moon, and I was accompanied by another templar.
At that point in my life, I had accepted Ilmater and that the church was now my home. I had friends. Albeit people who did not know my childhood. One of which also struggled with the emptiness of sleep. However, he did not beat his fears into inanimate men.
Rowan was my first friend in the church, and a reserved intellectual. On certain nights like this, while I terrorized the straw man, Rowan leaned against the wooden railings of the arena reading anything and everything.
He never flinched from the abrupt sounds of metal clashing with metal. As far as I could tell, it was a symphony of white noise in the back of his mind washing away the void.
That night Rowan asked me, "Mei, what is the point of all of this? You never use your martial abilities on anything else. What does this do for you?"
After a moment of consideration with the flashes of my past still vivid in my mind's eye, I answered, "Absolutely nothing."
But at least it was something.
***
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Memories of Mei
FantasyMei Marivaldi recounts the events of her life growing up in the era of the Second Lands. Many of these events remain a secret from her current traveling companions, and she planned to take them to the grave. Can Mei learn to let go of the past? The...
