The Commander of Death

Chapter One

A/N: Trigedasleng (the grounder language) is used occasionally throughout this fic, and I've read one that puts the translations at the end of each chapter, but scrolling to the bottom, losing my place, and possibly spoiling something for myself on accident has led me to simply put the translations beside the Trigedasleng for my fic. For example, Mount Weather in Trigedasleng is Maun-de, so this is how it would appear: "Maun-de [Mount Weather]." So, easy enough. 

Anyway, I hope you like the chapter!  

-JM 

Clarke drifted through the woods, the only sounds being the woodland creatures around her and the crunching of leaves, twigs, and the light layer of snow with every labored step she took. The urge to sleep was overbearing, but she fought it with all of the energy she could spare, unwilling to endure relentless, restless nightmares and hinder her journey.

She wore a tattered tank top and black jeans, rips of the fabric in her clothing serving as evidence of the past few months she'd spent alone in the wilderness. She had bruises in various places on her body, her knees and elbows in particular worse for wear, from stumbling and falling frequently.

She had lost a lot of weight, the girl practically skin and bones at this point. She was glad she didn't feel the hunger anymore; it was a rather irritating sensation to add to the overwhelming maelstrom of emotions she was constantly submerged in.

Clarke hadn't been able to step foot in Arkadia. Although they looked at her with gratitude and relative admiration, it made her feel sick. She'd saved them, so of course they had wanted to thank her, but they didn't have to live with being responsible for the deaths of three hundred and eighty-one people. The lives of her people had come at the cost of her very soul.

She was a murderer. A cold-blooded killer. She bitterly wondered how on earth she'd managed to murder nearly a thousand people in the span of a year. First, the grounders at the drop ship, then Finn, then letting people die in TonDC, and then Mount Weather. She'd burned three hundred people with fire, she killed the boy who had been sentenced to death because he'd been searching for her, she'd let a bomb drop on more than two hundred and fifty people, and then she killed three hundred and eighty-one people from radiation.

There were others, of course, like Atom, and some other grounders, and there were those whose deaths she felt responsible for and bore the weight of the same, like Fox, and others she couldn't help, as well as the eighteen people massacred in a small village all because Finn had been looking for her.

Hell, she even blamed herself for her father's death, even though she'd learned that it was Abby who'd told Jaha. She felt she could have done more, that she could have saved him.

How had she become this?

She had tried to be a leader, and instead she'd been a monster. The voice in her head that argued otherwise had gone quiet weeks ago.

She hissed as her rib cage scraped against a thorny bush, pausing momentarily and lifting her thin tank top to see her precariously closing wounds reopening. She had left Arkadia with a knife, and she used the blade in a desperate, feeble attempt at penance for all of the death she had caused.

Cuts covered her arms, all uniformed. They were relatively neat and organized, and they represented something similar to tally marks, each cut representing a life she took and serving as a permanent reminder of the horrors she'd committed. They were pale white, and despite the fact that they were not bumps, all of them smooth on her skin, they were still very visible. They were all no longer than an inch. If she made them larger, she wouldn't have enough room.