The Warrior And The Pacifist

Seperated

"I believed every word the she said." Darvi began, his head hung in shame. " mother Kosha told us that the outside world was full of evil, full of so much suffering. She told us that we weren't hurting the world but saving it! She told us that when Hevio came he would make the world whole. Borders wouldn't define us any more...we would become one with Hevio and live in paradise for all eternity. When we started..." he paused tilting his head up, staring at Voakkam who had him pressed firmly against the wall. "The harvesting I was as devoted as one of Hevio's children could be. I did things...terrible things that I'm not proud of."

Leki couldn't believe what she was hearing, commuting wholesale murder and then calling it a harvesting. Like they were farmers gathering up the wheat crop, it was absolutely barbaric. "How?" Leki asked. Trying her hardest to keep her composure now. Not out of the fear she had felt so many times before, but out of a rage filled sadness that had been stewing inside her since Sipo. In her minds eye she saw Kyah again, that child whaling with grief as her life had been changed forever. Then she thought of Iyizi, seeing that village that had been once filled with so much life turned into a smoldering ruin. "How can you people take life so easily, how can you cause so much death and then pretend that you are the ones who stand on any kind of moral high ground."

Darvi trained his eyes on her now. "Because I was born into the Oracles." He explained. "I grew up following the word, it was all I had ever known you have to understand that!" His words only added fuel to the burning fire inside her. A raging inferno that threatened to consume everything around it.

"That doesn't make it right." Leki said. "You killed people with families, you killed people who's only crime was where they called home."

"I'm not making excuses believe me." Darvi replied. "I know what I did was wrong and I pray to the spirits everyday that they forgive me for the part I played in those deaths. I thought we were saving the world, but we were just making it worse than it already is. I will live with what I did for the rest of my days...I think that is a fitting punishment, plagued with remembering."

Voakkam scoffed. "Yes...it must be terrible for you living in that big house with that wife of yours." He said, Darvi looking surprised now as he returned his gaze to the water tribe man. "Does she know about all the blood that is on your hands, or did you bury it away and pretend it didn't happen?" Darvi dropped his head in shame now, his body subtly shaking. He then slowly shook his head.

"Then you haven't suffered enough, a worm like You doesn't deserve a happily ever after...not after what you did. If it were up to me I'd walk you home, sit that pretty wife of yours down and I would tell her in great detail everything you did before you met her...now that I think about it I'd go to your employer too, I'd go to every friend you ever made in this new life you created and warn them about you. But it's not up to me and you should be thanking your lucky stars that it's not, because if it was I'd slit your throat and leave you to bleed out in this gutter and I'd sleep like a baby knowing I scrubbed you from this world."

More and more Leki found herself pondering the creed of violence only as a last resort that had been taught to her since she had been old enough to remember the lessons. She had thought about when she Baliph and Voakkam were sitting at that tea shop at the harbor of Port Hamcho and she thought about it now with a vigor. How easy it would be to just kill Darvi and be done with him. But could Leki throw away her beliefs and then live with herself after the deed was done? She still didn't know, but the longer she found herself faced with the worst people that humanity had to offer the more she wondered if maybe....just maybe, there were some instances where taking a life of another was necessary.

"Why did you leave your group?" Baliph asked from behind Leki. Her body still turned to watch the street. "I don't know much but I know what it's like to be preached to, I also know you don't forget that teaching over night. Something made you run from your past."