The Non-Human Society

Chapter Fifty One - Renn - The Last Painting

      The fire was... oddly dark, in the murky night.

Most of the fire had died down, it seemed, but every so often I could see the dark orange flames inside the black smoke.

Luckily, thanks to the size of the building and the fact it had been made mostly of stone... the fire hadn't spread very far. Only a single other building had caught fire, a storeroom and barn that the Carvill knights used to house their horses and other items.

Glancing away from the cloud of smoke, I dared a glance to the man sitting nearby.

Vim sat on the wall's ledge, with slumped shoulders. Watching the fire like a hawk... had he even blinked in the last hour?

Looking away from him, I glanced up and down the... what had Vim called this part? The battlement?

He sat in-between two of the extruding parts of the walls, which somewhat hid him from view in the dark of the night.

I stood behind him, but not because I was afraid to sit on the ledge of this wall. It wasn't that high, honestly, only a few stories tall... but...

If I sat in one of the crevices, as Vim was doing, I'd not be able to keep an eye on him.

No one else was on this section of the wall. Most of the guards of the city, and in fact most of Ruvindale, was on the other side of the town. Either aiding in fighting the fire, or watching it.

A part of me was... pained, to know that there was a very good chance that the fire had killed someone. It had spread so... so fast... Hopefully they also got the horses out of that barn, too.

And hopefully that young boy also found peace.

That young knight had guided me to a small garden, covered in glass. In fact it had been very beautiful. The kind that made me forget the severity of the moment... and because of that I had been ensorcelled by it. I had gotten lost in those flowers, which were blooming even during this cold winter.

What had been a simple trick to allow Vim to be alone in the storeroom... turned into me losing track of time.

Then the world had exploded. Glass shattered. The floor had rocked.

And in that moment, not only had I been forced to realize how serious the moment had been...

Closing my eyes, I groaned softly at the memory.

Of the young boy, who had been all smiles.

Of his shocked expression, upon seeing my tail.

Opening my eyes, I looked at Vim. He still sat there, staring at the fire... focused on it and nothing else.

Stepping towards him, I tried to look over his shoulder. To see if his right hand still had that young knight's blood on it.

That young knight's terrified expression as he died would haunt me for some time.

It hadn't just been shock. It hadn't just been terror...

It had been betrayal.

And somehow that hurt the most.

"Was... was this the right choice, Vim?" I asked the man with the tear-stained face.

Studying the Societies protector, I wondered how such a man cried so openly. So purely.

Yet... what were those tears for? How many of those tear stains were for the humans he killed? How much of his grief, so obviously visible on his expression, was for the knights... and how much of it was for us? For Lughes and Amber? Crane and Shelldon?