Confessions of a Madman

Chapter Four: A Genesis of Slaughter

"I was twelve then - no, thirteen. I had no immediate relatives, save my dying grandparents. The police was stumped in its investigation, and my grandparents were sadistic aristocrats who had nothing but contempt for the 'unclean witch-spawn' that I had been, given my mother's heritage, so I only saw one way - the running way. 

"Being a street urchin is not hard. Especially when you lack scruple. I did anything, as long as it filled my belly enough to last a night. Most of the time, I ended up stealing. Food, or something else. I was quite good at getting around, and there were men in need of good little boys like me. A cut-purse here, an ear there, I was part of rather large network of little spies, you see. It's no different today, and it was no different then - tragedies happen, and children become fatherless, motherless, desperate for purpose. And praise.

"We're so easy. We know what we need. Children don't seek glory, or vengeance - a roof over our heads and a meal in our stomachs, and we'll love you. Or at least, normal children. I was no normal child. Few of us were, given what we had been through. And I grew up to become even less normal in the earlier days of my manhood. I don't remember quite how old I was - in fact, I don't know how old I am now. I do know, however, that its only under his guidance that I lived through those years." I finished talking, sipping from the cold water.

"His guidance?" the Admiral asked predictably. "A man took you in?"

"No." I countered. "He gave me no food. He gave me no home." I looked up from the straw, slowly panning my gaze towards my opponent. My enemy. The only friend I have left. "He gave me something... better. A purpose. A reason to go on.

"I surmised that my parents died due to incompetence, that my uncle died due to incompetence, and that I myself am a failure. A byproduct of dead relationships and passed-on souls, and that I, too, should pass on." I said coolly. The Admiral made no notion of a comment, nor did he seem to truly listen. Yet something made me think that, despite the airy look he was giving me, he wasn't missing anything. "I was a coward, and suicide was not my way. I lived, yet I would strive not too - I wanted to die, but not by my hand. Trouble was what I sought, and I oft found it. He must have had his share of wayward souls, because one night, beat and bloody and in a gutter, he passed me by and dropped a note. Not sure why he presumed I could read, but I could, so it's not a detail of great import. The note was simple - it didn't tell me to cheer up, or to live life happily, or to let go of the past - it gave me a name, a description, and an order to kill."

"Name?" noted the Admiral. His eyes fleeted over the papers, then back onto me. I leaned as far as I could before going on.

"Yes. A name, my dearest Admiral. Marion Grenchhawk, a local apothecary. Small business, yet incredibly fraudulent. Also a distribution point for dangerous toxins - our competitor's number one supplier of poisons. Back then, I was a conflicted youth, driven to do what a piece of paper told me to, despite the lack of sense in that, but today, I know that it was the first of many phases in a great plan.

"Assassins, murderers, men like you and I who carry swords and fight with bullets, its our wit and our strength that molds humanity. We murder each other, cutting away at those with different beliefs, different ideals, differences. We kill them, we hack at their bones and saw at their flesh, we consume their legacies and fill the voids we leave with our seeds, seeds of all kind. Look at Khooma, that miserable, blistering pile of shit. Today, it's the prime example of human savagery. Yet savagery is what the propaganda said we would be fighting. What you would be fighting.

"We're the men with the blades, who shape this world to our will, yet our will is not our own, after all. We're told what we want to hear, so we may stow our blades, or we're intimidated with threats of death and famine, so we may draw them. Tools, tools like hammers and chisels, first to clear away the pestilence, and then to replace it with brick and stone and -"