On The Edge of a Blade

Chapter 10.1

Shilah towered over Rose, seven feet tall at least. "Prove yourself."

"I don't want to."

"But you must! See, matter of fact, you have no choice." Her eyes remained locked onto Rose, her gaze evil and unwavering, tearing into her very soul. "You know nothing else, Alister. Chaos is in your nature; mercy is a foreign language to you."

"That's a lie."

"Your namesake created the Greater Desert. Do you not do the same to others, taking life away and placing it into the ceaseless burning of Hell? Don't we all?" Shilah ran a hand down Rose's cheek, the roughened hands of a killer. Rose looked down to her own; they were just as calloused. They were also coated with a layer of blood, a stain upon her skin.

"But I'm not like you," Rose said wistfully, trying to convince herself of that claim just as much as Shilah.

A smile, cold and twisted, grew upon the other assassin's face. "Oh? Then what are you?"

What, indeed? Rose was a mortal with a human body, but she hardly had any claim upon humanity at all. At the same time, however, she wasn't a monster like Shilah. The world's expectations was for to fit into the extreme of either good or evil, but she had failed to conform to either one or the other. "I am my own entity," she decided slowly, each word full of measured hostility. "I am not pure evil like you and I have none of a saint's virtue. If anything . . . I am neutral. I have my own agendas and my own goals, and I refuse to conform to either side. I am, and shall forever be, me."

There was a ringing in her ears, building until it reached a fever pitch. A thousand shrill cries resounded within her head, the screaming of bells, the shouting of pained flesh. Just when Rose thought she might become deaf from the din, Shilah spoke, breaking up the internal clamor. "How wrong you are, little Alister. There has been, and will always be, a need to chose one side. You are either with us or against us." She leaned forward, coming to be cheek to cheek with Rose. "You have no identity outside of Good and Evil. If you don't align yourself with one or the other, you might as well be nothing." Cruel lips turned up in a cruel smile. "Admit it; you have no clue who you are."

And she didn't. Rose knew what she did for a living, but that was about it. Her true self, however, couldn't be defined by her trade, and nor could her mind. Did being an assassin mean that she was automatically bad? Were people so quick to judge that they assumed all assassins shared a single personality, a single mind, a single set of goals?

Killing was only part of the job description.

Shilah laughed. "Of course you're bad, Alister," she said in response to Rose's thoughts, indicating that she heard each of them in perfect clarity. "When was the last time you cried at the sight of another person's blood?" A pause. "Allow me to rephrase that; have you ever cried at the sight of another person's blood?"

The answer to that was no; she never had. Rose had been killing ever since she could remember, but she was hardly able to recall the last time she was burdened with the weight of a guilty conscience. She was simply a killer from the very pit of her soul. The ill-tempered assassin knew that she should feel remorseful for all that was wrong with her, but her face didn't so much as fall at the sight of death, and her heart barely twinged when she was responsible for it.

"So there. You are, indeed, a bad, rotten person. It's simply in your nature." Shilah drew away from Rose, self-satisfaction plastered upon her visage and exuding from every pore. "You were born to kill, and you kill to live."

That statement felt wrong. How could a child possibly be born violent? A baby cried out her misery at having been brought into such a wicked world; she didn't cry out of a need for even more bloodshed.