A Violent Redemption

I had a feeling I was going to lose this wager, and so I ensured I did not put up anything more than I was willing to part with. His debt was now a minor thing to me, and very easily racked up again if I was so inclined. For now, I was more interested in testing the mettle of the professed black mask turned politico. For a man with no formal training, he wasn't half bad.

The Magistrate has a fetish for power play. I think perhaps his desire for power is only superceded by his unconscious desire to have it be nearly wrenched away from his tenuous grasp. The blade tipped quarter-staff had skillfully come up from his knee to his inner thigh and bit into flesh, too close for his comfort to be sure. Hand-to-hand fighting for the sake of it alone is not my skill set. I am equipped with enough training to hold my own until a point that I might escape, but it is not for me to play these games. Still, I obliged him. He bled, and so did I.

There is something mentally clarifying about pain. It reminds us that we are still alive. The bleeding; that we are mortal. These are things that one is best reminded of now and again, lest we become too comfortable in our high perches. I allowed him his advantage, allowing only a glancing touch, save for one that cut decidedly deep. This was his game, mine would come later.

In a moment of foolish decision making however, he removed his belt and struck me with it across the thigh. The old oiled leather snaking around my leg sharply, covetously. The discomfort was minimal, hardly noticable, but the action itself was enraging. If pain is clarifying, anger is a dark fog. The tables were quickly turned back toward him, and the staff cast aside in favor of bloodying his face with precise strikes.

"All of us, be we man, or woman, or child, are within ourselves no more than animal. We wear the skin of civilization, the mask of manners, the cloak and hood of decency and morality. But beneath the guise, we are base. We are savage. And once you are immersed in this truth, Savana, there is no guise you may wear to let you forget it. They truly become no more than something to mask yourself from the other animals." He narrowed his eyes on me critcally the night prior to our combat. "You are an animal already though, aren't you."

"More than you know," I answered.

He watched me closely from the couch, "So the drinking is to keep you sedated.."

"I stop drinking, when I hunt" I had replied.

His debt was erased that night. Absolved through a bloody penance. I wish my own transgressions were so easily forgotten.