You Almost Had Me

The moonlight bathed the bloodshed, adding a silver blanket that glimmered in waves across the bodies of men that wailed and grunted, sparkling with scarlet spears, carnage of human fields, and he exhaled with reticent resolve—gazing beyond the ocean of death, thinking of home. Recollections of horripilation, while he ran across cold marble floors, sighed through his mind momentarily; a laudable lad longing for a world outside of luxury, befriending shadows in a vast palace, while his father fought another foreign war. He would stare at a gargantuan orange and white-centered sun, holding his wooden soldier, rubbing it with his left thumb and smiling at the thought of his father, The Emperor, defeating the furious armies of lesser peoples from other lands. His mother would call his name and faintly with her chiming tone, but he would lose himself thinking, “If my father conquers the world, I will then…have to conquer the sun.”

 

And as the whining last gasps of his enemies filled the night with song, a thin beam of light shot from behind his right ear, and he knew.

 

With a thunderous scream, a digging of his feet in the soil, he dropped to one knee and like paralyzing lightning, stabbed his adversary with five fingers and dug deep inside, yanking intestines out like burgundy ribbons. And as the rain began to pour heavily, he beheld the countenance of his assailaint…it was a woman.

 

He rose slowly as she choked on her tongue—she tried uttering something. He tilted his head in mild curiosity as he felt her violent breath on his lips.

 

Grabbing her by the jaw with a cold metal-scalloped glove, he said softly, “You almost had me.”

∞