Balder's Babbles [CRIT ME] - Printable Version
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Balder's Babbles [CRIT ME] - Balderdashing - 08-12-2016
So, I'll post stories here or something. I will also not put my 100% into them, but please judge me anyway. I live for criticism. I haven't written anything in long form in a very long time, so I need it. Pls help me git gud. I'll also update this blurb here eventually, but for now I'm lazy.
RE: Balder's Babbles [CRIT ME] - Balderdashing - 08-12-2016
+++ALARIC STERN+++
Silence and fury.
These two things were his only constants. There was the still of the long wait, whistling and unfathomably cruel. Wherever he would find himself waiting, the silence was the same; painful, drudging, and interminable. Oftentimes, as he lay there in the dirt, prostrate beneath broken girders and crumbling masonry, or secreted away in some distant plascrete hollow, he would depart from himself. He was not asleep, certainly-- He was too good for that. The medals on his chest, the notches in the rifle that rested so precariously before him would attest to that.
No, indeed, he was aware, always watching, always waiting. He had come to grow a need for the long vigil, but he would drift all the same. The helmet hid his face, reductors sifting out the white noise of the whistling wind or the groans of distant structures protesting their looming collapse. It left him precious little to distract himself with, that silence. And so he embraced it, cradled in a graven amniosis, left to float alone within the emptiness, reflective of the actions he had taken and those that awaited his fulfillment. It was always the same. Long hours, or days spent dwelling within himself, broken by thunder.
He need only call it down.
All it took was a sign; each were different, but he always knew them. Distant footsteps over broken rubble, maimed and forgotten. Hushed voices on the wind, filtered through a failing rebreather. The rattle and rumble of treads over a city long dead.
Or, as it was now, a man stumbling through the early morning haze, his cap peaked and torn, hollow and lost. He knew the signs. He would ask himself the same questions each time, the rifle rising to his arm, a sad satisfaction in the click of stock to shoulder. The thing gave a low whine as the distant figure stumbled over uneven ground, yearning to pronounce it's judgement.
What was the worth of a man's life?
The man below him stopped, seeming to sense something amiss. Alaric did not falter, putting the scope to his eyeplate, a synaptic link in his gauntlet feeding data across his peripherals in a sickly amber light. His finger found the trigger, waiting there pensively.
There was none.
Vox had shown him that. His body, broken and bloody, ravaged by twisted steel of his own design, had been his lesson. Sairose had been his teacher. It had been his folly in loving her. That hesitation had cost him more than his faith-- It had robbed him of his humanity.
Was this just?
His finger tightened around the trigger like a noose around his neck. The man in the clearing looked to the sky, as though for an answer. He received only scorn.
It did not matter.
There had been a time when he had viewed the world objectively, through the lens of a reasonable man doing the best he could to preserve those he loved. He had loved many, surely; the people of Vox, his companions in the Vanguard, and Sairose-- His beloved Solon-- He had loved her more fiercely than any. And then she had killed him.
Not then. Not now.
The man in the clearing crumpled to the ground, a fist sized hole bored through his chest. Fingers of white smoke spidered towards an empty sky, dust blowing over him. Alaric began to rise, packing his things together. The actuator in his right shoulder hissed, sending pinpricks of pain shooting through his neck. He grimaced, moving through it. There would be no parting glance paid to the body in the clearing below. The man was just like the others. Just like him. They would all end the same, irrespective of their struggle. There was no nobility in it.
He would die again, one day, as that man had.
Soon, but not now.