Korax Tavarius Part Deux

Korax lay on his bed, unable to sleep. It was often that way after a battle. Not because he felt regrets or guilt, but rather because battles were generally all the same, and he always marvelled at it. He used the same movements and the same skill. The setting would change, the faces and armor, but the precision of his sword remained the same. The timing and reactions, they did not change. It was, in a way, comforting, and though he'd mulled it over many times, it was still intruiging to him. Battle was always battle, and it had been since he'd been a common soldier fighting in another man's war. Of course, he hadn't remained common for very long.

His thoughts turned to the mental images of the faces of the men he'd slain sometimes for his own cause, but usually for the purposes of someone he'd never met and never wanted to meet. He did his job, and he excelled at it. His long-dead wife, noticing his unrest after a battle, had once asked him if it bothered him. His answer had frightened her. No, it didn't bother him. He didn't let it. He had seen men go mad from the guilt of killing a boy who shouldn't have been allowed in the ranks; seen his fellow soldiers lose their focus because they hesitated to take their enemy's life. No, he felt no guilt. He felt nothing when he went to battle, and so he felt nothing about a battle. There was no emotion, no feelings in his movements. There was focus, precision, awareness. Emotions did not win wars. Tavarius had learned long ago to snuff them out before he went to battle.

When he'd been younger it had been more of a struggle, so he'd come up with a sort of code. He killed only soldiers or those who had attacked him. Soldiers had been trained, and somewhere in the masses of armies, there ought to be one man or a group of men who could combine their tactics against him and conquer him. In fact, Korax held that he ought to have died in every battle, but the men he fought were afraid or unprepared - two things a soldier could not ever afford to be. Once in the midst of battle, it had occured to him distantly that the men he was slaughtering probably had families who were depending on them to provide, and thus, he was breaking his own code. In his detatched state though, the thought slid by unheeded and never came back when it might have found a foothold in his conscience to challenge his code.

Blinking in the darkness, Korax stopped the reel of faces that was playing in his mind and turned onto his side, removing the battle from his thoughts. It still wasn't eliciting emotion from him, but remembering would keep him awake and rest was necessary. Closing his eyes, he silenced all thought and soon slipped into a dreamless sleep.


I read through this again, and it seemed kind of redundant to me. . . Oh, well. Seeing as he's not even in a story yet, everything will probably get rewritten anyway.