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“Well done,” spoke many familiar, icy voices, echoing around him in the starry void, “we did not expect you to fight so fiercely. And all alone, against three of them? Impressive. Starved enough to shake the fast at last?”
“Shut up,” he croaked, still stunned, “I don't know what happened to me… I-I knew I was done for. I should have just let them kill me, I should have. I just felt this surge of frenzy and I-”
“Oh, that is simply adorable. You’ve danced on this battlefield for long. Of your own volition, may we add. We know why. You know why. You are one of us. You know precisely what happened to you. You know you yearn for it”.
“You know nothing. I am no bloodhound. I’m not going to break. I don’t revel in death and bloodshed like you do. You force them into wastelands to kill each other. You feast on it. It is me who makes their damnation bearable. I have not been the same since the cactus ring”.
A laugh rang, halfway between a roar and a hiss, “And yet you kill. More than any other, too. You claim to go down there a saviour, but it doesn't even take for all the chips to be down for you to have more blood on your hands than there runs in your veins. You are the fiercest killer of all”.
He began in protest, but stopped before any words escaped his throat. He looked down in dismay, watching The Trader face off against Blood Moon.
“You yearn to be back in the ring,” they spoke. And their tone was final. “Go now, Xelqua. Guide the new victor”.
****
Grian observed as Scar searched for his dead opponent.
“She’s dead, Scar. You won”.
The words boomed across the fallen land. Another ruin of corpses and rubble. Blood, ash, smoke and splinter.
He did know. He’d die a million times over before he admitted it, but he did. He was not meant to be here, and yet he needed to. He did not want to confess that he also wanted to. He felt pity and anger as he looked around, sure, but there still festered in him a hunger. A lust for catharsis and for decimation. Something within him had been simmering for long, every kill strengthening the flame. That fight turned what had charred in the ring into a wildfire.
He shall defy them. He shall leave the one he’d killed in the ring to tend to the sunflowers. They will be blind, but he, too, watches. And they will know his eyes are that of a falcon.
He was only ever meant to watch, but he is of none and for none.
His will, be done.