• A golden orb scanned the area, surveying the number of corpses and the still-living. Either his eyesight was terrible, or there were too many to count. Although he only had one eye, his eyesight was just as good as anyone else's. He sighed. He'd done it again. But for what? There was no reason. No ******** reason. He had gone and killed dozens, possibly even hundreds, of people. People that had done nothing. Nothing at all but live their lives.

    He still had a headache from earlier. Those screams were louder than he had thought, apparently. His clothes were ruined, and he knew he was going to have to wash his hair and his ears to get the blood out. He lifted his hands to examine them. Yup, he'd have a hard time getting the blood off of his skin as well. (His only weapons had been his hands.) He let his hands drop quickly back to his side, not putting any force behind the movement whatsoever. That was another thing. He felt like he could pass out, he was so tired. He would have sat down, had there been a decent place to do so. He settled for just standing there, not moving.

    This was the worst part of these incidents. Afterward, he'd have to look at what he'd done and stand there; all the while his emotions would flood his mind like a dam had broken and his conscious was the only place they could drain. It was hell. The leftover anger was always joined by the new guilt, regret and sorrow. Always. It was like he couldn't feel good when he was the one killing. When that thought went through his head, he stopped and laughed. Laughed like someone had just told him the best joke he'd ever heard. It was just that funny. He was always euphoric when he could watch Dina slaughter innocents, and then afterwards, always afterwards, she'd give herself new cuts; new scars. Long after his mental distraction had ended, he still laughed. If someone were to witness the scene, it would surely be a very frightening experience. Luckily, he had never brought anyone along with him to things like this. He couldn't explain why, though. When it happened, it was like he was possessed. He quit whatever it was he was doing and went to the nearest village (always at night) and slaughtered whoever he could get his hands on. He didn't feel anything when he was like that. It always hit him after everything was over. When he could do nothing but punish himself for once again unnecessarily ending lives.

    His usual self-punishment was to drink himself into unconsciousness after standing in the midst of his destruction for a few hours (the longer, the better). Sometimes he did other things, such as cause himself actual physical pain and sometimes he would walk through the corpses and search for the living. (He only did the latter in extreme situations.) This certain situation was far from the worst he'd done, so he would probably only use his normal methods. He'd stay there for a few more hours and then go home and drink. He'd drink every last drop of alcohol he owned, if he had to. Going without for a while was fine; Dina was a good distraction from drinking. With another sigh, he looked down at the ground around him. The closest thing to him were a few bodies and a tree. He sat on the blood-soaked ground, letting his hands rest palm-down on the dirt. He looked around a second time before looking straight ahead. He'd stay like that until he decided to leave. When he sat like that, he usually sat there trying to remember what he had done or he let his emotions run rampant and he beat himself up over and over, just to feel bad.

    While he sat, he let his anger and regret and guilt and grief make a maelstrom of his consciousness. In one second, he'd be to the point of wanting to injure himself and in the next second, he could be sitting there, bawling like a lost child. One word described him when he was like that: pitiful. It would have been an extremely depressing sight, had anyone been around to see it.

    ~~~

    Once he judged that he had been sitting there long enough, he slowly stood up, not bothering to brush off. He started to make his way through the remains, avoiding any corpse-like object or something that might have belonged to one of the deceased. He was perfectly respectful to the dead.

    It took a while, but he eventually made it back into the coldness of the forest that surrounded his home. If he continued at his current speed, he'd be there within a half-hour.

    ~~~

    He couldn't be sure that Dina wasn't inside, but there was a good chance that she was, so he went inside without making a sound, closing the door lightly behind him. He immediately walked over to his drinking table and took his boots off before gathering up the bottles that still had alcohol in them.

    A few minutes later, he was sitting down at the table, looking over almost a tableful of bottles of assorted types of liquor. He started with the bottles with the least in them, hoping (he hated to) that he might be able to finish the almost empty bottles off. He finished one in no time and quickly picked up a second bottle, then a third, then a fourth, and so on until the almost empty ones were gone and there were the ones that 'had-been-drank-out-of-but-weren't-quite-full' left.


    An unknown amount of bottles later....


    Kael was slumped over in his chair with his face pressed against the cool wood of the table under him. There was also an overturned bottle on the table, and some of the liquid that had been inside had spilled and had since pooled around Kael's cheek and had dripped off of the table, joining countless other bottles in the floor. At first glance it might have seemed that he was asleep, but if one looked close enough, they would be able to tell that he wasn't asleep. He hardly breathed, he was so drunk. The moonlight coming in from the half-open window didn't help to tell if he was asleep or dead, and it didn't help that he couldn't be woken up. Only the light of dawn could do that. Only the assurance of another chance would wake him from his comatose state. Only the passing of the horrors of his nightmares of what he could have done would wake him up.