Ilara Bonaparte
The church bells were mourning my death in a sad requiem.
I realized they couldn’t have been doing this; I wasn’t dead yet. But as rosy-fingered dawn spread her palms toward the west, this is surely how it felt. Four ribs were broken, maybe five. One was protruding into my lung and I gradually felt my lung collapsing. There was a sucking noise every time I breathed, and my breastbone was shattered in two. I was missing a good many teeth and my face was a shrine to gods of bruises and blood. My hair was matted with blood- my own, and other’s. Only my eyes, a pale gray, resisted the oncoming death.
The Grim Reaper himself would be forced to take me; I’d never simply “pass away”. I wasn’t a normal person.
In some ways, I’d stopped being human long ago.
I lay twenty yards from the afore-mentioned church. It looked like a pillar of hope, its steeple raised to the heaven in a prideful praise. It was a deep color of cream, looking dark gray in the lingering darkness. It stood so close…
If I’d only made it to the front doors, I may have lived through the night.
Regardless, now I was dying. I was fighting it, of course- it was in my nature to do so. But part of me ached for the sweet release, for the blessed silence. There would be no more prowls in the darkness, no more adrenaline-fed sprints, no swinging of my sword, no beating informants to a bloody pulp of unrecognizable meat.
My life didn’t really speed before my eyes. My eyes were open, and all I could see was the sky above tinged with the impossibly beautiful tinges of dawn.
I didn’t need to see my life again; I’d seen enough of it the first time around.
I fought the death; but in the end, the battle for life always loses. Death claims us all as his mistress and servant, stealing us from what we once were. In death, however, I would know peace.
In death, I would know the end of war.