Confessions of a Killer

I was eleven years old when it began, this…obsession, with the blood. To see it, touch it, feel it sliding through my fingers and running down my face. Not yet a man, yet with a man’s sickness, a disease of the mind, though one I would not trade. A strange word that: disease. Break it down into its parts. Dis-ease. An uneasiness of the mind. That would not be the unkindest thing said of me in the last 40 years. Not by half.

My obsession, as I prefer to call it, manifested itself in the form of my father. My father…so removed from me now as to be but an echo of a shadow of a memory. A righteous man; strong in his beliefs of faith, virtue, King and country, he was Christian al’Covren, of the old House al’Covren. Third cousin, several times removed, to King Terrylin of Eharon, a man of principle and honor in a world long gone to the quick and the damned. And above all else, a fool. That was my father. From the time my brothers and I could hold up our heads without aid, he had us schooled in the ancient arts and practices of the nobility. Instead of games and toys, our days were filled with lectures and dissertations on the duty of the peerage toward the common man, our sworn code of honor to protect and nurture the needs of the lower class. Ever the one to fly into noble crusades, the old Lord al’Covren was blinded by his own goodness to the effects his perfection would have on his youngest son. In time, I would grow to despise the old fool, seeing in the assembled nobles that gathered to table like pigs before the trough, a largely expendable group of two-faced old men who spoke expansively of honor and privilege while taxes increased every year.

But I digress. I was speaking of the blood, and it’s rapturous effect on the spirit. In an abandoned storeroom, deep within the bowels of our manor house, I began to experiment with the beasts of the land, learning with practice to draw out the dying over many hours, so as better to study the effects of my ministrations. I learned, in those formative years, the ecstasy of pain; of torture so skillfully applied that the spirit dies while the body lives on. By my thirteenth nameday, I was ready for larger things, for the penultimate step in my self-imposed education. His name was Jhoran, a page in my father’s court, and the unwilling usher to my future career. He was days in the dying; his tortured screams muffled by layers of blankets and rugs hung over thick stone walls. At times in those long, unforgettable nights, he would cry out to Heaven and Hell, screaming his pain at ancestors dead a millennia, calling for his children and Desette, his pitiful wife, over and over, as if the mere mention of their names was a balm against his agony. I learned much from him before I finally let him go, more a carved piece of meat than a man by that time. The blood flowed thickest nearest the heart, as if thinned by the passage through the veins. And the veins themselves! Millions of myriad vessels, branching infinitely out from that intimate pump, only to return to be purified and spilled out once more. I had watched him die, watched in fascination as the dripping blood... slowed inexorably to a halt and the life drained out of his eyes. In my life since, I have yet to find an equal beauty in the world to compare with that first death.

It was only three days later that my life would change forever. The discovery of the corpse, hastily buried beneath a woodpile on my father’s land, sent a riot of panic through the surrounding towns. The subsequent discovery, through means I have yet to fathom, that I was the demon that had wrought this deed, brought life, as I knew it to a complete and utter standstill. My father, the self-proclaimed Defender of the Weak that he was, went into a murderous rage. I was imprisoned, denied light and warmth and kin, and tried as a commoner before the King and the assembled Lords of the Land. I was pronounced a Darkfriend, though in truth, at that time I had no idea what it meant to serve the Shadow. As a final show of devotion to his much loved though misguided son, instead of the hanging all of Eharon expected and craved, my father begged for exile. In the end, his pathetic gesture of love saved my life, though small favor it won him in my heart. His death, years later, and at my own hand, is another story, and one I would delight in relating. Perhaps another time.

I know not why I feel compelled at this time to take quill in hand to commit to words these, my initial steps down the road to Hell. Perhaps it is age, and the desire to be remembered that forces out these images I have never before shared. Perhaps it is a warning, to those who would think that the reputation of the Devil is overblown. Perhaps I am influenced by some unseen power, forcing these words from my shaking hand. Or perhaps it is merely the call of the blood, singing to me once again, of simpler times and moments of purity unmatched in the long years since.

Let reason be damned, along with all else in this fool-infested and doomed world. It is the blood. It has always been the blood.