Blood splattered the walls of this lost and dark alleyway in the middle of nowhere, and the Ash Knight slowly stepped back from their victim, someone who had been a simple drunkard a few minutes ago. But now? Now it wasn't a drunkard. Now he wasn't someone. It was something, just like the Knight himself. The armored man-thing could only wonder, would it rise as well? Maybe a Unionist Deity would pity it, and bring it back to life... "Wouldn't that be fun?" The Knight mused to himself. They could get a companion, who could understand how they felt, and they could be called...the Drunk Knight. It wasn't funny though. Nothing seemed really funny anymore, aside from killing, and the act of that on itself wasn't funny, was it? It was more of a satisfaction of pleasuring Woldemar, and there wasn't much else to it. The Knight sat down in front of the corpse, and a gentle orange glow started to shine on his palms. Their palms. The Knight allowed the thought to be consumed into apathy, and focused on the armor, which also glowed in burgundian reflexes. Slowly but surely, the Knight moved their hands over the armor, little by little mending the impacts and scratches, allowing it to return to it's smooth composition. They had been beaten. He felt... disgust at the thought that he had to rely on their masters instead of cutting the heads of their enemies when he had a chance. But he had to see it as a learning experience. He looked at the corpse once again. "You think this makes me weak, don't you? Killing unarmed civillians by surprise, who aren't even given a chance to retaliate. You probably believe I'm just a bully who punishes the world to feel some sense of wholeness." Said the Ash Knight to the unresponsive body. As no response came, the Knight kept speaking. "I still remember the first kill. An Ailor. Apparently, he knew me before all...this." And with a small nod, the Knight remarked his body. "I used to be someone who liked to speak. Can you imagine it? Me, on a podium, giving a conference on the rights of the common man? About why Kathars should be trusted? On why Sanguines and the Regalian Empire would function better if they cooperated?" With another nod, the Ash Knight took his helmet off, allowing the putrefact and dead skin to be touched by the cold air and the snow, as the clouds covered the sun. With that, the Knight observed their face into the reflection, and in his reflected eyes, he only saw disgust. "I obviously don't care about that anymore, otherwise, you would have gone on, and would be home by now... Or maybe not, like I said, I don't care about this type of stuff anymore. But, I'm getting off-topic, where was I...? Oh, that's right, the Ailor." With that, the Knight put it's helmet once again, rose up, and forced the corpse to look at their eyes. The blank stare of death met the vitriolic hatred of the Knight's eyes. "Apparentley, I crossed the guards. I was planning on doing something big, becoming a martyr for a lost cause. In my last moments, I apparentley tried to kill them, and that didn't go well you know?" No response came from the corpse once more, and the Knight threw it on the ground, before crouching until they reached the man's ear. "Now before I leave, let me tell you something. It's a small secret, and you better avoid telling everyone about it, okay? I'm trusting you with a funny life lesson that you don't learn until you are dead." "You see, the little secret, the hilarious joke, the funny thing about being dead is that once you come back, despite people telling you that they were going to miss you, that you mattered to them, that they will never forget you... The funny thing about all of that is that they don't. People sooner or later move on, until eventually, you become an insignificant speck in their past. The world will eventually forget your actions, no matter where they subjectively good or evil. Once you come back, you realise that the world you were born in does not care nor values your life. And once you reach that conclusion, you realise that you shouldn't care about the world as well. It eventually boils down to all life having no value, and that's why I don't care about any of you, and you won't care about any of them." The Ash Knight remained silent, looking at the body for a second. "I just realised, old habits die do hard, don't they? In any case, I just wanted you to understand why you died today. You weren't valuable. You weren't worthless. You simply were alive." And with that, the Ash Knight turned around, and left the alleywey, with darkness engulfing them, leaving a lonely corpse in the middle of nowhere.
