Forgiven

by BlackheartPony

Rating: teen
Tags: Alternate Universe, Tragedy, Adventure, Human
Length: 6772

A cold, heartless killer 'dies' and is introduced to a land where love and harmony reign instead of death and chaos. Can an old killer learn a new way, or is he doomed to repeat the same painful mistakes for as long as he lives?

Teyoninhokovrawen, John Mars, or Mare (depending upon who you ask) is a Shakespeare quoting, rock music blaring, nihilistic monster of an assassin with no morals, rules, or feelings. The only allegiance he's ever known is money, and the only thing he's ever considered himself good at is ending a life. Some would call him a tragic hero, others may call him an asshole, I suppose it's your call really. On his (unbeknownst to him) final job, he dares show a modicum of mercy to a man, sparing the life of an enemy that would have been just as easy to snuff out as let survive. This single moment of weakness leads to his demise, however, and after his life 'ends', finds himself alone in a snow laden forest with a single man in front of our hero who claims to be God; offering him a final chance at redemption. To live a new life, in a world where he'll finally have the opportunity to find peace. Can a man as cold as him change, or he is doomed to slowly destroy himself and everything he comes into contact with for as long as he lives?

Published 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC
Last updated 2013-01-12 07:51:16 UTC

The Hitman

'I know you are here to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man.'

-Che Guevara

Now, before we begin this story I’d like to clarify something first, I’ve done a lot of bad things in my day. I’ve put a stop to so many lives, both innocent and guilty souls have found their final resting places thanks to me, I lost count of the people I put in the dust a long, long time ago. You know, after one kills as many humans as me… well… you stop looking at them as people. Hell, you stop looking at them like they’re living beings. After you follow around a man long enough… he stops being a man. He becomes what a simulation, a set of binary codes programmed into a computer to simulate what a man’s life, might appear to be, doomed to be repeated over and over again, ad nauseum at its finest. After so long, they stop becoming creatures in your eyes and instead become machines, enslaved by their day-to-day routines.

The longest I’ve ever followed a man before pulling the trigger is… four months? I wanna say. I had followed this guy, around and around for about a month before I found a moment of opportunity; his wedding. He had one of those real expensive ones that you rent out a portion of a beach to perform on, you know those, right? Well, even if you don’t, I’m assuming you can guess as to what one would look like. It was on this absolutely beautiful part of the world, where the land kissed the sea, and the golden sands were overlooked by a romantic looking cliff, the one you’d see on a magazine cover, with the sun setting over the sea as the bride and groom tied the knot, having their first kiss as a married couple. I, of course, had known for a long time about this wedding, where it was planned, when, how many people were gonna be there, everything. I wanted to try to rub out the guys as quickly as possible, of course, so I could get my money at the earliest convenience, and I figured if I really couldn’t find a safe time and place to do him in before the wedding, that ceremony would be my fail-safe.

Needless to say, I hit my mark. It certainly wasn’t a hard shot, almost no wind, which was surprising due to the fact that I was right next to the sea. The cliff, although stretching about 40 feet into the sky above my target and his would-be wife, wasn’t nearly far enough away to have to worry about the coriolis effect having much of an impact on my aim… and of course, the groom sat still as a boulder as I lined up the shot. I recall splattering that poor man’s brains all over his bride’s wedding dress, careful not to hit her with the shot (I wasn’t afraid of killing her out of empathy, but rather fearful that more deaths means more evidence). I also remember feeling a little bad; not because I most likely ruined the rest of her life and/or killed a man on what should have been the happiest day of his life, but because of the fact that that wedding dress looked kind of expensive, and it’s really hard to get blood out of white clothing.

The things I did... they were unforgivable. I’d snuffed out lives like candles; I felt no regard for who they were as a person. To me, they were just a target. They had to be just a target to you, or it’d drive you insane. In fact, I remember a little game I had, 50 for the heart and head, 40 for any other vitals, 20 for a body shot, and 10 for hitting a limb. I’d take all the points I’d harvested while out on a job and tally them up when I got home, whenever I’d hit a certain milestone I’d reward myself in some way. Take myself out to a nice steak dinner and get the 18 ounce cut, buy a nice, new car, treat myself to a vacation… whatever I was in the mood for when I hit my target score. There were points in my career where military officials in different nations hired me to get onto a sniping spot and just lay waste to as many of the ‘enemy’ soldiers as possible, the same ‘enemies’ I’d be working for the next month. Those sprees, when I got to shoot at anything that moved, were the most fun when it came to my game. Instead of only adding one or two sets of points to the board when I was done with a job, I got to add tons of them. I think before I headed out on my last job I had a little over 2,500 points, although I had only started tallying them up a few years after I adopted my profession, so the real amount of points I had might have been closer to 4,000.

Now, before I finally tell you about my final job, I have to impart a single scrap of knowledge in order to discard any pre-mature conclusion you’ve no doubt jumped to about me by now. I, contrary to what it may seem, have feelings. I just choose not to feel them, it’s… easier that way. So when a little girl steps into your sights far past the point where you can recall the message to your body to stop pulling the trigger preventing yourself from sending a high caliber and speed bullet from exiting the barrel of your rifle, which then travels through space until it reaches her head and sends fragments of her underdeveloped skull flying through a newly formed exit wound in the front of her face well… it’s best to have numbed yourself to emotion. No, I’m not saying that specific scenario has ever happened to me, I’m just trying to make you understand that having emotions in this line of business can be detrimental to your success and overall sanity.

Now, onto the real story, I suppose: I had recently been hired to take out some pirate who had ambushed an American cruise liner in the dead of night and ransomed off a bunch of hostages for a few million dollars or so, nothing unusual or special about it really, except for the fact that during the storming of the cruise line one of the patrons of the ship tried to jump one of the pirates, but was killed long before he managed to do any real damage to the pirates. Now, this on its own also is nothing out of the ordinary; it’s a tragedy and the U.S. government will make some hollow promises to put an end to this and that and blah, blah, blah… they never really did anything in the end, just try and win the hearts and minds of their people; however this certain bystander wasn’t just another blue blood who had been unfortunate enough to be on the deck of an invaded vacation cruise ship, he was the son of one of the… Louisiana congressmen, I think it was. So needless to say, that man was damn furious, and the government knew it was gonna have to terminate the leader of that particular sanction of pirates if they wanted to keep that congressman from spilling his guts and, in turn, start riots and revolutions. And let me tell you, when the American government hires an outside freelancer such as myself to take down a pirate, you know that this guy is gonna be a real piece of work. America only finds it necessary to hire the likes of me to take out a total and complete animal that they’d never risk one of their real snipers on, plus you know America is always gonna need it done real discreet and hush hush-like, so they certainly weren't going to be supplying me with any equipment that could be traced back to them. All in all, it was nothing I couldn’t accomplish, but I wasn’t going to be able to take him out cleanly with a .308 round to the back of the head. No, this guy was balls deep into pirate territory in some abandoned U.S. military bunker; according to the little birdie I had imbedded with those degenerates the guy never left his makeshift panic room, so I couldn’t just dick around on top of a cliff till he poked his ugly pirate head out the door. I was actually going to have to plan this one out, which was a rarity now and days, seems like no one realizes that they just might have a hefty sum on their head anymore.

The old Luna was already high in the night sky when I docked my dingy onto an aquatic tree that was growing particularly close to the edge of the gulf perhaps a mile outside of Bullaxaar (the shithole where my target had decided to bury himself into). The cover of darkness would be more than enough to slip into the town unnoticed, my skin had a natural dark tint to it, and with all the sun I had been getting of recent I was more than tan enough to pass off as a Somali in a low light situation. Have I ever told you how much I love the night? It’s so useful, it’ll hide absolutely anything for you without question, and its only problem is the frequent and lengthy interruptions that the sun feels necessary to interject into my beloved darkness.

As I made my way through the dense undergrowth toward the town I contemplated how exactly I was going to find my target this time. It was always interesting to find out what kinda things people were doing before you did them in, it was actually easier to remember the situations I found targets in than it was to remember their faces or even their names. I remember probably my favorite kill was when I walked in on some guy choking the bishop as I pressed the muzzle of a silenced 9 mil to his head. He had a gun jammed into his face as he had his gun gripped firmly in his hand, it’s just too bad it was the wrong kinda gun for that situation. I barely resisted laughing as I tightened my gloved pointer around the trigger; I had at least wanted to give that poor bastard some modicum of decency and honor before he bit the dust. Call me sadistic, but that kinda thing just tickles my sense of humor.

A cheap barbed wire fence surrounded the perimeter of the shanty-town, with the only intended entrances and exits being the small harbor that stretched a few meters into the Gulf of Aden and a fence gate that red directly into a dirt road highway. The gate was swarming with cheaply dressed, dirty, untrained assholes who thought themselves tough because their inexperienced hands were wrapped around a near-broken AK47 and they managed to successfully ambush a non-military vessel. I hated cowards like these, if you’re gonna feel pride in your work, at least have a reason to feel proud about it. Kidnapping and ransoming innocent children is nothing I’d ever write home about. Perhaps that’s the only feeling I ever did end up experiencing in my time as a hitman, anger; but that itself was for the soul (get the pun?) reason that an angry soul helped in a few aspects of the job. A direct fistfight was made a lot easier if your blood was boiling with rage and your veins coursing with more adrenaline than hemoglobin. I’m sorry, you’re going to have to excuse me faithful reader; I tend to melt into diatribes every so often. Come on, you know you do it too! However, I must warn you now that if you go on a tirade about any Native American tribes- I will find you in the dead of the night and forcibly insert the entirety of my lower arm into your holy passage. Sorry, doing it again.

I found myself in a bit of a predicament at that choice, as to see that I only had two options that didn’t reek of suicide; either scale the barbed wire or go for a little midnight skinny dipping session. Due primarily to the fact that the barbs at the top of the short fence appeared to be unkempt and infested with rust, and my failure to have brought along buckets of Neosporin and tetanus shots, I opted for the latter of the two choices.

I spotted a point along the fence where the outside line of brush was particularly dense and began shoveling out handfuls of dirt, feeling the grainy soil dig underneath my finger nails as I labored away. I kept raking and raking away until I had managed to excavate a hole just large enough to fit my equipment through as well as carefully sliding my jacket underneath the hole as to prevent from tearing a new scar into the worn leather that I’d have to once again patch up. Good God, those had to be the worst pirates ever. I mean, for the love of Christ, you’re supposed to put barbed wire on the top AND bottom of the fence to avoid this kinda shit happening. Hell, they’re lucky I hadn’t opted to bring a shovel along, or I coulda just tunneled into their shitty little hub of underworld activities. I could have stayed warm, dammit! Although, I suppose in the end it hadn’t made much of a difference… but we’re getting to THAT little tidbit in a moment.

I rose back to my feet as I heard the bizarre blend of sounds that the pirate encampment and jungle crafted together, a pair of opposites working together to create a sense of awe and bewilderment. I enjoyed the harmonic sound for a split second before refocusing my tension to the gulf that lay before me, the reflection of the old Luna showed on its surface, making it seem almost never-ending as I beheld its beautifully crafted vastness. Intimidating for some perhaps, but it was a sight of comfort for me; it was so very, very easy to lose someone in the ocean, especially during the night. I sucked in a breath of salty sea air before breaking into a silent run toward the golden beach, feeling the wind whip past me as I dove headfirst into the cold water, feeling my arms break the surface before being followed shortly by my head and body.

I released a bubble of air from my lungs and cracked my eyes open a fraction of a centimeter in the saturated water to search for my target surface break, I spotted the darker splotch of black amongst the rest of the black on the water’s surface and swam for it, releasing another bubble or two of compressed carbon as I swam. It took me maybe 15 seconds to break the surface underneath my target, a pier that extended into the Gulf. I inhaled sharply through my nose for a split second before once again constraining the oxygen to my lungs, listening for any footsteps that came from the planks above me. The really nice things about the huge bodies of water such as this were the ways they managed to amplify and tune sounds so well, magnifying the vibrations of sound waves by God knows how many times before they reached your ears. Underneath docks like this, you could hear ANYTHING that moved above you, be it man, animal, or something in between. If anything was gonna move, I’d hear it.

Hearing only beautiful silence floating there, I released a sigh and pulled myself onto the dock. The bunker in which my target hid, was about in pirate terms equivalent to the fucking Taj Mahal. The panic-room was nestled up nice and cozy-like dead center of town, surrounded by leagues of heavily armed pirates and other such security measure, not to mention that the bunker itself was no doubt home to a small army of the foul-smelling bastards. At this point I’m about equivalent to a black widow who is trying desperately to kill and consume the queen of an ant colony; if I wanted to succeed in my endeavor I was gonna have to flood the workers out of her throne room. Fortunately enough, a plan was brewing.

-Page missing, we apologize for this inconvenience-

‘Shiggy diggy, it actually worked,’ I thought as happily as my sociopathic self could as I slipped into the now practically unoccupied bunker unnoticed, pirates rushing from all conceivable angles toward the now burning building on the outskirts of their precious outlaw town. ‘Moths to flame’ I laugh to myself. There wasn’t a shadow of a doubt in my mind however, that a select few of my target’s bodyguards would stay glued in their current positions, their only objective was to keep the pirate king alive and breathing. At the time however it seemed insignificant, a handful of pirates strung along my path was going to result in little to no true resistance to me. Just pop out of a corner with your weapon drawn and aimed forward and be prepared to reposition your gun and fire as quickly as possible, you get good at it after a while.. Which is fortunate to me obviously, it was of course in my best interest to slip in and out of this pirate town as silently and ghostlike as possible.

I slid my Beretta from its leather shoulder holster as silently as possible and checked the clip, which still remained full, which meant that a round had not been magically lost when I stashed my gear under the fence. I let my mind race as I progressed through the bunker, ready to fire on an unsuspecting enemy. Alright, 15 round clips, one in the chamber, so 16 rounds, two pistols, that means I can pull off 32 shots before I have to swap mags. Two fresh mags for each pistol means I have a tiny bit under 100 rounds all together, according to my bird there was somewhere between 30-40 pirates that live in this town, including their leader and including the snitch. That meant at the very most there is gonna be 38 pirates I would have to deal with if anything goes bad and at the very least 28. If it ended up being closer to 40 then that meant if I created a choke point somewhere in the bunker then I’d have to put in a fresh clip at least once to take them all out, and that’s IF I don’t miss with a single shot. Then again, if there were 5 guards in the bunker and I took them out along with King Blackbeard then that’d be another 5 I wouldn’t have to worry about if things went awry, which would mean…

My frantic mind stopped dead in its tracks when I heard it, two voices coming from the next room it. My left hand reached for my other shoulder holster as I listened in on the voices, hearing them speak about random bullshit, I could honestly care less about what they’re saying and more about where they’re saying it. I was trying to create a general sense as of where the voices originated for when I popped into the room, if I knew where the two were located then the easier it would be to silence them before they could make a peep. ‘Back of the room, a little to the left of the entrance.’

I sidestepped into the open doorway, tracing each body as quickly as possible with the pistols and firing a shot from either handgun. ‘Forget the one in the chamber,’ I muttered silently as I surveyed the two bodies on the cold, cement floor. Both were quickly beginning to form massive blood pools as my heavy, long strides narrowed the distance between myself and them. Much to my dissatisfaction, as I approached, I found where each shot had connected with flesh. My right target was a clean shot through the head, directly under his left eye; while the pirate to my leftmost side had gotten a round in the neck. I cringed at my subpar shot, ‘It is my bad hand.’ It’s right about that point that I noticed the left pirate was still kicking, in fact, he was trying his very hardest to suck in a mouthful of air, blood leaking profusely from his neck. “Shit,” I said out loud, assured that my voice was quiet enough so that it wouldn’t leave the room. I let my eyes wander around the room as my legs bent and my back bent forward, putting my face inches above the pirate’s. He was young, that much was apparent from his body, but there was something about his face… it was so beat up and eroded away by painful experiences. He had this wrinkle-ridden cut-up face that said, ‘I do what I must’, along with a pair of cold, dead eyes that practically screamed misanthropy. As I looked at him, I couldn’t help but feel a tiny level of remorse.

“I’m sorry about that man,” I began, seeing his mouth close and shut rapidly like a fish flopping around out of water. “I was aiming for the head,” I made my middle and index finger into a gun and fired a fake round into my temple. “Boom, quick death; ya know?” He simply gave me a look of horror as he gasped inaudibly, desperate to take a breath. “Look here, would ya rather just have me shoot you now, or do you wanna just wait and bleed out to death here; unhappy, alone, cold and in pain?” His mouth continued to flop up and down like a salmon’s. “Right, can’t talk. Uhm… forgot I said that. Look, just nod your head yes if you want me to end your suffering right here and now, but you can just keep doing nothing if you wanna, you know, let nature take its course so you can die of shock and blood loss.”

(“Objection, he is leading the victim!” Shut the fuck up reader, I didn’t ask your opinion on this.)

He gave his head  a soft bob up and down as his eyes began to cloud up and grey, his mouth finally giving up on sucking in air that couldn't be found. He was accepting his fate; I don’t know if that’s heart breaking or awe-inspiring to you, but to me it’s just manly as fuck. “It’ll be all over soon,” I gave a limp smile as I pressed the muzzle of the silencer to the middle of his forehead, his eyes closing as the cool steel came to rest atop his head.

“Cinis ad cinerem, pulvis ad pulverem; rest in peace brother.”

I pulled the trigger and felt the meager amount of recoil shake my hand. They say if you’re real, real close to a man when you kill him he dies, you can feel his soul leave his body. Personally, I didn’t feel much of anything. My action, that little mercy killing of mine, probably seems out of character to you, right? Well I figure this much: If you’re going to spend your life as a murderer, at least give some sympathy to the braver men that you have been bestowed the honor of killing. Live not in agony because your fellow man has died but instead give thanks that he once was; right?

I rose back to my feet and regarded my position, open shot whether you were going from the inside out or from the outside to the inside. ‘Time to quit dicking about.’

I kept snaking deeper and deeper into the bunker, dropping lower and lower into the earth as I steadily encroached upon where my target had no doubt buried himself. Surprisingly enough, besides the two safe-guards stationed in what was the entrance to the vast underground hole in relativity, I hadn’t come across a single other body, living or dead as I moved closer and closer to the nucleus of this pit. ‘Damn, this is overkill’ I thought, nearly yawning in boredom as I progressed. ‘A nuke that turkey slapped this fucking bunker dead on wouldn’t do any damage to the infernal tunnels.’

A new room cascaded in pure darkness surrounded me as a pressed on, and that’s when I heard it. The unmistakable sound of someone having a nice, warm leak onto a cold, rough ground. I felt my heart skip a beat as my head snapped in the direction the sound of fresh, rolling piss was made. I pointed my muzzle toward the source of the sound as my finger wrapped itself around the trigger. ‘No, no, no. He doesn’t have to die; let’s get going,’ a tiny voice called out. Was that… my conscience? Whatever it may have been, I decided it were best to follow its instruction and move on. ‘One less soul lain to waste.’

It wasn’t long after that that I had finally found it, the entrance to the room itself made it clear that what lay beyond wasn’t just going to be another space filling room. This was gonna be the command center, the heart of the bunker, or at least what WAS the heart of the bunker until pirates infested the place and completely destroyed the incredibly sensitive technology. ‘Fucking Somalians, no respect for how hard it was to set up a command center like this in the shit crack of nowhere. Man, fuck this area in particular.’

Now this guy, I definitely had him caught with his pants down. Not literally, like that one guy who was spanking the old monkey, mind you, but this guy was almost disturbingly calmly watching a rerun of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air on a dingy little TV in the corner of the crumbling control station after he no doubt got a message from SOMEBODY that one of the building in his shantytown just got blown the fuck up.

“Narro vestri preces, you piece of shit,” I smiled as I lined up my pistol with his surprised face, (maybe this was funnier than the guy who was beating off). A bullet through the skull is nice; it's clean, fast, and painless. All I had to do was pull then trigger and then I could get out of this shithole and-

The sudden impact of a bullet sent me falling forward, hard. My body smashing into the floor at a velocity I didn’t know was possible to reach going from a standing position to the ground. I heard my sternum groan in protest while my ribs cracked and clavicles shattered into itty bitty little shards of bone. My hand went limp in an instant, causing my gun to scatter to the ground and slide forward a few feet as I groaned in an unimaginable amount of pain. I could feel my vision blur as beads of sweat and blood poured profusely into the eye that isn’t buried into the coarse ground, causing me to squint as I reached for my gun, much too far away for me to even dream of reaching in my wretched state. I can hear the clatter of an emptied shell dance methodically on the ground behind me as the hard cobblestone digs into my cheek, causing more drips of blood to join the already pooling amount of scarlet on the floor forming around my upper body.

As bad as my chest and upper body felt, it was nothing compared to the amount of pain that was pounding in the front of my neck. It was so unbelievably cruel; the sensations so uncomparatively disdainful that I shudder when I even imagine trying to pen down the experience. But for you, just cus I like ya so darn much, I’ll try.

Alright, so; you know that feeling when your cock grows so unbearably hard that it aches and so much more than anything else in the entire world you just wanna stick it into something soft and wet to dull that unbearable sensation? Yeah? Well imagine that pain to an immeasurable exponent centered directly where your Adam’s apple just got blown the fuck out of the front of your vocal chords. Needless to say, it wasn’t looking too good for your humble and faithful narrator.

I could feel myself fading away, the edges of my vision beginning to dim as the heaviest exhaustion I’ve ever had the displeasure of feeling began to settle over me, I think it was around that point that I caught onto the drift that I had no hope of grabbing my gun. My lids began to droop against my will as the pool of blood soaking into the floor expanded even more and more around my broken and battered body. Even in my state of shock, my dysfunctional senses dimming and slowly becoming useless, I knew exactly what was happening to me.

And then, I swear to you; I felt it. I felt it like I felt the cooling touch of a light breeze on a sweltering summer’s day, or felt the lapping of room-temperature chlorinated water lapping against my abdomen in a pool. I could feel the not-quite-solid sensation of death running his bony fingers up my spine, his hands phased through my clothing as if it weren’t even there. It was so numbing and cold… in a good kind of way. I felt the chill climb up each vertebrae, scaling it as if it were some sort of miniature mountain; climbing higher and higher and higher. Passing the impact wound near the top of my spine, it finally halted at the base of my neck. Where my hairline ended and gave way to naked flesh, where my Medulla Oblongata transformed into my spinal cord, the ungodly slow traveling wispy digits reached their final destination. I felt like a soft itty little pricking sensation, and then it melted into nothingness… you know, they say the soul is extracted from the back of your neck.

…

And just like that, it was all over; the pain, the foreign ambience of helplessness, the cold cutting of the cobblestone floor just seemed to blink away in an instant. My eyes were open and I found myself dead center of a small forest clearing; a light layer of snow covered the ground. ‘Snow… it’s September? Where the fuck am I that there’s snow?’ I felt a flake of snow make a soft landing on the tip of my nose as I surveyed the surroundings. ‘Snow, snow, snow, snow? Where the fuck am I?’ The forest that completely engulfed the clearing on all sides was familiar… somehow. I just couldn’t place my finger on exactly where they were familiar from. I was almost sure I had seen them, somewhere on a job, but what job? It’s not like a lot of humans just hang out in the woods when they expect to have a hired killer on their back, so I really didn’t have a wide variety of forests I had been in before. It took me a moment for the answer to pop into my mind like the Pillsbury Doughboy (that fat fuck, always convincing kids to eat unhealthy food) popped a toaster strudel into a toaster.

‘Aww, no shit,’ I felt like a moron; of course I knew where I was. The Aokigahara Forest in Japan, or as its popularly called now and days in this pathetic excuse for a society, the Suicide Forest. ‘How in the actual fuck did I get here?’ I took another glance around to confirm my previous theory, I was 100% alone in this completely fucked up and death filled forest. Awesome. I still remember the job I pulled off here; the good old fashioned fake suicide. I knocked out some fat old rich fuck and drove him into the woods to hang him from some tree a mile or so in. By the time his body would be found they would have no way of confirming the cranial incapacitation prior to the ‘suicide’ and thus not be able to figure out it was indeed murder and not seppuku that ended the man’s life; the old bag of a wife he had was hiring me so she could collect the nice plump life insurance off this poor bastard’s head as well as reap what money he had stored in the bank. I, to this day, still think it was a pretty cool way to assassinate someone.

‘Wait, wait, wait, snow? Now? In this part of Japan? That’s impossible, the base of Fuji don’t get hit with snow until December. It can’t be manmade, can it?’ I mean, of course it has to be cold enough to make the snow in the first place, but I know places that have blown fake snow over landscapes in order to give it that pretty Christmas feel for photography or why the fuck ever you’d want there to be snow; could it be that?

‘Obviously not,’ I thought as I took a small lick off a patch of my jacket that had the uniquely shaped white flakes adorning the dark leather, feeling it turn to water the second it hit my tongue. The part that truly scared me the most however, wasn’t the fact that it was snowing in mid-September, what really, really made my heart start to beat was the fact that I wasn’t the least bit cold standing in the middle of a patch of grassland amidst a forest, snow ever so lightly trickling down on me as I just stood there and let it fall. No pricks of cold ice hitting my skin, no sense of cool water snaking its way along my face as I kept my eyes fixed on the sky, nothing that would indicate that I was being hit with Frozen. Fucking. Water.

And then my brothers, I shit you not, just like in a snap of your fingers of blink of your eyes, the trees around me were no longer empty. They were adorned with mutilated body after mutilated bodies, hanging from the tree branches, what should have been ever single viewable inch of bark and wood was covered up by preserved dead flesh. ‘What the fuck…’ I recognized the bodies, all of them. They had all, at one point or another, fell victim to my blade. I never forget a face, especially the face of a man whose life I brought to an end. For the first time since I could remember at that point, I felt absolutely sickened to my stomach.

“Can’t stomach what you’ve done,” a voice, pure but masculine, called out from behind me. I reached for – “don’t bother with that, boy. You must be crazy if you think I wouldn’t take those from you before you were brought here.” He was right, I didn’t know how but before the idea had fully formed in my head not only had the full accusation left his mouth, but also the solution was already performed. Both of my pistols were absent from my shoulder holsters, God knows where. “Don’t try anything cute with me; it will not work, trust me on this one.”

I don’t know how to describe this, but when I turned around and finally looked at the source of the voice, I was overtaken by a sense of awe and what must have been envy. Now don’t get me wrong guys, I’m not swinging for the wrong side, but this man was absolutely flawless. His blonde hair was combed neatly on his head, a length long enough to advertise how perfectly it grew yet short enough to demonstrate masculinity. His face was perfectly mirrored, any blemish, mole, freckle, or scars were completely nonexistent, and the features were scaled perfectly to the size of his face. His hair was such a beautiful shade of brown…

Wait, brown? His hair was blonde a second ago… and now it’s brown? I looked back toward the top of his scalp when I noticed the brown begin to gradually lighten into an attractive shade of ginger. His hair was naturally altering from color to color in matters of moments. “That face, everyone always makes that face when they first see me.” The almost musical words snapped me out of my hypnotic gaze at his ever-changing hair and refocused my attention on the actual man… the beautiful, beautiful man. “Come on, pay attention!” I was snapped out of my trance once again. “This is why I hate meeting humans for the first time ever. Imagine the fact that I have had to do this BILLIONS of times so far.”

I was finally beginning to comprehend the words leaving his mouth, as opposed to just the joyful tone that his voice took. “Wait, what? What are you talking about? Where am I? How’d I-“

“Please, one question at a time, Teyoninhokovrawen” that voice was still music to my ears, but I managed to understand the actual words the joyful tune created.

“Wh-what did you just call me?” I was… so confused, dear reader. Hell, that image still remains so bizarre and surreal to me, it’s hard to imagine that at one point I was living that moment.

“Your name, your REAL name. None of that John Mars trash that they forced onto you, or that ridiculous alias, Mare, you've come to adopt.”

“No one ever calls me that outside of ceremonies and shit, how'd you know my birth name?” Or for that matter, how’d he know any of my multitudes of names? “Or hell, how could you even pronounce that? No one outside of my family has ever pronounced that right without me going over it 20 times.”

“I know more than you’d think I would. In fact, I know more about you than you do, Teyoninhokovrawen.” It was so… unnatural to be called that title again, let alone the name coming from the lips of a strange man. “Look at me,” I felt compelled to follow his instruction. “ You've killed a lot of people, haven’t you?” I nodded my head; it felt physically impossible to lie to this man, even just with body language. “And you don’t feel any remorse for that at all, now do you?” Another nod on my part. “But do you know why you died?” I couldn't answer the question; I knew exactly where I was and who I was speaking to now. “You showed mercy; and it killed you. The very man whose life you spared is the same who put you into the ground,” the soft words confirmed my feats, but in some way put my heart to ease. “And that’s why I’m going to go as far as to give you a second chance in a new world. A world where you won’t be looked at as a tool to kill people, but instead as a being with a soul and values just like everyone else. I’m going to take you to a place where your heart can find the peace it longs for.”

“I don’t deserve that…” a weak mumble, it was all I could manage.

“Of course you deserve that, everyone deserves a second chance. For the icing on the cake, I’ll even let you keep your current form as human.” ‘What else could I be?’ I wondered in silence, the question not dare leave my lips. “But be warned Teyoninhokovrawen; if you kill once more in the name of greed, then that’s it. After that, you don’t get a second chance, its straight to the place where I’m sure you don’t wanna go. Now good luck, son, and don’t concern yourself with goodbye; I’m sure we’re be doing this again soon enough.”

And then like that, it came, like lightning on a clear night sky; an explosion of light replaced the vision of the snow and death covered forest in my retina for a split moment, and when it faded away; I was in a different forest. I stood solitarily at the base of a huge pine that stretched into the daytime sky; but there was something different about the way the world around me looked. It felt more colorful, more… animated?

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