“‘Honor’?” Marcus spat back at Skeever. “You have a funny way of showing it, Skeever Steelclaw."
The Talon-Commander shook his proud snout. Whatever his aspirations were, he clearly didn’t imagine that the man sitting across from him had the moral high ground here.
“You think I am a traitor, Marcus,” he began, stoically facing his now-foe. “But I am being loyal to my people. Nothing more.”
“By imprisoning me? The General chosen by your people?”
“By imprisoning one who would use us to fulfill his own ends.”
Both man and rat stared with determined eyes at the other.
“You have wished to leave us all this time,” Skeever said quietly. “You do not care for our plight. Like all humans, you think only of your own ambition.”
“If you believe that,” Marcus said with an indignant scoff, “then you’re more deluded than I am.”
Skeever shook his snout again. “I saw it clearly when you refused to take and hold Grindlefecht,” he whispered as though sentries of his King might have eyes and ears amidst the dead of the underground tomb. “I should have known it before. I did not even believe the King at first. But… that was doubt eating at my mind. It will not happen again.”
Marcus blinked. “So,” he said, “now it comes out.”
Skeever locked eyes with him again and gripped the bars of his metal cage.
“Did you think the King would not find out that you murdered Sire Verulex?” he railed. “Did you think he could not see how powerful you were becoming in the eyes of the priesthood? He assumed you would make a move against him eventually.”
“Which you yourself suggested, Skeever.”
“I suggested your only means of survival!” the rat roared. “How can you not see? If you had taken this place, you could have brought us into a new age of wonder. But you only wished to leave and return to your own kind. You never thought of our future.”
“And you, Skeever?” Marcus asked. “Is it the future of your species that you have in mind here?”
“It is the only thing I ever think about,” he replied with a cursory look at his misshapen stump of an arm. “I gave my body and soul for my people. Not for commanders. Not for Kings. Not even for He-Who-Festers. Ratkin must endure. We must be strong. It is how life is for us.”
“If that is so, then you have doomed your people,” Marcus sighed, gripping the bars of his cell just as Skeever did, paying no mind to how the rat’s razor-claws pierced the rusted iron of the bars beside him.
“The King gave me an ultimatum,” Skeever sighed right back at him. “He forced me to make a choice…”
Marcus could finish the sorry story before the ratman could even begin: “Kill the disobedient Gloomraava – the head of the Sha-Alud’s new cult – and then end the reign of the Prophet himself before he gains a power base here.”
He didn’t need the rat to confirm his suspicions. He could see the truth of the matter written plainly on his face.
“Skeever…” he wheezed. “Don’t pretend you acted out of a sense of loyalty here. It was to save your own skin that you murdered your Brother in cold blood. It was to save yourself that you cast me down here to wait for your weak King’s execution.”
“N-No…” the rat stammered. Then, growing more bestial as he looked into the unchanging eyes of his foe. “No! Marcus – how could you know what it is to hold the entire hopes of your race upon your shoulders? You – a human – can only care for yourself. Perhaps you think all other races must be the same. But we who are born in the dark, born of the dark, know what true kinship is! We know sacrifices must be made for the sake of building something that will last forever.”
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“Even if it means sacrificing your own comrades you fought back-to-back with to build it,” Marcus said, his face a bloody mosaic of pained disdain in the dim illumination of Skeever’s candle.
Skeever lingered on the bars for a minute, snout twitching, fangs bared, and claws digging so deeply into the bars of Marcus’s cell that the latter thought he might pull them clean off and tear the human limb from limb right then and there.
Instead, the ratman merely sighed again and moved away, taking up his candle before he turned his back on the man he once called General.
“The King’s army will come in the next three days,” he said. “King Shrykul will find you and deliver you to his cousins as retribution payment for the slaying of their Talon-Commanders during The Skittering. Once they have you, you will be theirs for eternity, or until they are done with you. I suggest you take the food my men and I will give you during this time. They could be the last meals you have in your life.”
Before the ratman finally departed, Marcus stood and rattled the bars of his cage for a final time to halt his steps.
“SkeeverSteelclaw,” he said, his dirt-caked face pressed between the bars where the ratman’s claws had made their marks. “You say that I, like a human, sought to do nothing more than sacrifice your people’s own hopes and dreams to claim my own. But shall I tell you what it is that I dream? Shall I tell you what I see as I close my eyes every night in this realm of darkness?”
The Talon-Commander did not turn. He barely stirred at all. But he did halt.
Marcus licked his lips as he said what he knew was probably pointless to say but which, he knew, he had to say. Again, it could be his own vanity that compelled him to have the final word of their conversation. But he liked to think, even long after this pivotal moment in his life, that it was a commitment to the truth that guided his tongue.
“I see the faces of all those who have fallen under my command,” he said, fighting to control his wrists – forcing them not to shake as the memories swept over him. “I see them raise their blades in my name. I see them fight tooth and claw for something they believed in. And I see the places where they died – the fires of that same belief still strong and pure in their eyes. I close my eyes and see their faces, and I remember all their names. I’ll remember them long after their faces vanish, and even though it causes me nothing but pain, I’ll cling to the memory of the memory when even that fades from my mind. Because I carry them with me, SkeeverSteelclaw. I’ll carry them and their belief with me till the day that I finally fall. And then I’ll join them wherever they are now – in the dirt or with your God.”
He saw the shoulders of the ratman slump slightly. His massive gait gave way to something which was hidden by his hulking back.
“So, tell me, Skeever,” Marcus said. “Do you really think that, after all this time, I never once stopped to care for you or your people?”
Whatever expression might have weaved its way through Skeever’s face was lost to time and the dust of Grindlefecht’s forgotten dungeon. When he spoke again, his voice was nary a murmur:
“Goodbye, Marcus Graham,” he said.
Marcus watched him go, seeing the light of his single candle gutter and vanish as the steel-clad dwarven vault-door closed behind him. Once again, the First-Talon was left to stew in the juices of the fallen.
“The funny thing is,” he told himself as he slumped against his cell door. “I can barely blame him. The mortality of a ratman like him is probably measured in months, not years. He’s survived this long on cunning and strength. He’ll probably survive much longer than even that docile King of his.”
As these words left Marcus’s mouth, a thin gleam of green sparked into life on his hand again, and this time he fell to the bone-cluttered floor, overcome by whatever was now flowing through his veins.
He clutched his hand and watched the veins on his palm bulge with alien life, seeing the thin arcs of emerald light zap between his fingers. The light of the lightning flashed sporadically as he tried to still his shaking hand.
“What…” he breathed, thinking of the horror that had appeared to him before he had woken above ground. “What’s happening to me…”
As though answering for the priest from beyond the grave, a voice suddenly emanated from the depths of the cell across from him.
A dark voice, yet one tinged with the tenor of sophistication.
“Quite a thing, isn’t it?” the voice said. “Quite a thing to live in terror.”
***
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