The day after I took my first life the training started. Now most people imagine training to fight as training to fight, but that isn’t what I was trained in. No I wasn’t taught to fight; I was taught to hurt, and I was taught to kill. I was taught to kill someone before they ever noticed me. I was taught a fighting style that could only be described as brutal, to strike fast and to always go for either debilitating injuries, or for the lethal strike.

From dawn to dusk every day for two years I trained. I bled, I sweat, I fought. I learned to use the environment against my opponent. I learned to always put the sun in their eyes. I learned to fight dirty, to throw sand in their eyes and use roots and obstacles around me to trip them. Everything around me was a weapon to be used. My father kept bringing me new people to kill, one a week like clockwork. I no longer hesitate, for I know what will happen if I don’t. I became an eight year-old killing machine. But that was just the start.

After the training ended the missions began, and that’s where I am now; on my first assassination.

I crept silently along the perimeter of the massive compound composed of a dark stone with a wooden palisade surrounding the entire thing, barefoot so as to make less sound. Two guards walk around the corner, one a shifter the other an elf I felt with nothing but intuition. In the darkness that surrounded me, my small frame making me almost invisible to begin with, I crouched behind two bushes. Never take a chance was the first rule I’d been taught.

The two guards continued their route forward, but not attentively, as they chatted and laughed the entire way through. Little did they know their inattentiveness would make their end.

Slinking silently forward as they continued to laugh and jest, I quickly reached them. I knew this had to be quick if they lived through my first attack everyone in the compound would be alerted. I raised the crossbow with a quarrel tipped in a paralyzing agent, and from behind I shot it through the shifters throat. Before he could make a sound he choked on his own blood and died.

The elf turned quickly to face me raising his sword, and with a magic spell on the top of his tongue ready to blast me into oblivion, but before he finished I threw a dagger at his midsection. He smirked at my small figure in haughty derision, effortlessly blocking it with his sword. Too bad he didn’t see the needle coated in basilisk venom I shot at him seconds later. The needle flew a little off course, striking his shoulder rather than his heart. That didn’t matter. The poison did its job. His skin started to corrode; the poison forcing his skin to go into a state of necrosis, but far far quicker.

He gave one last attempt at foiling my plans. I saw his quick intake of breath in preparation to scream, but before he could I jumped on him forcing him to the ground, placing my hand over his mouth to muffle any noise, and struck my knife deep into his stomach and twisted.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

He looked at me in sorrow; in his eyes I saw the same look I had seen in so many before. The look of a man who knew that his life was over. I moved my hand as I saw the life leave his eyes, but before he died he grabbed my arm and looked me deep in the eyes with one final question, “wh.. why?” Before his hand fell away and he slumped against the ground lifelessly.

For the first time since my first kill I asked myself the same question. Why. All of the others I had killed I’d never even heard their voice; they’d always came gagged. His question rattled me in a way nothing else ever had. I slumped back against the wall, I had 17 minutes before another guard patrol would come around the corner, I had time to waste.

His voice resounded in my head, and was all I could hear. Why had I done this? Why did I kill? Why did I train for two long hard years just to get better at killing? Why was I even here?

It was at that moment I realized the answer. My father told me to. My mother told me to. But why did I listen to them? I don’t have to. I’m my own person I don’t have to do what they tell me to. I finally, for the first time in my life, realized what I had to do. I had to escape. I had to get away from them.

I knew, however, that this wasn’t the moment for that. I was tracked at every moment, as of now there was no way to escape, and I had a mission I had to complete.

I quickly hid the bodies in the brush, and in the dark no one would ever notice the blood even with torches. I threw a grappling hook over the wall. Climbing as quickly as possible I soon reached the top and pulled the rope attached to the grappling hook over the edge of the wall.

I had no specific target. Tonight my objective was to kill everyone in the entire compound and I knew how to do it.

I ran around the outskirts of the palisade pouring alcohol along the entire thing. Thankfully there was only one guard on the palisade who was easily disposed of with a quick ambush and knife across the throat.

Slipping down off the palisade and into the compound I poured gallons and gallons of alcohol that I kept in an interspacial ring all along the dark stone. I encountered no one along the way not even maids. It was too late for anyone besides the few guards outside to be awake. As I finished pouring the alcohol I heard something from one of the rooms, it sounded like... crying.

I knew that I shouldn’t. It went against everything I had been taught to check it out, but I couldn’t help myself. Pushing open the door I saw a young girl probably around my age sobbing her eyes out into a pillow. She was dressed in some of the finest clothes I had ever seen so I knew she wasn’t just anyone. In that moment I made a decision that would change my fate in ways I could never have comprehended at the time. I decided to save just one... Just her.

I stabbed a tranquilizer dart into the back of her neck, and picking her up and cradling her in my arms, I walked out of the room. I set her down one last time as I reached their protective formations that prevent fires. Taking the dagger I had killed my first victim with, I plunged it deep into the stone that held the ruins to prevent fire, effectively destroying it. With one last look around I picked the girl back out and left the compound.

I reached the palisade quickly having memorized the route to get there, climbing back up it as quickly as possible with the girl tied to my back with rope I then slid my way down the rope to get out.

My powers were sealed at my birth to come out slowly as I aged so I could gain control of them as time moved forwards, but I had just enough power to summon a small flame. Taking one last look at the imposing compound before me I threw the flame onto the palisade. The alcohol quickly ignited and soon I could hear the screams of the hundreds of people burning to death inside.

I set the girl down at the edge of the forest prepared to leave without ever even speaking with her but as I began to walk away she opened her eyes, “who.. who are you?” She asked groggily, an effect of the tranquilizer. I stopped for a single moment and looked at her, as I did I saw her memorizing my face and pushing it to a place she would never forget. I walked away quickly into the forest without answering her question.