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Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I can't be sure.
She always told me I was the worst of the worst, a scoundrel. That I belong to the bowels of the city’s sewers, manned by it’s servicemen, the Blackguard. Why anyone ever thought to assign such a meddling lot of thieves and scammers to be service personnel of our city of Algeria is beyond me.
They say it was for cheap labor practices. Why pay a man to clean the city’s sewer lines when you can have a thief do it for free and learn a moral lesson in the process. The arguments for not using slaves contained the same logic. Slaves cost money, if they die their masters must be reimbursed a tidy sum -- however, if a thief dies, that’s one less criminal to worry about stirring chaos in the streets.
Then one day disaster struck: the “Great Conflagration.” That is what some of the street orphans I heard call it. I looked at them with despair. Not my despair for burning down the “temple” of the disreputable, our post of the Blackguard at Algeria but their forthcoming despair.
I knew what awaited them because I had lived it. I could see their future selves destined to be the next generation of Blackguard servicing the city.
If an adult struggles to survive on these damned streets that are stricken with disease, the criminally insane, and petty crime. What hope does a child have? News from the garment district in the northwest sector of the city has been that less and less orphans are being apprenticed to all three main trades: clothing, metallurgy, and the food sector.
I killed everyone because I was sick of society’s mores. The vice grip of society’s authoritarian labels. The magistrate, had he been there, would have likely passed a decree that I had gone criminally insane -- perhaps he would have even been correct in issuing such a judgment.
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I have often said to myself: “I live to the point of tears.” However, one day as childhood advanced into adolescence I decided I was going to stop crying now and forever.
Tears bring me nothing I eventually realized, thieving does; or as mother would say, “If you keep crying, you’ll stop growing dear.” I saw her less and less after the age of six as her weekly visits turned to monthly encounters which ultimately ceased altogether.
I'm now roaming the streets much again as before I was forcefully enlisted into the Blackguard.
This time, however, I can’t scurry about on these streets forever. People will start to ask questions if they see me too often: Is he a traveler or a foreigner? Perhaps a merchant?
They then might reason: Well he is too familiar with the interior of the city to be a traveler. His tongue and eyes are like ours so he can't be a foreigner. And he is too poor and too asocial to be a merchant.
"Who is this man?" . . . It is a question I have often asked myself. I still feel no need towards absolution for my “crimes.”
I once knew a man who was visiting the Blackguard. His name, I believe, was Gibrani. He was the strangest kind of man. Not only in appearance as he looked to be half a foreigner in complexion yet spoke in our words and of our costumes better than I .But because the Vicar, Sir Thorn, that had brought Gibrani introduced him as the son of nobility and proclaimed he would be “sojourning” with the Blackguard for the length of two full moons!
Imagine that, nobility among the most disreputable of the city -- and my own eyes the witness!
One night this man of living juxtapositions asked me why I was with the Blackguard. He had deemed me more capable of mind than the other scoundrels and said I didn’t belong here.
When I said, “I don’t know,” which I half meant to be true. He replied “when anything can happen, everything matters.” I think he was telling me that I should be elsewhere due to my abilities. Perhaps this is why my conscience is unburdened by the Great Conflagration.
But now I must sleep.
END
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