Can you mourn the life of a man you never knew?

Can you mourn the life of a man that you killed?

Was it self-serving to do so, or even disrespectful to the man himself and those that may have loved him? Rethi didn’t know, and he might never truly know that answer either. Maybe his master might know, the man sometimes seeming like he had the answer to everything you ever wanted to know about the way you feel and who you are, even who you could be.

But right now, Rethi couldn’t bear to go to the man, not like this. Rethi wanted so badly to go upstairs from the dining floor of the Skinned Lizard, to go to his room and find himself in the soft comfort of Alena’s arms, the comfort that he knew would be waiting for him if he only just let himself fall into it.

Emotions weren’t an overly private thing for him, like they had been for his mother and many of those he’d grown up around in the tough life of living at the edges of civilisation, or something like that. He’d been an open person for a long time, so it only confused him more when he found himself trapped within his own chest, the emotions like the titanic waves of a raging sea. Or, what he would imagine a sea was like from what he’d been told.

Instead of going to Alena and letting his heart pour out through the words he could put them into, or simply going to Maximilian and watching as the man understood it all—knowing that the man could feel exactly how Rethi was feeling… Rethi decided to sit in the dining room in front of a drink that hadn’t been touched, in the severely diminished crowd of patrons.

All of the patrons were Gek, with lankier of the two overwhelmingly common Reptilia species having rather fluid sleep patterns. He’d been sitting at this table for hours, staring into the wooden grain of the decently made table. Tenra, who seems to have been working alone for the night, had checked in on Rethi a few times but hadn’t come by for a while after Rethi had refused any services.

The Tiliquan, while older than Rethi by quite a handful of years, hadn’t been able to approach the sandy blonde-haired boy with enough confidence to strike up a conversation. But there was someone who was confident enough, and Rethi could only assume that they had been informed of Rethi’s odd mood.

Rethi’s dull focus on the table’s grain had stopped him from noticing the man approach, even with his sizable form, both in height and in stoutness. The Tiliquan, a fair amount taller than most others of his race including the more physically adept females, stood at the other side of the table, looking down over his wide snout at Rethi.

Rethi glanced up and saw Tek’s impressively intimidating guise, the large burn down the side of his face only adding to the effect, having long since destroyed the scales on the left of his face and down past the collar of his shirt.

“I hear that your day has not been a good one.” The man’s voice rumbled as he sat at the table without invitation. Tek was not someone who waited for invitation, he was either there or not, which was its own form of extreme confidence. In a way the Tiliquan was much like Rethi’s master, in his own specific ways of course.

“You could say that.” Rethi said, finding his voice weak and weary in comparison to its normally powerful and confident tone. The confidence was something that he had initially imitated from Mayer and Maximilian, in the way they held themselves and talked, and that confidence had slowly become his own, one that matched his still youthful face and happy demeanour. But this tone he found himself speaking in… it made him sound shockingly old.

“Ah.” The Tiliquan said, nodding as he crossed his powerful arms, a mean set of claws resting against his scaled skin. Rethi found his attention pulled towards the eyes that he’d found so unnerving in his first days within Crossroads, the eyes so expressionless and cold in comparison to those he was used to.

But he’d soon found a fascination with trying to understand the gestures and movements of the Reptilia repertoire, and that had spawned an interest in their eyes—quickly departing from their almost predatory image in his mind to an intensely expressive window into thought.

Tek looked at him with narrowed, slitted eyes, but soon after they had relaxed into a more open form as the Tiliquan sat back in his chair and sighed deeply.

“A babe who has tasted the lifeblood of another in combat.” He shook his powerful head, his face morphing into a close approximation of sadness as he returned his gaze to Rethi’s green, clear eyes. Rethi felt his throat bob as the man looked back at him, a different kind of understanding than he’d expected.

“Is it that obvious?” He intoned weakly, his voice dry and scratchy, as if he’d been crying for hours despite not having shed a single tear.

“As my mother once told me and all of my sisters;” Tek looked Rethi in his eyes, the intensity of his slitted eyes growing as he assumed a more powerful pose, “The stench of blood lays thick on claws as clean as yours.”

“You’ve killed?” Rethi asked, though he barely needed to ask the man for an answer. There was something about Tek that screamed ‘warrior’ that Rethi wasn’t quite sure if he possessed.

“Many.” Tek said deeply, though not quite with sorrow, “The warring between tribes to the west were brutal—are brutal—and I was a peak warrior of my tribe. I did not just kill, Rethi. For many I was the nightmare of their battlefield.”

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If it had been anyone else saying those words, or if Tek had said them in any other tone than his deep, resonating voice—like a man decreeing himself guilty—then Rethi would have thought he was bragging. But no, there was no ego in that tone. It was merely a sliver of his sins, displayed in the rawest of words, almost bleeding in their cutting exactness.

“I killed someone who didn’t need to die.” Rethi said, his voice almost silent, but Tek heard them with crystal clarity. As if the words were broadcasting to his ears at a frequency only he and others of his ilk could hear and understand.

“We walked right into a trap, knowing it was a trap, and when Alena’s life was that close to ending,” Rethi held up two fingers, only a centimetre or two apart, “my power moved by itself before I could stop it.”

“And you killed him, when you could have simply disarmed him?” Tek completed, looking at Rethi with searching eyes. Rethi nodded slowly, shame rushing to the forefront of his mind as he realised how easily he’d ended the man’s life, when it would have been just as easy to knock the blade from his hand and leave him to heal from the half-healed wounds he’d surely been given to attract Alena’s attention.

The Tiliquan man let his gaze rest on the younger man’s face for a while, maybe trying to decipher the expression that Rethi wore, which even Rethi himself wasn’t truly conscious of, but after a moment of silence, the man stood from his chair and gestured for Rethi to follow with a clawed finger.

It took a moment for Rethi to react to the man, but as the powerfully built Tiliquan disappeared into the kitchen, and then hearing the distinctive sound of the door to the back rooms opening, Rethi got to his feet and followed quickly. It wasn’t the most graceful walk that he’d ever performed, but it got him through the kitchen, and then through the open door towards the back rooms that had been left open, which he then closed.

However, there was one door at the end of the short hall that Rethi could feel the slight breeze against his skin from, a door to the outside where the night air had cooled and the light had diminished to the point of painting the sky an inky blue. He emerged through the door and into a small dirt courtyard.

The courtyard was unblemished, simply dirt ground and nothing else. But as Rethi’s eyes trailed its edges, finding that there was not one window looking into the small space between buildings, Rethi realised that it was more than that. Tek stood in the centre of the courtyard, watching as Rethi came to stand in front of him.

“Do you know the reason that you killed, instead of simply disarming?” Tek said, his voice bouncing off the walls and only adding even more power to his already impressive voice. Rethi looked up at him, but even as he racked his brain, he couldn’t come up with an answer that quite fit how it felt.

“It is because you don’t know how to truly kill.” The Tiliquan’s voice sent an intense shiver down Rethi’s spine. It wasn’t anything that he’d ever truly felt before just today, it was the overpowering feeling of impending doom.

The Tiliquan didn’t even move, not even an inch, and yet the emotion was so intense in Rethi’s mind that he couldn’t help but take a step back. It was more than just battle prowess, which Rethi and Maximilian had trained to have in droves. This was what it felt like to stand against Mayer, on occasion, but never once had it felt so raw and exposed, hidden underneath a layer of instruction and protection.

But Rethi could feel the blood leaking from wounds that the other man hadn’t inflicted upon him yet, the feeling of claws rending his flesh whispering in the back of his mind like a ghost.

“I am not as powerful as you are. You are a weilder of a Divine Blade, and I am merely a mortal warrior.” The words shook the air around Rethi with a terrible urgency and impending danger, “But in this I am superior to you, child.”

Rethi gritted his teeth against the intensity that he almost couldn’t believe was anything but divine or ether powered. For it to be so distinct, the danger so viscerally real, was almost flooring to the boy. Mayer had always said that Rethi had good sense for combat, and it was only now that he began to actually understand what that meant.

The Tiliquan in front of him, Tek, was the most powerful person Rethi had met who didn’t have some form of shifting or divine energy.

“You have killed, and that is irreversible,” the almost soft tone didn’t do anything to diminish the warnings in Rethi’s mind, “and you will find that those you have killed will weigh on your mind more as you age, the emotions maturing into their own trees within your mind. You will never be absolved of those you kill, but you may yet learn to kill and what it truly means.”

Tek’s eyes drew into a pair of terrifying slits, and if Rethi had thought the man was dangerous before, then he now realised that the idea had been total folly. The Tiliquan uncrossed his arms, taking a step forwards with his eyes trained on the younger boy, like a true predator seeking its prey.

In that single moment in time, Rethi could swear that the pungent smell of iron had diffused through the air, the taste of it as it rotted all within an instant of touching his tongue. The moving Tiliquan was covered in the red, having long since dried into a black armour that surrounded him, and the fresh red that leaked from his claws.

Rethi’s mind, frozen in its horrified awe, couldn’t react when the man’s form snapped forwards long and powerful arms blurring as his wide torso compacted itself into a dense wall of muscle. The claws of his fingers glinted in the dull moonlight, their black lustre tainted by the ephemeral blood that Rethi’s mind had created so vividly.

The claws drew nearer, at a pace that Rethi had blocked and countered thousands of times in spars with Maximilian and Mayer. But this wasn’t the same. His master’s blows weren’t ever intended to kill, to rip the life from him so cruelly, they were meant to force him harder, to push further beyond his own perception of his ability.

But these claws were death itself, and as they approached his muscled chest—seeking to rip through the bone of what Alena calls a sternum and into the muscle of his heart—time slowed to nothing. It was the terrifying understanding of being unable to stop what was going to happen, complete consignation to fate’s grander plans.

Rethi could feel the exact moment that the hard and sharp claws touched against his skin, the hand splayed wider than a human’s hand could, perfect for ripping and tearing through flesh. But it wasn’t the feeling of those claws ripping into him that woke him from his horrified stupor.

It was the feeling of something else standing off to his side, a presence so undeniable that it blasted away the illusion of death that Tek had so heavily instilled in his mind. The world began to move again, the claws pressing harmlessly against his own rough shirt, then removing themselves and pulling back to their owner.

Rethi followed the arm back to Tek’s intense eyes, finding them hard and unforgiving, as if he had truly just killed Rethi rather than leave him alive without a scratch.

“You are not prepared to die.” Tek’s voice hissed with viciousness, “I will make sure that you are.”