Blood
It started with blood and it ended with blood. In the beginning we were rivals...and friends. At the end, I don't know what we were. It was my brother's blood I originally intended to shed, not his. Our rivalry...and friendship...intervened. And it caused our destruction. Just the way we were told it would. Naturally, we didn't listen. I guess by the end we were so far gone that we forgot the original purpose for all our fights. The reason why we were having this final stand.
It started with the blood of my family, when my brother killed them. Back then I didn't know why he did. All I knew was that the pain I felt that day when I saw him with his sword stained red was the most pain I'd ever felt. It cut into me more than a knife ever could. And I wanted my brother to feel the pain I felt at that moment, as if my heart was being torn out of my chest, jumped on and then torn into a million pieces. I swore that I would avenge my clan at whatever the cost. And from that moment, I became an avenger and set my fate. If that hadn't happened I might have been able to have a rivalry that didn't end in destruction. A rivalry that didn't end in death. But it never would have been a friendship. After all, it was the solitude that we both felt that brought us together, but still, a happy ending may have been achievable.
For a while, I was able to forget about my revenge. I was teamed up with my rival. It was the village's way of making us bond. In a way, we were good for each other. Our need to get one up on each other made us get stronger. Nobody understood our relationship, least of all ourselves. But we preferred it that way. Everything was fine. Until my brother reared his ugly head to disturb the peace I finally created for myself.
He almost destroyed me in the way he destroyed my family, our family. And he still had that same impassive look on his face the night he killed my clan, his clan. And I still couldn't stop him. The difference in power was still there, even after the years spent apart. In a way, the whole sorry affair was his fault. He told me to get strong so that I could kill him. So I did. But my best friend, my greatest rival,was against it. Because it meant leaving him and everyone else important.
Why did he have to make it so complicated? I'd intended just to sever those bonds and leave it be. But he just had to come after me, didn't he? And he just had to be strong. If he hadn't come after me, things could have been different but he did. And that set the wheel turning. We fought seriously for the first time ever. I barely defeated him. And then I left. Leaving him and everything else behind.
And then, nothing for three years. I thought he'd given up. But he hadn't. He trained, gotten stronger, just so that he could bring me back home. In the meantime, I'd killed my brother. I'd achieved my goal, finally. It should have been simple.
So when did it get complicated? When did we start to lust for each other's blood? When did his intentions change from wanting to bring me home to wanting to kill me? Was it when I killed the girl he loved so dearly? It was an accident. She never understood our rivalry. She got in the way. She jumped between our attacks at the last minute. And he blamed me, for the fact that she loved me and not him, for the fact that I couldn't stop my attack in time, for the fact that we were even in this situation. But even when he cried quietly into her long hair-the hair she grew for me when she found out I liked long hair- dyed red with blood, I felt nothing. I hadn't loved her after all. But for my part, I left and battle was unfinished. Or did it even start from our first serious encounter, when I betrayed my whole village and worst of all, myself. Did it even start when we first met? We'd always wanted to get one up on each other.
That place, where we fought for the first time and the last time, The Valley of the End was symbolic. It signified the never ending struggle between two rivals. Its river continues as if it will never end like the struggle of the two who originally fought there. Those original two rivals who the Valley was dedicated to, my ancestor and someone else, their struggle was nothing compared to ours.
Life is full of its little twists. A particularly cruel trick was the fact that my brother had in fact had good intentions. By killing his clan he had prevented a war. What nobody ever told me was that my family were planning a coup. They didn't include me because I was too young at the time to be involved. And so my peace-loving brother changed his personality to a cruel man in order to kill his family and help me become stronger by making me hate him. But I didn't know until it was too late. And I couldn't turn back the clock. And that pain in my heart that I wanted my brother to share with me, I didn't need to make him feel it. He felt it already, perhaps even more acutely than me. And while I was thinking about exactly just the way I'd ruined my life, my rival showed up. He'd come for one last battle, a final stand. And now we're in a deadlock, the last one we'll ever have. And all we ever wanted to do prove was one's superiority over the other. Another one of life's petty tricks. So here we are at the Valley of the End and this time it truly is the end. Weapons lie scattered and the river, that endless river is running red. And even as I stand with my sword still in his heart and his knife still in my gut, both of us about to die, I have to smile at the sheer irony of it all.