Chapter 2: Impulse

It finds him how it always does: Alone, the rhythmic clomps jarring him from any attempt to sleep, his heart and head aching with realization, doubt, guilt, pain, and some measure of love rejected and hidden away like some mythical treasure in a sunken ship. He imagines himself before God and the pain is unbearable. He almost laughs.

Lord, today I tortured and killed an innocent man.

And he knows that if God could see him he would surely be retching.

He stops the horse on the edge of a dusty boarder town he can't remember the name of. He spits.

Shit. I've got the memory of an asshole twice my age.

He doesn't want a bounty, but he needs money. He knows he should sleep but he isn't tired. He knows he's thinner than he ought to be but he doesn't want to eat. He doesn't want to be drunk. He doesn't want a woman because in his heart there is only one and no other giggling, annoying whore could be a quarter of a third of what she is. What he can never have is all he will ever want.

He rides through town at a gentle trot, his hat drenching his face in shadow. Shady men propped up against pillars and walls are visible only by the glow of their cigarettes and prostitutes call to him from the balconies of the buildings those men lean against. He is stone faced and enshrouded in darkness, riding through town like death itself come to scrounge for souls as black and cold as his own to condemn. He doesn't need to go very far.

A man bursts from a pair of saloon doors with a black-haired prostitute in a red dress and throws her to the ground a few feet ahead of him. He draws a gold-plated pistol and presses it to the head of the wailing whore and something clicks in Auron's head and he's already thumbing back the hammer on his own colt and he shoots the man in the hip, sending him flailing to the ground as a spurt of his blood comes to rest on the young woman's face. His pistol flies farther than he does, glinting in the dim light as it spins wildly. The man screams and the saloon that produced him erupts into shouting and the moaning of pushed tables and the cocking of guns. Four additional men burst from the double doors and only two shots escape the barrels of their weapons before Auron fells all four of them with one shot each. He pulls his horse to a halt and jumps off, stroking the mane comfortingly before planting his last bullet in the head of the man on the far left, who had still been clawing for his gun in the dirt. The streets are filled with bloody rivers and the prostitute cleans the gore from her face with the back of her hand before stepping back to avoid a spreading pool of deep red that holds the moon and stars. Auron pops open the chamber of his weapon and empties the shells, golden canisters splashing in the blood of his five latest victims.