A/N R&R, with INTENSITY

Chapter 10 "Daggertail and the Only Reason"

Her red shirt that ended at the stomach was riddled with dust and sand from the air and so was her skirt, her feet bled, her arms tired, and her forehead was streaked with sweat, she realized the cool air near the water was not this far down. Farah wandered the mysterious land, trying to escape from everything. She thought of the bird she chased as a little girl in her dream, and how she wanted to simply fly away.

She sat on a flat rock that stood at the bottom of a hill, legs folded and arms encompassed around them. She wiggled her toes, the sand between them falling to onto the rock, it sliding off and back into formation with the rest of the sand. She scraped her index finger's nail against the rock over and over, looking at the gravel that protruded from it. Her brow was furrowed and her lips pursed.

When her thoughts settled at the bottom of the glass, and she thought and reflected on her conversation with her husband, her blood boiled and she started scratching at the rock faster and with more intensity.

"Was I mad to run off like that? Was I fault-finding, was I childish? I see the harm in what I did, but I couldn't stand there and listen to his overbearing pride speak its mind any longer. He spoke of his kingdom and revenge more than he spoke of his own son…my actions were justified, I see that now. He had married his blade long before he married me, he felt lust for blood and I was just the second wife of which he flaunted about town. Oh, I hate him so. Was I wrong to call him the light at the end of the tunnel all those years back? Am I wrong to cry now?"

Farah quietly wept, still absentmindedly clawing at the rock's surface. Her tears were that of anger and of odium for war and violence. In her stubborn mind, she would even go as far as to say she hated her husband at that moment, and that was the reason she ran, for she would have drawn her bow had it not lay back at King Bermudez's empire.

"Is it dreadful that I wish death at every shooting star I see? I think it is, yet I do not care. I was happy for so long in the beginning, and sad for even longer. I wish I knew what to call these swift changes in mood, these thoughts of sadness and the feeling that I'm obscured into the shadowy background of his mind, maybe if I was made of cold iron, of steel, or made of leather and strapped to a shield, then he would caress me, embrace me more than my flesh and blood body."

Farah cried into her shoulder, tears streaming over her elbow. She leaned over, nearly falling off of the edge of the gray, study rock.

"They say that if you look for something, you're going to find it, whether it be for better or for worse. And what I found was an illusion, a hallucination in the middle of the desert of matrimony, a taunting illusion that he had changed, that maybe I would be the one to tame the lion who thirsted for glory. It was something I fantasized about, that a family would be the only thing on his mind, forever. But the looking glass was already set on him, and it must have been too heavy to move for I would not stop looking for cracks in the perfection of my prince, and those cracks were cracks that I could not slip through and fix, for they were a part of him, his personality, and I was just someone he met after the damage was done, the clay was molded, and I had married a prisoner of war, a slave to his own destruction."

The Dark Prince swung his daggertail overhead before he flung it at the retreating pirate, it stabbing through his calf and he screamed in agony as he collapsed to the ground, he gave a loud thud as the wind was knocked out of his pulsing lungs.

"Ah, let me go! Let me go!" He pleaded, his nails digging into the sand as he tried to prevent the Dark Prince from pulling him back in like a fish. The charred man licked his dry, arid lips with a near shriveled tongue and his fiery yellow eyes were hungry for the scared man's soul. The drunk, fearful bandit turned on his back and fumbled with the sharp whip, trying to pull it from his leg, but to no avail. He then grabbed onto a dead pirate's leg, but the body simply dragged along with him.

The Dark Prince chuckled under his inert breathe, eerie and sinister as it corrupted the breezy air. He raised his sword as the injured pirate reached him, the pirate's eyes so wide that the green and hazel could be seen in them, as well as the tiniest grain of sand on his gritty face. As the pirate screamed his last breathe, cursing the Gods, The Dark Prince lowered his sword's curved blade with a grunt into the pirate's stomach, slipping easily through the man's ribcage, hitting right below the heart. The man gasped in shock, he was too stunned to feel the pain, but he knew he was going to die as sure and certain as he was born. The Dark Prince removed his sword, blood streamed from the man's ribs, pooling under him and leaving him uncomfortably warm, and then chillingly cold.

The Dark Prince left his victim to stare to the sky as he bled out. He observed the area around him, fifteen dead attackers turned victims, their bodies mutilated and strewn about. After a moment, no men lie alive but the mystifying monster with the crimson shined blade.

"What have you done?" A familiar voice asked from the misty walls of oblivion.

"What you could not, what you would not, you lost control and I stepped in for you. You notice there is no scar upon you, those men stood no chance."

"They were merely drunk…"

"And you were merely angry. You must admit that they, being pirates, weren't decent men to begin with. They have most likely murdered children, women, and others just because jewelry hung from the victim's necks, or sat around their finger."

No response.

The Dark Prince gave no witty remark, he didn't comment on the Prince's silence at all. He listened to his surroundings, a smile among his charred face. "I can hear the blood leaking from these men's mouths, I think I can even hear it drying in the ground, and I can still hear their screams echoing in my ears." The Dark Prince sucked in air through his mouth. "And I wish there had been more of them."

Farah looked back towards the shore, her mind binding her brain. She wondered if the Prince was still on the other side of the wall, and she wished that he had found his way past it because she wanted him to come for her, it may have been petty but she wished for it more than anything at the time. She slid to the end of the rock, and she carefully guided her way down to the bottom. She smoothed out her skirt and looked around at where to go, though her anger had subsided and she wanted to return to the Prince, she figured once she saw him again the flame of fury would ignite again. She tightened the golden bracelets around her wrists and set off in a random direction, her curiousness getting the better of her.

The Dark Prince sat down and rested in the middle of his massacre. He retracted the daggertail and it wrapped around his forearm. He wiped his finger in the blood of his sword; it made a clear line in the weapon.

"I wonder where she is." The Dark Prince said.

"Then we should be looking for her! Let me loose!"

"You know it does not work like that, and we will search for her in due time, she is angry right now, and I can assure you that seeing you surely won't cheer her up."

"I don't enjoy your humor."

"I was not trying to be humorous, dear Prince."

"Why do you even wish to search for her? Won't you take us to Razgod now?"

"Finding the girl is what you want, and if we go ahead on our mission without finding her first, you will be sidetracked, distracted, and you will get us both killed."

"Is that the only reason?"

"You have questioned my motives twice now, Prince. Honestly, when I speak of the girl in an intimate manner, it is only to irritate you, which is the truth. That is the truth. That…is the truth."

The Dark Prince rubbed his fingers together, smearing the blood and smoothing it out, nearly to the thinness of water. The wind had picked up, and it had gotten colder, but the Dark Prince didn't feel the windy breeze. Whenever he blinked, it was as if two fireflies disappeared out of thin air. Whenever he talked, the world grew a little darker, and whenever he breathed, the air in front of him died. He was killing the world one minute at a time.

"You know, Prince, you talk as if you hadn't lost control, and you stayed in your body, you wouldn't have attacked those men."

The air that he didn't feel was the only sound in the noontime. "You would have killed them, you would have, but you would have gotten hurt, injured, you should be thanking me, you know."

The sand moved with the motion of the breeze. The Dark Prince sighed. "We'll find her, don't worry. And no, that wasn't the only reason; we also don't know where Razgod is, so how could I possibly take us to him if I have no knowledge of his whereabouts?"

One of the soldiers standing post in front of King Bermudez's kingdom walked outside of the outer gates to relieve himself. As he pissed, he caught the shadowy figure sitting down in his peripheral vision. He panicked and reached for his bow, The Dark Prince leaped up and began to swing his daggertail.

"No, no! Not the guards!"

"And why not? You already killed a few of them last night!"

The Dark Prince, nonetheless, didn't attack the man, but he chased him as he ran back into the palace grounds. To meet the Dark Prince was an insane defense, arrows, cavalrymen, and swords alike.

King Bermudez approached, moving past his grouped men. His eyes were narrow and then wide again, his mouth was stumbling.

"It's me, The Prince!" The Dark Prince yelled out.

"No..no you…you look just like them."