A Thief's Concience
By Bhamv
Author's note: This is a short fic that's been floating around my head for a while. I was thinking about how the game forbids players from killing people, and this is what I came up with.
Garett crouched outside the wall of Martin Manor, hiding himself in the small tent of darkness available under an open window. He could hear voices inside, two people, servants.
"Where is Lord Martin tonight?" Asked one voice, that of a young girl.
"He is dining at Lady Carmen's manor," A second voice replied, a woman's voice. Her words suddenly took on a snide, mocking tone. "And if last night is any indication, he won't be back until morning."
"That's good then. A good night's sleep for us!" The girl's voice again. "When will father be back?"
"Your father is on guard duty tonight, his shift will end in an hour or so. Hush now, daughter, rest. You will need your strength tomorrow." The woman's voice said, now rich with loving emotion. A whoosh of breath was heard, and suddenly the light from the window vanished. The faint, acrid odor of an extinguished candle reached Garrett's nostrils. Moments later, only rhythmic breathing could be heard from inside the room.
Garrett pondered his situation. The Lord of the manor was away, but had left his guards on duty. That meant the servants' quarters were likely to be filled only with sleeping servers. This was exactly the opening he needed to enter the Manor and examine its contents. An unconcious smirk curled Garrett's lips as he pictured the riches just waiting to be plucked from the sleeping mansion.
With a practiced silence, Garrett straightened and leapt through the open window, looking about the room and taking everything in before he'd even landed. Two beds, on either side of a low table, and a slumbering female figure in each of them - no doubt the speakers he had heard, probably mother and daughter. A low shelf at the foot of one bed, stacked with worthless junk, and an empty open chest at the foot of the other. The doorway out of the room to his right. Landing on the balls of his feet, ever more silent than a cat, Garrett turned to the door and prepared to leave.
The young girl, the one lying in the left-sided bed, suddenly whimpered and twitched. Garrett froze, slowly craning his neck to stare at the sleepers. The girl seemed to be having a nightmare. To Garrett's consternation, he watched the daughter's eyes shoot open, and she sat bolt upright with a soft cry.
The girl curled her knees up to her chest, hugging her legs and tightening herself into a small ball as her eyes gradually told her brain she was now awake, and the nightmare was over. Then her eyes spotted something amiss, a man in the room, silhouetted against the moonlight flowing in through the windowframe.
"Who... who's there? Who are you?" She cried softly.
Beside her, her mother woke and stirred, then sat up in shock. "What? What are you doing here? There's an intruder! Help!"
There was no time to think, no time to analyze and consider. Garrett acted out of reaction and out of instinct. He hurled himself at the closer enemy, the mother. His hand grasped for his blackjack but missed, and his fingers closed around the hilt of his sword instead. With no time to correct his error, Garrett brought his weapon forward, tensing his arm like a bowstring hurling an arrow forward to attack. There was a flash of cold steel, and suddenly he felt his sword sink into the chest of the woman. The edge of the weapon scraped against her ribs as the flat blade slide through her heart and out her back. The path of the blow finally ended with the tip of the sword sticking to the headboard of the bed, gruesomely pinning the woman against the wood. Her cries were cut off with a sudden gasp. Blood, black in the darkness of the room, stained her tunic and spread outwards from the blade like a ripple in a lake.
For a moment that seemed like eternity, all was still. Garrett felt as if the blood in his veins had congealed, as if the air around him and solidified into ice. With a herculean effort, he tore his gaze away from the woman he had just run through and looked at the girl. She wore a look of stunned horror, an expression that undoubtedly mirrored his own. She looked at him, then at her mother, then at the sword in his hand and in her body, then back at him again. Garrett saw, as if in slow motion, her mouth open and her chest expand as she drew breath to scream.
Acting once more on instinct, as if he had lost control of his own body, Garrett yanked his sword from the dead woman and raised it above his head. He was dimly aware of the mother's body crumpling to her bed then falling to the floor, but his attention was devoted solely to her daughter now. His sword came down, again with a flash of steel, and plunged into the flesh of the girl, cutting off her scream before it could begin. The blade entered her body at the point where shoulder joined neck, cutting deeply before slamming against her collarbone. Wounded, but not fatally, the girl fell back against her bed, freeing Garrett's sword as she did. Once again, blood oozed into cloth, a tide of black slowly spreading down the girl's nightshirt.
Garrett stared down into the girl's eyes. They were wide open, terrified, full of hatred yet pleading at the same time. He raised his sword one last time, for the killing blow, but did not bring it down. No, he thought to himself, not like this. He turned to the window and leapt through it, his limbs strangely stiff and ungraceful. Landing loudly on the grass outside, he sprinted away from the manor and through the streets of the city, finally secreting himself in the darkest alley he could find.
His back leaning against the brick wall of the alley, his chest heaving with exertion and his stomach in knots, Garrett closed his eyes and tried to calm himself. He then opened his eyelids and looked down at his sword, still grasped in his bloodstained hand. With a convulsive motion, as if the weapon was a venomous snake, he threw his sword to the ground. The blood on the blade, still wet, splattered against the tiled stone. Then Garrett turned and vanished into the night.
The Keepers had always told Garrett not to kill. They told him a kill was an unwieldy thing, both to the body and to the heart. He'd never believed it before, but then again he'd never killed before.
He believed it now.
Like I said, short fic. I've been going through some writer's block lately, and I thought I'd write something to try to get over it. Let me know what you guys think, all right? -Bhamv