Disclaimer: Forgotten Realms does not belong to me. Obviously.
The Love of Assassins
Another day, another body.
There are few people in the world who can comprehend the strange, dark and coldly efficient world of assassins. Not even all those who move within their circles understand them. They may learn enough to survive encounters with those shadows made flesh, but none bother to take the decades it would take to learn what goes on in an assassin's mind. Why would they want to? Assassins do not want to be understood. They need to stay hidden in the shroud of enigma to do their job properly. Those who learn too much about a hired killer are rarely seen again. At least, not intact.
A common misconception most people have of assassins is that they are unfeeling, emotionless. On the contrary, that icy surface hides deep, swiftly running rivers of feeling. By closing off their world to others they make every emotional experience they have that much sweeter, that much more painful. Assassins weep, they laugh, they scream and they love. More often than not, they love each other. And they love deeply.
Assassins love death. Assassins hate death. Assassins are death. For death is the one thing they are sure of, the one thing that they understand.
Or so they want to think.
They wield death, surely, and deal it to whom they so choose, but they can only ever be the mystery. They never really understand it. They can never see what it is they give to their 'clients'. Everyday, they open the gates to the beyond but they can never look through and see it for themselves. They can never know until the gates are opened for them. There is a moment in every assassin's life when suddenly they realize their situation. They see, in a flash, that in truth there is nothing they understand. All their lives they have believed in the greatest lie of all: that they know who they are. Perhaps he, or she, does not realize it, but they desperately want to understand what lies beyond. In that horrible moment, the assassin wants to die.
An assassin never kills themselves, though. They simply cannot, no matter how much they want to. Instead, they fall in love. They find another assassin to touch, to hold and cherish. Assassins are the most generous lovers of all. In an effort to know themselves, assassins pour their hearts, their souls, every thought and every feeling they have ever known into their lovers. They love their soulmates so deeply that the other becomes practically an extension of themselves. And then they kill them.
Assassins kill their lovers in hope that they will finally comprehend their own nature. It never works. They do not learn. There are no epiphanies, only dark and bitter emptiness. And yet, when they have picked up the pieces, they do it all over again and again, until the day that they do not have the strength of will to strike first.
Assassins both hate and love death, that which they are, until it tears them apart.
And, somewhere in the world, deep underground, a young assassin kneels weeping, cradling her dead lover's head in her lap.
A/N: Thank you for reading. This vignette is based on the relationship of two of my characters who fall in love in my story Caught in the Web. Please let me know what you think.