This is a true story.
I'm not usually a fan of campfire tales, but I can never resist telling this one. It's not funny, and it's not moral. War stories are never moral. It's not for entertainment, and it's not for enlightenment. Just listen.
A few months ago, Commander Ike sent me in to the woods to look for deer, rabbit, anything that was edible over a good fire. We were all hungry after marching for a weel, and I hadn't eaten anything for half a day. I groaned but the commander was gone before I could look up. Standing in the place of that blue-haired boy was Soren, our second-in-command officer.
He gave me this gaze that made his eyes flare up, every cone in his cornea pumping out liquid fire. Maybe he was angry at that time – I really don't know – I didn't want to ask him. He just stood there in some sort of a trance. Then he smiled – he smiled like a madman, and I could see the rabid saliva dripping from his mouth. He wanted blood.
Soren accompanied me in to the deep forest under a full moon. I couldn't hear much, but the whole forest smelled like manure. Don't ask me why it did – it just did. The odor was so strong, that I didn't even hear the loud rustling of leaves in the distance. My nose too occupied for my ears to work. Soren however, saw the animal. It was just a young deer still too skinny to provide any good meat. It noticed us and began to run away.
Soren raised his hand in an unholy arc and slammed the deer hard in to an old tree with a wall of green wind.
It wasn't dead.
Soren walked up to it and took out a piece of bread from his pocket and held it up to the deer's mouth. It didn't budge. It just kept exhaling blood and looking at Soren with those dark deer eyes. He pushed the bread up to the deer's mouth, but it still wouldn't move. Maybe force of the impact snapped its spine or something like that. I thought Soren was trying to comfort the deer in its last seconds of life, but hell no – hell no.
Now here's the part that'll stay with me. Soren unsheathed his blade and cut off one of the deer's leg in a single slash. The sloshing noise of the leg just dropping off and hitting the ground was absolutely sickening. I can still hear it ringing in my ears. The deer didn't make a sound – it just kept staring at Soren, who smiled this disgusting smile that could only come from the deepest level of hell. He just kept grinning as he cut off the deer's limbs one by one trying not to kill it. The blood gushed out and soaked the dirt beneath my feet and stained the nearby grass in to a morbid submission.
Soren breathed to the rhythm of his sadism. Every time he made a motion with the dagger as he sawed off the limbs.
Forward, inhale. Backward, exhale. I could hear the gravity in his breaths.
The trees began to tremble from the nightly winds. The deer's blood deposited itself in a red puddle beneath my feet.
The deer wasn't dead after he cut off its ears and tail. There was just more blood gushing out of the openings. Soren just kept smiling, but I saw his eyes. Those eyes – those goddamned eyes were twitching with excitement as if he got a rush from torturing that innocent deer. He held up the bread against the deer's head again and I'll bet he actually expected the deer to move. Even when it didn't, Soren just kept smiling that short smile as he pushed the bread up against the deer's bloody face and up the deer's nostrils so that it couldn't breathe.
The deer opened its mouth for air, but it only swallowed the blood that was in its mouth. Those disgusting wet gasps for air that the deer made could be heard throughout the forest. The deer swallowed more and more blood, drowning itself in its own raw essence. Its eyes went black and then started to drip the blood that circulated through its head.
It wept blood.
I stayed silent. I just prayed to Ashera that he wouldn't come after me next.
That goddamned freak.
"Let's go," he whispered.
I glanced at the dead deer and then at the dagger. His hand was shaking horribly, probably from the adrenaline.
He actually enjoyed this.
We hiked back to the camp under a black sky. The moon was covered by clouds this time, and the stars seemed to have vanished as well. Every step he took made the surroundings darker to conform to his demeanor. The grass beneath him seemed to curl away from his feet. The trees rustled violently as the nocturnal breezes pounded at them.
I didn't get a close look at his face when we were walking back – it was too dark. But I'm sure that he was smiling.
That same smile under the same infernal eyes.
He didn't even bother to wipe the blood off of his face when he strolled back to the camp.
I guess he didn't want to wipe off the blood or the smile.