To Wake and Realize
Pain.
Anger.
Kronos! How dare he!?
Betrayal!
How dare that pathetic brute strike him, cause him pain?
Pain.
Fear.
His chest ached unbearably, breathing became more and more difficult. He tried to move. Immediately, the pain darkened his vision, the stars of the night sky vanished into darkness as he died.
Pain in his chest, his breathing laboured.
What-
Kronos!
How dare he strike him!? A God!
Anger rose.
He had been betrayed!
He remembered the dagger in his back, piercing his heart. Instinct made him try to reach for it.
Pain flared, his vision darkened.
Before he succumbed, he realized that his wrists were bound.
The first thing he registered when he came to was pain, the second was heat and brightness.
Kronos! That inferior animal had stabbed him in the back!
As he coughed, the jarring made the pain flare up, but he couldn't stop. He barely managed to spit out a mouth full of congealed blood before the world darkened once more.
When he awoke, he consciously relaxed to minimize the pain.
A dagger from behind! Oh, Kronos would pay!
As would that miserable wretch of a woman because of whom this had happened!
Carefully he tested his movements. His wrists were still bound, but his feet were free. He was lying on his back, looking up into the cloudless sky, arms spread wide. Even more carefully he moved his head.
His right wrist was bound to a peg with coarse rope. Pain threatened to overwhelm him again as he turned his head to the left.
As he caught sight of the sword in his chest, seething anger suffused him.
Kronos' sword, nailing him to the ground. Oh, he would pay!
He was imagining numerous torturous deaths for his fellow horseman while blood slowly filled his left lung. Air grew sparse, and the pain worsened. When he couldn't hold the cough back anymore, he felt how the movement made the sword bite into his heart.
He awoke once more, the first stars above him and the lingering warmth of the day told him that it was late in the evening. Pain in his chest made him wordlessly curse Kronos.
While he was extremely angry at his brother, he also questioned his own judgement. Why had he turned his back to Kronos? He knew that the other was prone to violent anger, they all were. Still, Kronos didn't know how to hold a grudge for long, a few more deaths and things should be back to normal.
Of course, he would make his brother pay – and enjoy it.
Imagining how to best accomplish his revenge helped him to ignore his pain and passed the time till death.
He came to in the coldest hours of the night, shivering lightly. The cloudless sky was nearly black and adorned with countless stars. The cold somewhat numbed his pain and cleared his mind.
He was hardly comfortable, but he had long learned to ignore discomfort, and he felt calm for the first time since… he couldn't even remember.
Stretching his quickening as he hadn't done since before joining (leading, a small voice in the back of his head insisted, controlling) the horsemen, he found his brothers, Silas and Kronos sound asleep, Kaspian keeping watch. He also felt the young slave, Cassandra, tossing and turning in restless sleep.
He surprised himself with a thought of pity for the nearly broken woman. Who was she to awaken his compassion? Yet even while he asked himself that, he remembered that he had once been in a position akin to hers: at the mercy of one without mercy, living and dying at another's whim.
Once, he would have nurtured her, taken her as a wife or possibly even as student.
Why had he not done so? When had he turned into a monster akin to the ones he had once fought against?
As death, whose name he had so blithely taken, reached for him once more, he found the answer and understood the connections, but then he lost them in the darkness.
It was still cold, but the sky was lighter. Morning approached, and clarity came with it.
So did Kronos.
His brother laughed gaily, the anger of the previous day dispersed like smoke. A fine joke, he laughed, and had he not gotten one over Death! Grinning, he pulled the sword out of it's grisly sheath.
As his mouth mindlessly spoke agreement and cheerfully taunted Kronos, scorning the pain he was in, Memitim slowly unfolded from the depths of memory that he had been pressed had folded himself had hidden from one stronger and oh god so so evil into, carefully stretched his newly freed limbs under Kronos' unknowing gaze and rose to true awareness.
The next time they came close to a settlement, he skilfully steered his brothers away from it. And if the slave woman ran and ran until she was nowhere to be found, well, it certainly hadn't been his plan.
Kronos was, after all, their leader.