When I first saw you, there on the field where my village used to be, sinewy and scarred, your clothes worn and stained with dust and blood, your matted hair held back with a comb stuck to it, bow slung across your back, sword hanging from your hip, and staff in your hand, I thought you were Death or Her emissary waiting upon me, or perhaps War itself come to inspect the work of its acolytes.
It was always a battlefield where you went: if there wasn't one when you arrived, you would create one.
You looked at me and I looked at you for what felt like a long time. I felt oddly at peace — everything I had known had been swept away in an afternoon of fire and blood, and I thought I, too, would soon be gone. There were no tears, rage, or fear in me. I might have simply sat there and withered.
Eventually you walked to me and knelt in front of me, your hand resting on the hilt of your sword. "Did you live here?", you asked, your voice not unlike ash. Did you live. Like I no longer did — and it was so, for there was no longer anything to live in, merely the smouldering ruins and the cooling corpses.
"Yes. Who are you?"
"I am called Saqrät." You paused, thinking. "Now I am going to ask you a question, and I want you to consider your answer carefully. Do not be hasty. Speak from your heart."
I nodded, not comprehending, and convinced you were a god or a spirit.
"What do you want?" Your voice was slow and level, your eyes like rock.
I almost laughed — what could I want? what was there to want, and who was I to want anything anymore? — and felt the quick answer, 'nothing', forming on my tongue. But I remembered your warning and swallowed it. I looked around me, at that place that used to be my home, at the corpses that used to be people I knew; and I closed my eyes, and the answer blazed across my consciousness bright as the sky.
I opened my eyes. "I want to live."
You nodded, very slowly, and asked your second question. "Will you kill to do so?"
"Yes", I said, surprised at how easy the reply came to me, how the word seemed to crawl out of my throat on its own; how cold I felt inside. I had seen Death. I had breathed Her scent; I could excrete Her too. I could and I would.
And you said, "Come with me. I will take you on as my apprentice. I will show you how." You lifted your hand from your sword and offered it to me, palm up, in the gesture of giving gifts.