The sword that the soldier held quivered, almost as if it were vibrating on its own and not because the hand which held it aloft trembled itself. She watched the sword rapturously, as if enthralled with the muted light flickering on the shining steel blade, but she knew that it was merely a distraction from what was before her, from the task she had to see through. She nonetheless continued to stare along the edge of her weapon. Slowly, the gaze of her amber eyes climbed from the base and up to the middle of the shaft, where dried blood was caked over the polished metal. There she paused. Slow, heavy thoughts began to seep into her mind like molasses, choking her with threatened tears. They sped up, twisting into a fierce, howling wind whipping about her mind. So much blood, their voices wailed in her ears, too much. No more blood. I don't want any more. Her hand shook worse than ever, so much so that she thought the sword would fall from her fingers.

“No.” The word passed through her lips as if it had climbed out of her mouth by itself and hovered in the air in front of her on its own breathy wings. A second word followed it, but it was more certain and clear than the first: “Enough.” The loud, stifling thoughts stopped flooding in at once, and the soldier was left alone in the silence that threatened to engulf her, naked and vulnerable. She screwed her eyes shut, then opened them again with a sharp inhale that slit the thick ambiance. She released her free hand from its grip on her wounded abdomen, fresh blood gleaming on her dark skin, in order to steady her sword arm. A deep, shaky breath found its way into the still atmosphere. The next words she released were broken with pain and saturated with effort as they breached the lull.

Her words lingered, hanging on the choked air even as she brought her sword down with a cry. There they remained even as the walls about her crumbled and bricks and rubble came crashing down onto the soldier's discarded form and the light of the moon and stars came streaming in. And they waited there still as its luster at last suffused the silhouette of the young man who slept on a stone slab in the midst of the wreckage of his temple. His eyes fluttered open, and he rose abruptly. The remnants of the soldier’s sword, which had been strewn across his chest, fell to the ground. The resulting clatter echoed off the fallen stones and the trees surrounding the decimated temple. He looked sharply down and stared at them, pondering the cloven blade as its fragments rocked themselves back and forth into stillness. He smiled, not too pleasantly. Then he stood and stretched in a lazy way before noticing the soldier's words, hovering above where he had lain. One by one he plucked them flamboyantly from their positions in the thick night air, and then paused, listening. A low moan had escaped from under the debris, from the soldier lying almost right under the young man's feet. His smile, which had never really left, broadened into a grin that could have been a sneer, and, still clutching the words, he bent down to gaze at her. Her face, bruised and bleeding, was exposed to bright silver moonlight and the folds of her dark red headscarf were strewn about her like a bloody halo.

She couldn't have known as she laid there, unconscious and hurt, that she had failed. But she would when, hours later in the cold light of morning, she woke gasping from pain and struggling to breathe. Because then she would see the empty slab, and the rubble she was trapped under, and the broken sword lying at her feet. The words she had spoken into the night would be robbed of the meaning she had breathed into them, written all over the scattered ruins with plain, cruel irony: “This is what I must do.”