The End
By: Eleanor Bishop

They stand in a line, these warriors here to kill me.

It was not a conscious decision, the lines. Simply something formed out of ages of practice. Their natural state is to prepare for battle, in their mission to vanquish me; they have learned to never let their guard down. So many have been lost along the way.

Now they have arrived.

I can see the pain on their faces. Faces that had once held courage and youthful arrogance is now worn down to a blind determination. I suspect it is all they can do to keep themselves together.

Focus on the mission.

The mission to kill me.

Perhaps I should be killed; it seems unfair for one to live so long, out of balance with the natural order of things. Maybe that is why things like me aren’t supposed to exist--yet I do anyway, which must be infuriating for these little beings that stand so rigidly before me, blind rage on their faces. Why do they despise me so unconditionally? Is it from the stories they’ve heard? From the tales of my evils whispered round their village fires? Do they hate me for the hardships they have faced on the way to my lair? Their fallen comrades? The cold nights and dark forests, the barren deserts and hideous creatures that slithered, hidden, in the underbrush? For that is truly unfair. That blood is undoubtedly on the hands of their own kind.

Did I send them off on their perilous journey? Did I promise them honor or paint in their heads a romantic picture of adventure and glory? Yet they look upon me as if I was the one who handed them their sword and packed their bags.

I wonder if they yet realize that even if they succeed in their mission to end my life they can never really return to the world they are fighting so hard for. They have seen far too much now for them to reenter the quaint and ordinary lives of their peers.

They would try to settle back into their familiar chairs. To care once more about the trivial worries that used to cloud their heads. Try to forget about those left behind in their journey, lying cold in some alien territory.

Abandoned in death.

It is better this way; if they never come home.

With a kind of pity I watch them fall. Mercifully I end them quickly. I’ve never seen the life exactly fade out of anyone's eye, in my experience it’s usually more snuffed out. Similar, I imagine, to a candle in a hurricane.
They are alive, and then they simply are not--it is not a slow fading kind of process.

When I was young I was one to draw out these sorts of things. Back then they came in swarming hordes, shouting cries of war and raging at me with fiery passion, a great lust for war that could have only come from the naivety we both shared. It was new and exciting for the both of us, and I relished every moment.

Now we have gotten older, wiser, and the jaded men that arrive at my door come without the hope of their predecessors. They have seen generation after generation try and fail to erase me from the earth. The sport is lost.

It’s strange, but I have begun to fester a strange sort of hatred for those that send these warriors to my door, who would trick young men into fighting an impossible battle.

I think I’ve done it, killed them all--until I notice the figure off to the corner, clutching his side. The last hopeless man stands before me.

He breathes with labored breaths, his hands and shirt wet with blood, streaked across him like paint by an erratic, sadistic child. It is both his own and of his fallen comrades. Their cries are still fresh in his ears, playing over and over and over in his head.

He is a golden sort of person, really only a boy. No doubt used to attention for his looks. From his skin to his hair he is cherubic, down to blue eyes that sparkle in the torchlight. Today, though, these eyes shine with an unconstrained loathing, turning his fair features bitter--but it is not the hatred that takes me aback; it is the determination.

His is not blind or mechanical like the others before. It holds the passion that I have missed all these years. His hatred has not been passed down through generations; it is fresh, new, and foolish.

The best kind.

He lunges towards me, a sword, over-sized and ill fitting, clutched in his hand.  As he approaches, I find myself transfixed by the spectacle of this little warrior, so vastly outmatched and alone, surging towards an immovable force--I suppose I am spellbound.

I let him advance, and with a wild, flailing swing his sword digs into my side. Old, time-hardened scales do not allow for much of a wound, but it is enough to stir something inside me. There is pain yes, a sort of burning sting, and I see deep red blood dripping from the gash, like water rushing to escape from a long closed spring--but I am somehow shocked by the simple sensation of feeling.

I realize suddenly that I have been living in a sort of hibernation for the longest time, never even aware that I was slumbering. Tucked away in my cave, I have waited, lethargic, for a new batch of journey-weary warriors to arrive, and every time I vanquish them just the same. I became unaware of the increasing time that passed between these visits, or maybe I was just unwilling to see what that meant.

The routine of it all had lulled me into sleep. It was not until I looked into the eyes of that golden boy and saw the way they glared, noticed the exhaustion and the pain that had formulated into unadulterated rage--that I was awoken. Like the crack of a whip my senses snapped back into place and for the first time in an achingly long time I am truly aware.

He doesn’t seem to believe what he has done. Fully expecting to die in his charge, he never dreamed he would actually mark the beast before him--and I cannot believe I let him, but I did. I did, and now I find myself unable to stop the little thing in front of me. Having felt something, anything after ages of apathy, I am not sure I want to go back. I do not want to be waiting anymore, always waiting for the next batch.

Always waiting, and when they come it’s all over so quickly and then I am back to it, alone in my cave. Back to the endless string of ins and outs and blood and screams and weary, war torn faces almost begging for an end to pain, for something that will be over quickly.

In that moment I see very clearly the never ending pattern of my existence, always the same; an endless, horrible string that drags on, stretched too thin, close to breaking--but always holding on. Always holding forever and ever and ever and I realize something.

I do not want it.

I do not want it, not at all, not one bit. It sickens me, disgusts me that I have been rotting for so long, long past my days of pillaging and fighting. I have not been outside since before the mens' great grandparents were born. I am not even sure what I am anymore, not the monster I used to be. Not the one that resides in the tapestries, the stories that have become legends and soon will be myths.

I wonder if I would’ve died long ago if it weren’t for these men, the ones that come to my cave, determined to kill me for sins even their elders did not witness. If they had just let me be when I retreated to my cave those many long years ago, would I have withered away on my own?

Instead they kept coming, and I kept killing, and from the pain of their loss more warriors rose. I live because they keep me alive, always labeling me as the problem and never looking at themselves to explain their suffering. They need me, for if I am gone, who will they blame? If I am not the cause of their problems then they are forced to look inward, upon their own brothers and see the fault in their ways.

It doesn’t take long for him to get over the initial shock of still being alive, my little golden warrior. He stabs again, this time more calculated, not so much the last desperate act of a desperate man and more of the motions of a soldier carrying out his life order. I register the pain but am more aware of the great fatigue that has fallen upon me, like a blanket of fog. It runs deep, right to my core, an utter exhaustion and a yearning for something different.

The fury is still clear in my warrior’s face, but now there is confusion as well, melting into frustration; He wanted to battle the beast that killed his friends, not hit it while it lays, unresponsive, on the ground.
He yells at me to fight him, shouts, curses, challenges and pleas. All the while he digs his sword again and again in my flesh, until a great fountain of blood has spilled and covers his body, soaks his shirt and sloshes onto the stone floor. It charges out of my wound, eager to escape from its ancient prison, and flows in an effortless stream around me, pooling at his feet. He is crying now I see, there are thin tears trailing down his cheeks as he continues to hack into me, but something has left him.

It is a forced movement now, something he seems to be clinging on to in a desperate rush to have something left. I see the way his body shakes, trying to fight through the images that are forcing themselves upon his eyes. What has happened is beginning to crash over him like a slow, horrible wave, and he doesn’t want to feel it. He doesn’t want to think, so he just lets his body take over. He has practiced these motions his entire life, his arms still remember how to fight even if his mind is otherwise occupied.

The pain has begun to come in great, red hot waves, corresponding to the consistent blows to my side.

Surroundings begin to tiptoe away until all that was left is him, thrown into sharp focus when everything else is a murky blur.

Part of me is drifting away, lazily wandering off--to where?

Then I realize:

This is it.

This boy is killing me, and I am letting him.

As darkness begins to fill the corners of my vision, I find myself wondering with a sort of detached interest what will become of my body once I am gone.

Will he drag me back to his village and parade my corpse around for all to see? Proudly recount the tale of his bravery to his multitude of new-found admirers? He would certainly be hailed a hero for doing so, celebrated for ages to come--but I doubt it.

He knows, and I can see it clear on his face. He knows that I am letting the end come, that it is because of no great skill of his own that I die--except, perhaps, that he made me see something I had never comprehended before; a horrible truth that hangs around me, like a noose encircling my old, weary neck . I had been waiting in the gallows for a long time, never realizing my location or my desire to let the floor fall out from under me.

We are forever connected, my little warrior and I. Our fates are intertwined in the way that only two people who share a great and terrible secret can be. For that is what it will be, I’m sure. The true account of my death shall be what he can never tell his brothers and sisters back home.

The crying, helpless tears.

The blood splattered across his face, pooled at his feet. Predator’s mixed with preys in deep red puddles.

The whimpering death of a horrible monster, made meek by age and truth.

Death as a sort of mercy, the end of a life gone on far too long.

Killing because it is all we know to do.

They gathered, standing in lines, those same warriors here to kill me so very many times.

They came with a vague idea of why I must die, from men with an equally clouded knowledge. The vengeance they held had been passed on so many times it had become worn out and frail. Men less concerned with the why of it than the fact that I was still alive when so many of their kind is dead. One of us has to stop this, this constant wheel of cause and effect. Upon my death I wonder if they will not simply seek out another monster in another distant cave. If they do, they will surely find them, but nothing will ever change until they stop seeking out their villains in far off lands and attempt to tame the beasts inside themselves.

I’m going now; in fact I think I’m mostly gone. Only a kernel of my consciousness remains, and even that is shrinking away.

I am not afraid, which surprises me; I feel simply as if there is nothing left for me in this place. In a way, I feel more alive than I have been for a very long time.

They stood in a line, those warriors who came to kill me, but they will never come again.